Interview: Buffalo Tom Co-Headlines with Fellow Alt-Rockers Belly at Fete Music Hall
When it comes to the history of alternative rock, the New England region has played a major role in it becoming a part of the musical lexicon. There are numerous bands from Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island who have assisted in forging the musical style over the years. On September 14 at Fete Music Hall on 103 Dike Street in Providence, two prime examples of this fact will be performing at 8pm. Belly from Newport and Buffalo Tom from Boston are going to be supplying a double dose of awesome while playing their hits along with some newer material. This is especially the case with the latter band due to the fact that the trio of vocalist and guitarist Bill Janovitz, bassist Chris Colburn and drummer Tom Maginnis put a new full-length record with Jump Rope back on June 4.
Janovitz and I had a talk about the making of the album, releasing it via the band’s own record label and how the upcoming show has been in the works for a while.
What was the experience like for you, Tom and Chris when it came to the songwriting and recording process for Jump Rope? Were there a lot of similarities to your previous album Quiet and Peace due to working with Dave Minehan again?
Assembling the songs was different. Well, I wouldn’t say different because we had a big lag time due to the pandemic. Chris and I were writing songs separately as we usually do with song ideas and things that become songs while chucking them into a Dropbox folder. They really started to accrue a big pile of them because we had a bit more time and we weren’t able to get to them and attack them as a record. We had a lot to choose from and when we were finally able to get into a room together while emerging from the pandemic, we kind of approached it differently.
Usually, we would get in there as a trio and start hammering it out almost at full volume. We have a weird way of working, but our ears are all suffering as we get older, so the songs were kind of chosen either accidentally or otherwise. Tom made the observation that they seemed to want to stay more or less acoustic as opposed to electric file versions, so we kind of approached it acoustically, even in rehearsal. I didn’t bring an electric guitar for a long time, but that was phase two. Then during phase three of recording, it was more or less the same.
Again, I kind of approached it acoustically as a basic track and then I started to overdub all of that. I didn’t even know if we were going to do the overdubs, I thought we were going to keep it focused on acoustic, almost like a campfire type of record. Being Buffalo Tom, these songs grew into more of our sound no matter how much we tried to throw them into another direction.
Like Buffalo Tom’s previous releases, there’s a photo serving as the album cover for Jump Rope which features the bottom half of a kid doing exactly that, jumping rope. How did you discover the photo and what initially inspired you guys to incorporate photography as your album covers rather than concept art, logos or anything else?
I’ve often tried to steer our art direction into more of a “let’s make an album cover” type thing, but there’s so much great stuff out there, like these photos from Mark Cohen, not to be confused with the singer. He’s an older photographer who took these photos from the ’60s and ’70s around rural Pennsylvania that I didn’t really know much about, but Chris had found a book of them or something like that. Chris was throwing some of those images at us as we do, we all throw each other different ideas when it comes to the artwork. I would like to at some point maybe make an album cover of something that’s conceptual, but with this, we found the art first and then we came up with the title. When usually throw titles around, sometimes these things match up, like Let Me Come Over, for example.
That one kind of matched up, I think we had the title first there. Actually, I’m almost certain that we did. For Sleepy Eyed, we found an image from Abbas, the photographer, of a Mexican girl holding up these skulls in front of her eyes, so there’s a certain serendipity to it. We just came up with the name for Jump Rope from choosing that image.
That makes sense. Was there any specific reasoning behind releasing the album via the band’s own label at Scrawny Records rather than teaming up with a different label like you’ve done in the past?
We actually haven’t really done a real record label since the early 2000s, 2007 maybe when we worked with New West and Artemis Records. The was Danny Goldberg’s label before New West, so those were two labels that were kind of the remnants of the older days. We love and have loved Danny for a long time, and it was a thrill after taking some years off to do that. Everything since has been more or less of us releasing our music ourselves. We did work with The Orchard, which is kind of a record company, but it was more our label, which is when we came up with Scrawny Records.
Labels don’t really do much anymore, especially indie labels. There are a handful of great ones, Sub Pop is still around and there’s also Merge and Matador, but I don’t know what they do for their artists that we can’t do ourselves. There isn’t a huge concern about distribution anymore and you hire publicists anyway, so it’s all changed quite a lot since we started.
I can totally see that, especially from the ’80s to now. What are your thoughts on being part of this double headlining show with Belly at Fete Music Hall? I know you guys have played Providence before, but I think it’s your first time playing this venue.
We played Providence a bunch back in the old days, but I didn’t even know about this venue until the show was offered to us. Belly and we have played some shows together, not many though and not in a while. We’ve talked about doing something like this, teaming up, for a long time. They’ve been friends of ours from way back, especially Tanya from back in the early Throwing Muses days. It’s a natural pairing, so we’re all genuinely really excited to do it and hopefully we can continue doing it elsewhere.
It sounds like it’s going to be an awesome show. When it comes to crafting the setlist and melding the newer material with the older material, how has that process been? Have there been any surprising moments of cohesiveness with one of the songs from Jump Rope and an older song from a previous album?
With the concern about crafting a setlist, there’s certainly the aspect of tempo, flow and tone, but the songs are still Buffalo Tom songs. It’s a matter of how many new songs you want to do that will sustain the audience’s interest. The longer our band is around, the more it becomes about nostalgia. People wanting to hear the old songs that meant so much to them and seeing them played live. I do think that most of our fans are interested in hearing the new songs, so we pepper the setlist with a few of them.
With this show with Belly, we’re going to be playing shorter sets than what we’d usually do at our own shows. We just got done with a U.S. tour where we didn’t even have an opening band, it was just us, so we were playing sprawling sets while including more new songs. I haven’t made the setlist yet for the upcoming show, so I don’t really know how it’s going to balance out.
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