The New Mastersounds celebrate a decade together with newest work, Ten Years On

:: The New Mastersounds ::

:: Fox Theatre :: March 3 ::

:: Grand Ballroom (Steamboat) :: March 4 ::

:: Agave (Avon) :: March 5 ::

:: Ogden Theatre :: March 6 ::

:: Belly Up (Aspen) :: March 8 ::

By Timothy Dwenger

Colorado is known for many things, but high on almost every list are the majestic mountains and the incredible music scene. These are two of the main features that keep Eddie Roberts and his bandmates in The New Mastersounds coming back time and time again. Though the band hails from the Northern England city of Leeds, where the highest point is a mere thousand feet above sea level and the only ski hills are housed indoors in giant warehouses, Roberts loves to hit the slopes when he can while out on the road.

“There is nothing here in England.  Just indoor slopes,” he said during a recent interview with The Marquee, before admitting that he’d spent the morning with his kids at a nearby indoor hill. “They all learned there.  I haven’t managed to get them on a mountain yet but these places are good for learning. At least it’s snow.  I think we have a day off in Aspen so the plan is to ski. We usually try to get some skiing in on the Colorado run.” Continue — Read more »

Les Claypool’s career is constantly evolving and getting weirder every day

:: Les Claypool ::

:: Fox Theatre :: February 13 ::

:: Ogden Theatre :: February 14 ::

By Joe Kovack

For the past 20 years, Les Claypool has given America some of its most eclectic and ethereal music it could ever imagine.

Since the early days of Primus, Claypool has been warping the minds of music lovers with his infinitely intricate bass styling and strange but good natured sense of humor. Permeating the counterculture scene, Claypool has become an iconic member of music’s elite, creatively evolving every step of the way and forging a career that would rival that of imaginative wizards Tom Waits or Frank Zappa. Continue — Read more »

:: Kerouac’s Big Sur Concert ::

:: Benjamin Gibbard and Jay Farrar ::

:: Boulder Theater ::

:: January 26 ::

 By Timothy Dwenger

“‘One fast move or I’m gone,’ I realize, gone the way of the last three years of drunken hopelessness,” Jack Kerouac wrote in his 1962 novel Big Sur. “That feeling when you wake up with the delirium tremens with the fear of early death dripping from your ears like those special heavy cobwebs spiders weave in the hot countries, the feeling of being a bentback mudmad monster groaning underground in hot steaming mud pulling a long hot burden nowhere … I’ve got to escape or die…”

That novel, which chronicles Kerouac’s time living in his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s cabin near Big Sur as he reeled from the fame that was thrust upon him by the success of On The Road, tore at the souls of many Americans including a  young Ben Gibbard, who was 19 when he first read the tome. “Big Sur was, next to On The Road, my favorite of all of the Kerouac books and it was that way before this project,” said Gibbard when The Marquee caught up with the Death Cab for Cutie frontman as he was getting ready for the holidays. “It is such a profound and brutally honest piece of work, where he really goes to this place within himself and has to deal with some demons that he has always kind of danced around and never really had to face.”

So, when he was approached, by Kerouac’s nephew Jim Sampas, to contribute some vocals to the soundtrack of a documentary that focused on the time Kerouac spent living in the cabin near Big Sur, Gibbard jumped at the opportunity.  “At the time, there were a lot of other names being thrown around and there was this idea that the album would be this who’s who of alt-rock and roots rock,” remembered Gibbard. “I’ve been a big fan of Kerouac for my whole adolescent and adult life. He’s been a huge influence on me and I probably would have found a way to be a part of this project regardless of being invited or not. If I had heard about it through the grapevine I would have tried to figure out a way to snake my way in.”

Fortunately for him, he was asked, and when he heard that Son Volt leader and co-founder of seminal alt-country band Uncle Tupelo, Jay Farrar was involved, it made the opportunity that much more inviting. “I had never met Jay before this,” Gibbard revealed. “I didn’t meet him until the night before we went into the recording studio. We went out and had a couple of drinks and we kind of speed dated each other. It’s a small enough world that we have enough mutual friends to at least have a place to start. We got to bond on something that was really close to both of our hearts. Kerouac was very influential on both of us.”

Despite the fact that the pair had never met, they were able to harness their shared love for Kerouac’s work to foster some extremely productive studio sessions. “I showed up in San Francisco to spend a couple of days recording with Jay and it turned out that I was the only one who had signed on for the project,” Gibbard said.  “That was a little bit surprising to me, but nonetheless, we did a couple of songs together and it was an enjoyable experience. When we finished those, Jay flew the idea that we could just finish the record together, just the two of us and see what happened. I was into that idea and even contributed a song.” The resulting recordings became the soundtrack and accompanying album for the film One Fast Move Or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur, which was released in late October.

While the two did collaborate extensively in the studio to flesh out and complete the compositions, all but one of the songs on the album were crafted by Farrar before the sessions started. “The song ‘One Fast Move or I’m Gone’ is the one that I wrote top to bottom, but we did some punching up and co-writing on a couple of the tunes that Jay had already started. I do have to emphasize that this is very much Jay’s project as far as the writing and the heavy lifting goes. I played a lot on the record and sang and co-produced, but Jay did the lion’s share of the work on the front end of it and that tends to be the hardest part,” Gibbard said.

Rather than attempt to write new lyrics that would do the project justice, Farrar chose to draw exclusively on the pages of Kerouac’s novel for the lyrical content of his songs. It was an ambitious project, but one that made perfect sense for the songwriter to tackle. He has long been influenced by Kerouac’s style and this unique approach allowed for the two artists to collaborate in an unexpected and yet very successful way. In Gibbard’s words, “Jay wrote these songs with Jack, in a manner of speaking.”

For the one track that he contributed to the project, Gibbard didn’t use quite the same approach but was heavily influenced by the novel and the dark, lonesome feeling that lingers on its pages.  “It is a narrative that I wrote around Big Sur, and it’s written from the perspective of Kerouac at the end of the novel. The line ‘one fast move or I’m gone’ is taken from the book and I used that because the producers had said that they wanted a song written around that line, so I took a crack at it.”

“One Fast Move” and the rest of the songs that make up the record convey a hauntingly bittersweet mood that is infectious in its sense of urgency. The vivid imagery of the lyrics blends with stripped down acoustic instrumentation to give the album a feel of Americana that suits it as perfectly for a road trip through the heartland of our country as it does for its intended purpose as the soundtrack for a documentary about Kerouac’s time in Big Sur.

The cinematic journey of the film takes the viewer to the cabin deep in the woods where Kerouac lived as he wrote Big Sur, and puts events in the book into context with scenes of the old Beat haunts in New York and San Francisco.  Throughout the film, contemporaries of Kerouac’s like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson and Michael McClure, and artists like Robert Hunter, Tom Waits and S.E. Hinton add colorful anecdotes and memories about the man who was known as “the vibrant new voice of his generation — the avatar of the Beat movement.”

To promote the release of the film, and their accompanying album, Farrar and Gibbard scheduled half a dozen shows in October, where they teamed with Nick Harmer (Death Cab for Cutie), Mark Spencer (Son Volt) and Jon Wurster (Superchunk, Bob Mould, The Mountain Goats) to form an all-star five piece band. The shows were so well received that the group will hit the road again for another short run this month.

“People shouldn’t come expecting Son Volt, Death Cab or Postal Service songs. I think that if people are expecting that they should probably go and try to get their money back. We are playing the record and some covers that fit the vibe of what we are doing, and a smattering of songs that have popped up in either of our solo releases,” Gibbard said. “We did about six or seven shows in October and it was really fun. I was a little bit worried that people would be expecting something other than what they got, but it seemed like people really enjoyed the show. We both have such a small window of time to go out and play this material that we really just want to get out and celebrate the record and get a chance to hang out some more together,” Gibbard said.

Recommended If You Like:

•Bonnie “Prince” Billy

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:: Kerouac’s Big Sur Concert ::

:: Benjamin Gibbard and Jay Farrar ::

:: Boulder Theater ::

:: January 26 ::

STS9 drops new album this month and gets set for first-ever acoustic show

:: STS9 ::

:: June Swaner Concert Hall at DU ::

:: December 29 ::

:: Wells Fargo Theatre :: December 30 & 31 ::

By Timothy Dwenger

Though originally hailing from Georgia, Sound Tribe Sector 9 (aka STS9) has found a second home, both literally and figuratively, right here in Colorado. The band enjoys one of their strongest fan bases here and bass player David Murphy has relatively recently relocated to the area and now calls it home. “We all lived in out Santa Cruz since 2000 and while everybody else is still out there, I moved out here to be with my girlfriend,” Murphy told The Marquee as he got ready to head to a Nuggets game. “I’ve been out here a little while and I’ve been loving it. It is really nice living in Colorado. I guess we just like picking the nice places to live.”

For the last five years STS9 has celebrated New Year’s Eve in Atlanta, but, like Widespread Panic last year, they have decided to shake things up this year by bringing the party to Denver’s Wells Fargo Theatre. “We really like the Wells Fargo. I went in and toured it back in January and really loved the room,” Murphy said. “We’ve been playing the Tabernacle in Atlanta, and that’s our home, but sizewise, and with some of the difficult logistics they have as far as hanging things and other stuff we can do with our production, we are limited. So we really wanted to get out and take our production to a little bigger scale for the New Year’s shows and Colorado seemed like the perfect place to come do that. We are excited about it.”

While Murphy didn’t drop any secrets about what the band may be planning for the landmark shows, he seemed very excited about being on-stage in Denver when the first decade of the Millennium comes to an end. “The first New Year’s we ever did was at The Fox in 2000 going into 2001, so it’s going to be nice to get back out here,” he said. “Colorado is by far our biggest market in the country. I don’t know if that is because half of Colorado used to live in Georgia or what, but there is a great love of music out here. People really go out and support music and it’s been a real blessing for us in our musical career.”

It’s that fan base that has enabled STS9 to sell nearly 50,000 tickets in Colorado over the past four summers. With three soldout shows at Red Rocks in that time, Murphy and his bandmates were itching to play here at a different time of year.

In addition to the two big shows at the Wells Fargo, the band plans to “axe the cables” and perform a very special acoustic concert for the first time ever on December 29 at the June Swaner Gates Concert Hall on the campus of DU. The band, known for the swirling electronic effects that saturate their progressive “post-rock dance music,” will strip things down and feature several songs that fans have probably never heard before. “We are way more excited about the acoustic than anything else we are doing, just for the challenge of it,” said Murphy. “We grew up sitting around living rooms and playing music together on acoustic guitars and drum kits and stuff so it’s going to be really neat to take our show, and some of our pre-existing songs, and translate them into that format.”

“We’ve also written a bunch of down tempo acoustic, piano, acoustic guitar, fretless bass kind of stuff that we’ve never released and haven’t played for anybody, so we’ll be doing some of that also. We are just really jazzed about the opportunity to do something different than just the full blown rock show with all the spinny, twirly lights and the fog machines and dance music. It’s a side of music that we love and it’s a side that is inherent in a lot of our songwriting even though it is translated live into a more revved rock band show. We are looking forward to the chance to break that down for some of our more hardcore fans who will really enjoy seeing us in that intimate space,” said Murphy.

While the music of STS9 has always been about exploring all reaches of the sonic palette, as their foray into the acoustic proves yet again, the story behind their new record Ad Explorata involved some exploring of a different kind. “Allegedly,” during the recording of the album, the band discovered a shortwave radio channel that was broadcasting a female voice who was reciting numbers on what is known as a “numbers station.” Though it isn’t officially acknowledged by the government, numbers stations are widely thought to be a method of communication between government agents and their operatives in the field. The band was so intrigued with what they had found that they sampled the voice and used it for the beginning of the Ad Explorata track “Central.” They even went so far as to have a cryptographer decode the message that was being broadcast. The numbers turned out to be a set of coordinates that corresponded with an exact location in Big Sur, and several members of the band chose to investigate. It wasn’t long before they were face-to-face with an abandoned military bunker, where they found an embroidered patch that is thought to represent a secret unit that first used satellites to gather signal intelligence from other countries during the Cold War. The story is that this team actually gathered signals from another civilization in our galaxy. Their motto was ‘Ad Explorata, Forward into the Unexplored.’

The band was so affected by the experience that when they returned to the studio they decided that Ad Explorata was the perfect name for the record they were working on because they were exploring uncharted territory and combining elements of their sound in a new way. “We are brining back some elements that we definitely haven’t put into a studio record in a while,” said Murphy. “We’ve always been caught in this weird dichotomy between ‘are we this chill somber Radiohead style band or are we a more Nine Inch Nails dance-floor in your face rock band?’ We always jump around and that’s what we enjoy. After being in a band for 12 years we’ve gotten to the point where we just say, ‘Hey, let’s write music that makes us happy.’”

Fortunately, they have used this philosophy to stay happy as a band and as their legions of fans continue to grow, the band has figured out some very socially responsible ways of harnessing their popularity to give back to the community. As if their non-stop touring schedule and long hours in the studio weren’t enough, the guys in STS9 go out of their way to actively support a number of charity organizations including Boulder’s Conscious Alliance and the New Orleans-based Make It Right Foundation.

“Make It Right are building green, eco-friendly, low income houses back in the Ninth Ward for families who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina,” said Murphy. “After Katrina, we took the first opportunity that we could to go back to New Orleans and play music. We toured the Ninth Ward while there was still complete devastation and, like it would for anybody, that had a lasting impact on us. Those people had everything wiped away in just a few days. In the end, we felt like we needed to do something.”

Consistent with the good message that they spread through their scene and their music, throughout the course of 2009 the band has been donating $1 from every ticket purchased to the foundation. “We decided this year, after going down there and doing some work with a food bank, that we were going to pool all of our resources to try to build a house. Our goal has been to try to raise $150,000 to build one of these houses for a family. We are about halfway there,” Murphy said. “What we tell our fans is that this is their house that they are building for a family, we just happen to be a catalyst for it. We really appreciate the opportunity to do it.”

With yet another fantastic album of otherworldly sounds, a heightened sense of social consciousness and a few tricks up their sleeve for their Denver New Year’s celebration, STS9 promises to continue to break down barriers both musical and otherwise. More than 10 years into a career that shows no signs of slowing, the band continues to prove why they are one of the biggest live draws in Colorado and across the country.

:: STS9 ::

:: June Swaner Concert Hall at DU ::

:: December 29 ::

:: Wells Fargo Theatre :: December 30 & 31::

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GWAR starts two-year celebration of its twenty-fifth anniversary

:: GWAR ::

:: Gothic Theatre :: November 11 ::

By Brandon Daviet

In many ways, GWAR’s career plays out like an intergalactic version of “Celebrity Rehab” crossed with the pages of Marvel Comics, albeit with a slightly more perverted tone. Not a day goes by when the group doesn’t find themselves embroiled in conflicts and adventures that should grace the tabloids in every known star system.

And with the late-summer release of their album Lust In Space those tabloids are really starting to take notice. In recent months GWAR has found themselves getting more press than a summer blockbuster, more ladies than Wilt Chamberlain, and more gigs than a hippie jam band on a never-ending tour.

For those who are not familiar, the Richmond, Va.-based metal band lives in a false reality they’ve created, which essentially states that the space beasts of GWAR came to Earth eons ago, had sex with the apes and created the human race. They wear over-the-top costumes, have live shows that involve dousing their audiences with blood and other boody fluids, and rarely, if ever, break character. But despite the gimmicky, comedic nature of the band, the group actually does play quality metal — quality enough to earn them two Grammy nominations and sustain them for the last two-and-a-half decades. Continue — Read more »

Frightened Rabbit Ready To Sink Teeth Into Monolith Music Festival Crowd

:: Frightened Rabbit ::

:: Monolith Music Festival ::

:: Red Rocks Amphitheatre ::

:: Saturday, September 12 ::

By Timothy Dwenger

Early last year, a small, unassuming band from Scotland dropped an unconventional pop record which has sailed along under the radar of most casual observers, but caught many in-the-know upside the head like the lightening quick backhanded slap of an irate mother.

The bulk of the material on the album, Midnight Organ Fight, was largely the fruit of a break-up that Frightened Rabbit’s lead singer and founder Scott Hutchinson endured several years ago and, quite frankly, the rest of us are better off for it.

The anger and pain that fueled the twisted beauty of lines like,”Why won’t our love keel over as it chokes on a bone, and we can mourn its passing and then bury it in snow,” show us that Hutchinson possesses a true mastery of language as he expresses some of life’s most elemental sentiments.

Continue — Read more »

Yonder serves up its latest musical recipe, its fifth studio album, The Show

:: Yonder Mountain String Band ::

:: Fox Theatre :: Aug 7 ::

:: (FMQB Conference) ::

:: Fox Theatre :: Aug 27 ::

:: Red Rocks Amphitheatre :: Aug 28 ::

By Timothy Dwenger

Ever thought about how closely cooking and music are related? Maybe not, but it’s clear that Yonder Mountain String Band’s Jeff Austin thinks about it a lot. As a self described amateur chef and “foodie,” and a full-time member of one of the biggest bluegrass bands around these days, he has plenty of experience with both art forms.

Austin is a walking encyclopedia of high-end restaurants in every nook and cranny of this country, but it is his taste on mandolin and the recipes that he and his comrades serve up on stage that has not only catapulted them, but sustained them in the international bluegrass spotlight for so long.

“Food and music are very, very similar,” Austin said in a recent conversation with The Marquee on the deck of a little café just minutes from his Nederland, Colo., home.  “The collaboration between you and an instrument, the thought process of a song and the thought process of a recipe, the fact that you really have to pay close attention to your essential basics and after that you are free to improvise. It’s really the same.”
Continue — Read more »

Ani DiFranco: The Righteous Babe hard at work on another album, her 20th

:: Ani DiFranco ::

:: Mile High Music Festival ::

:: Dick’s Sporting Goods Park ::

:: July 18 ::

By Ryan Lappi

After releasing nearly twenty albums in just as many years, it is safe to assume that Ani DiFranco has created one of the most comprehensive, creative, and strikingly intimate scrapbooks in modern music. Since establishing her own label, Righteous Babe Records, in 1990, DiFranco has offered a rare portrait of unrelenting creativity independent of the traditional trappings of corporate music, resulting in a sustained outpouring of unabashed personal and social commentary that not only chronicles her own evolution as an artist, but also holds a finger to the pulse of democracy in America.

That early declaration of independence from the commercial record industry continues to pay huge dividends for DiFranco. Her 2008 album, Red Letter Year, was perhaps her most vast in scope, chronicling everything from politics to her new found – dare we say it – domestic role as mother, to the song-filled alleyways of her new home in post-Katrina New Orleans, to the majesty of existence itself, exemplified in the song “The Atom.” Continue — Read more »

:: Meese ::

:: Westword Showcase ::

:: featuring 50 acts on 10 stages::

:: June 13 ::

By Dan Rutherford

On a warm Tuesday night in early March, nearly 200 of the Denver scene’s most recognizable faces packed Denver’s Larimer Lounge — not for a bloggerati praised “savior of rock” or even the U.K.’s hottest import — but for a poorly veiled “secret” show for hometown heroes, Meese.

For the first time, the band was able to share a year’s worth of studio sessions, countless knob tweaks with acclaimed producer Sean Beavan (Nine Inch Nails, Marilyn Manson), and more importantly, the announcement that Broadcast, their first full-length on Atlantic Records, will be in stores June 30.

Months of speculation and unfounded claims of the label’s lack of interest by envious messageboard trolls quickly halted that evening. Since their signing in October, 2007, the ominous shadow cast over the band who have been touted as “Colorado’s Next Big Thing” quickly started to dissipate and for the first time, their opportunity to shine in the national spotlight was visible on the not-so-distant horizon. Continue — Read more »

:: Thievery Corporation ::
 :: Fillmore Auditorium :: April 16 ::

By Timothy Dwenger

Fourteen years ago, in the then brand new, hip and trendy 18th Street Lounge in Washington D.C., a mutual friend set up a meeting between one of the lounge’s co-owners, Eric Hilton and a young producer named Rob Garza. That meeting went much better than anyone could have imagined and gave birth to one of the most innovative bands of the last 20 years, Thievery Corporation.

“We started talking about the kind of music we were into and we both had all these common influences. I think at that point I was very into Brazilian and Indian music,” said Garza in a recent interview with The Marquee as he prepared for the group’s Spring tour. “So, we decided to put our equipment together and create a studio to see if we could make any sound. The first week we got together we made two songs that were on Sounds from The Thievery Hi-Fi.” In the years since, their loungy, chilled-out take on world music has influenced a whole scene of younger artists.

Though Thievery rarely performs at the club any more, Hilton’s 18th Street Lounge is still actively supporting the thriving downtempo scene in D.C. South of the border, Garza is doing his part as co-owner of a club called La Santaera in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. “The club is kind of lo-fi and artistic. It has great vibes and we bring in DJs from all over the world. It gets going around three in the morning and winds down around 7. It’s a crazy scene,” Garza said.
Continue — Read more »

:: The Airborne Toxic Event ::
 :: Bluebird Theater :: Feb. 23 ::

By Timothy Dwenger

A band leader is often born out of many awkward teen years toiling in a friend’s garage, working on songs he would never admit to today. Maybe he followed that with a classic rock cover band that might have gotten a few gigs at local bars and frat houses in college, and then two or three mediocre original bands before he finally landed that sweet opening gig on a Sonic Youth tour … or something like that.

It is pretty rare that a successful journalist-turned-aspiring-novelist decides one day to drop everything and start a rock band, but that’s exactly what happened in 2006 when Mekell Jollett decided to form The Airborne Toxic Event. “I’d just gotten into Yaddo, the writers program in upstate New York, and I’d just gotten an agent for my book,” Jollett told The Marquee, days before The Airborne Toxic Event set out for the U.K. to kick off nearly three months of touring on two continents.  “I was at this crossroads where I could have gone deeper into my writing career but I just suddenly snapped and decided I had to start a band. Everyone thought I’d lost my fuckin’ mind.  When I told my folks they were like, ‘WHAT!!!’ and they looked at me like I was nuts. But, suddenly the idea of being alone in a room for three months or six months or a year as this tortured solitary writer just wasn’t how I wanted to spend my time.” Continue — Read more »

:: Umphrey's Mc Gee ::
:: Aggie Theatre :: Jan. 22 ::
:: Boulder Theater :: Jan. 23 ::
:: Fillmore Auditorium :: Jan. 24 ::
:: North Indiana Allstars feat. members of Umphrey’s McGee :: Cervantes Masterpiece :: Jan. 24 :: (late nite) ::

By Lisa Oshlo

Starting on their second decade as a band, Umphrey’s McGee is continuing to gather momentum like some of the great bands that have come before them. In fact, as their new album Mantis demonstrates, they continue to push their limits and are continually looking to evolve their sound.

Mantis (to be released on January 20) is their darkest and heaviest album to date and showcases these influences more readily than their previous releases. Recorded over 20 months in their home base of Chicago and kept completely under the radar until this tour, Mantis promises to be an exciting album for hardcore fans and newbies alike.
The Marquee had the opportunity to speak with keyboardist Joel Cummins about their latest effort, as well as everything new in the world of Umphrey’s McGee.

“Mantis ended up being this really intricate, dense record, and definitely the best music we’ve put together to date,” said Cummins. “It’s made up of completely new songs that we’ve never played live before, which is something that our audience won’t fully expect. We usually tend to road-test the songs and then tweak them in the studio. But it was different with this album, and I think we’ve really captured the personality of what the band is at its core.”

Umphrey’s McGee was formed in the shadow of the Notre Dame campus in 1997 by guitarist/vocalist Brendan Bayliss, bassist Ryan Stasik, keyboardist Cummins, and drummer Mike Mirro (who left the band to attend medical school in late 2002). Since that time, they have added percussionist Andy Farag and guitarist Jake Cinninger, and replaced Mirro with jazz drummer Kris Meyers.

While they are often lumped in the ubiquitous “jamband” category, the band is actually far more influenced by progressive rock bands like King Crimson, Frank Zappa, and Pink Floyd.

For a band whose reputation was bolstered by the strength of its live shows and the enthusiasm of its fans, it has been difficult for Umphrey’s McGee to keep the new music under wraps, but Cummins thinks fans’ anticipation will be rewarded. “It’s definitely unprecedented for us to have this much new material, so this tour should be really exciting,” said Cummins.

One of Umphrey’s greatest strengths is their ability to improvise onstage, bringing new life to songs that have been played countless times before. It is meticulous work, and one to which the band devotes much time and energy.  Cummins described aspects of this process: “One cool, creative tool is to identify sections as places to break off and improvise. So over a song’s life there might be five or six different sections that change, and I think that’s really exciting for us and just as exciting for our fans, because you just never know when these spots are going to pop up.” While they prepare heavily in advance, they also rely on each other in the moment for direction. “Once we’re onstage we have kind of an elaborate system of communicating with each other which includes hand signals and body language, like a baseball coach,” said Cummins. “Some things are more composed and some are more open-ended, where anyone can take the lead. On any given night, something different is going to happen no matter what. Usually it happens really organically.”
Despite their playing three shows on the Front Range, Cummins promises the fans completely different setlists from night to night. While they will certainly highlight the new material, they will also be playing many older tunes, covers, and fan favorites.

In addition to their vast catalogue of original music, Umphrey’s McGee has notoriously good taste in cover songs, which they play with and make their own. “We like to play covers that we’ve heard and liked, but maybe haven’t heard live before,” said Cummins. “We like to do the songs that will really surprise our fans. Anything from Metallica And Justice For All to a Daft Punk song or something like that. We really try to morph the sound so we can get as close as we can to authentically recreating the song. Fortunately, we have guys in the band who have everything from classical training to having drummers and guitarists that have played every type of music from metal to country, so we can really have some fun with it.”

While Chicago is still home-base for the band, Cummins said that Umphrey’s McGee looks forward to playing on the Front Range.

“This will be the first time we’ve played at the Boulder Theater, which will be a really cool thing for us,” said Cummins. “We’ve played the Fox since about 1999, so it’ll be nice to step into a little bigger room with all the new production we’re bringing out. And yet it will still be an intimate experience. We’ve definitely got the the best light show that we’ve ever had coming out on the road with us, and in addition to that, I think the new album is going to feature some pretty cool vocal arrangements that are a little more dense than what we’ve done in the past. We’ve been holding onto this material so long, it’s been killing us not to play it live.’

:: Umphrey’s Mc Gee ::
:: Aggie Theatre :: Jan. 22 ::
:: Boulder Theater :: Jan. 23 ::
:: Fillmore Auditorium :: Jan. 24 ::
:: North Indiana Allstars feat. members of Umphrey’s McGee :: Cervantes Masterpiece :: Jan. 24 :: (late nite) ::

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