[laughs] Well, anyhow, back to the record. How do you guys decide on what songs you’re going to cover?
We all bring cover songs to the band, songs we like and we’ll make suggestions and try things out in rehearsal. Sometimes we’ll try it live and it doesn’t really stick. But it’s usually something we’re really connecting to. We’re huge Neil Young fans – Neil Young is like a god – and we do a bunch of his songs. We put one on the record. And then we have friends that are amazing songwriters, but are more obscure. We have two songs on the record [like that]. Our friend Jeremy Lindsay from Chicago, he’s in a band called JT and the Clouds. He’s just amazing, like Willy Nelson meets Sly and the Family Stone. We did his song “Scattered Leaves” on the record. And then we did a song by an amazing songwriter from San Francisco named Sean Hayes. You should really check him out. He’s got this unearthly, eerie quality in his voice. It’s like this high male voice that’s crackly. It almost sounds like a horn. Every song is an amazing piece of poetry.
And then we’re also all really into these old archival recordings of gospel and blues. We did a couple [songs] that are from that era of recording, from unknown dudes on these crappy recordings. We did one from a guy named Mississippi Fred McDowell. He wrote and covered traditional songs. And then there’s Mississippi John Hurt and Washington Phillips. He plays this instrument that nobody knows what it is [after some research, I found out it’s a dolceola]. It’s like a harmonium, with a bellow that you play with your feet. It actually has hammers in it, and it’s almost marimba-ish. Someone did a field recording of him and he had some really famous songs. We did one of them – “What Are They Doing in Heaven Today?”
