Music: The Band Talks Music

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ROBERTSON: Your roots really are everything that has ever impressed you, and how much of it you can remember. A bridge from a song by Little Milton seven years ago might start you off on something; that's how loose it is. Maybe you'll never even remember it. There are five guys involved, and everybody has a little different thing. Like one guy in the group would remember very impressive horn lines by Cannonball Adderley. Somebody else would remember a singing harmony that J. E. Mainer and his Mountaineers did years ago. Over all the years we've been playing, we've been buying thousands of records by people nobody remembers the names of. Just the music. Right up to Edith Piaf.

HUDSON: I found out I could improvise; I probably found out too young. I could never really adhere very strictly to classical music, could never become a good classical player. Could never get anything "down." It amazes me what the classical people have to go through to get something down so that it happens every time. It's really superhuman to maintain the kind of quality that's required.

The "churchy" feeling in their music:

HUDSON: I never think of any hymn at any time. It's an idiom. You're acquainted with the movement and the way that it sounds. The Anglican Church has the best musical traditions of any church I know of. It's the old voice leading that gives it the countermelodies and adds all those classical devices which are not right out there, but they add a little texture. If you look at Bach's three or four hundred chorales, you'll find every rule and every kind of chord that's ever been used since, but it's snuck in so discreetly you don't pick it up as being definite dissonance. You don't realize that he's playing a minor ninth—what we call a minor ninth in dance-band terminology—because it will lead to another chord which will be harmonious or simpler in harmonic texture.

The basic ingredients of rock 'n' roll:

ROBERTSON: People say rock 'n' roll is a combination of rhythm and blues and country-and-western, but really it's just blues and country. White music has always been very ricky-ticky, steppity-step, plunkety-plunk-banjo. You could always imagine a stiff collar behind it. Country music was played by white people, and blues was played by black people. And when it interchanged, it became something else, which is what Levon's father sings like. He sings blues with a twang, with that different accent, with a different bump on a different place. The new Rolling Stones album sounds like a bunch of blues-oriented cowboys, man, no doubt about it. . .

Some people call what they do classical rock, or jazz rock, or folk rock. But what we play is really just rock 'n' roll. It's the same music we've been hearing for the last decade and a half. People like Little Richard or Elvis or Fats Domino—these are the people we're carrying out the tradition for, or trying to. I watched a little bit of the Tom Jones Show, and that's when you really learn to appreciate Elvis.

Songwriting:

MANUEL: I lean more into chord changes and melodic stuff. I can write music very easily, but when it comes to words, I cringe. It's hard to get those words in the right slot, to just get going.