We're stoked that you guys are going to be coming back here to Grand Rapids [on Feb. 15.] A lot of people got down when you guys played here at Founder's Fest [in 2010] and the other times you’ve played here. What do you guys like about playing here? Jesse Miller: Yeah, it’s been a little while. Two years, or something I think. We always used to go up to Grand Rapids and play when we were starting off, so we always, whenever we tour, we try to get back up to that neck of the woods every so often.
You guys were also here in West Michigan for Electric Forest last summer. How do you reflect back on that experience now? Yeah, that was kind of a crazy weekend. If you were there, I remember on the day that we played, there was a huge rainstorm, and a whole bunch of sets were canceled and it created some technical problems, and we actually had to bolt right away because we were playing Red Rocks that same weekend, and another show out in Colorado, so we were kind of in and out real quick. It was a little bit of a madhouse because of the rain, but obviously that location is something else. It’s always been great when we’ve been there for the Rothburys [in 2009] and for Electric Forest last year.
Since you guys first started playing summer festivals, how has that whole circuit changed? Yeah, we’ve been doing it for a while now… At the beginning, it’s kind of tough to get very good deals to play these festivals, and it’s hard to get very good slots, and you have to slowly work your way up, but then, after you’ve established yourself a little bit, and you can come into these festivals and play good slots, and every weekend you’re going out and playing in front of thousands of music craving fans, it’s really awesome, and that’s really been at the heart of spreading the word about Lotus is these festival appearances. So that’s one side of it. The other side of it is that definitely the music has changed pretty drastically since we’ve been doing it. The whole influx of electronic music and kind of the way that’s been accepted in what’s been traditionally rock festivals, has definitely changed the nature of a lot of these festivals.
Yeah, especially at something like Electric Forest, where it was almost a fifty-fifty split between electronic and dub step artists and rock and jam bands, where you guys almost bridged that sort of gap. Do you feel like you guys play that sort of role musically? Yeah, I think we have been doing that for some time. Back in the day when there was a festival, and it was more of a jam-rock festival, we would play those events, and there would usually be one or two token DJs that would do late nights, but it was never really much of a focus, and yeah, I feel like we’re always somewhere in between that, kind of working both ends. We’re saying to people that may be coming from the electronic end, ‘Look, you can approach dance and electronic-informed music, but still have a real performance aspect to it.’ And then on the other said we’re saying, ‘You don’t have to be afraid of these dance rhythms or synthesizers or anything else, coming from the rock side. There’s something in that.’ So we’ve always tried to walk that tightrope and draw from both sides.
Another balance you guys have to maintain is doing those festival shows, and then doing your own club shows. How different would you say the vibe is at your club shows, say in the winter time, from your summer festival shows? It’s pretty different. I would say, for one thing, with the club shows, we can control the production a little bit more. With festivals it’s always a little bit wild with so many acts throughout the day and production that needs to be changed up. So with a club show you can haul in your own lighting rigs and sound, and really dial it in with the sound check. But it definitely is tough to match just the pure energy, especially at some of the bigger festivals where you have like ten thousand people, that’s pretty hard to match in a club. But the other side of it is, when you play a club show, it’s Lotus fans. They tend to be a little more familiar with the music, whereas at festivals it’s a little bit more mixed, and we’re trying to turn people on. But that kind of intimacy with the music coming into the show kind of allows us to take it to another place that we maybe couldn’t do at a festival. At a festival you just have to paint with a little bit broader strokes.
When it comes to improvisation, do you guys improvise more at a club show than you do at a festival? I wouldn’t say it’s too much different. At festivals we usually have shorter set times, so maybe the set will be designed to be a little bit more focused than a club show, but I don’t really think too much changes as far as the improv.
Do you feel like you guys improv more or less now than you used to? Definitely less than we used to, and I feel that’s really a product of writing compositions that are really tight in themselves. I think that when we were first starting off we were more drawn to writing compositions that kind of really set up an improvisation, like there might not be all that much to the composition itself. And now I feel like we’re spending a lot more time like really working on our arrangements and making each composition work really well within itself, and sometimes we do build those to have more extended improv, but yeah, I feel like composition and improvisation need to have some kind of balance. We don’t just throw in some improvisation because we can do it. It really has to be set up, in my mind, from the particular composition, to work in a particular way. If that makes sense. Like not just jamming for jamming’s sake. It’s got to serve some kind of purpose.
I know that you and [guitarist/keyboardist] Luke [Miller] come up with the compositions on your own at home, and then kind of road test the stuff as you’re working through it. How much develops as you’re writing and working on the songs initially and then feeling some of them out with the crowds? You know, I think it’s usually planned out from the beginning. Like we’ll say, ‘OK, this is going to set up some kind of improvisation of some sort,’ and we’ll kind of have an idea of some sort parameters of what that might be, like if it’s going to follow a particular beat, or if maybe it needs to move from this particular thing to a piece B eventually. And we definitely play around with stuff at shows, and sometimes if something is going really well, we might not even talk about it. It might just be something that the next time we play we’ll just naturally go back to some of those ideas again. So yeah, I’d definitely say there is some influence with playing the stuff out and seeing how it works in front of a crowd.
When you guys released the new self-titled album last fall, you made it known that you were going in more of an electronic direction than you had on your last album [2008’s] Hammerstrike. Was that change something that you got a feel for from playing live? I think that was a little part of it. I think the other part of it was having done the whole Hammerstrike project, or the Oil on Glass/Feather on Wood EPs [in 2009], which were a little bit more guitar-oriented, we were just kind of naturally finished with that cycle and ready to start just doing more synth-driven stuff. So I think that was a little piece of it, too, because not all of the self-titled album’s tracks are really heavy-hitting live songs, especially toward the end of the album, we don’t play live all that often, because they’re a little more mellowed out. So, it was a combination of all those things. We’ve been playing some of those tracks out for quite a bit of time and really developing them both in the studio and live, and so the crowd interaction definitely played a part.
Yeah, I did want to talk about some of those mellower tracks, especially the last song on the new album, "Orchids." That has almost more of an indie vibe to it, with a real Radiohead sort of feel. Why did you guys want to close out the album with that song? I thought it was a really well-written track. Luke wrote that, and I think in a lot of ways, even though it’s different than a lot of the stuff that’s earlier on the album, it really ties some things together. Particularly with the strings, that was a theme that went throughout the album, we used live strings on I think four or five different tracks. So it just kind of felt like a good way to bring the album to a close. It just worked really well in that position.
[Late last month] you guys released a free download of The Album Leaf's remix of "Orchids." How did that remix come about? How open are you guys to having your stuff remixed by other artists? That one, we commissioned that from The Album Leaf quite a long time ago, and we’ve just been holding onto it for about a year, I think. We just try to get in touch with producers that we respect and think that do a good remix, and that one I was really pleased with how that came out. We reach out to a lot of different people, and sometimes it works out with their scheduling, and sometimes it doesn’t, but we’re definitely open to having people, like experienced producers, reinterpreting the music.
I know that you personally have got your Beard-o-Bees side-project going. How much do you enjoy doing remixes and that sort of stuff with that? I do as much as I can. Obviously Lotus is pretty busy, but when we have time off, I definitely spend a lot of time with Beard-o-Bees stuff, working on tracks. Right now Luke is writing like crazy and has a really big collection of tracks that Lotus hasn’t even gotten to yet, so that’s nice. I don’t feel tons of pressure to crank out tons of Lotus material every week because Luke is writing so much good material. So I try to find a balance between the two. But for me, having this other outlet really keeps me fresh, and lets me try out different stuff that would be pretty tough to try out in the context of Lotus. It keeps my production skills sharp.
How different would you say your influences, or maybe your current listening habits, are from Luke’s? There’s a lot of stuff that we cross over on and we both enjoy, but I would say that I lean a little bit more toward the weirder and minimal stuff, and he tends a little bit more towards stuff that’s more poppy. But that can change, as there are certain more poppy things that I’m into that he’s not as into. But yeah, we have a fair amount of crossover in the things we enjoy.
I know that a few of you guys have degrees in music and I know you've got a degree in music yourself. For other aspiring musicians, how important would you say that foundation and that theoretical understanding that you got in college is to what you do with Lotus? I don’t know how important it is. There are definitely benefits to it, but I think I could certainly do what I’m doing now without any degree. It’s pretty handy when I transcribe something for some horns or some strings, but really what I’m doing now is really more in the realm of audio engineering rather than straight music theory stuff. But I don’t know. Learning that really gives you different perspectives, especially on compositions and how form works and how form can work for you. So I don’t know. It’s tough for me to say what it would be like without having studied that stuff. That’s kind of a long-winded answer. I’m glad I have that degree, but I don’t know if I’d say that you necessarily need to have that, I guess is what I’m saying.
On the flip side of that, how much have you learned on the fly, like with what you do with the sampler and everything, while Lotus has been going on? Uhh, every single piece of it. Yeah, I really had to throw myself into a lot of that stuff. A lot of those things aren’t something that you can just take a class for, especially now the way these things are designed, you’re basically building your instruments, if that makes sense. You’re finding ways to manipulate things that you’ve already done for a live performance. But on the flip side of that, is being able to create that stuff to begin with. I’ve done a lot of learning on my own, talking to other producers and engineers and reading books and doing whatever, trying to further my education on that every single day.
So particularly with the new album, what was it like incorporating some of those sounds, like the live strings and stuff, back into the live setting with the sampler? I’d already developed my system for playing different elements live for Lotus, so that was all pretty much set, it was just a matter of taking those recordings and getting them into my stuff. It was really something that wasn’t too big of a deal. But I definitely did develop a few different techniques, probably in the last year or two that enabled us to do some of those things a little bit differently than we would have in the past, and makes it possible to pull off.
What do you guys have planned for later this year? I know it's too early to say for sure, but we'd love it if you guys came back for Electric Forest this summer. Yeah, we’re just starting to book a bunch of festivals and sketch out this summer. So, there’s still a lot to be determined. We’re definitely going to be making the rounds to a bunch of different festivals this summer again. We’ve got a lot of studio stuff in the works. I don’t want to reveal too much information about it, because it’s still happening, but we’ve got kind of like a special project that involves some remix stuff from the last album, and collaborating with some different artists, as well as record some new material. So we’re keeping ourselves busy.