Liner Notes: Blues Traveler, 'North Hollywood Shootout'

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CHAN KINCHLA AND the rest of the guys in Blues Traveler have a new hobby this summer: golf.

But they're not just playing for fun. No, moments after Express' interview with the guitarist, Kinchla stepped onto the links with the No. 24 golfer in the country, Adam Alfieri.

The No. 24 10-year-old golfer, that is.

Alfieri is first cousin with bassist Tad Kinchla's fiancee, and Chan is using his brother's future relative to improve his swing.

"We're doing some in-law bonding out here on the golf course, but we kind of suck so we're already looking for tips," he said from a course in Raleigh, N.C., where Blues Traveler was on a tour stop.

The group went out on tour this summer with Live and Collective Soul, Blues Traveler's first large-scale, multi-band tour since 1998, when it last played H.O.R.D.E., the touring festival band leader John Popper helped create.

But when Blues Traveler returns to the road this fall, the spotlight will be set firmly on the 21-year-old group and its new CD, "North Hollywood Shootout" (Verve Forecast).

In order to open itself up, Kinchla said the band tried some new methods — and a jam session with Bruce Willis — while recording its ninth album and first collection of new material since 2005's "¡Bastardos!"

"We realized, in the past, we had been preconceiving songs in the rehearsal studio and really arranging them and getting really into song arrangements," Kinchla said. "So, we'd get in the studio and play it kind of stiff, especially the last few records. It was good for us, in learning and experimenting with song arrangements, but we were kind of losing what we thought we do well, which is: When we play live we find all these happy mistakes and grooves while we're improvising and we weren't really capturing that in the studio.

"So, in the studio this time we did a lot of long jams and then we'd go back and listen to them and with our producer David Bianco would find cool little parts, save those, go back and start building songs around those kind of cool grooves."

With that info in mind, Express asked Kinchla to take us track by track through "North Hollywood Shootout."

You can stream the new CD's "You, Me and Everything," Forever Owned" and "Love Does" on the band's MySpace page.

» "Forever Owed"
"Forever Owed" is one of the songs where we kind of found this kind of pocket and really simple chord progression and it felt nice, so, we started building the song there. Once we had a very open template, John started writing a melody on that then. We started responding more to the melody in the song after that, but that one came directly out of just a jam.

» "You, Me and Everything"
We put a really crappy drum loop up just to kind of get us out of our own comfort zone and jammed to that, without even a drummer. Just me, Ben [Wilson, keyboards] and Tad jammed it out for, like, an hour because we wanted to get out of what you get in your own stock beats. … [We] came up with that thing that Ben does [vocally mimics the keyboard hook] and that became the basis of the song, and Tad came with a really cool baseline and got the groove. And John came in … with cool really nice melodies again, and once again the idea was to keep it simple, so that was another jam, jam, jam, jam, jam.

» "Love Does"
You know what the magic is? Once again, [like] the first two songs, exact same process — I didn't even realize: Took a bad drum loop because we wanted to get our of our comfort zone and also because it also made us relax a bit, because you tend to speed up sometimes, so once we you get into that loose pocket we tend to fool around and then came up with a cool chord progression and then started building from there. And you know, lyrically, we like to leave the lyrics open to interpretation by the listener; don't like explaining them too much.

» "Borrowed Time"
That was a song that John had a really big chord pattern and he had all figured out. … It came out for him as a really traditional piano thing like it is at the beginning — and it was important to us to try and make it something else in the end, so we spend a lot of time trying to make it weirder. I wanted to make it even more weird, but John had his part — actually, it came out pretty darn nice as I listened back. It's hard to get perspective, after I finish a record. I don't listen to it once it's done, for a couple of months, just because you're so inside of it. I'm pretty pleased now. Right when it was done there were a million things I wanted to change, but now I can just let go and enjoy whatever it was we came up with.

» "The Beacons"
That was just me and Brendan [Hill, drums] just hashing out an upbeat rock thing. And me and Brendan we're kind of the rock element in the band so we were like, "Let's just do a nice big rock song." … Once again, we jammed for like 30 minutes, and that was like 10 seconds of whatever we found in all those 30 minutes and built the song from there.


» "Orange in the Sun"
That was a song all pre-written by John on a little four-string ukulele thing. … He had that all written out, so we just built it around that and then put in a big signature lead line in the middle of it to kind of take the song somewhere. Because the song just repeated, loop, loop. … So, that one's much more preconceived. But you know, it's nice to blend the two because we felt like we gave the album a little perspective.

» "What Remains"
That was a song that John wrote, preconceived, and it was much slower — to the point of putting us to sleep — so we wanted to put a nice soul groove on it. Like, [an] "Easy Like Sunday Morning" groove. And then it was John's idea to put the kind of mournful muted horns on the bottom to put a little New Orleans on it.

» "How You Remember It"
That was actually a song I wrote in my backyard, and I actually wrote that pretty much in the entirety. I even wrote all the lyrics for it — because John wrote some lyrics that I thought sucked. That was pretty much a preconceived-by-me song. We did work on the verse groove and trying to make that better, so we applied some of what we'd been doing jam-wise to make a cool verse groove.

» "The Queen of Sarajevo"
That was written a long time ago and never quite got together. That was written very much in a rehearsal space about two years ago, but its one of the few songs that lasted from that writing session. … That song is inspired by a trip we had to Sarajevo for our USO tour after the Kosovo war. … It was incredible, the military. To get inside the whole military complex is so impressive and so many people take what they do for granted it's amazing. And there's no better hangover cure than a low-altitude Black Hawk helicopter at 7 a.m. in the morning.

» "Free Willis, Ruminations From Behind Uncle Bob's Machine Shop"
That was John and Bruce Willis — Bruce has been a friend with us for a while — and they were just out partying one night, brainstorming, and they came up with this brilliant idea. And the jam and all the stuff that's going on behind it was, we just literally jammed for like 30 minutes and came back and took all the best parts of it and kind of stuck it together. And then Bruce came in and hung out in the studio and we smoked a lot of pot and free-formed all the stuff — kind of a free-verse idea — and then Dave took those ideas and whittled it down and put it all together. Dave was really in charge of putting the collage of all that together, and it just came out as something different and kind of cool, loose.

Written by Express contributor Rudi Greenberg
Photos courtesy Conqueroo