American indie rock band The Good Life will hit the stage in Albuquerque at Sister Bar on Sunday. The band is touring to promote their newest album, “Everybody’s Coming Down,” which was released in August. It is their first new album in eight years.
Tim Kasher, front man of The Good Life, spoke with the Daily Lobo about the experience of touring with the band again and the new album.
Before August, The Good Life hadn’t put out an album since 2007. What have the members been up to all this time?
“Well, I’ve been putting albums out with my other band, Cursive and I started putting albums out in my own name. And Stefanie (Drootin), she’s our bass player, has started a band called Big Harp. She and her husband have a family … and Roger (Lewis) was in Omaha. He must have been working on his projects as well.”
How has your sound changed in the last eight years?
“Well, the last album for The Good Life that we did in 2007 was more of an acoustic-based record. But this record is a lot louder. It’s more of a soul rock band record.”
What’s it like touring with the band again?
“This time around, it’s different, just out of necessity. Everybody’s gotten older and our lifestyles have changed. Stefanie and her husband Chris have a 7-year-old and 5-year-old and so their children tour with them, so we don’t all travel in the same touring van anymore. That’s the biggest difference. Also, we’ve all been doing this for a long time, so we still have a lot of fun (touring), but now we have a more mature approach to it than we did when we were 20 years old.”
Tell me more about “Everybody’s Coming Down.”
“I think the first big difference between this record and the last one is that after taking a long break, then deciding to get back together, this album is a much better representation of what the band sounds like as far as each member’s contribution. This album is more significant than the previous record because we had a little more of a band songwriting phase, so it feels a lot more like a full-fledged band. I think that’s why the sound’s a little bigger in scope. It became more of a rock and roll album.”
How does the new album better represent the band as a whole?
“For example, Roger, our drummer, is a lover of classic rock and so we made it a point to bring in some more rock aspects to it. And Ryan Fox has a really unique and kind of noisy approach to tonality. It’s kind of a psychedelic approach to the songwriting on this album that we didn’t really represent on previous albums.”
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Why make it more of a point to capture the sound of individual members in this album?
“I think because that was what called for the justification of why we were getting back together. We never really talked about this, but I think it kind of became an unsaid thing that if we’re doing a Good Life record instead of me taking the songs and putting them out under my own name, (there has to be) a reason. A lot of people wonder why the band got back together, and even though we never talked about it ourselves, we realized that we wanted to answer that by having each band member contribute something as a really significant part of who they are as a musician, which is kind of why we made this record.”
Why is The Good Life back together?
“We just took a lot of time off. But all along, we had the feeling that it might be nice to get back together and do some touring again. And if we’re going to do that, we thought, then wouldn’t it be nice to get back together and do a record as well? We’ve just been busy doing other things, but there’s always been this thought that maybe eventually we can get back together and do it again.”
What is your favorite song from the album, and why?
“That would tend to vary, but currently I’d probably say the ‘The Troubadour’s Green Room’ is my favorite song from the record at the moment. It’s a song that came together well. All the pieces fit together. It feels like the song was completed properly (because) it came together pretty smoothly. We didn’t have much struggle with that one at all.”
What’s in store for the remainder of this tour?
“Now we’re headed South to San Diego, then we’ll be headed east toward Austin. And then we’ll go back up north to finish in Omaha at the end of November, around Thanksgiving. We’re touring our new album now, but we play stuff off the old catalog. It’s been very well received.”
What are yours and the band’s plans when the tour is over at the end of this month?
“The band will have time off for the holidays. Then we all have some shows that we’re playing with our different projects, but we’re going to pick up again together at the end of January to head off to Europe for a few weeks of shows. We don’t have anything firmly set up, but we’re planning on getting out in the U.S. again sometime next year.”
Skylar Griego is the culture editor at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @TDLBooks.
