B-Sides

Originally formed ten years ago in Vermont by a tight-knit group of friends, Grayspot blends 50’s rock and country with alternative music for a certain punk/pop appeal. No stranger to the hard road to rock glory, Grayspot just released Out of Time - their first full length - after years of revolving door lineups left them unable to record. Now based in Boston, Grayspot plays 4 to 6 shows a week in and around town with their newest lineup.

Glide's David Boffa I got a chance to talk with Duncan Jewett, guitarist and Grayspot’s sole songwriter, to discuss their new album.

This is your first record as a band, but when did you first get together?

1997. The lead guitar player, Matt Ludwig, and the drummer, Mike Stavish, grew up together and went to grade and high school in Vermont. Then I met them when I moved to their town. They’ve been friends for 15 years or so, and I’ve been friends with them for 10 of those years. We have probably three or four CDs worth of stuff and we just kind of randomly picked the songs that are on this first one. Mike had moved to Boston to take some Berklee classes, he’s 24, a little younger than we are. So he moved to Boston four years ago and was coming back and forth helping us with the recordings, but it kind of slowed up the process a bit.

How did you originally get into music?

I actually didn’t do much with music in high school. I’m the oldest in Grayspot, I’m 28, and I had interest in music when I was in high school, but they never really had the music classes that they have now. We had band, but it was more like 'play the trumpet.' Once I was in college I went to a lot of concerts and I just picked the whole music thing up randomly. When I moved to Killington, I was around a lot of bars with open mics and started learn music through teaching myself. I didn’t take lessons or anything like that. That area is a really nice area; it is very easy to be by yourself and music just comes naturally to you up there. Its a really great area for writing music. A lot of people, well known musicians, tend to buy a house and be up there for that reason.

Who are some of your influences?

My heart is in 50’s and 60’s music, such as Buddy Holly, Elvis and classic country like Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson. Those were my biggest influences growing up, and then in the 90’s, the whole Seattle music happened. I was in college around then, so I just kind of based my mentality and writing on that also. And that’s just how my influences all came about. The more you learn musically then obviously the better stuff you write will hopefully be. (laughs)

Is it safe to assume then that those are the main influences of Grayspot?

Yeah, we all like older country rock and a lot of 50’s music. It’s interesting because we’re all really different from each other. I like early pop-rock, whereas Matt is more into Alice and Chains and Pantera. It’s pretty cool because I can have a country rock song that I wrote, but then he will have his own input on it and the song will have more of an edgier, guitar driven slant that alters the song from every other song that’s out there. That’s why we hired the singer Matt two and a half years ago. Matt’s from Austin, Texas. We’ve had singers from all over the place for the past eight years, from Boston, L.A., New York. It was one after the other with drug problems they’ve had or, you name it, just all sorts of problems. And that was the biggest problem for us because it slowed everything down. Not having a singer is the worst because, when you don’t have someone else, like a guitarist, you can always find a sub or replacement. When you don’t have a singer it slows everything completely down. So we finally found Matt after auditioning about 40 or 50 different people. It’s good we found him because a lot of the music was more rock ‘n roll than we wanted, and with his Country influences and his accent and all that kind of stuff, it takes the music just enough to where people that like other kinds of music can relate to it now and not look at it as all the songs are rock n’ roll. A lot of older people like our music and a lot of country people like our music. Having Matt, it helped a lot in giving us a wider variety of music to wider audience.

Were you recording the album during the transition period?

Yeah, the three of us have been together for a while, and we’ve been recording the stuff on the CD for the past two years. It was basically done over a year ago, but because of the change in singers, we had to go through and re-record everything. And, the famous “nobody can find a bass player” thing came true. We had gone through three bass players since we’ve been in Boston because they just didn’t fit the style after a while. So we’ve been struggling with that. For the past three or four months, we’ve had a guy that plays with us live, and we have him until we find a permanent fixture. So I did all of the bass recording on the album, but it’s been such a pain in the butt trying to find the right fixture. Its hard because when you’ve been friends for 10+ years, its so hard to throw a random person into the pile that’s going to fit and be used to all of your habits and patterns and be used the music and get excited about the music and stuff. I think, because of Berklee, there are a lot of young bass players really into jazz and reggae, and they just really overplay things. There doesn’t seem to be much in the way of rock ‘n roll bass players as there used to be, so finding the right fit has been hard because everybody wants to take this straightforward rock n’ roll song and overplay the shit out of the bass and make it all complex and change the songs completely. (Laughs) So we’ve just had a hard time finding the right person. We’ll see, but for now we have a live performer whose playing with us.

What are your own reflections on the new album?

I feel we have our own sound. You can go to Best Buy and buy a new cd of a band that’s out there now, like My Chemical Romance for example, and the quality of the CD is good and its like “oh, these guys just got famous.” Then you go see these guys live and the singer sounds like shit. The CD doesn’t sound really bad, but it just doesn’t sound that good, like it’s overproduced. The thing I found that is opposite for us is that everybody who hears our CD always says “you guys sound better live than on the CD.” I feel the exact same way because I feel like we don’t have $35,000 to record in a studio and make it sound like everybody wants it to sound with perfect volume and quality. For the amount of money that we had to spend, we are definitely pleased with the result but we wish we had more money or had somebody pay for it for us. (Laughs) So we’re hoping to eventually re-record the album and re-release it when we get enough funds. We’re happy with it, but we eventually want to make the quality a lot better in the future.

Where did you record?

We recorded it in my ski loft in Vermont. Except the vocals, we did the vocals in our studio in Boston because we had to prepare things with the vocals.

What was the setup?

We have a 15 track digital home studio, just a big music block.

Any memorable stories from playing Boston bars?

Not really about playing around here, (Boston) it’s all pretty similar. The people who know you come out to see you. Some bars are more fun than others, some sound better than others. We’ve lived in Boston for about a year now, so for the amount of time that we have been here, we feel people really like us. We’ve gotten really good feedback and people have been really positive about the music. As far as living here, nothing really stands out. As far as recording, it’s been a really big struggle for us because of being spread out where we have lived the past couple of years, and also the struggle to find a singer. For Matt, Mike and I, just getting something out after eight years of piecing shit together and dealing with singers and with their problems, its good to finally have something that’s tangible for people to listen to and understand who we are and what kind of sound we have. With all the songs on the CD, we have a ton of them, but we didn’t say “these are the best 11 songs and we’re going to put those on the CD,” they were just kind of the first 11 songs we started working on and Matt learned the lyrics fastest too. The last song on the CD is "Windowsill", and that’s the only song that meant the most to Me, Matt and Mike because we had been working on that since 1997. I wrote it in October of 1997, and I was outside freezing my balls off by a pond, I was all scared in the dark and the song just came to me (laughs). So for us that was like that song had been around for so long that it was nice to see it put on an album.

What is your approach to songwriting?

When I write something, usually nothing gets changed. With the singing, I’ll go through stuff with Matt, and while I’m not a great singer, I’ll try to show him the harmony and what I’m thinking, but he pretty much sticks to the tape with the lyrics. He’s a good singer, so he’ll ask stuff like “can I change ‘and’ to ‘to’ because its easier to pronounce. The drums are pretty much straightforward. A lot of the songs I’ll write using a drum machine so I can get the tempo right and Matt will kind of listen to the tape and get an idea of what I want. It all usually stays the way I write it. Matt knows what to do before I need to tell him, he knows exactly what I’m thinking to put for leads and stuff. It’s really weird because he just knows, you know? But he definitely has good intuition as far as making a song that much better. I’m not really a fan of music from the past five years, so I try to not write anything like what’s out there; I try to reinvent the wheel. I just try to write what comes to mind, and not everything I write is about me personally. There’s a lot of stuff I write that’s like “I feel like shit and this sucks.” There’s also a lot of times where I’ll be at a café and I’ll hate how people are acting towards each other. These are times that I feel like an observer of a situation, and I’ll write a song about it and it’s up to you to assume the rest of the story and how the rest of their day went and how shitty or great their life is. They are fictitious stories but you can relate to them because everybody else has probably been in that situation. So the songs are not always stuff that happened to me. I try to write about situations that people can hear and be like “I definitely can relate” when they hear the songs.

What is the title track, "Out of Time" about?

"Out of Time" is a fairly new song, I wrote that about a year ago. A lot of songs that were left off the album are more alternative; acoustic oriented, darker and slower, with an Alice In Chains unplugged kind of vibe, or maybe a Ryan Adams kind of vibe. I was trying to break out of this pattern and write more fun and catchy music. When that song came to me, it really showed my 50’s and straight rock n’ roll Buddy Holly type influence. I didn’t write the lyrics first or the music first, it just kind of came all together in a really short period of time, like in a day or two. I wrote it about myself with references to Matt and Mike, its one of the songs that we have that’s definitely aimed towards myself and struggling with commitments. It’s also about having all these songs that people like and hearing people say “how come you can’t find the right band, times running out.” I hear it over and over and I get frustrated and want to give up. We have songs that we wrote when we were 23 and 24; and now we are 27 and 28, and we’re still working on the songs. When I hear stuff like that it just pisses me off. I feel like I’m running out of time and its sort of a song to motivate myself, I guess. It’s definitely a song saying “You’ve got do something now, you got to do something fast, every year your getting older and you’re running out of time. Look how old you are.” It also motivates Matt and Mike; every time we play the song we feel there is more we can do to be successful today.

What about "Talk Above The Music?"

That’s a very sarcastic song. Its more like a ballad-like, alternative influenced song. The song itself could go in several different places, but I kept it simple because the point I wanted to make with that song was not complex, its one of those songs that lets people think about what they want to think about when they are listening to it. Its about…(Pauses) When you go out and your partying, its very sarcastic because its like there’s a hundred people there, and if there’s no music playing, people would think it sucks because its boring. If the music is playing, or there’s a band playing, people who don’t really know the band don’t really pay attention to the music and talk louder. What the hell is the point of the music being there in the first place? Its like people think “if there’s no music, it sucks, but if there is music, we’re just going to ignore it.” Its sarcastic because there are so many people who try to express themselves with music and when they play their stuff, people don’t pay attention to it. The last line says “all the people in this world/will they listen anyway?” Is anybody listening to this song while you are playing it?

For more info see: grayspotmusic.com