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You thought you had a bead on Band Of Horses. Now that you’ve heard the unrelentingly retro Mirage Rock, you’re not so sure. Our warts-and-all oral history should set you straight. By Hobart Rowland
“Live action!”
Making his way from the tour bus to a pre-soundcheck interview, Ben Bridwell has just spied a murky pond that would be the perfect staging ground for one of Ernie “Turtleman” Brown’s shirtless critter extractions on Animal Planet’s cult hit Call Of The Wildman. ¶ “I just got into the show on this tour—it’s fuckin’ hilarious,” says Bridwell, quite pleased with his Turtleman impression as he fires up an American Spirit and has a seat near the load-in area at Maryland’s Merriweather Post Pavilion.
Bridwell and the rest of Band Of Horses are in the thick of a summer tour with My Morning Jacket, where they’ve been road-testing music from their new album, Mirage Rock (Brown/Columbia)—tracks like the yee-haw chaotic first single, “Knock Knock,” and Earth Day anti-anthem “Dumpster World,” a weird shotgun marriage of CSNY-like harmonizing and Grandaddy’s “A.M. 180.” By any standard, Mirage Rock’s in-yer-face aesthetic is a thorough dismantling of the methodically assembled, heavily reverbed sound of 2006’s Everything All The Time, 2007’s Cease To Begin and 2009’s Infinite Arms. The constants remain Bridwell’s looming presence and the band’s acknowledged classic-rock influences, which are more exposed than ever under the sway of septuagenarian producer Glyn Johns, who supplanted longtime go-to guy Phil Ek in the studio.
“Glyn chose some songs that maybe we weren’t that comfortable doing, that are a bit more Stones-y,” says Bridwell. “But who gives a shit? We got to be with this 70-year-old dude who’s having a blast, stepping into this time machine where he’s recording just as he did on Who’s Next.”
Johns coached Bridwell through some of his best vocal performances to date, mostly stripping away the overdubs that once made his potent upper register come across like Perry Farrell fronting a trailer-park approximation of Built To Spill. He did the same for the group as a whole, essentially giving the band members permission to sound derivative in all the right ways. “Electric Music” is a hokey BTO rip-off, its celebration of life on the road a nice nod to the Who’s “Going Mobile.” (Recorded by Johns back in 1971.) “Slow Cruel Hands Of Time” and “Long Vows” bear an almost ridiculous resemblance to early-’70s Eagles. (Turns out Johns produced that band’s 1972 debut. Go figure.)
“Hopefully, people get the joke,” says Bridwell. “But if I’m the only one laughing, I don’t mind.”
Less funny is “Heartbreak On The 101,” a devastating ballad about a disenfranchised lover who takes up residence beneath an underpass on the Ventura Freeway. Bridwell digs deep on this one, heaving out the first verse as the tune pieces itself together around his dismembered growl. Soon enough, the singer returns to a more comfortable range as the music swells with a despairing, string-laden urgency: “Heartbreak on the 101/Everybody’s watching, come take look/Heartbreak on the 101/Everybody watch, everybody look.”
Mirage Rock’s live-to-tape energy has drawn some comparisons to Neil Young & Crazy Horse. It’s a bit of a stretch, sure. Bridwell, guitarist Tyler Ramsey, multi-instrumentalist Ryan Monroe, bassist Bill Reynolds and drummer Creighton Barrett never muster the same fury. But they have come convincingly into their own—to the extent that the album feels like a reintroduction to a group that, intentionally or not, has kept itself somewhat at arm’s length from the rest of us.
“I actually named our genre ‘mirage rock’ before the new album came out,” says Bridwell. “It’s the kind of music you hear from a distance and think might sound really good. But then you move a little closer and you’re like, ‘Ah, shit. There’s no substance.’”
If you believe Bridwell, Band Of Horses may be one of rock’s most misunderstood bands. Here, we give them a shot at clearing everything up.
Ben Bridwell: I’m the youngest of three. I grew up outside of Columbia, S.C., but we’ve always been huge Georgia Bulldogs fans. I even force my kids to wear the little cheerleading outfits. It’s the church of college football down there.
Ryan Monroe: We were in the same elementary school. Ben’s older brother had a really kick-ass room in the basement of this really nice suburban house.
Bridwell: Ryan’s the funniest fuckin’ guy I’ve ever met. I’ve known him since we were nubbers, man. We played baseball together … birthday parties, fingerin’ people, fingerin’ each other. I still have a Little League team photo with us in it. Ryan’s trying to look all mean. I just look like a pussy.
Monroe: We played a bunch of sports, but we couldn’t wait to get away and steal a can of dip or somethin’. We weren’t really jocks.
Bridwell: I quit playing sports and started smoking cigarettes and stenciling Black Flag logos on my backpack. Then it all kind of went downhill from there. Or maybe uphill—it’s hard to tell. I dropped out of high school and started moving around.
Monroe: Ben was always getting into trouble. You’d always hear stories about him cuttin’ up.
Bridwell: My mom lived in Tucson, so I quit school and moved out there. I became a random gutter punk—just sleeping wherever. I was hell-bent on living the cliché of a drugged-out, blissfully ignorant life with no aim and no target. The only problem was, in my gut, I knew it wasn’t really me. I got into some bad shit in Tucson and followed some friends out to Olympia, Wash. I couldn’t live in a small town when the city was so close, so I took a bus to Seattle and kicked it homeless there for a month or two. I found a job at the Crocodile Cafe, Peter Buck’s club. They hired me with my sleeping bag on my back, and I worked the dish pit. It was a dream come true, because all I wanted to do was see bands. I saved enough for a security deposit on an apartment, and my friends came out from Olympia and joined me. We got food stamps and shoplifted a lot to survive.
Monroe: It’s a testament to Ben wanting to do this music thing for such a long time, because you can’t really survive with people you don’t mesh with personally.
Bridwell: I never imagined being in a band at all; I never played any instruments or any of that shit. Out West, I was in Carissa’s Wierd playing drums basically because they needed someone to tour with, and we all got along. I forced them to get a real drummer, and I played bass and a little slide guitar. As the band was petering out, they let me sing some harmonies. I figured I could help out the group by printing 1,000 CDs for them to sell at shows. I stuffed all my tips from my Croc gig into a hole in a speaker at home. After a few months passed, I broke the speaker casing open to check my funds. I’d saved up around $600. I needed around $1,000, so I explained my plan to my dad. Luckily, he loaned me the rest of the cash. Everything with Brown Records kind of snowballed from there.
Patrick Hallahan (My Morning Jacket): Do Jim (James) and Ben sing in the same register? Yes. Do their earlier vocal recordings sound similar? Yes. When Jim and Ben sing together, does it sound like something that was meant to be? Absolutely.
Bridwell: I listened to the fuckin’ crap out of Jane’s Addiction in middle school. I got lucky in that I could double-track my vocals in a way that gives a strange effect—sort of that same kind of vibe. There’s always been this twang in my voice that I can’t really kick. Shit, I sounded like that before I heard MMJ—even though I get compared to Jim a lot, which is a great compliment. I remember hearing that first recording of myself and thinking, “Jesus, why can’t I sing like a normal person?” I suppose what I’m trying to do is get back home. At first, though, maybe I was bit cagey about all the “My Morning Jr.” comments.
Hallahan: Do our bands sound anything alike? No.
Bridwell: It sounds crazy, but Band Of Horses has had, like, 10 former members. If anything, maybe there were some ambitions that were off—pompous ideas of being in a band that didn’t match ours. I want to hear “please” and “thank you.” That’s the way I was brought up. And if I’m going to be the dude in charge, I want to have that vibe wherever we go.
Monroe: We had a guitar player in the band who was a fuckin’ phenom, Blake Mills, but we just didn’t need him. It was kind of weird letting someone go who was that good.
Bridwell: It just took having some people who weren’t the right fit to get to the people who were. And God bless every one of them, because I feel like I’ve found the band that I’ve always dreamed of. Tyler was the last missing piece of the puzzle.
Tyler Ramsey: I’ve lived all over, but I settled in Asheville, N.C. I’ve known Bill (Reynolds) forever; we’ve been buddies for 20 years. At some point in 2008, he called me to drive him to a BOH rehearsal in Charleston. I bailed on a gig and ended up hanging out with those guys at a surf bar on Folly Beach. Long story short, it all came together over some tequila.
Creighton Barrett: I’ve lived in coastal towns up and down the East Coast, but I grew up mostly in Ocean City, Md.—kind of a crazy place. Now, I’m in Charleston.
Monroe: He’s got gills … He surfs.
Hallahan: Be sure to put the words “Creighton” and “baby powder” in the same sentence.
Monroe: Right now, we’re about as far away from each other as band members can possibly be. But we all grew up in the South.
Bill Reynolds: The South is always there. My family is from North Carolina and Alabama, so I was a ping-pong ball, going back and forth. Right now, what works for me is where I’m at in California, about an hour-and-half north of L.A. in Ojai. I have place that’s quiet, where I’m able to write and record.
Monroe: Bill has a serious setup; he’s kickin’ out the jams. In my place in Boston, I basically have a Rhodes and a laptop. I made two rooms out of one with a bookcase, and I record on the back side of it. And half the space is taken up by a fuckin’ radiator.
Bridwell: We were doing demos for Cease To Begin, and I called Ryan up. He came over, and he had this Big Gulp with vodka in it. He’d driven from Irmo, which is a good 30-minute drive. And he’s like, “Well, I didn’t start drinking until about halfway.” That’s just the South Carolina thing: drinkin’ and drivin’ as a hobby.
Barrett: When Ryan first joined the band, I didn’t even know he played guitar. Then I walked into the studio, and he was just shredding on a Les Paul.
Bridwell: Ryan was integral from the very beginning. He busted out organ licks in this bed I could sing over.
Monroe: I like the fact that I’m able to serve the song in different ways. I like to stay busy.
Bridwell: The paranoia aspect has really fueled the Band Of Horses machine from the beginning. Some of my favorite songs were motivated by fear. I’ll just get so into my head and get so nervous that someone else can hear me that I’ll start to sense that someone’s close to me, listening to me sing loudly. And back then, I was bit more out of my skull, using stimulants and things that would fuel it even more. Cease To Begin was like trying to turn six songs into nine to hopefully get to 10. A lot of kids gravitate toward “Is There A Ghost.” Maybe it’s the simplicity of it. It should be a bit scary, but there’s something a bit calming about it, as well. It goes to show that I have no idea what a single should be. It was just this shitty demo with two chords. Phil said, “Man, we’ve got to do something with this. Let’s turn it into a rock song.”
Ramsey: With Infinite Arms, we had kind of a false start, and we were touring in the process. It took awhile to get the whole record done.
Monroe: Initially, we were going to knock it out in three our four weeks, but …
Bridwell: We went bonkers with Infinite Arms, because we could. It was a challenge to see what we could do, but we also overcooked some shit.
Reynolds: It was a guilty-pleasure record for us. We wanted to use chambers, use tympani, use strings—just have a blast.
Bridwell: We had a bunch of folks from different labels come by and listen to Infinite Arms, and then another round of meetings in New York with other labels. It seems like we talked to most of the labels in existence. In the end, Columbia showed the most enthusiasm and put together the most alluring configuration by any other label in the running—and we hit it off with label head Ashley Newton. If we had to do it all over again, I’m certain we wouldn’t find a better deal.
Monroe: We worked hard on Infinite Arms. It was like a jigsaw puzzle on a table that you keep coming back to.
Bridwell: The Grammy nomination was a great justification to the parents. And our fuckin’ guest lists suddenly got bigger, too.
Hallahan: I initially met a couple of the Band Of Horses guys at the 2009 Bonnaroo, but it wasn’t until their next Louisville performance that we ended up closing down a rooftop bar. As I went to leave, Ben yells across the table, “Hey man, let me get your number!” I looked at him, deadpan, and said, “I’m cool, man.” I laughed all the way to the car. The next year, I was touring with Dan Auerbach, and we played right before Band Of Horses at Lollapalooza. I walked over to Ben and said, “I hope you know I was kidding about the number. Let me give it to you.” Ben responded with an even more deadpan, “I’m cool, man.” Masterful.
Bridwell: It’s a little strange when fans walk up to me in a restaurant, and I’ve got the kids (young daughters Annabelle and Ivy) and they’re acting like little monsters. They must think I’m the worst dad ever. My wife (Elizabeth) and I own a Pilates studio near Charleston—it’s like the house of estrogen there. We met at a show in Minneapolis in 2006, and we’ve been together ever since. I’m the luckiest dude in the world. Not only do I have a hard-working, incredible wife who’s a great mom, but she also teaches Pilates and has an awesome butt. Having a family and all, I guess I’ve become the responsible elder statesman of the band. Creighton has a seven-month-old, and it’s only a matter of time for Ryan and his girlfriend. I think they’re starting to have sex now, which is fuckin’ disgusting—they’re not even married. But God will judge him.
Monroe: If Infinite Arms was like Brad Pitt, then Mirage Rock is more like Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Bridwell: I’d done this unreleasable solo record. It had a lot of funny stuff—at least what I thought was funny—and a lot of dark stuff people weren’t that comfortable with. They wanted me to release it as an EP, if anything, then save some songs for Band Of Horses. I understand it now, but at the time I was pretty hurt. Once the Kings Of Leon tour tanked, we were left in a lurch. So, we decided to go to Sonic Ranch in El Paso, Texas. We just messed around for two weeks or so.
Reynolds: Cannibal Corpse was coming in as we were leaving. Nicest dudes ever.
Ramsey: We have some cool stuff from El Paso. Bill’s really good in the studio, and he brought along a buddy of his, Jason Kingsland, to help engineer it.
Jason Kingsland: What was captured on tape was the sound of a band realizing, in real time, that the songs were great and they were performing great—and being inspired by that. It sounds really hokey, but it’s a rather incredible thing to watch happen right in front of you.
Reynolds: We were really fastidious. We had one room to rehearse in and one room to track in. We tried to work as fast as we could.
Monroe: We actually had enough material for an album. We were kind of hoping that if it kicked ass, then that would be the record.
Reynolds: It was about 17 songs. The plan was to send what we did to a bunch of producers to see who wanted to do it. We were really proud of it at the time, but no one really gave us any feedback, probably because they wanted to see if we could do better. [Five songs from the sessions can be found on a limited-edition version of Mirage Rock.]
Reynolds: We actually did another demo session at Queens Of The Stone Age’s studio in the Mojave Desert. We played music probably 10 percent of the time, and road motorcycles 90 percent.
Bridwell: Because we had such a heavy hand in the production of Infinite Arms, we wanted to let go. Once Glyn Johns’ name came up, we knew it was going to be a completely different mode of recording—strictly analog and live. But if Glyn Johns says he wants do your record, you’re gonna fuckin’ do it. I had a feeling it was going to be a great storyline for the label. But once I got to know Glyn, that shit didn’t matter to me at all.
Reynolds: Glyn didn’t give two shits about the recordings. He wanted to see us live. He got a real hard-on when it came to seeing us live.
Ramsey: We had dinner with him one night, and it stretched into four-and-a-half hours. He was definitely enjoying the company.
Bridwell: After Glyn agreed to do the album, I finally got a chance to go woodshed up around Pigeon Forge, Tenn. The whole ride up, I was listening to Who’s Next, Let It Bleed, White Mansions—all my favorite records that he’d done. I barely got to the rental cabin before sundown, and I opened the door and the alarm goes off. There’s a cleaning company that comes up there—apparently someone with a fuckin’ Sherpa—and they forgot to leave the thing off. The alarm company was calling and the police were calling, but I couldn’t hear anything because it was so fuckin’ loud. This went on for like two hours. There was a motion sensor, so I had to sit there on this couch. The cops show up, and I’m worried they might think I’m a bad dude and pull their guns. “Finally up, all the peace is disrupted,” “The sheriff’s department got the wrong guy”—it’s all there on “Slow Cruel Hands Of Time.” But I couldn’t finish the song because I knew I wasn’t supposed to be writing new stuff—I was supposed to be correcting older tunes. I did nothing else the whole time except for that shitty demo. I waved the white flag.
Barrett: We wanted go up in the mountains and record in a house. Glyn was like, “Fuck you. We’re not doing that.”
Reynolds: He wouldn’t even turn the goddamn fluorescent lights off.
Monroe: I would yawn, and he’d be like, “Are we keeping you awake?”
Reynolds: Glyn wanted us in the studio with the initial idea for a song at 10 in the morning with a cup of coffee. By 8 p.m., we’d be finished. It keeps you on your toes.
Bridwell: I knew Glyn would want me to play guitar while singing, and that was pretty terrifying. A lot of that stuff stayed, and listening back, there are some imperfections there. Phil taught me that if you can do better, do it. Glyn was more about the energy of the performance. He didn’t care about perfect, because you’re never gonna find perfect. It doesn’t exist.
Barrett: Glyn did see the Eagles side to it, and it was also exciting for him to know that we’d be able to do the stuff well in a live setting. So, that kind of got all his boners in a row.
Bridwell: You have to wonder if there’s a lack of consistency or a lack of cohesion to Mirage Rock, because songs are pulled from different points in time. But, in the end, Glyn was happy, so we just kept moving. It took a lot of the guesswork out of it.
Monroe: Glyn had this saying that 10 songs is a rip-off, 12 songs is too much, and 11 is perfect. I didn’t really get it at the time, but now I do.
Reynolds: I don’t even own a double album. I’m with Glyn: short and sweet.
Barrett: On an unspoken level, it’s always been, “What kind of a band are we?” To me, it’s great to be able to do anything and still make it your own. But I always wondered if that was realistic. With Glyn, we were confronted with the fact that we are that band. We can do edgy, indie-rock stuff, and we can throw down ballads.
Bridwell: “Electric Music” is a pretty good representation of what we can do now that we have personnel who actually know where to put their hands on fretboards and keyboards and shit. That song isn’t funny to anybody else in the band but me.
Monroe: It sounds like the type of song we would cover. So why not write one like it?
Bridwell: “Knock Knock” was supposed to be a montage piss-take. I hope people realize that I’m playing the cliché card on purpose. It’s supposed to be funny; it’s an arena-baiter. I sent “Dumpster World” to Jason Lytle, and I got the nod from him: “Two cool songs put together? Nice job.” The song is supposed to explain two sides of the psyche.
Monroe: The whole recording process was about five weeks. There’s really not that much shit going on, which may be why it’s so easy to take in. Most of it’s live.
Bridwell: Bill sent me the demo of “How To Live,” and I just started singing words over the music, forming a story around it. Some of it is dead serious and autobiographical, and some of it’s total phonetic fuckin’ garbage. My biggest concern is that people won’t get the joke.
Barrett: Everybody in this band is so fucking hilarious in his own way, and that’s what will keep us going—the way we interact and the love we have for being around each other. In the back of our minds, we’re always laughing.
Hallahan: Are Band Of Horses huge dorks? You can bet your life on it.
