Shortly after their album release show at the Highline Ball room, I had a chance to catch up with Mike White (Drums), Derek Gregor (Piano/Synth) and Drew Brody (Vocals); three of the “well-groomed” boys of M-Lab for a quick Q & A session in Midtown Manhattan.

Jurassic Paque: Gents.  Derek.  Drew.  Mike.  Thanks for joining me.  You guys just had your release show for a bold and hopeful spark.  From what I saw the audience seemed to be having a great time.  There were a lot of women running around.

Derek:  Were they running out of the room?

JP:  (Laughing).  No no no.  They seemed very excited.
Drew: (Laughing).  They were running in terror.

JP: (Laughing)  Yes.  Screaming as if there were a fire.  You guys released From Baser Elements (M-Lab’s previous album) about five years ago, so there was a lot of excitement regarding a bold and hopeful spark.  Tell us what it was like working on it with [producer] Stacey Odell.

Mike: Well, Stacey’s a drummer and I had worked with him before on some other tracks for another band, and I really liked his approach to the drums.  A producer that paid attention to the drums was cool to me.

Drew: We had been working on the tracks for this CD for a long time.  Trying to get everything sounding right.  Trying to figure out what our sound was going to be.  And he [Stacey] was really instrumental in bringing that all together in the last year.

Derek.  It was the first time we had a chance to really experiment in the studio.  On the first album we went in there and had to be efficient with our time.  We’d go in with a list of things to do.  But with Stacey, I spent entire afternoons there.  We were just playing around with sounds on the computer and stuff.  What we did for this album was kind of reinvent our sound in a lot of ways.  Especially since our first album had no guitar on it at all, and this album has quite a bit of guitar.

Mike: We didn’t really feel pressed for time ever.

Derek: One of my favorite things on this album is the track ‘44 Days in a Row.’  I had some ideas, I had some melodies and stuff that I had been playing with.  But Stacey and I spent two days in the studio.  It was something we would never have come up with if I had to go in there and bang it out in an hour.  I would love to do a whole album with that much freedom to experiment.

JP: Freedom.  That probably created a different energy than having to just go in and perform.

Derek: That track sounds so different than anything else on the album.  I think it’s directly related to the environment.

JP: Your sound is very polished.  Very fleshed out.  How did it evolve?

Drew: Well I think evolved is a really good word.  Because we’ve gone through many phases.  Like Derek said, we started off thinking it was really important not to have any guitars (laughs).  At first we wanted to build it around piano.  We had a violin player that played electric guitar, so we had this sort of electric sound.

Derek: The violin player played electric violin.

Drew:  He played electric violin…what did I say?

Derek: Guitar.

Drew:  (Laughing).  He played electric violin!  So, we wanted to figure out a way to keep the piano at the heart of the sound and still have a broad spectrum to choose from.

Mike:  The guitar is a little more accessible to our listeners.

Derek: There’s so much you can do with electric guitars, it just opens up a whole sonic level.

Drew: We kind of reinvented the wheel on that one.

Derek: But it was important for us to start where we started.

Drew: We had to go through that to realize there’s something nice about a nicely structured song.

Derek: But we still preserved a lot of those elements that were in the more experimental first album.  And now were able to have that [experimental feel] without writing a song that’s nine minutes long.

Mike: And still has our M-Lab sound.

JP: Speaking of song construction.  I’d love you guys to walk me trough the construction of a song.  The process.  Anything off of a bold and hopeful spark.

Derek: Each one is a little different but in general I think this is how a song gets written.  It starts with some sort of piano riff.  And then Mike is my writing muse.  Because I could play the same thing without drums, and then with drums, and all of a sudden I feel the life of it.  Nate is our bass player, he’s a full fledged band member and he’s got great ideas.  When we have the song sort of musically in shape, we pass it off to Drew and he writes the melody, he writes the lyrics, he deals with the structure, he tells us when he needs more time or less time.  Drew is a songwriter in his own right.  But we give him something that puts him in a different place than where he would normally start.  But then he approaches it as a singer-songwriter.  It’s a relief to me, because I don’t think of a lot of melodic things anymore, I feel like it’s not really my business, because it’s not my voice.  So I let him physically get the melody from what his voice wants to do and I just focus on keys, hooks.  We’ve added a new member so I wanted to involve Kevin that process.  Until now we’ve only done one song [with him].  And that song was great.  And he came in with it.  He had this riff.  And then we all worked on it.  Drew touched it last, went off and came back when it was done.

Mike:  Being a drummer, usually the drums are kind of an afterthought.  But, being at the beginning of the process it’s really interesting for me to work with Derek.

Derek: Like our song ‘Celsius.’  That song started from Mike.  Because he was playing his electric drums and had a tympani or a bell sound.  He was playing this melodic drum part.  It said something about what the tone of the song could be.  I just put some type of synth on and that was the beginning of the song.  From there Drew just took it and made it into a story.

JP: It’s one of my favorites…

Derek: Mike was definitely first on that one.

JP:  A bit of a gear shift here.  A lot of rock bands have a horror story where something tragic befalls them or their tour bus or something.  Do you have one of those?

Mike:  Yes!  It happened to our tour van!   We were coming back from Boston a few years ago, from a show.  And we were sleeping in the van.  And Nirvana was playing on the radio…

Drew:  ‘The Man Who Sold the World.’  From the unplugged concert.  That’s seared in my brain.  (He sings the guitar riff from the song.)

Mike:  So we’d almost made it back through this horrible rain storm.  We’re on the turnpike.  Right outside of New York, we were going down hill and you know we’ve got the trailer on back and this guy puts on his brakes in front of us and Sky, our violin player, puts on the brakes on the van and we proceed to hydroplane and jackknife it seemed for like five minutes.  There were blue sparks, orange sparks.  We’re thinking we’re hitting cars.  We hit the guard rails on both sides, left and right.  So finally after we get out of the fishtail, everyone’s awake at this point, everybody’s in everybody’s laps.  We pull over to the side of the road and call the police.  They came and we say “we don’t know if we hit any body.”

Drew:  They didn’t want to be bothered.

Mike:  They did not want to be bothered.

Drew: They were like, “you didn’t hit anybody.”

Mike: No we didn’t.  So then we surveyed the damage.  The only thing that really got hurt was Sky’s [violin player] equipment and the trailer.  The axle broke on the trailer and the van was really dinged up.  We survived, but it was scary.

Drew:  We still have the van.  It’s still going!

Mike: Not the trailer (laughs).

JP: Speaking of road stories, if you guys were able to hit the road with one other band, who would it be?

Drew: The Scissor Sisters.

JP: Hell yes.

Drew: That’d be fun.  The other thing I think of is a pop-rock band that’s sort of similar.  Like, The Fray has a piano rock sound that I feel like we would mesh well with.

Derek: I think we’d do really well with The Fray.  Maybe The Killers too.  We’re moving in a more dancy direction.

JP:  The new track that Kevin brought in [One on One] definitely has a dancy feel.  A sort of dirty glam.    When you guys aren’t working on your own stuff, recording, writing, producing, what’s something that might come on shuffle on your ipod that would surprise your fans?

Drew: (Laughs) I don’t put shuffle on for exactly that reason.  Lately my guiltiest please is definitely some Lady Gaga.  I resisted for a really long time, because I was like, this can’t be good because everyone likes it.

Derek: I’m really baffled by musical guilty pleasures because I have them, but everything seems to be working its way into what I’m doing.  Even Lady Gaga, who I love too.  This new song [One on One], her name kept coming up when we were talking about it.  It totally doesn’t sound like a Lady Gaga song, but in my part, there’s a really interesting synth, poppy techno, top 40 part.

Drew: (Laughing).  We keep talking about this song that only exists in a live performance.

Derek:  Were going to record that song soon [One on One].  We got an overwhelmingly positive response to that song and the website got flooded with stuff about it.  So I think were going to record it soon.  I just think that all my guilty pleasures work their way into the things that I consider my serious musical taste.

Mike:  I don’t listen to too much top 40.  But I do try to listen to a lot of music.  I guess Michael Buble you know might come on, and then maybe Metallica.

JP: To bring things home on a light note, a fan of yours from Cincinnati wants to know, when the boys of M-Lab step out to the pub, what do they order?

Derek: Well Mike’s the man, so Mike drinks beer.

Mike: I drink beer.

JP:  Perfect, Mike can start us off.  Do you have a type of beer you like?

Mike: Leinenkugels.

JP: Hell yeah.

Drew: I barely drink.  I almost never drink.  But I will now and then enjoy a nice…

Mike: Scotch (laughs).

Drew: No!  I used to drink scotch.

Derek: Tequila.

Drew: Tequila.  A nice chilled Tequila.  But I rarely drink.  Only if I’m really celebrating something.

Derek: I don’t drink that much these days either.  But…after a show, well the other night I had whiskey.

Drew: You used to drink a lot of red wine.

Mike: Then you went through your Irish coffee phase and your Kahlua phase (laughs).

Drew: Your Margarita phase.

Mike: Your vodka tonic phase.  (Laughs) Oh yeah, your Long Island iced tea phase.

Derek: (Laughing) That was because…

Drew:  Economically it makes a lot of sense (laughs).

Derek:  I like kettle one vodka.  And soda.

————————————————————————————————————

For more details on M-Lab’s album a bold and hopeful spark and upcoming shows, check out www.mlabmusic.com

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