It’s a truly exciting time to be a fan of The String Cheese Incident. After 23 years of existence, the band continues to press boundaries in any direction possible. Whether its incorporating new musical elements, collaborating with special guests or more, SCI never ceases to evolve as creative artists. The latest step in their evolution is the SCI Sound Lab, a recording studio that the band can call their very own. With the freedom to create on their own schedule, the band both announced the Sound Lab and released SCI Sound Lab Vol. 1, complete with three tracks created in the new laboratory.
With new music in mind, we sat down with Cheese’s own Michael Kang for an extensive interview on all things String Cheese. The first part of the interview talks extensively about the band’s new music, and is printed below for your reading pleasure.
L4LM: Let’s dive right in with the new material. Obviously last week’s big announcement was the new SCI Sound Lab.
MK: We’ve been definitely incubating this new situation that we have, where we bought a building in Colorado. It’s the first time we’ve ever really had our own space, so we’re really excited to be able to turn it into a creative lab. We’re excited, we’ve got it all set up. It’s kind of like our own little clubhouse now with all our stuff.
L4LM: You didn’t record Song In My Head there, right?
MK: No, we did that one at a studio in town. You know, these days, everybody is pretty much working on a lot of studio stuff. Not that it’s easy, but it’s a lot easier to have your own home studio and work recording stuff.
As the recording industry changes so much, we felt it’s more important to constantly put out stuff. Albums, unfortunately, seem like they’re dying in popularity. That’s a whole other discussion, but at the same time, we just felt like it was necessary for us, creatively, to keep putting stuff out. Honestly, it’s one of those things where we as writers, and as a band, will start to create music together. Sometimes we struggle because we write a song and we’ll be like, ‘Man, I don’t know if it works for String Cheese’ or the concept of the band. We have a lot of interests, musically, and I think we just decided that none of that really matters. We’ll just write songs, some of them sound like us. We might write songs that we never even play live. We just want to get into a creative space and write. It could be more electronic tracks, folk tracks, guest singers, collaborations. We just want to be open to it all, for all intents and purposes. It’s kind of a laboratory for us.
L4LM: Do you see this as the logical next step for the SCI Fidelity label?
MK: Yeah, our intention is to really make it a hub for all of our friends, side projects, whatever. Yeah, we’ll see how it goes. We don’t really know how the best way to put it all out, we just want to make it available to everybody. We want to crank content and have it all available to our fans. And it’s really good for the band too.
L4LM: Does that mean other artists will be utilizing the Sound Lab as well?
MK: Yeah, hopefully. We really just started – we bought the property last fall, started recording everything there. We’re just really getting the studio set up. Our sound guy Chris is learning, getting better at engineering. We haven’t had any guest artists on this new schedule of releases we have. We have some people that are local, friends of ours that have guested on it, different singers and stuff. We’re not putting any preconceived notions of anything on it; we just want to use it as a template for doing whatever we feel like. To be at that level is really exciting.
L4LM: I know that the band’s announcement mentioned an extended songwriting session. Care to comment on the scope, and the schedule, of that?
MK: So, we’ve been a band for 23 years. In the early days, we were all so busy touring that we’d literally try to do writing on the road, then we’d get together to rehearse. So much of the focus was on learning a song and putting it out into the live rotation. Then when we’d go into an album, usually you’d go into a studio and then you feel like you’re forced to produce these songs that you’ve been working on for a while.
We’ve never done anything that was like a complete open slate. Especially since all of the guys in the band started having kids and stuff, everybody was getting really busy in their lives. And so, we came up with this idea – we should just go on a band retreat and have a completely open creative experience where we weren’t forced to feel like we had to do anything. We could kinda reconnect as guys and just hang out. So we rented this house in Arizona and we went on hikes and we cooked meals together. Without the pressure of the family schedule and whatever routine we do at home – even though our wives probably hated it – we got back to just jamming with no preconceived notions. A lot of times we would start a groove or mine an idea. In the five or six days we were there, we surprised ourselves. We had twenty different stems of songs, some of which were more developed, some of which were just ideas. And we were like, oh this is pretty darn cool. If we spend the time to just hang out and have music be the complete focus – and at the same time, you’re not spending a ton of money because you’re not in some studio with an engineer paid by the hour.
We did that, and out of that we decided on six or seven or eight new songs that really developed. Then we started working with Jerry to bring those into fruition. In total, I think there’s like six new songs coming out.
The other thing we wanted to do is to really work on a song before we decided to play it live, just so it really had an identity. Sometimes when you play them live, you’re limited by what you can actually do in the live setting – what instruments you can play. We wanted to do the studio process where we’re like, let’s just throw all that stuff out the window and figure out what the best parts are, whatever instruments they are, and learn to play them that way. We wanted to do it the opposite way.
These EPs – we decided we wanted to just get some stuff out. They’re going to be a collection of some new stuff, some stuff that people have never heard, some stuff that we really wanted to record just to get a version of it down that we really felt was the right version of some older stuff. So it’s going to be a combination, and then in the future, who knows? We’ve got tons of ideas. We just had another retreat where we worked on a bunch of tunes, and we’re tossing around the idea of just starting to play them on summer tour before we record them.
We are just focused on trying to get more and more new music out, constantly.
L4LM: The new EP really encapsulates what you were saying about wanting to record new and older, more familiar tracks.
MK: A lot of times, we’ll work on stuff – when we put out an album, putting it in production, putting into the advertising realm and all of that stuff – it takes forever. We had this scenario where we had this album that was essentially in the can but it wasn’t being released for another six months. By the time it came out, we were like, man we’ve been playing this shit for two years!
L4LM: We had a nice fresh cut from you on the album called “Believe.” Can you tell us about it?
MK: I think that song just popped in my head, the chorus of it. It was just one of those things that stuck in there for a while. It’s not like I really worked on it, I just had the concept in my head and then Jerry and I worked on the lyrics a lot. That one came together pretty quickly because I had a pretty good idea of what it was going to sound like. We’re stoked that one came out, it’s great.
L4LM: I have to ask, what is it like working with such a legend as Jerry Harrison?
MK: He has so much history to get into the musical storytelling, which he’ll do. He’s a really really intelligent human being. Besides just hanging out with him, talking about the music and going through his process, we sit there and talk about a lot of the world. We have a lot of similar interests, like environmental causes, issues, technology and things like that. We bond working on the music, we’re brethren, kindred spirits. It’s really cool to have that with somebody.
With any producer, I think sometimes you run through it and some things you agree on, some things you don’t. Overall, he and his engineer ET, they’ve been working together forever, they have a really good system for how they do stuff. Yeah, we’ve learned a lot with them. In the future we’re going to try self-producing stuff, just to see how it goes and get our production chops up. That’s exciting too, but overall it’s been a great experience.
Stay tuned to Live for Live Music for part two of this interview, where Kang goes in depth about the many exciting performances that String Cheese Incident has up ahead! You can download SCI Sound Lab Volume 1 for free, by following this link.