Evolfo: The Acid Cowboys Ride Again (Part 2 of 3)

Continued from Part One…

What led to that change toward this more organic, collaborative approach?

Rafferty: I think it was conscious, and it also had to happen over an extended period of time. When you start recording music as a band, a lot of times the mode of operation is: write the song, rehearse the song, go in the studio, cut the record. You start there, and as you go, you start to think, “How can we express who we are in a more all-encompassing, genuine way as a group? How can we accentuate the unique sound that we’ve developed?”

Through spending a lot of time together, we’ve experienced both the more traditional ways of recording a record and finding our own space and recording ourselves, getting better at recording ourselves, building a studio. And it all culminated in this record. But it was a long and not always conscious path through this terrain to get to this place as a seven-person group. During the [Covid-19] lockdown, we spent a lot of time focusing on connecting the hive mind as deeply as possible.

With a lot of the improvisations that Matt referenced, the goal in the moment was to be more connected as musicians in a spontaneous way, to prompt ourselves to get outside of our box as players and just see what would happen. Sometimes it was bad, and sometimes it was really good and made it on the record almost as we played it in the room.

And you built your own studio?

Rafferty: Yeah, in Ridgewood, Queens. Our band and a couple other people who are part of our community all share the studio, which is not very large; 20×20. It’s an open floor; there’s no control room. It’s floated and soundproofed; we built it ourselves. And that’s where we recorded everything.

Matt and I spend a lot of time in there recording other people as well; it’s become a little hub for us. The main directive for our studio space is to not have anyone ever feel like they’re on the clock, even if it’s a paid session. We always want it to feel flexible, keeping pressure as far away from the recording process as we can keep it.

What was the timeline of the album’s creation?

Matt: It began in the heart of the pandemic; I distinctly remember distinctly going down to meet the guys, just to play. Maybe that was before we were miking it up. It took place over a long time, 2021 to 2024, but we weren’t [always] necessarily in that “We’re recording now” [mode]. It was this experimental process where Rafferty’s playing with the studio mics and the mixer, we’re setting up and jamming. There’s nobody saying, “Ready, set, go: Here’s the take.”

Rafferty: Also, the release of Site Out of Mind was delayed a little bit because of the pandemic. So we were in this space where we had a record that was done – that we were gonna release and promote – but no one really wanted to be playing the set because we didn’t know when that [release] was gonna happen.
So we’d just get together and play, and it wasn’t until a year or two later that we went back and listened to those recordings. I just was documenting the stuff as we were going, experimenting with the room mics, having fun and just messing around. And then in hindsight, after we had toured [in support of] Site Out Of Mind, we went back and were like, “Wow! There are actually some songs here, some gems that we can develop and write on.”

If there’s a unifying aesthetic to the songs on Of Love, it’s a kind of dizzying, disorienting crosstalk. It’s as if there are two different things happening independently of one another. And they somehow fit together, not because they’re supposed to, but just because they do. It all feels like the sonic equivalent of being in an altered state. Is that intentional?

Matt: Maybe sometimes. When we did take the basic jams and work on them, often we were playing with those woozy or echo sounds that suit the feeling of the song. And often what would suit the song is to do something sort of dissociative-sounding.

Echo really makes you feel like you’re far away; sometimes it gives you a kind of bird’s-eye perspective. And at least sometimes I write from a perspective that’s kind of above the main character; you’re watching the story unfold. And I think that’s how it feels to be on psychedelics.

But to say it was ever intentional would be inaccurate. At least speaking for myself, I’m shooting more from the gut, letting the feeling guide me rather than establishing a concept and then hitting it hard.

Rafferty: I do like that you get that from it.

Matt: Yeah. I want to support this thing that you’re saying, because it’s great.

Considering the manner in which the songs were developed, what does that mean when it comes time to wheel them out in front of an audience?

Rafferty: It’s definitely an interesting kind of reverse-engineering process, which I really enjoy. My thought is that at the end of the day, it’s us. So when we play it again, it’s still going to be us, but it’s like, “What were we doing here? What the hell is that?” Sometimes I’ll make a weird edit, and [band members] will be like, “If you get into counting bars, it could get complicated.” There are a few songs where everyone in the group was like, “Oh, I don’t know if this is gonna work.” But surprisingly, a lot of it did come together. We played it together in the room and we were like, “Oh, wow. That’s just what it is.” And to me, that’s a fun challenge.

This is a broad-brush question. From where do you draw lyrical inspiration?

Matt: The three primary Evolfo songwriters are me, Rafferty and Ben Adams. We all have our own specific things. One of my specific things is that I really like Jungian psychology. But then what’s inspiring to the group is when the lyrics are stories, told in a way that doesn’t make them so literal.
And I think we enjoyed doing that together. The main thing that’s unique about our process is that we’re writing the lyrics by committee. A lot of bands don’t do that. But I think that relinquishing that control to the group is a whole creative exercise in and of itself. The lyrics have to be personal enough to be effective, but you’ve got to open yourself up to the group or feedback.

I don’t want to define it too much, because we’re not doing any one specific thing. We definitely aren’t writing to write hits.

Rafferty: On this record, the music came first. Going into the lyric writing, I was trying to listen and find the feeling behind the instrumental: “What’s the overarching theme that I’m getting from this on an emotional level?” And then I’d try to write from that perspective.

A lot of the times one of the three of us will bring in a song seed, and we’ll finish it together or revise it together. But that’s not always the case; sometimes someone will just write the song and it’ll get little edits or whatever. And other times, I’ll have this feeling about what the song is, and then we bring it out together.

To be continued…