Features

The Core: Tea Leaf Green

Keyboardist Trevor Garrod on Tea Leaf Green’s new album Radio Tragedy!

Think Tank

We started working on Radio Tragedy! before [2010’s] Looking West came out. We had it sitting there for months, and then, we ended up deciding to start all over again because by that time, [second drummer] Cochrane McMillan was in the band and we were a little bit more focused on what we wanted to do. So we chalked up that first session as pre-production, which is something we had never done before. Cochrane was such a creative influence and [Apollo Sunshine drummer] Jeremy Black was interested in producing. So we pulled back from the whole band thing and became a think tank or artist collective, if you will. Nobody had a delineated job—[bassist] Reed Mathis played keyboards on some of the songs. There wasn’t one person singing on all of the songs. It was a matter of everybody doing what they thought was necessary for the album to be awesome.

Off the Clock

We recorded Radio Tragedy! in Cochrane’s studio, which gave us a lot of freedom because we were the top priority as far as using the [studio’s] space. We still had to book the time and we were still paying for it, but we could stay there as long as we wanted. And it was the first time we made a record in our hometown [of San Francisco]. Every other time we’ve made a record, we’d always go to some destination and we’d have a week or two to make the record. This time, we went through the process of just doing it song by song. We’d go in and say, “We’re going to work only on this song today and we aren’t going to move on until everybody’s happy with how it sounds.” In the past, some band members have felt like they got the short end of the stick about how their parts sounded because there were time constraints.

Necessary Changes

It’s not like we sat down and were like, “We need another drummer.” We could have added any other member. We had come to a place in Tea Leaf Green where we needed something different. And we didn’t realize that until it started happening, but it has opened up a lot of new opportunities for us. It’s broken things up—a lot of the old baggage, a lot of the stuff you store up in a band over the years that becomes personal between these four people and blocks creative expression. It gets broken away when you have a new member to remind everybody that we’re all friends. And Cochrane has been an inspiring person, too. Even though he’s younger than me, he’s much more experienced with life. He’s geared up and into getting shit done—going a mile a minute—and it’s taught me a lot about my own laziness.

New Familiar Voices

It was a group decision [to include songs by guitiarist Josh Clark and Mathis on this album]. I’m just as egotistical as anybody else, but I feel that there are other songs that everybody has to do. We’re all in it together, you know? It’s not about me. In the past, with our old management, there was that push to have one person singing but it wasn’t something that I had my heart on. Now, we’re out of that sphere of influence, so we’re free to not focus like that—for better or for worse.

Jamband Revivalists

For the last four or five years, Tea Leaf has been struggling to redefine our voice. We had already spent 10 years as a band and then Reed joined. But we were still pussyfooting around where the next step was going to be and how our sound was going to change. It wasn’t really gelled together until we discovered that we needed to add another person to break free and find the new sound that we’re making. There’s always this kind of push and pull: jamband, not a jamband. For a while, we were going through a phase of trying to just be a rock and roll band, to produce songs. Right now, there’s more improvising going on than there has been in a really long time. So we’re more of a jamband now than we have been. And for me, that’s where it’s at. But really, what we’re best at is being in uncharted territory where we don’t really know what the hell is going to happen.