grOund

Even pop/rock can be about more than just surfaces, ego and energy drink sponsorships. When it's great it can be very intimate, personal and sacred and still be gigantic. It doesn't have to be a creme-filled, sugar-glazed, grunt-fest. It can be a real struggle to contact that part of yourself that's beyond the everyday experience. There's a special angst that goes along with that struggle and it's perfectly at home in pop/rock. There is a big part of the world that doesn't want that though. They want the surfaces. So for us, the music is about how do we connect the ordinary to the super-ordinary, in our live performances and alone in the writing process? We have no idea but it's what we reach for as a band. That's the prize.
We don't know what our appeal might be to other people. We try not to think about that and just concentrate on making the music that we can't seem to find anywhere else. That's what we want from the bands we love and we think that's what our fans would want from us.
We became two guys with a laptop out of necessity. Finding musicians that were driven, great at what they did and into writing something different seemed like it was never going to happen. We experimented with guitar players, bass players, vocalists-just trying to find what felt right. In the past five years we've reinvented the band and the sound several times over.
The two piece band pretty much came from our rehearsals. Mark and I would show up to practice and the other guys would leave early, forget to tell us about some other gig or disappear. The two of us would continue to rehearse and all these new ideas would come up and we'd just work 'em out by ourselves. After we incorporated the computer into the writing process, it was almost always with us at rehearsal to capture parts or new ideas or whatever. Basically one day someone didn't show up and it wasn't a big deal, we just rehearsed with the computer as if we were recording. That kind of thing went on for quite a while and it just turned into what we had to do to keep playing shows. Not only has it become the way we create music, it's how we design shows and perform now and we're loving it. It's really stretched us and we've learned to look at the concept of a band in a whole new way.
When someone comes to one of our shows for the first time, they don't quite know what to make of it at first. We're a two-piece band that sounds like a four piece band. From the stage we can see there are some moments of confusion, but once people start living in the songs with us everything gets right.
We both know it may not be the traditional way, or even the “right” way, but it definitely feels right to us.
The name of the band came from some of the stuff Toby was reading when we started. He was really into Ken Wilber, Joseph Campbell, Robert Bly, David Deida because all those guys we're writing about consciousness and Toby's pretty into that. "I kept seeing the word ground used to refer to the underlying consciousness in everything. That was just awe-inspiring and beautiful to me". It kept coming up in our conversations and it eventually stuck as a band name.
We run Pro-Tools 7 on an old i-Book connected to a Digi-002. Mark runs the laptop from behind his drum-kit so he can tweak his headphone mix. The live Pro-Tools sessions are just super lean versions of our studio sessions and have a bass track, usually a keyboard track and sometimes a second guitar. Each track has it's own dedicated output, so if we have a engineer who knows our songs he has everything he wants. If we're somewhere with a four-channel radio-shack p.a. and no sound-man we can still put out the whole mix on a single cable if we have to.
At first we thought that doing the show this way would make the music sound rigid. Admittedly, at first, it did. Playing with the laptop has now become very organic to us. All of the performances in the playback come from us so it makes for some really big music.
We have several different versions of the show in different lengths for different time-slots. Really the only drawback is that we're tied to the timeline now, and if we want to extend a jam we can't, but we're working on overcoming that too.