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All Them Witches Interview with Robby Staebler: “We All Do What We Want.”

About a day after we spoke over the phone last week for this interview, I got a text from All Them Witches drummer Robby Staebler that read as follows:

Robby. Atw. Important point. As individual players we are more concerned and focused on our own playing. We are not focused on what the others are playing. We all do what we want. It’s why it works.

Talking to him, one could hear a core belief from Staebler in what the band is doing, both in how they approach writing and putting together material like that found on their excellent late-2013 sophomore full-length, Lightning at the Door (discussed here), and in how they’re handling the practical end of being in a band whose success seems to be burgeoning more each day. Their debut album, Our Mother Electricity (review here), was initially self-released in 2012, but was picked up for release by Elektrohasch Schallplatten in 2013 — they are the first American band the label has worked with — and since then and on through Lightning at the Door, the four-piece of Staebler, bassist/vocalist Michael Parks, Jr., guitarist Ben McLeod and keyboardist Allan Van Cleave have received the kind of response that most bands dream of. Label offers, tours, praise domestic and international from fans and critics alike. All Them Witches are onto something special sound-wise, and they know it.

In May, the band made their way to the West Coast for an appearance at the Scion Rock Fest in Pomona, California, and several other shows around it. It was their first time there and yet Staebler reports talking to fans who drove upwards of seven hours to see them. For a group as relatively new as All Them Witches are — formed early in 2012 — to have that kind of loyalty only underscores the deep impact their material, particularly Lightning at the Door, seems to have had on those who’ve encountered it. Later this year they’ll head to Europe, also for the first time, and on a tour booked by Sound of Liberation, they’ll hit Desertfest Belgium in Antwerp, which runs from Oct. 10-12, and the Keep it Low festival in Munich on Oct. 18, as well as play other shows around those. This along with more touring in the US will form the bulk of the rest of their 2014, but as Staebler hints, there’s new studio material in the works as well that may see release as an EP before the New Year hits.

The short version is All Them Witches have a lot going on at the moment, and it all seems to be building a forward momentum for both their prominence in the underground, their reputation as a live act, and a band whose stylistic nuance of bluesy twang, sonic pastoralia and heavy riffs distinguishes them from nearly everyone else around them. Tracks like “Charles William” and “The Death of Coyote Woman” from Lightning at the Door not only affirmed the potential All Them Witches showcased on Our Mother Electricity, but demonstrated a cohesive aesthetic already taken shape from players whose confidence in each other bled through each and every dynamic turn they made. And there were plenty of them. Lightning at the Door remains one of the best albums I heard last year, and Staebler makes it plain that the band considers it a landmark as well.

In the interview that follows, Staebler discusses that album and putting material together with Parks, McLeod and Van Cleave, while remaining geographically separate — a certified arborist, he lives and works in Ohio, while the rest of the band is in Nashville — his feelings on the response they’ve gotten since Elektrohasch released Our Mother Electricity, playing on the West Coast, thoughts on heading to Europe and much more. As confident as he is in what he and the band are doing, he never comes across as arrogant or crass about it, rather sounding like someone driven by his passion and eager to discover where that might lead. I’m curious as well.

Full Q&A is after the jump. Please enjoy:

So you guys are back in Nashville now from doing the West Coast, right?

Yup, those dudes are. I live in Ohio. I’m from Ohio. I actually moved to Tennessee from Oregon, and then after the band was apparently gonna do its self-sustained thing, I moved up to Ohio with my girlfriend, got a house. My family’s here, so that’s where I’m posted up right now.

How far are you from everybody else?

Six and a half hours. It’s pretty awesome though. We stopped practicing a pretty long time ago, I guess, and now we’re getting back into writing some new stuff, so we’re gonna be seeing each other a little more often over the next five or six weeks. We’re gonna make some special trips to work on some new material and stuff. But it works out good because when we see each other, we’re excited to see each other. We haven’t seen each other for a while, we haven’t played for a while together, so we kind of get some real interesting energy going on by keeping our distance from each other. And I work all the time. I love working, so it’s good for us. We all do our own thing, and then when we get together we’re ready to explode.

You’re an arborist?

Yep, that’s true.

You were certified in Ohio recently?

Yeah, I got my certification. I took my test in January, I think. Actually, I don’t even know if that’s true. It was sometime earlier this year I took a test from the national board, and got a pretty good grade on it and now I’m certified by a national board to do that stuff. You don’t have to be, but it just helps.

I hope it’s a pretty ride down to Nashville when you’re going to meet the band.

It’s okay. It’s kind of boring. I’ve done it hundreds of times. There’s nothing really in the Midwest that is terribly beautiful, to tell you the truth. You gotta really go off the beaten path to find interesting natural things to do around here.

Where in Ohio are you?

Columbus.

How were the Scion Fest and the other shows on the West Coast?

The Scion fest was fun. There were four stages and we were on the smaller stage. It was our first time being on the West Coast. It was a real good reaction. People were real into it. When we played San Francisco, we had people drive two hours to see us, and then when we played at the Scion festival in Southern California, we had some people drive seven hours to see us. There were some mixups, several people thought we were the headlining act in the places we played. The energy’s there from the fans. People are stoked on it, and we’re just trying to spread the word. I think it’s spreading pretty well, but we’re still basically an undiscovered band, getting some good attention here and there, which is helping out big-time, and I think by the end of this year, beginning of next year, I think our band schedule’s going to be a lot different than it is right now. It’s on the up and up. It’s good. But yeah, California was awesome. I’ve been out there several times and it’s one of my favorite places to go, so I was excited to go out there with the band and do that. It was more of a vacation than anything. Touring the East Coast and the Midwest, it’s fun and you have a good time with your buddies, but when you go out west, it’s a whole different ballgame, puts you in a whole different mindset, and that’s where I like to be.

What’s your reaction to the response the band has gotten?

I’m pleased with it. I’m not surprised, honestly. I’ve been doing this for a long time. I was in a band with my brother, a two-piece band, we were playing shows consistently for eight or nine years, and I always had the same goal in mind, which was to have a band that was able to let itself go on the road, go on tour, just be self-sustaining, pay for your food, and anything after that would truly be a blessing and some things are going on behind the scenes, and the possibility of making a good living at doing this is super-enticing. I think that’s what all of us want at this point. But yeah, I’m very pleased with the amount of attention that we’ve been getting. I’m not surprised. I’m not trying to be cocky about it, but we’ve got some pretty heavy hitters in the band, and we all have some crazy energy together. We get along real well. I think we each know what it’s gonna take for us to keep doing this, and we all want to do it. We’re not doing it for ourselves primarily. I think we’re all doing it for each other so that the band can be its own entity. We try to put our individual egos aside. We never, never fight on tour or anything. If anyone’s arguing or getting on each other’s nerves, it usually just ends up in a joke and a laugh and there’s never any hard feelings with anyone.

How did Elektrohasch putting out Our Mother Electricity come about?

Well, we put out that first record, which was mainly, me and Ben were jamming together. I was pretty much playing drums on a four-track by myself, then we would both go over it, and he would come up with riffs and things like that. Most of the first record was me and Ben making shit up by ourselves. Then we got Parks on bass. He presented us with the song “Elk.Blood.Heart,” and I think that kind of opened the gates for us a little bit. We realized who we had gotten on our team with him singing, so we just started shopping around. Ben sent a CD out to places like Volcom and some other places, I have no idea where he sent it, but he put it out to a lot of places, and the only people that got back to us was Elektrohasch, and it’s cool because Colour Haze, Stefan [Koglek], the guitar player, he owns Elektrohasch, and Ben’s really into that band. So that’s how he knew of the label. He sent them and they got back, and we signed a distribution deal with them for the first record, and I think that put us on the map in Europe. I check our status and stuff online and I like to see where fans are coming from, and a lot of it’s coming from overseas. It’s really spreading throughout crazy places that I wouldn’t have – I guess I’m kind of surprised to see people sending us emails from different places we’ve never been. That’s how Elektrohasch came to be. We presented it to them and they took it. I think part of the success of this band is due to that. A lot of Europeans got on the ball before anybody else did. That gave it meaning.

Will they do a pressing of Lightning at the Door?

We are really attached to this record. The first record was kind of thrown together. We had just met each other. We were still getting to know each other. At that point, we really didn’t know Parks too well. With this record, this was all of us being a band. All of us living together, spending a lot of time together, playing a lot of shows. That came out of that. We’re real attached to it. We have really no plans to put it out yet. At this point it makes more sense to do it ourselves, put it out on our own. We’re making pretty good money with online sales. We’re able to go on tour with that, pay ourselves at the end of the tour with online sales. I think we’re just gonna keep it in-house for right now. If there’s a label out there somewhere that wants to give us a really good offer that we can’t refuse, but right now we’re holding onto it.

I’m sure you’ve had a few offers at this point?

Yeah, we have. We’ve had some from no-name labels, we’ve had some offers from cool labels. Elektrohasch, they were really interested in it too, but at this point, someone’s going to have to make a real good offer for us to give it up. We see the reaction that it’s getting and we all believe in each other as musicians, and not just in this past record that we just put out, but in the stuff that we’re gonna be doing in the future. We’ve only been a band for two years, and we’ve just tapped into something and we know that crazy shit’s gonna happen and we’re just gonna ride it out and see what happens.

How did the songs come together for Lightning at the Door? You mentioned everybody living together and that kind of thing, but how did the album take shape?

I think Lightning at the Door came out of us rehearsing the first record for shows. We practiced a lot when we were playing our first round of shows, before we put out the record, while we were recording it. And after we put out the first record, as we started to grow into each other, know each other, we were rehearsing all the time, and with that came some new jams that we all drew down on lyrically, riff-wise, beats. Some of them would just start out as drum beats. Some of them would just come out of being drunk or Parks having these crazy dream-visions that he has or just wherever the hell his mind goes. A lot of that comes out of that. A lot of Lightning at the Door was just being on the road, playing a lot of shows, and being tired of the first record and knowing that we didn’t have enough material to play as long as we wanted to. Pretty lax. It all pretty much came out of little effort. It was very easy. Those songs came out of us.

If you’re starting to put stuff together now for a follow-up, how is that process changing or continuing?

Those guys’ll come up to see me, and I’ll come down to see them, play a show or whatever. We’ll get together the day before we go on tour, and we’ve been jamming on cassette tapes, four-track tape to cassette, and we’ll just hit record and start playing randomly, and we’ll hear some things we like and go back and listen to it. Ben’s really good at reviewing all the tapes and picking what he wants out of those things and presenting those to Parks, and then they’ll start working on some things together, and I’ll tell them what I think about it, remind them of some other jams they had here and then. But it’s kind of just the same process. We’re fooling around. Parks will present some lyrics, or someone will present some lyrics they made up, or someone will have a guitar riff and we’ll just run with it. We were in the studio for a day two days ago. We recorded four songs. One of those is gonna be on our official next full-length, but I think we’re working on a shorter release right now. It’s gonna be cool. It’s gonna be pretty jammy, a lot of guitar. It’s cool.

I wanted to ask you about the drum sound on the “Born under a Bad Sign” single.

That was straight to cassette tape. I tune my drums wide open. I use coated heads. I don’t use any dampeners or put any pillows in the bass drum or anything like that. I like to let them resonate as much as possible. It doesn’t come out as much on a cassette tape as when we’re doing an official recording. But we were all in the same room, we were in a big wooden room with plaster walls, wood floors. It’s got that warm, live feel. Grainy sound that you get from low quality stuff with some shitty-ass microphones. That’s where that drum tone comes from. It’s just wide open. It’s funny, on both records, Lightning at the Door and Our Mother Electricity, they were recorded a year apart, but I used the same drum heads for some reason. I thought that was kind of funny, but it worked out. I spent a lot of time when I was younger learning about tuning drums and stuff because I sucked at it and I wanted to be able to tune the drums, so I figured out how to get my drums to sound the way I wanted them to. I took a lot of points from the way John Bonham’s drums sound, and Nick Mason of Pink Floyd. Those guys were heavy hitters and I kind of took points from them, just listening how their drums sounded and trying to mimic it.

The stuff for the new release. How did you do that?

We recorded it to ProTools. We did it in the same studio, same way, same dude we did the first two records with.

That’s Andy Putnam?

Andy Putnam. He’s recording this too. So yeah. That’s that. We recorded it digitally, not analog. It’s a lot faster.

How did Desertfest Belgium come into the picture?

A booking agency that works with Elektrohasch artists.

Sound of Liberation?

Yes, Sound of Liberation. They hooked us up, said they wanted to bring us over. We wanted to go over really badly – I guess we still do because we still haven’t been there – but we wanted to go when we signed a deal with Elektrohasch for the first one, I was like, “Dude, we gotta make a point to go over there to make this deal worth it. We gotta go to Europe.” We talked to Elektrohasch earlier this year, and they hooked us up with the booking agency they worked with, and they set us up a tour. So they are setting us up with dates, and they’re working with our booking agent here in the States to make sure that we don’t get stranded out there or something.

How long will you tour out there?

I think right now the tour is for 17 days. It starts in mid-October.

Are you doing anything else in the States this year?

Yeah, we definitely are. I think we’re working on a decent tour in August, I think a short tour in July. I believe we’re taking June off probably to work on some new material and I gotta work. I need to get some money. So I’ll be hitting it hard.

One last thing: Who was Charles William?

Charles William was Parks, the bass player, he was his grandfather. And honestly, I don’t really know too much about him. It’s funny, because everybody in the band knows my family, everybody knows Ben’s family, everyone’s met Allan’s family. No one has met Parks’ family, with the exception of Allan. I think Allan met his mom and his aunt, so Parks is bringing some mysterious vibes around. Charles William was his grandfather and I don’t really know much about him. But Parks certainly does, and he’s got something going on there. Parks is a mysterious dude. I don’t ask too many questions. I just let him do what he wants.

All Them Witches, Lightning at the Door (2013)

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All Them Witches on Bandcamp

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