“To be nothing, absent thereafter.”
Welcome to In Conversation, our interview column where we chat to our favourite artists who are producing incredible music. The first of our interviews undertaken at ArcTanGent, we had the honour of chatting to the legendary Tommy Giles Rogers of Between the Buried and Me, one of the essential bands that forms the bedrock of Boolin Tunes. Kieran and Dobbin chatted to Giles about the upcoming record, The Blue Nowhere, signing to InsideOut, their set list choices and preparation for album tours, and the true origin of all the ‘goofy’ bits.
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Kieran: Let’s start talking about your latest album, The Blue Nowhere.
Tommy: Almost here! Have you heard it?
Kieran: I have – I love it. It’s probably your most crazy, eclectic vocal performance of your material so far. What was your thought process going into writing that and the album?
Tommy: Sometimes I really have to go one moment at a time. We don’t really start writing vocals until we are about three quarters done with the music. So if I look at the big picture, it brings a lot of anxiety…. ‘how is this going to work’? So I plan carefully with where to start out, focusing small at first. My job is to make the songs be a ‘song’, I have to find my way throughout our crazy music and make my voice work with everything, led by the music. Almost like an actor would. Our music goes to so many different places, and we continually push each other musically as well. It’s also fun as a vocalist to get the opportunity to tap into new things.
Kieran: The Blue Nowhere has massive range. It’s very heavy, but it’s also got a lot of new sounds as well. It’s crazy, eleven albums into your career, you’re still managing to find new ground and get even crazier.
Tommy: There was a lot of magic with this record. Once we started writing, it happened really fast. There was not a moment when things weren’t happening amongst all of us. It was a nice process, and the recording went really smooth as well.
Kieran: You were recording with Jamie King? That’s been a long relationship.
Tommy: Yeah, that’s our dude. When we record, it’s literally like hanging out with friends. It’s so fun for us. It doesn’t feel like work. At this point, we know what we’re doing, we know what is going to work and what isn’t. We’re so comfortable with each other and our ability; we’re not looking over each other’s shoulder, we don’t check in. Instead, we discover what we’ve added over each other’s parts. One time Dan Briggs wrote this weird bass thing, and for two days I was thinking, man that’s a weird choice. But it was because he wrote this horn arrangement over it, and we didn’t know that was even there! Then it all clicked and it worked. In the writing process, we do a lot of cutting, but ultimately we give ourselves a lot of freedom and find comfort in that.
Kieran: What song is your favourite from The Blue Nowhere?
Tommy: Damn, that’s tough. I really like the title track, just because it is so different. For us, in our head, it was a yacht rock song, but in ‘BTBAM’ style, that was kind of the goal. The demo title was “Prog Yacht”.
Kieran: I love that track, especially after the previous songs that are so wild, it’s very much needed in the running.
Tommy: That was a really happy accident with where it was placed in the flow of the album. The two tracks right before almost bring a point where you say, ‘is this too much?’ – it gets to be a lot. If we’d had two more songs like that right after, people would be saying ‘we get it, boys…’.
Kieran: The opener “Things We Tell Ourselves in the Dark” definitely feels like a Between the Buried and Me song, but then straight into track two it’s a complete shift into a weird mish-mash of electronic and crazy heavy stuff. When I first heard that song, I was a bit blown away.
Kieran: You signed to InsideOut Woldwide for this release, what led you to doing that? It’s a great label for modern prog.
Tommy: That’s it, that’s one of the reasons. We have a lot of buddies who are on the label that all have really good things to say about it. We’ve met Tommy of InsideOut many times over the years at shows. For us, it felt like the right move. We’re also trying to grow outside the US, so a European label helps a lot.
Dobbin: Between has always had these ‘goofy’ bits, increasingly over the years. The new album has loads of this – I wonder which individual member is most guilty of contributing the ‘Scooby-Doo’ element to Between the Buried and Me.
Tommy: Even on the self-titled, we had a lot of that stuff. I would say that Dan Briggs is the main contributor of these ideas, he’s in the quirky lane, influenced by Oingo Boingo and The Cardiacs.
Dobbin: I guess a lot of these ideas just come out of silly ideas in the studio?
Tommy: Not really – we do an intense pre-production and have full demos before we head to the studio. Sometimes these bits fall out of a simple idea from any of us. It also follows when we sent each other things – I’ll write a sick death metal riff, and then Dan Briggs will say “oh, I’ll add this little horn here…”. Paul Waggoner wrote this crazy stuff for “Absent Thereafter”, that chicken picking bluegrass guitar part. From there, we just started building this song. It’s cool – it’s not a whole lot of actual dialogue going on, it’s all musical. We don’t really talk about where the song is going to go.
Kieran: At ArcTanGent you’re playing two sets – Colors in full, which we saw yesterday, and then an additional main stage set. These full album shows and tours are something that Between the Buried and Me have always enjoyed doing. As an audience member, it makes for a really good experience, especially Colors with the flow of the songs. Some people might see it as a risk too, and perhaps you might get sick of the material. What goes through your head planning tours, such as the Coma–Alaska tour?
Tommy: If you’re the kind of band that does the same set every night – and we are, because we can’t remember eighty songs or something – you’ll naturally get a bit sick of it. But once you have the energy of the crowd, that goes away pretty quick. Most of the time we do plan carefully with album tours, but this was a bit of a different one. Our agent said that promoters were asking for Colors in specific regions. Because we’ve done Colors so much, we don’t have to do a whole lot of prep. It’s in our brain. We don’t have to really sit down and hash it out.
Kieran: I imagine you really had to sit down for Alaska, because a lot of those songs have been played very little. Are there any songs you’ve written that you wish you could play more often?
Dobbin: I’d love some The Great Misdirect material. Some of the back half of that record is stunning, “Desert of Song” is really unique.
Tommy: Gosh, that’s tough. Well, we’re playing “Disease, Injury, Madness” today, and we haven’t played “Desert of Song” a lot, just two tours I think.
Kieran: We ran the numbers and a lot of the ones lower on the list were from The Silent Circus and the self-titled. They do still feel like Between the Buried and Me albums, but they feel not as ‘you’. You still play “Mordecai” a lot.
Tommy: I can’t say I miss playing a lot of that stuff. It’s fun, but vocally it’s very linear. It’s literally a different person from twenty years ago.
Kieran: Last time I saw you was in 2019 in London and you did “More of Myself to Kill” from the older records, that was great. That was a really great set list, where you did the interludes that lead to the big tracks – you did and “The Black Box” into “Telos” and “Bloom”, and “Mordecai” into “Reaction”.
Tommy: That was a fun tour. It was fun to re-vamp a lot of the old stuff.
Kieran: Perhaps my favourite song is “Melting City”, perhaps I’m alone in that, but if you’re taking requests for future tours…
Tommy: We normally just do “Melting City” as part of a full album show. We talked about doing Parallax one into Parallax two, but it would have been too much. Coma–Alaska was honestly too much, physically.
Kieran: A quick question on your solo material – I thought Don’t Touch the Outside was an incredible album and a big change of pace. Is there any solo material in the works?
Tommy: I have about half a record done, it’s just slow moving. Life’s busy, band’s busy… my goal is next year, but we’ll see… don’t hold me to that.
Check out the audio for the full uncut interview with some extended discussion. You can read our review of The Blue Nowhere here.