The Daily Aztec: How does it feel to be back on the road?
John Popper: Well we’ve just started this Duskray Troubadours tour, or as I like to call it, the “Troubatour.” It’s just been amazing. People’s reaction to the new material is very affirming to me, it’s been very positive. We don’t end songs like Blues Traveler ends songs. It’s quiet at the end. People aren’t expecting that because most of the fans who have come to see us so far are fans of Blues Traveler. So, you hear their surprise and then you hear their approval. It’s a really neat kind of fearful moment for me because I’m used to having this droning ruffling ending that’s very full of volume.
DA: What’s the main difference between performing with Blues Traveler and doing your own thing? Is there any kind of dynamic that is different?
JP: Blues Traveler tends to seek out and find a pocket that’s a bunch of chords that it does over and over again, while what we do is a mode of exploration. We do a rock ‘n’ roll version of what Coltrane would do, where you explore a mode as thoroughly as you can. We take a really melodic approach where you take a specific song melody and you build the song outward from that. The solo act is more dutiful to the melody rather than just an endless jam. And those are two very different but equally valid types of playing and I just love doing both kinds. It definitely makes me play differently.
DA: Is there a different approach to writing songs now?
JP: Well the Duskray Troubadours has been very much about co-writing with other people, which is something I’ve never really done before. John Manson was fronting this band the SweetTones and was very much a mentor with us when we were in high school. He really took us under his wing. It was a very safe place for me to work on collaborating. I really trusted his songwriting instincts. In some of the songs I was just the vocalist and I just felt like Billie Holiday or something and that was really fun to do also. So I took these new ideas to Blues Traveler to a writing session in January for our upcoming album in 2012. Blues Traveler took to it in a very different way than the Troubadours did because they were such good jam musicians. It was just a great way to open the floodgates as far as collaborating went, and Blues Traveler had been having trouble eliciting writing help. We got a little too “assembly line” with it and we tried to keep it all in-house out of some kind of misguided loyalty to what we believed The Beatles were. I have written so many songs that I don’t feel like I have anything to prove as far as writing goes. I want new ideas that respond to those ideas. In both bands, the musicians want the same thing. They are all honest musicians and they want to react honestly and that comes from interacting with someone else.
DA: Where does most of your inspiration for your lyrics and songwriting come from? Do you draw from personal experience often?
JP: Definitely. I think the best comedy is when a comedian makes you laugh because you know exactly what he means. You identify with what he’s saying. He’ll describe a scenario and you go, “I’ve done that.” I think it’s the same thing for songs. They paint a picture more abstractly than a comedian does, but they still are setting up a situation where they are saying, “I feel this way. Do you know what I mean?” And you identify with that. Your only fuel for this is your honesty, so you have to write something you mean. Whatever it is you’re talking about is the only thing to make it really good and that connection is really what the whole thing is about.
