Pat Metheny
Straight Ahead

Pat Metheny has always considered himself incredibly lucky to have grown up in a fertile musical environment, serenaded by the trumpet playing of his grandfather, his father and his older brother, Mike. The arrival of braces at the age of 12 curtailed Pat's own trumpet playing career in favor of the guitar. From that point on, he spent most of his waking hours consumed by an intense dedication to playing guitar and listening to Wes Montgomery, Miles Davis, and Ornette Coleman, visionaries all. By the time he was eighteen, he'd become a local legend in and around his native Missouri, and in 1975, at age twenty-one, Pat released his first album, Bright Size Life, with another young phenomenon named Jaco Pastorius, on bass, and veteran Bob Moses on drums. Even then, Pat possessed a clarity of vision and a uniqueness to his playing which immediately put him in a class by himself. Along with his innate sense of melody, his lines encompassed a weightless purity and beauty which have become primary elements in his soloing and writing as well. After his Grammy award winning albums, Still Life (Talking) ('87), and Letter From Home ('89), where Pat utilized Brazilian and African rhythms to a great extent within the music of the Group, he has finally fulfilled a longtime desire to release an album showcasing his straightahead jazz abilities, a side that many of his fans have never heard. We caught up with Pat recently in Brazil for an exclusive chat about this upcoming release.

Back in 1985, you played me some great live tapes of the Rejoicing trio, with Charlie Haden on bass and Billy Higgins on drums, where the focus of the music was straightahead jazz improvisation. This is a side of your playing that you feel has never been properly presented until now, with your new trio album, featuring Dave Holland on bass and Roy Haynes on drums.
How did the new project come about?

"I've been thinking about using Dave and Roy together for a long time, and my policy these days is why wait? Life is short. The Group toured Europe for three months and about the last week of the Europe tour, I still really felt like playing. I was sad the tour was over and I thought, well, maybe Dave and Roy are available, and it turned out that they were. So I set a date for the day I got back from Europe, and I went right from the airport into the studio."

Where did you record?

"At the Power Station. We recorded the whole album, fourteen tunes, in eight hours. I wrote eight tunes, a couple a day or two before, and we did some standards. We did Old Folks, the Miles Davis tune Solar, Tune Up, All the Things You Are and we also did one Ornette Coleman tune, called Law Years."

From the album, Science Fiction?

"Yeah. I'm not that familiar with that record. I learned the tune from Charlie Haden. You know, to tell you the truth, the whole thing happened so fast, I don't even remember what we did. We ended up with about 90 minutes worth of stuff, and of course you can only get about 60 or 70 on a CD, so we picked the best. There were a couple of tunes of mine that we didn't use, and in fact, I'm still in the process of paring it down. The question is, is it better to weed out the weakest stuff and put just the best stuff on there? There's a nice Eb blues that we were thinking of not putting on. We did the E waltz that we've been doing for a couple of years with the Group that I never recorded; we did a nice version of that. It's a hip record. I did it without really thinking it was going to be a record. I wanted to do it kind of as a Christmas present to myself. I just really felt like playing, and I had been thinking about Roy and Dave. The Power Station was really cool; they had a day open, and they just gave me the time. We just played it and I didn't think about it, and then about a week later I listened to it. I played in a real loose way that I've never gotten on a record before. It's a lot like the live tapes of me with Charlie Haden and Billy Higgins that I've thought of releasing. It's as good as that stuff, but it's a little more condensed. With Charlie and Billy, each tune was about 15 minutes long; here they're about eight minutes, so it's a bit more digestible in record form. And I think the playing is better. We didn't really have any arrangements or any fancy things. It's just us playing. There were a bunch of little clams, and I fixed a couple of them, like the real blatant things, where I completely destroyed the melody. I didn't touch any of the improvised stuff, though. It ends up being a really nice record, and the more I listen to it, the more I'm like, wow, where did this come from? The last couple of Group records I've been spending months on, and this one, in one day it was done. It was really weird."

You did it the old-fashioned way.

"Well, it was the way I made records for ten years, and I'd sort of forgotten how satisfying it can be to do it like that. Not to say that I'd always like to do it like that, but this was a refreshing experience."

Had Roy and Dave played together in recent years?

They have never played together, other than one recording session a couple of years ago, that they both described as the most bizarre recording session they'd ever done, with some piano player that none of us had ever heard of, and probably never will. So they felt like they had never played together, and my suspicion turned out to be true, which is, they're a fantastic team. They both play in that real aggressive, 'on top of the beat' way. The first take of Solar that we did is on the record; it's the first notes that we played together, and it was just instantly 'on'!"

There must have been an air of excitement to it, because the three of you had never played together, and you being such a big fan of theirs.

"It was an interesting thing, because there was that, but it was also very relaxed, the most relaxed recording session I've ever done, because we didn't listen back to anything. We only played. It was like a jam session kind of thing, and I trusted Rob Eaton, the engineer."

You've recorded quite a lot of stuff at the Power Station, right?

"Just about everything since Offramp. I really like it there."

Did you record this in Studio A, the big wooden room with the high ceiling?

"Yeah. All the Group stuff was done in a different room, upstairs, which is a bit more modern, but it's not as big as Studio A. We had Roy in that big room, and Dave was in a separate room, and then I was in another separate room. My recent thing, especially on jazz dates, is that I played without any headphones. Just with two monitors. It really helps. You don't feel like you're making a record; it's more like you're just kind of playing along with a tape."

How loud is it coming through the monitors?

"Really loud."

And there's no bleed-through, because the amp is tucked away?

"Yeah, the amp is tucked away, and I'm playing with just the DI (direct input); there's no microphone."

Then what you're hearing through the monitors is a mix of the whole band?

"Yeah, and there's a little separate headphone cue system where you can make your own balance."

That's similar to how Stevie Ray Vaughan recorded his last album.

"The thing of putting headphones on can really mess you up, because, all of a sudden, first of all, you're aware of every note you play, dynamically, in a way that isn't really that natural."

You're losing that natural reaction with your instrument that you normally have, because your ears and covered up.

"Right. I really like doing it this way, with the monitors."

How would you describe the tunes that you wrote?

"It's straightahead jazz style, for the most part, a lot of triplet-based rhythms. I wrote little heads, and then I wrote a ballad that's got a lot of chords. A lot of people who have heard it say it reminds them of Bright Size Life, which, I think is true. It's got more straightahead kind of stuff than Bright Size Life, but the tunes have a Bright Size Life thing, and the sound of the record is very much like Bright Size Life."

When Bright Size Life came out, the sound of the heavily reverbed 175, the use of the 12-string tuned to fifths, and the originality of the compositions made that record stand out. You created a new approach, a new sound.

"You know, it's funny, 'cause I've always seen my thing as very much in line with a bunch of other things. To me, Jim Hall was really the father, not just for me, but for almost all the other young guitar players, including John Scofield, Bill Frisell, John Abercrombie, Mick Goodrick. All of us are very, very much descendants of things that he discovered, and all of us have real strong things that we do that really are almost like directly taken from this record, that cut. And also Wes's thing had a very, very strong effect on me in terms of melodic continuity. That, probably more than anything that any guitar player has affected me with, did more. There was a time when I sounded exactly like Wes. I played with the thumb; I played in octaves."

Did you, for instance, learn, all the solos on Grooveyard?

"I didn't learn to play along with them that much. I could sing along with them, but I didn't want to play them, because what I was doing was bad enough already, which was that I sounded like him, playing my ideas. There were a few things that I learned, but the thing is, I was around people who, fortunately, didn't dig that. Like nowadays, I see kids, and if they sound just like so and so, all their friends freak out, "Oh, he sounds just like so and so!" People would really give me bad vibes when I started to sound like Wes. I mean, some audience people would like it, but with a lot of the musicians I could feel the draft. For me, it was really a good lesson learned young, which was, Wes did that, it's been done, and that's that. There's plenty of lessons to be learned from his music without coming out and playing octaves with your thumb all night long. I have to say, when I hear other guitar players playing in octaves, and playing very Wes-style stuff, it bugs me. In fact, I usually turn it off, or leave, because to me, it's a little bit disrespectful. I feel the same way when I hear bass players sounding like Jaco now. Jaco's thing really was out of the blue, like "where did that come from?" It sort of just started. I've always seen my thing as much more like the next one of the things to come along."

Were you surprised that people were reacting to your playing as being really different and fresh?

"At the time that record came out, it didn't get all that much attention. It got kind of mixed reviews. I have a different perspective on it now than I did then, because, to tell you the truth, after we did Bright Size Life I couldn't listen to it for about seven years. I thought it was terrible. It went OK, and it was fun, and Jaco was really wild; it was the first time he'd been to Europe, and he was really a high energy kind of guy, so it was exciting, but I remember the whole time feeling like, "I can play better than this." And it was like every jazz record, done very fast, like in one day. From my perspective now, 15 years later, that's probably one of the best records I've ever made."

Why do you say that?

"'Cause it's got something. I don't know what it is, but it's got something. Also, now it has a whole other value to me because of Jaco, 'cause I definitely think it's one of Jaco's best records. That's one of the best examples of what he did."

From my own standpoint, there was something coming out of the three of you playing together that was very uplifting and positive, a presence, similar to when I saw the Mahavishnu Orchestra live for the first time in '71.

"Oh, I remember seeing the Mahavishnu Orchestra around that time, and that was something. That really was something. When I saw them, Larry Coryell's group 11th House opened up for them, which was a really good group at the time, with Steve Marcus, and the blind piano player, Mike Mandel. They had a good rhythm section. They were really good, and I thought, "Oh, man, how's McLaughlin gonna follow this?" And then they came out, and first of all, it was just the loudest thing I had ever heard in my entire life! It was like an earthquake! It was at the University of Miami, on the patio outside. It's a famous concert, because I've run into more people who were at that concert. There were maybe 6,000 people there. A lot of musicians were there, people I didn't even know were around at that time happened to be at that concert."

Before I heard him, people just told me that he played faster than Alvin Lee.

"Maybe ten times faster (laughs)."

And how about the intro to Awakening, with just John and Billy Cobham playing together.

"Yeah, and not to mention all the time signature stuff. Compositionally, that was one of the hippest batches of tunes I've ever seen anybody come up with, those first couple records. In a lot of ways, that's almost as impressive as the playing, the compositional side of it. He's one guy though, that really got screwed by his imitators. Everybody started playing stuff like that, and it just completely watered it down to the point that it made that thing a cliche. It then became like a nightmare to sound like that. In a lot of ways, my whole band thing was completely reactionary to that."

You also had your share of imitators after you first came out, like the guitar playing on the big Chuck Mangione record at that time. There was a period of time where your band sound was a new thing, and a lot of guys tried to play like that and get your sound.

"Well, the thing about when people try to sound like me, is that they sound really bad. There were people who sounded like McLaughlin, and that thing is fairly easy to cop, in a way. I hear people sounding like Scofield, and it sounds pretty good, or Pat Martino's another one. You hear people trying to sound like that, and it sounds pretty good. Whenever I hear people trying to sound like me, it sounds like somebody who was just in a bad car accident or something, 'cause I slip and slide around all over the place, which is what I just kind of naturally do. When you hear anybody else doing that, it sounds like they can't find the notes. I get seasick when I hear some of those guys. So I always tell people, I'm a terrible cat to try and copy, 'cause it doesn't fit with the real world, or something. It sort of works for me because of my weird background."

I think part of your individuality as a player is that you don't really play in a conventional way. The way you move around on a neck is original and makes the sound come out in an original way, like just playing on two strings moving up and down the neck, sliding around. There's a lot of things that you do that are really your own thing, and I think a big part of your sound came out of you trying to not play like other people.

"That was a concern for me, 'cause I really did want to try and come up with a different thing if I could. That's when I started writing tunes, too. The reason that I started writing tunes was that I was having a hard time finding vehicles to set up this way that I wanted to play, 'cause if I played All the Things You Are, or standards, or bossa novas or something, I always ended up sounding more conventional than I really wanted to sound, so I thought if I wrote music that set up this other vibe, maybe it would help. Bright Size Life was the first time that I did any extensive writing."

You wrote some incredible songs for that record, like Sirabhorn. It was a whole new and different vibe. I don't know of any records that sound like that.

"No. In that respect, the closest thing would be some of Gary Burton's records. I mean, Gary and Keith Jarrett were big influences for me, too, starting around that time. being in Gary's band, with Steve Swallow, Mick Goodrick and Bob Moses .all those guys had a very big effect on me. I mean, there's a lot of Swallow in Bright Size Life, in the tunes. You know the thing he does with arpeggios? A lot of that came from just playing with Swallow every night."

Like Unquity Road?

"Yeah, Unquity Road and just the way I was improvising around that time. I mean, Swallow really knocked me out. I learned a lot from him. And Goodrick too. He was definitely the best guitar playing improvisor I had run across, 'cause he would play really differently every night."

Phase Dance is a tune that you still do, and in a lot of ways it fits in well with all the music you're doing now.

"There's a few tunes from over the years. Phase is one, Are You Going with Me is one of them, Last Train Home is one, First Circle is one, Letter From Home. They're exactly the way I feel. That says it for me, and I'm sure I'll always play those tunes, or I'll always be happy playing those tunes, 'cause each one of those tunes has something to do with something that's real important to me as a musician. The thing about Phase that's far out is, yeah, we've been playing that for 12 years now, and I can find some different stuff to play every night. There's a kind of resonance between the three chords, and the way they modulate from one to the next."

Something that you do a lot, in other tunes, and you even make it happen when you're playing free stuff, is you'll have a chord change like D to Bb, and over D you'll play, intervallically, one, two, major third, and then over Bb you'll play one, two, minor third. That's something that's in a lot of your songs.

"Yeah, that's my favorite change (laughs). I used to worry about that, because that happens at least once in almost every tune that I've ever written. Now I decided, "I like it." I'm gonna go home and write four or five more."

Rhythmically, Phase builds in a similar way to your new songs and arrangements, where you utilize a lot of percussion.

"One thing that I've always taken exception to, especially recently, in terms of the Bb analysis of what I do, is this thing that all of a sudden our music has this Brazilian thing, which, to me, is just crazy. I'm writing the same kind of tunes that I've always written, and if you were to take Pedro or Nana or Marcal into the studio, and overdub them on Bright Size Life, it would sound just like what I'm doing now. I mean, it's just the treatment of the tunes has gotten a little bit of that Brazilian flair to it, but the essence of the tunes, I think, is similar. A lot of people hear percussion and think "It's Brazilian." From a rhythmic standpoint, I suppose it's true, but in terms of the melodic stuff, and the kind of chords that I like, it's been the same for a long time. It's just that I think I have more skills now, harmonically, than I did before, in terms of how I write tunes."

Has your concept of what you write for the Group changed in any way?

"Well, the writing thing for the band changed real drastically for me around 1980, 'cause that's when I got the Synclavier. From that point until now, I basically have written everything on the Synclavier. At least on the keyboard, as opposed to writing on the guitar. I think that was a real big shift, and I think you hear a fairly substantial compositional change around that time."

Besides Offramp, what records were done around that time?

"As Falls Wichita and Travels. I'm talking in terms of writing and playing. It's keyboard oriented as opposed to guitar oriented."

Back in '86, I asked you how you felt your playing changed in the four years before that. You said, "Light Years".

"I think that around '84, '85, my playing really tripled, in terms of technique, in terms of ideas, and flow. In a short period of time, I felt way, way stronger."

Was there anything specific that made that happen?

"I'd been, at that time, playing a lot with Charlie and Jack DeJohnette, all these other older guys, and it's really good to be in environments like that. I ways playing with Dewey Redman a lot, too."

What records came out at that time?

"Well, that was sort of a transition time. I did Rejoicing, which I really hated. That to me is one of the worst records I've ever made, if not the worst. That trio live had so much energy, had so much spirit. But, when we did the record, the vibe in the studio was the worst vibe I have ever had in a recording studio. That record is the reason that I left ECM. I could not take Manfred Escher anymore. He made it really impossible to play on that date. What's on there is a struggle to try and get something over this dark blue barrier he had created between us and the tape. It was really bleak. There's a couple of things on there that are OK, like Lonely Woman. The other thing is that the sound of that record is so weird. It's just so bad, muffled and reverby, and it doesn't have to be like that. But I was playing with Charlie and Billy and Dewey a lot around that time, and we had done a whole year's worth of touring with First Circle around then, too. A lot really happened for me on that tour, because that was the first time I felt like my group was really something. All the time before that I thought it was good, but I didn't think it was that good. First Circle is still one of the best group records. That whole record was a real breakthrough for me, in terms of writing and playing. The tune First Circle was easily the best thing I had written for the Group. That's a serious tune. I really felt proud about getting that album out."

Did everything in that tune grow out of writing that specific song?

"Yeah. I wrote out the rhythmic pattern literally on an envelope, while walking around with my girlfriend. I had just recorded, with Jerry Goldsmith, this film score called Under Fire, where there was a lot of music that had twos and threes back and forth, and I hadn't really done anything like that before. So I was talking a lot with Jerry at that time about writing, 'cause he'd write this complicated stuff. I said, "How do you do that? Do you play it on the piano?" He said, "No, no, no. See, that's the trouble with you guys who are players. You don't write anything that you can't play." And it dawned on me that he was 100% right, that everything I wrote, I would learn to play it before I wrote it. It was like, "Oh, yeah, that's true!" So I said, "OK, this time I'm gonna write something and then learn how to play it," and that's what First Circle was."

It's a tremendous tune; it's like a mini-opera or something.

"It's totally fun to play; it's a total gas to play that tune. It's like getting on this ride. That tune really is like a vehicle, like a big truck or something."

When you were done writing that tune, did you feel a sense of accomplishment right away?

"All those tunes that I'm talking about, after I wrote them. It's an indescribable feeling. It sounds morbid to say this, but my feeling is, OK, I can die now, you know? The feeling is this incredible burden is released. It's this incredible release, 'cause tunes like those take a long time; they vegetate for a while, even if you don't know it."

On the new album with Roy and Dave, is this one instance where you're really happy with the sound of your guitar?

"Yeah. Any problems that I have with the sound of the guitar I blame on myself. And actually, just for guitar interest, because of custom regulations, I couldn't bring the 175. All the instruments from the band had to come together from England, which is where we played the night before, so I had to do the whole record on the Ibanez Pat Metheny model that I've had for quite a while. It ended up sounding really good. It did fine. I would have preferred to have done it on the 175, but it's nice to know that the Ibanez can handle something like that. That was the only down side, but I wanted to record while my chops were still in gig mode. Even after I stop playing for two or three days, there's a noticeable drop in the reaction time, from the time I think of an idea, to being able to execute it exactly."

Compositionally, do you think this new record really is like Bright Size Life?

"In some ways it is. I feel like I'm so much better as a musician now than I was then, and that's reflected in this. Also, Bright Size Life is much more about the compositions than this record is. These hears are really functional to get right to the blowing. On this record, it really didn't matter that much to me if it was my tune or someone else's tune. The main thing is the interplay between the musicians. That's what makes the record so cool, because there are times when I'm soloing, or when Dave's soloing, but even during those times, I'm soloing and he's soloing behind the other guy, and Roy is just playing non-stop. This record has the most to do with interplay of any record I've ever done. In fact, I think the record is going to be called, unless we change our minds, Fearless Conversation, because that's really what it sounds like. Both Dave and Roy are extremely busy, but in a very good way. With Charlie and Billy, they more or less kind of lay it down, and you sort of play on top, and it's incredibly sophisticated accompaniment. But with both Roy and Dave, they're in there all the time. They're never just playing a part. They've always got something to say about what you just played. It really sounds like a conversation all the time. It really, really gelled in a very natural way."

Do you feel that sort of thing when you're playing with Jack DeJohnette?

"Yeah, and to me, Jack, and Tony Williams, and most of the other famous modern drummers - and virtually all of them have said this same statement - are sort of descendants of Roy Haynes, much the way that John Scofield, and me, and Mick Goodrick and John Abercrombie are descendants of Jim Hall. It's a very similar relationship. Roy sounds so good on this record, it's just unbelievable. It's so musical, and it's so busy, but it's never in the way. It's really far out. Working with Roy, it's the same feeling that I've had working with Ornette or Sonny Rollins. You're with a master. You're with one of the main figures in the development of this music. Roy really functions on an extremely high level, not only in terms of what he does, but in terms of the experience he has. If you just stop and think - the guy played with Charlie Parker, and not just a little bit. Just that alone! All I can say is, playing with Roy is like the greatest honor and the greatest feeling that I can experience as a musician. I've played with a lot of great musicians, but when you play with somebody who has singlehandedly changed the course of music - Roy has a real special place in my mind, in terms of the way I define the course of jazz history. He has the ability to keep things fresh, like almost nobody else I've ever seen."

The first thing that struck me when you mentioned those guys was the famous trios with Chick Corea - Roy and Miroslav Vitous, and then Dave and Barry Altschul. This is like a slice of each.

"It's true. A couple people have mentioned that this is like a guitar version of Chick's Now He Sings, Now He Sobs. I have to admit that that album was one of my favorites, and it was a big influence on me, mostly because of the Roy thing. There's also another record that Roy's on, called Reaching Forth, which is a McCoy Tyner record that I used to spend hours listening specifically to what Roy was playing. I always learned a lot from him. He's like the king of crossing barlines, and setting up deceptive cadence points. There's a lot of that in this record. The great thing about Dave is that he also really backs the stuff up. He's displacing beats all over the place, but the thing is, all three of us have a lot of confidence in knowing where "one" is. I'm sure most people, when they hear it, are going to say, are these guys just playing free or what? But we're always playing on forms. The only thing on the record where we didn't have a form was the Ornette thing."

But the pulse is always there.

"The pulse is always there. Even though we're playing around with it a lot."

So, you felt that, whatever those things are, those deceptive communicative things that happen when it's the right moment between three improvisers, that stuff was happening?

"Yeah, definitely. That's the fearlessness part of it. Like I say, the first notes that we recorded are the take of Solar that's going to be on the record. There's a certain kind of trust that you instantly have or don't have with certain musicians, and it seemed like with that trio, we could all do anything at any time, which is what you want to have happen when you're having a good conversation. It can go in any direction. That's what this felt like on a musical level."

Now that you've done the record, being that it's something that you wanted to do for so long, and it came about in kind of a casual way, how do you feel about the end result?

"Well, you can probably tell I'm excited about it. I always think that I could have done things better. It's weird to do a record in such a casual way, after spending so much time on the last couple records, but I think that right now, it's important for me to have a record like this just for my own mental health (laughs). I've got 15 records out and I've been playing on the scene now for 15 years, and this is going to be the first time under my own name that I've recorded a standard, and that's the music I've played the longest. A lot of people think that's what I do best, so I'm kind of glad to break through that barrier. I can't say there was anything stopping me from doing it, but the fact is that I hadn't done it. These are, for better or worse, good examples of what I sound like playing that music, right now. I don't know that it's the best day that I could have had, or the worst. I think it's somewhere in between. The one thing I can say is that I've never heard a guitar trio record that sounds like this."

Whatever preconceptions that you had about it, did some of those things come to be true?

"Yeah, and I would say in most cases, it was better than I could have preconceived, actually. You know, it takes a minute to get used to something that's that bare in sound. I've been used to playing with lots of lush chords and pretty strict arrangements, and my first reaction upon hearing it, after seven or eight months on the road with the Group, was, gee, it sounds kind of empty. But, on the other hand, the spaces are just filled with different things that you don't have the room for when there's all kinds of stuff going on."

You mentioned to me that there were certain new things that you were doing when you were practicing, just things about playing guitar. Are we going to hear some of those things on this record?

"Definitely. In terms of guitar playing, this record and Letter from Home both have good examples of the stuff that I've been working on, that always eluded me on previous records. In the area of touch, for instance, just sound - the way each note speaks - there's so few guitar players who really concern themselves with that. Most guitar players have a sound and they kind of play notes, and, however the notes get played, that's it, and their sound justifies the technique that they use to play the notes. For me, there's a whole lot of different ways to play each note, and I think that's exhibited on this record and on the last Group record. And also just in terms of playing with drums, and really getting inside a rhythm section in what I would call a "modern" way, meaning a post-Coltrane sort of way. I like both of these records for that, and that's coming from somebody who hates almost everything that he does."

Something I can hear on the last two Group albums is a certain relaxed assurance and authority in your soloing, following through on an idea with a clear sense of melody.

"That's an important thing for me. That's something that all my favorite players are great at. I've always worried about it and thought about it and tried to do it, but one of the good things about getting older is that you actually tend to understand it a little bit better as it's going down, and get control of it."

When will the new record come out?

"Hopefully in May or June. We've still got a few editing things to do, and I still have to think of titles, which is going to be a nightmare, like always."

Did you surprise yourself on it?

"Oh, yeah. I was so surprised when I listened to it back, just because I really didn't take it that seriously. It was just kind of fun, and I didn't listen to it for about a week after we did it. Gil Goldstein, who was there supervising and just sort of helping me, kept calling me saying, "You've gotta listen to this stuff!""

You were not listening to it on purpose?

"Yeah, I was kind of afraid to listen to it, 'cause I thought, well, it's probably going to suck. Roy and Dave sound good, but ... then I listened to it, and thought, wow, this is good! A bunch of it is good, and then there's a couple of moments where it's serious, like on Law Years. It goes into another zone."