While I’ve met all of them individually, whether it was on the sandy shores of Paradise Lakes, in the smoke-filled haze of One Art Community Center, or at the legendary Warehouse on Watts, I recently got the chance to chat with 5AM Trio all at once.
If there was one word I could use to describe the ethos, camaraderie, and general discourse between Sam Andrus (5AM), Keith Wadsworth (of Wax Future), and Aaron Harel (Zone Drums), it would be brotherhood. It was inspiring to see not just three bandmates, but three humans, three friends, three brothers have so much compassion for each other.
Which is important when you’re spending 10+ hours in a van together.
In our conversation, we chat about said vanlife, the evolution of their sound, the value of collaboration, their particular style of live improvisation, artistic vision vs. audience expectations, and using music as a tool for activism.
MV: This is an interesting time for the electronic scene for a lot of different reasons, one of them being the recent increase in live/jamtronica bands. You guys have been doing this for quite some time now. I’d love for you to bring me back to the moment that you decided to create the trio and how it all came together.
SA: That’s a really great question. So I actually started my performance career trying to do live looping, using a much older version of Ableton along with MaxMSP, my guitar, and beatboxing. So the project looked completely different. Many more of the sounds were live and less prerecorded, and I was just looping my live vocals. It was very primitive and fun. You can actually hear some of it on my Bandcamp, but at a certain point, I decided that I didn’t love the production value of what I was doing and that it sounded a little bit too dirty, dusty, and unprofessional. So I decided to get into production and get my music to sound like the music that I really admired; Flying Lotus, Pretty Lights, Tipper, Opiuo, and over time everything in the glitch and bass scenes.
SA: I really found my sound in that scene. Then, at a certain point, I realized, “Wow, I kind of accomplished what I was trying to do,” which was purely just for my own musical interests. I really wanted to create some music that sounded like my favorite inspirations, and I was able to do that. Upon doing that, I kind of zoomed out a little bit and I was just performing it in a DJ fashion, which I had been doing for years at that point, and I was ready to try and incorporate some live elements.
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SA: I remember my manager at the Rust, Francesco had this idea, what if we started a band? What if we started a trio? He was really hype on the idea of the 5AM Trio. And it was right around that same time that Aaron and I met and started playing gigs together as 5AM featuring Zone Drums. We played one set at the Backroom with Mindex.
AH: It was like a garage in someone’s house.
SA: But even for that first set, we’ve always loved the idea of sharing with people, this is what we do, check it out. And I remember we shared some promo for that with him playing over one of my tracks, and it got a great reception. People loved it. They were super into it.
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After that, Francesco was really excited and wanted to make this trio thing happen, and our friend Zach (Tygris) came through, and he brought his setup and was so hyped. He was like, “Put me in coach, I’m ready!” He had a bass guitar, turntable, Ableton push keyboard, and he was all about the live electronica. And he was also coming from the Pretty Lights world and was really excited about what we could do with this whole live thing. Zach was in the project for many years and is a really good friend of mine. But listening to some of the music that I made during that time, I was just thinking this music could really use a mid-range melodic element.
We had been friends with Keith and jammed with him for years at that point. It was at that moment when I realized these songs need guitar, and I’m not going to be the one to play it. At that point, I was fully headfirst into the keyboard. And so we decided to bring Keith into the project and go headfirst into that jam direction and really double down on all of our passions. So the liveness, the sample-based music, the remixes, the jam music, and just trying to create something electrifying that tapped into all of that – that’s where the inspiration for the trio came from. I love playing music with friends. When I was in college, I was in a band that jammed, and we didn’t even have a drummer. It was a guy on djembe. It is the whitest band you’ve ever seen
I’ve always wanted to play music with friends, and that’s been something that I just have so much fun doing. It’s a value of mine. I want to be able to do it forever just to have jam sessions with homies. There’s no better feeling than when you have been jamming with a group of like-minded musicians, and you’re fishing around for a hook or a vibe or something, and then you find it, and then you chase it or take it, ride the wave of that jam wherever it wants to go. And then after that, you feel this sense of endorphins and “Wow, we really did something.” It’s hard to explain.
MV: An unmatchable feeling. Aaron, what was your first impression of Sam and how did you react when he approached you to join the band?
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AH: I’d been playing with DJs and electronic producers for a long time, actually. It was something I started doing in early in high school, so I was always looking out for that kind of thing. I think I had played with Wax (Wax Future) already a good amount, so I’d already been playing with Keith, doing a handful of things. And then we met at Farm Fest…
KW: As one does.
AH: As one does, we were waiting in line to get paid, as we may or may not have been. And we met there. And it wasn’t so much an approach to be in the band as much as it was like a “Let’s jam,” and then we did. I don’t even remember if we practiced a bunch before we made that video or if we just made that video day one.
SA: Probably a modest amount of practice and then just to press play on the camera…
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AH: And see what happens, just press record and go for it. Yeah, I mean, I’ve always been kind of wanting to throw myself at projects and be like, “let’s do this, let’s do this.” And I think it flowed pretty instantly. The way that Sam produces drums is very similar to how I play them, so it kind of fused naturally. And we also worked on a sample pack together super early on, which got a ton of use. I still to this day hear people using a lot of it, so that also kind of cemented the sound a little with like, “Oh, there’s live drums specifically made to use in electronic music,” and that’s kind of what they’re doing. So we played a handful of shows, I think literally just a couple. I can’t remember what else we did, if it was just that…
SA: Might’ve just been that,
AH: Oh, we did a psychedelic sleepover.
SA: Oh, that’s right.
AH: We drove up like seven hours to go up to Maine or Vermont or something, played together. We did probably less than four shows just as a duo, and then started jamming with Zach.
MV: So I got introduced to the band when Zach was a member, and although people were excited about the addition of Keith, people were definitely disappointed and curious about the departure of Zach. How hard was it for you to make that decision and what motivated it?
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SA: Yeah, it was a really tough decision. I am an indecisive person. I take a lot of time to make decisions, and I am generally a people pleaser. And so it was really hard that day when I met up with Zach and said, “Hey, we’re letting you go from the project and also don’t take this personally.” And it was very easy to feel like I might be making a mistake, or I might be perceived to be the bad guy in the situation because Zach didn’t really do anything wrong. He’s an awesome musician, it was my stylistic decision between having someone who does turntables and bass and having someone on the other hand who does guitar.
And yeah, it was a tough call, but ultimately I do feel like it was the right call because I had been looking for that funky, mid-range melodic element in my music. And since we’ve been able to incorporate Keith into the project, I’ve really felt like it was really a rewarding process. And a lot of the riffs that used to be played by a dinky midi synth, I’ll take that out of the song. I’ll be like, get out of here. And then Keith will play that live and it’ll be a lot more engaging.
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MV: Was adding Keith strictly a musically/artistically motivated decision, or did you also want him to join the band for his personality?
KW: Don’t hold back now, all gas, no breaks.
SA: When you are thinking about adding someone to a music project, probably 80% to 90% of those decisions are made depending on if we like them. That’s the only way that the trio could have even started was three dudes who were just like, this is really fun. We like each other. This is cool.
AH: He’s also had a ton of road experience. There were many, many factors. Obviously, musicianship and friendship first. It was also a thing where Sam and I were like, “He knows what he’s doing. He knows how to play shows and go places.”
MV: How do you guys feel the lines have blurred between being friends and collaborators? Has it been difficult at any time to balance the two, or does it make the creative process more seamless?
KW: I think that when you’re younger, you claim an idea or part and your ego holds it and you want it to win. You want your idea to win when you’re younger. I’m older now, and I think that even when I joined the band, it was like, “How can I help Sam’s vision? How can I make Sam’s songs more robust?” Yeah, I get to solo sometimes, but I feel there’s a level of being a supporting cast member in a way where it has my moments where the spotlight comes on. And that, to me, to be able to help flesh it out, brings immense joy.
KW: And as far as being friends, I think we’ve just been doing this for so long that we know when it’s time to clock in and we know how to talk when things need to get fixed or addressed. And that’s cool when you see that in motion, when you see the growth. I mean, I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and you see yourself growing up where you would be like, wait, that should be 32 bars of a solo. You are like, no, actually, maybe it’s eight, and maybe I play a melody instead of a solo. It’s a growth thing. I think that the friendship fills that out big time.
KW: And he’s wrong. It’s called “Calibrate.” No, I mean to your question about, “Oh, is it becoming almost like a red Alert or disillusioned?” But there really isn’t anything like that in what we do because we address issues, we talk about things.
AH: Yeah, we’ve never hit a breaking point.
KW: Yeah, we’re in the car for 10 hours at a time. If you see something or feel something, say something. And that’s been the way we’ve approached thing since I’ve joined.
SA: I will say there was one moment that I remember and I took something away from this, if I could get a little vulnerable here. We were in Wellfleet, which was Aaron’s family’s place in Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and we were hunkering down to work on music for a week. And we have this track, “Concentrated,” which is one of my favorite tracks, our favorites. It’s super funky, super electrifying, and the sound design on it was some of my favorite. So Aaron and I we’re doing a session together, and he’ll suggest something he hears, and because I’m the producer, it’s my job to actually do it. But the problem is that my brain moves a million miles a minute, and I’m always thinking about potential improvements. Every sound I hear, I’m like, “Oh, fix that, fade that change that, double time that section, create this riser right here. Okay, now reverb that riser out.”
SA: And so one change Aaron might suggest, I’ll do that and then I’ll have this idea. Well, that sounded good, but what if it was a little bit more? And then Aaron’s over here, and while my wheels are spinning and doing my technical thing, Aaron’s like, “Oh, I heard this other snare that maybe needed to get realigned.” And I am like, “Hold on a sec. I’m on my own little rabbit hole right now.” And Aaron’s like, okay. And then he’s like, “Hey, so about that snare.” And I’m like, “Hold on a sec.” And then he walks out of the room, he’s like, “I cannot do this right now.” So what that taught me is if you’re in a one-on-one session with somebody and they’re hearing things and they want to do things with the track, you are the producer.
They can’t do anything. Their to-do list can’t be accomplished unless you do it right now. That’s what the one-on-one session is for. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, do it later. I think that was something where. basically, you have to humble yourself constantly in a band. And a lot of it is like I have my preferences of tracks to play and stuff, and there are tracks that I don’t want to play where at a certain point I’ll be like, you know what? It’s not always about me. It’s also about the fans and maybe they want to hear this song, and maybe there’s a track we may or may not play in the Envision set, and that’s a super important set to us, and we want it to have the best possible tracks that will get the most fans for us.
If I have a track that’s not my favorite, well, maybe we should play it because it’s a lot of people’s favorite or it would really bring the energy up and be more hype, and I might need to swallow my pride about whether or not I enjoy playing it. So those swallowing pride moments and being communicative are key. And you got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them. You got to know when to just be like, this is not one of the battles I’m going to pick.
KW: Dying on that hill
AH: We’ve definitely all gotten better about voicing what we want and letting go of the things you can’t control.
MV: Let’s get back to the introduction of Keith. Would you guys say that you guys hit it off creatively right away? How has your chemistry developed over the years? And were there any eureka moments you can recall?
KW: When Sam and Aaron approached me, I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I’m like, “Wait, what? And so I didn’t really see Sam’s vision.
AH: It took a minute.
KW: It took a minute and it took some time to actually rehearse. It wasn’t like, oh, three months in, I’m still not understanding. But at first, yeah, I didn’t understand the vision. I was like, what’s happening?
AH: You’re not just playing guitar band. It’s a very specific fold in.
KW: Yeah, and I remember, credit to my wife, we were in the depths of wedding planning, and I was like, I think I’m going to be in another band. And she was like looking at our wedding to-do list and she’s like, “Oh, hell yeah, go for it.” So shout out to her.
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KW: But I think that it was so funny that when I first joined, I went to their old house and I sat in the front room with Sam starting to learn songs, and the first one he throws at me, like a mean person, was this song “Intangible,” which is just, it has an extra bar, it has an extra accent. And it took us like two hours to get it. And I was like, “What have I done?
AH: Did the hardest one first.
KW: It’s so funny because once it clicked, it burned so hard into my memory, that we pulled it out on the Winter Sprinter tour. We took 30 songs or maybe 25 songs with us out on that tour, which is kind of uncanny, you know what I mean? For electronic music, usually the shows are very, very clean, very buttoned, very standardized. We had two dozen songs, maybe more with us, and we pulled “Intangible” out from nowhere, from left field, maybe we ran it once in rehearsal, and that riff has still just been burned into my brain. But to summarize what you’re saying, on my end, I didn’t fully get it. And it took maybe a couple of rehearsals until I was like, “Oh, oh, shit, I get it. There’s places we can go. There are corners of the jam world that we can go that producers can’t go.”
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AH: Exponentially smoother.
KW: And it did. It grew and grew. But yeah, we can go into these corners, these Lotus or STS9 corners, and then come back with some kind of heaviness that could be in a dark nightclub. So once it all clicked, there was an aha moment, and I would say it was pretty early on for me.
MV: Did you guys get any pushback when you swapped Zach for Keith?
SA: I don’t think we got any pushback. I think maybe this is too self-deprecating or something, but I don’t think we were big enough to get pushback.
AH: Wehad fans comment.
SA: We were a big deal to a small group of people, and I don’t want to invalidate that small group of people’s feelings about what they felt about the change.
AH: I remember seeing one or two people being like, “No scratches?”
SA: To this day, people will still be like, what happened to Tygris? And I’ll be like, “Hey, in case you missed it, we have a new member now. Yeah, it’s been this way for four years.” And so it’s a major change that over time has felt more and more like it’s been this way for a while now. If anybody’s like, “Oh, we prefer this or we miss that,” it would be some people who like the turntable aspect because it has the same appeal in the Pretty Lights world with Chris Karns and the Tipper world. And I think that when we had a turntablist, our sound could approach what Tipper does differently because there was more space for the noise based scratch element. And that is something where I’m like, “It would be cool to have a scratch solo here.”
But I would say that the songwriting potential of having a guitar in the project and sounding like some of my favorite acts like Koan Sound or acts that use guitar as both a melodic element and an ambient atmospheric element, and having the ability to have Keith fill those elements in, for me, that’s what feeds my soul. But I do think there are people out there who maybe were more inherently interested in a project that had a live turntable. It is more common in electronic music, but our job sought after what we’re trying to do. And I’m excited to talk about how we’re doing it.
But what we’re trying to do is basically prove the haters wrong that guitar can sit in electronic music. We got to prove our haters wrong. I get like a million tweets a day about it. A guitar, when it’s dry, has a lot of harmonics and it can fill up the spectrum very quickly. But a guitar when it’s processed either with distortion, reverb, and in some cases totally drowning it out with reverb and creating these washy – think explosions in the sky – like big spaces, then now we’re cooking with gas when it comes to songwriting, because you can create atmospheric moments. You can create ambient moments. I’m excited because we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of that. We’re constantly troubleshooting and upgrading our technical elements. And the last one-on-one that I had with Keith, I was finally like, Hey, let’s increase the time on your reverb to be twice what it is.
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KW: Huge reverb guy.
SA: Let’s increase the range of length that the reverb can decay for and see what that sounds like. And then I was like, oh, this is something we can use or something that we don’t use that could be useful in certain sections, maybe where I’m soloing, Keith, all of a sudden puts reverb on the guitar. Now there isn’t that sort of clashing moment where the melody from the guitar clashes with the melody from the keys. Now, even though the guitar could play the exact same thing, because it’s in a bunch of space, it doesn’t clash as much in stereo. And these mixing tools can really help with getting guitar to sit in electronic music. And not only electronic music, but it’s very much at home in a jam world. And we’ve been playing these jam festivals.
AH: We’re somewhere in between.
SA: Yeah, yeah. Resonate, Dome Fest, to name a couple, but –
AH: We were the Jam at Gem & Jam.
SA: Yeah, we were the jam at Gem & Jam – us, Sunsquabi, and TAUK. Polish Ambassadors did a Grateful Dead set, and that was pretty jammy. But they’re kind of like the footsteps that we’re trying to follow in, if you will, or we’re trying to appeal to that world of people in the jam scene who might also be into bass music. Because jam and bass have a really long and intertwined history going all the way back to Grateful Dead and before them, a lot of breaks.
MV: It’s been really fun to see the project reimagined and brought to new depths with the addition of a guitar, and I think that really has taken into effect with the release of your 2025 album, Esoterra. Would love to hear how long it took you guys to put that project together and what you were trying to accomplish with its release.
SA: The first track for the album was started probably like seven years ago, “Rise.”
AH: That was the first song we ever played live. The first rendition of the trio at the first show was Rise.
KW: Where was that show?
AH: Sunnyvale.
KW: Oh, Sunnyvale
AH: In New York. Yep.
AH: So it’s been a long, long time.
SA: I always knew I wanted to make an album, and over these seven years, I always knew that song would go on an album and then I’d make another song and say, this one, it’s going on the album. And then I would finish other songs, put out singles, collabs, EPs, that didn’t so much fit, but I was always slowly stacking up. I wanted somewhere between nine and 12 tracks. I really wanted it to all tell a story, fit on the same release, feel in the same sound world, and where if two songs were not really in the same stylistic world, have a new song to bridge the gap or dig up an old song and revive it for the album to bridge the gap, like an old song that hadn’t been put out yet. And I was able to do that. And a lot of the tracks that I had been really hoping could make it on the album did make it on the album. And yeah, we ended up with nine tracks that kind of run the gamut from a bass banger to a chill, downtempo jammy song and everything in between.
MV: With people’s attention spans and the chaotic nature of the digital space, do you guys think that albums have become devalued?
KW: A record is called a record, a record of three people in a room and where they are at that time. That’s why it’s called a record.It’s a record of where they are. You are right, attention span is down without a doubt. I know, from where I sit, that you make a record in spite of that. Plain and simple.
AH: It’s for the people that do listen.
KW: You do it in spite of attention spans and hope people catch on because there’s aha moments in the connection, in the programming of the tracks, in the sequencing of the tracks, there are all these little stories inside the stories. So that’s why you do it. You’re not wrong, though. Your assessment is right. Now we’re seeing remix culture is just, “Hey, I need this clip of the most hyphee thing you got.” That’s a topical clip. So you do it despite the way it’s consumed, because it’s been the canvas in the history of all time. If we’re creating, it’s the way you put the albums out and the joy, I mean, Sam, when that day hit, when we released it, it was just a release. It was like, we did it. We climbed the mountain. And now you have that book, that audio story that people can consume.
SA: When it comes to how you overcome that, we use a method called the drip method, which is basically, it’s got nothing to do with coffee, well, it’s got a little to do with coffee, but basically, you don’t put out the whole album at once. We actually had five singles on a nine-track album, which meant that every new single release was a new chance to capture everyone’s attention span with zero fall off, because they just have to listen to that one track. So we now have nine tracks on this release.
It’s kind of random, and at a certain point, it’s kind of a wash. It’s like, well, maybe these are the tracks that people like the most. “Sprout,” which I know is one of my favorite tracks on the album, has 23,000 plays, the most plays of any track on the release. And it’s also the best in my opinion. So it’s kind of cool how it almost democratized the plays on the album to put out these random tracks from different parts of the album. Now people are like, “Well, I got to listen to this one song that I heard when it was a single, I really liked it. So I got to listen up until I hear that one.” Finally, I think when it comes to album plays, it’s when you accidentally leave an album on that you listen to the whole thing.
AH: And you realize, “Oh wow, that’s the track I’ve never heard,” or “I never listened to the second half of that one.”
SA: And so I just hope that a bunch of people out there accidentally leave our album on.
AH: Or even intentionally.
SA: Yeah. God willing.
AH: It is somewhat a call for patience.
SA: Absolutely.
AH: We have, I don’t know what it is, the run time, if it’s 49 minutes or an hour or something, I don’t know the exact run time, but it takes patience. And not only the album,
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But each song itself is not written like an EDM track, it’s written like a band where things take a minute, they change sometimes, there’s nothing heavy in the track until the second half. Sometimes there’s a long intro. It’s not just a sensationalist buildup and then drop and then build up and then drop. It is written to be consumed with patience. Whether or not people are coming with that, that is the intention that we have for it and gave to it. And honestly something we have to give to ourselves now.
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We put out this album, and once you release an album, you have to keep promoting it for a year. And we have to be patient with ourselves because we’ve been lucky enough to be touring since we released it essentially on loop. And so we haven’t even really had time to keep pushing the album. We dropped it and then we’re like, “all right, we’re on the road. So we have to be patient with ourselves in terms of the album as a whole.” We’re going to keep promoting it. We’re going to keep pushing it. Ideally we’re going to gig and get gigabytes of videos we haven’t even put out yet. We usually put out the entire album recorded on video in the studio, and we haven’t even had the time to promote it essentially. So it’s like, the album itself, the music, it calls for patience and the release of it even. We have to be patient with ourselves with it. So the hope is that people that want the music, that want to see us do it will go find all this stuff and find that it’s there. And over time it’ll live on in its own way.
MV: I’d love to talk about promotion for a moment. Do you guys ever feel discouraged or even jaded from the fact that the music scene has become so promotion/social media-heavy?
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AH: We have a rule with making content where if we’re not having fun, we’re not going to do it. And we do. We have so much fun when we’re making videos, we typically just press record and then just start going crazy. And it’s so fun. I don’t think we’ve ever produced videos where we are in a studio doing a produced video. We never plan anything. We never try to catch onto a trend. You’re going to lose yourself in trying to do it unles you do it genuinely. If we have the desire to make any sort of promotion, we’re going to have fun with it. That’s the only way we’re going to do it.
SA: Some good advice for producers who are trying to get their stuff out there with reels and stuff is get a friend to help you, whether it’s someone to hold the iPhone while you do something silly or someone to edit your video. Because even just having another character in the video or something allows for the fun improvisational tone compared to just you in front of your iPhone. We’ll stand in front of a festival lineup and just be like, “Hey guys, I’m going to lightening in a boot hole.” Just pronounce everything wrong. Be super silly. And I like that approach. But yeah, basically you got to keep the whimsy alive if you’re going to be posting so much, you can’t just be deadpan like, “Hey, I have music out.” You can, but we found it goes really well if you have fun with it.
MV: I think that’s a great approach, keeping it authentic, fun, and doing it for you as well.
SA: I think there’s a lot of power to whatever you do, just put the music in it. I have this strong sense that if the music is good, it will travel well. You just have to put it out there. And so the number one mistake people make who have good music is never putting any out there. And I think that once it’s out there, if it’s like the cream of the crop, it will rise to the top, and so just put music behind your Instagram post. Put your latest track in the background audio of whatever video. If you’re doing a silly video, put the track somewhere. So if people are watching the video, they hear the track, they’re like, “Oh, oh, that’s new music by X artist. Oh, I want to go check that out now. I didn’t realize they had new music out.” So you got to constantly be subliminally sneaking your music into everything.
MV: You guys mentioned that touring is also a great way to promote your music. You guys are currently on the Esoterra tour, and I was hoping you guys could provide some insight into the not-so-glamorous side of embarking on a tour like this.
AH: We only stay in five-star hotels.
SA: So much caviar, dude. Too much caviar.
KW: I have a collapsible cot from the military that I have in case our hotel doesn’t have three beds or even sometimes has one bed or…
AH: We’re staying in a friend’s house with no beds.
KW: We were staying at a friend’s house, who we were very thankful for letting us stay there, but the cot is there. Use the cot as a metaphor for how glamorous it is. It’s a great cot, it’s great.
SA: I also have a roll-up air mattress. The real tech is putting the air mattress on top of the cot. That’s the lap of luxury.
AH: And then in terms of caviar, it’s mostly trail mix and bananas for me.
SA: I’ll say this, it’s peaks and valleys. So people see the peaks and they don’t see the valleys. We were on the Winter Sprinter tour and had someone come and cook us a meal, just a random friend of a friend of Aaron’s.
AH: Yeah, she catered us a ramen meal out of nowhere. Despite the fact that we are not living lavishly, we are living richly. We have incredible experiences. We get put up at stranger’s homes all the time. For example, a friend of a friend’s mom who’s never met us before –
KW: That was very nice.
AH: Who will just let us in in the middle of the night without even meeting us, will give us a code to their house and let us in and let us stay in their house. We’ve been put up in so many places by so many people who’ve treated us so well that yeah, sure, we may not comfortable all the time, but we are very, very often getting to enjoy experiences that nobody gets to do. And we’re super, super lucky to do that. So yeah. Does it suck to get smooshed into a car? We don’t have a tour bus. We tour in a car or we rent a van. We don’t stay in hotel rooms every night. We stay in whatever’s cheapest, whether that’s our friend’s house which is free or a friend of friend’s house or someone we’ve never met before or the worst hotel you’ve ever seen in your life.
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We do not choose comfort. We choose the ability to keep doing this. But in doing so, we get exposed to a ton of really, really rich experiences that I hope one day gets more and more comfortable and a little bit easier. But for the time being, it is a privilege no matter how rough it is. We try to remind each other that, and we try to make the best of it – going to a really good coffee shop, even if we’re in the worst town we’ve ever been in or going for a walk in the woods if we have the time. So we are nowhere near touring comfortably, but we are touring in a way that we are all benefiting from the experiences more than we can explain.
^
KW: It’s incredible. Just the inverse, what you’re saying, people that don’t see on the inside think it’s all highs. Those friends of friends that are sharing their houses, they have some people in the industry they see on the inside, and they know how they can help us. So the catering of the ramen, and the houses that are shared, they can see through a tour flyer with 25 dates and be like, “They need a shower at this date, a meal at that one,” etc.. So seeing how people can rely on generosity and connecting with some really helpful people is part of that. Also, tiredness. Tiredness, plain and simple.
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But I’m telling you, there was a couple of stops on this Winter Sprinter tour where it’s getting off stage just absolutely energized from something we did musically. Some needle we threaded in a jam that we did not expect. And then it’s like you’re getting shot out of a cannon. But setting up at the show, no one’s talking to each other and we’re tired as hell. And it’s something…
AH: We never show up happy.
KW: …we were trudging through the setup, but something happens on stage, some moment where we’re all beside ourselves, we’re all outside of ourselves. We go some crazy place in a jam, and at the end it’s yelling and screaming, hooting and hollering. And so I think it’s high risk, high reward, wears your body down, but if you’re focused on what you love about it, you can get energy. You can glean energy from certain sections that makes it all worth it.
^
SA: It’s like the weather on an island where one minute it’s like a crazy storm and then the sun comes out, and it’s just amazing. Palm trees and a light breeze.
AH: But over and over and over and over again.
SA: And it’s not like good weather every day all the time. It’s not like San Diego.
MV: It’s almost like that sunshine wouldn’t be as beautiful if it weren’t for the storm that preceded it in a way.
SA: Exactly.
MV: So it’s clear to see you guys have a massive support network, whether it’s fans, friends, or otherwise. Would love to hear about two particular members of your team, Johnston Calhoun (Manager) and Sam Hutchinson (Agent), and how they have helped grow the project.
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AH: I mean, there’s no way we can express how unable we would be to do what we do without the two of them. We are maxed out even with their help. If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t be anywhere. They’re just workhorses. I’ve never seen anyone answer as many emails as Hutch does in a day. Nobody on earth. I would put him up with people on Wall Street. He’s answering thousands of emails a day. We will go to a festival and someone at the end who booked us would be like, “Yo, I love your agent. Hutch is awesome. He was so nice to us.” We hear the opposite of that all the time. So it feels so good to be represented by people we know are loved in the industry, who are just good characters that treat people well, are fair, honest, and would do anything for us. Calhoun has driven hours and hours to save us when flights didn’t come through. They are not extensions of the band, they are members of the band.
^
SA: Yeah, and I will say not all managers are Calhoun in the sense that he will go to a lot of our shows. He’ll see that we’re playing a show or help arrange a show for us, and then the next thing we know, he’s got his itinerary to fly out and see us at that show and help make sure the night goes well. We haven’t really had that level of attention from a manager in the past. And what I will say, to artists who might be wondering about whether they should get a team or have a team and are thinking about making a change or something, is if your team isn’t coming to you, not only telling you ideas and things that they’re going to do, but telling you things that they already did that you didn’t even know about, then you might want to get a new team.
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So we’ve learned through Hutch and Calhoun that your team can actually be working for you when you’re not in the room – having ideas and following through on those ideas when you’re not in the room. So it’s like you can’t unlearn that. Once you have a team like that, it’s going to be hard to go back. Hopefully we never have to because it’s an awesome team.
KW: Cal’s a unicorn, Rhizome. Everyone’s going to say “artist first, artist first, artist first.” He’s in it. He does it. He roots in the ground. Everything that Cal does comes from an artist first mentality. How can I nourish, nurture, build?
^
He had a birthday party. He had a bunch of artists down to his spot where he lives in Asheville. He got all of us under a roof to try to collab and we did sure enough. And that’s really special. So Cal’s great, absolutely great Hutch. Like Aaron said, wall Street’s funny. I mean, he does show us his inbox and It’s hilarious and terrifying. I wouldn’t want that many emails. But yeah, great team. Super stoked.
MV: Killers. Killers.
KW: Their egos don’t glaze them.
MV: So I imagine you have tons of great memories on tour, in part thanks to Cal and Hutch. I’d love for you to share some of your favorites.
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KW: So many. A lot. We flipped a remix of this track, Donkey Kong and Aquatic Ambience, one of my favorite video game soundtrack songs of all time. And in Winter Park we weren’t going to play it. And then mid-jam, I just started playing the motif, the main motif. And it just went on to be this crazy uptempo chaos that is the best, one of the highest highs on planet Earth, is when you nail something that we’re working through in an improv element.
AH: That you didn’t even think was going to happen,
KW: That you didn’t even think was going to happen. And that’s where we’re at with jamming. We’re really touching on this uncharted, untouched snow in the moment and crafting and molding it in front of people live, which is great.
^
I think it was Durango. I was out of energy and I just started singing, “Running Up That Hill” as if I was an Italian mobster, and I rewrote the entirety of everyone’s brains for the rest of the tour. We would all sing “Running Up That Hill” –
AH: But as an Italian mob.
KW: As an Italian mob. But anyway, that’s it. That was just goofiness. You know what I mean? When you’re so out of gas, and you’re not grumpy, you’re actually whimsical, I call it the sleepy hahas, not the sleepy o-nos. Just being in that state for days.
SA: I most fondly look back on the same jam that Keith mentioned, but a slightly different part. I think it might’ve been the “Vibe” jam before you brought in that melody. And then during, but even before, we were completely off the grid, completely off the cuff. So the song just ends and then we are all still playing our instrument, but just with no more backing track. So then it’s just an unplugged off the cuff jam, which can go literally anywhere. And I’m playing synth bass through Ableton, so I can control a lot of the parameters of the synth and Keith’s playing guitar. And we took that jam to so many places, and it all felt so coordinated, even though we’d never played it before. It was that sort of telepathic thing. And the cool thing about that is that later you can go back in, and you can reverse engineer and write songs based on any number of different riffs that we played.
There’s so much digging for new material you can do in those jams. But that particular jam where it’s halfway through, Keith randomly brought back the “Aquatic Ambience” theme and it just worked. And I knew the chords to it. We’d broken it down a couple nights before, and so I was able to quickly – I heard the very beginning of Aquatic Ambience and then I just played the E to the C chord progression immediately. As soon as I heard that, I was like, “I know where we’re going.” And I was able to keep up with it on my bassline that I was playing. And those moments are what it’s all about. I knew Denver was beautiful and had mountains and trees, but I didn’t know it had so many different types of mountains and trees and mountain tree combos and non-tree mountains. Non-tree mountains without trees, just the mountains with flat top mountains with no top.
AH: We saw a variety of mountains and trees.
SA: Lots of really beautiful nature. Nature was on one during that trip. The million-dollar highway was beautiful. It’s just you and nature. It’s literally nothing except just the road and the mountains, not even any guardrails because when it would snow, you got to plow the snow off the road so they didn’t have guardrails. So it was a very slow drive, which gave us a lot of time to embrace and appreciate the nature all around us. But that was the most beautiful trip I’d ever been on. So that’s definitely top tier memory.
MV: Very nice. Aaron, what about yourself?
AH: Well, mainly musical moments, this is part musical part-experiential, but I think our last Denver headline, we brought in a big light rig with Quantum Effects. This dude, Ryan Barry, we worked with him for a while to build a light rig. And I think that whole set felt like some of the most immersive that I’ve ever felt on a stage because we played on really cool light rigs and really cool stages, but this was our rig that we worked on for months to kind of curate with him and build a scene that felt cohesive with the music.
So I think that whole set kind of felt like we’re presenting an audio visual thing that we created, not just performing on a stage where someone’s doing lights. And so that made the music all the more intense for me. That made the whole experience a little more – just like something very…how do I explain it? It felt like we were presenting a very complete product in a way that I was really proud of. And I think we were all really proud of, I think to the biggest crowd we ever headlined to, the most amount of people who bought tickets to see us, not just at a festival or not supporting someone else. And then non-musically, yeah, every minute we were in the van on the Winter Sprinter tour with Sarah McWavy and Nick Phyphr. Every minute was fun. I didn’t sleep. I thought when we had all these drives, I thought we were going to be sleeping in the van. And all of us were just up talking and laughing and learning about each other and just saying ridiculous stuff to each other.
AH: I say this a lot to relatives and friends who talk about, “Oh, it looks like it’s amazing,” this and that. But it’s the moments in between the hour or hour and a half on stage or two hours if we’re really lucky. Those are great and we certainly do it for those moments, but the moments in between is where the overwhelming majority of our time is spent. And yeah, when you get to do it with friends, when you get to spend two weeks around each other and not get tired of each other at all, we all didn’t want it to end. That was crazy. You hear horror stories about tours and you hear people getting sick and tired and this and that, and we were all just on the perfect wavelength together and that was a huge, huge moment.
MV: Do you guys envision visuals and lights taking a larger position within your guys’ live set?
SA: Definitely, yeah. But we’re pretty far financially from that. I think it’s interesting because when I was in college and before I even started the trio, I was always really interested in the fusion of music and visuals and wanting to create an audio visual experience. And the only reason I didn’t was because I got so far into music and just kept making music that I went to school for art, but it took a backseat because I was so obsessed with music. And once we nail anything and honestly even remotely close to the vision for what I have that the project’s potential can be, then I think I’m going to start thinking more about the visual element. But what’s been great is Aaron is really on the same page and he is coming from the jam, live music, and big venue world and wants us to have big production. And so any chance we have budget for lights or VJ or whatever, we use it. And Aaron kind of runs point on coordinating with the lighting guy or the VJ while I prep the musical aspects of the set. And we will sit down and do lighting cues for what color this track should be, what color should that track be, which for me is kind of getting my feet wet with making decisions beyond what visuals might work with this track, which we still haven’t fully dove into. We sometimes let the VJ make more of those decisions. We’ll just give them subtle cues like keywords or things like that.
AH: We did get visuals for Red Rocks too. We commissioned a bunch of visuals from Jonah Parts and he collaborated with Alexis Spady. It was the coolest visual collaboration ever. And so we now have those on a flash drive whenever we have an LED screen we have access to, which happens every once in a while, depending on which stages we’re on at which festivals, but we are starting to incorporate it where we can. But we are definitely far off from having that a consistent part. But yeah, we’ve done it a couple times. We want to do it more. We did it in Philly with our friend Chad. He brought in some great lights for the Philly two night album release run. So it just feels so good to be in enveloped in lights. And is it a goal? Yeah, it’s a huge goal for sure.
MV: I’m excited to watch that side of the project continue to grow. Now I wanted to chat about a not so fun topic that having to do with what’s going on in the US right now. How do you guys approach being creative and promoting yourselves when the whole world seems like it’s falling apart?
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SA: Don’t stop creating. That’s something that I’ve thought of ever since. Being brutally honest about it and not really mincing words – we’re are all lefties. We all hate Trump, the administration, everything it stands for. It goes against everything we believe in, and it’s so unnecessary, disgusting, racis, and just regressive. There’s a lot of very regressive things happening right now, and we see ourselves as wanting to bring positivity into the world.
SA: Sometimes I debate, am I doing enough? Is music enough? Is just making music enough to help the world right now? And on the one hand, I don’t think it is. I would like to be able to raise my voice more and use my voice more. But the only way I currently know how to use my voice is by continuing to put music out there.
^
And so I would say just start with that. Start with creating things and sharing them with your friends. And if you get struck by a bolt of lightning that says this is the answer, then by all means. I would shout it from my megaphone if I really had a thought. I think one of my big problems is that I overthink things a lot. I overthink what I’m going to say, and I’ll start to write a post and share my beliefs and then I’ll delete it because I am playing devil’s advocate with myself about whether someone in my fan base will hear it and say something to me, which will get me embroiled in some argument and I’ll lose half of my day arguing with a random fan on the internet.
And our time is very valuable. So sometimes I don’t share things because I don’t want to spend the rest of my day having arguments in the comments about what exactly I meant when I shared that thing. So I don’t speak too much about politics from my platform. I think there is a tasteful amount that you could talk about politics and put your thoughts and beliefs out there. And I want to, so I don’t do it that often, but I would like to, and I think this is as good time as any to say that.
_______
I think that if we just let really rich, powerful, greedy people continue doing what they’re doing without worrying about the karmic downstream consequences of what they’re doing because they think that they are above it, we shouldn’t be okay with that and continue to live in a world where terrible, terrible things are happening in our name as American taxpayers…and I dunno, I’m going to take a seat and think even more about what I want to say, but I just have thoughts like that all the time and I’m like, “This is not ready for prime time.” These thoughts aren’t fully fleshed out enough to share. So I don’t, but I really support people who do and I want to see more of it. I think artists should be sharing their beliefs on politics more because art is political. One of the eras of music that I really resonate with is the seventies – artists were sharing a lot of their beliefs on politics.
^
AH: Creating art around it.
SA: You could argue that it did result in a lot of reforms in our country because of that.
AH: Keith, I know you I got a lot to say about it.
KW: Years and years ago, I think that the term virtue signaling was thrown around and people would try to bully people into not sharing their opinions because they’re just musicians. “Just stick to music, just shut up and dribble,” all of that. And I think we are so far into absurdity right now with how everything is going. All throughout the Winter Sprinter tour, I know it’s so superficial, but in the microphone, at any point, we would say “Fuck ICE.” Because we are at that point. We are at that point that if you don’t say it, you potentially aren’t passing the vibe check. There’s no virtue signaling anymore.
AH: I was looking into the crowd like, “Who’s not saying this?”
KW: We’re past the point. It’s almost like good vs. evil.
AH: It’s good vs. evil.
KW: You have to, at the very least, make some of your feelings known. It is beyond absurd – the current state of the world for marginalized communities, with the racism, the fucking brutality that’s happening. And it’s beyond pale. And so to answer your question, how do you make art through this extreme, extreme cognitive dissonance, a dizzying level of cognitive dissonance, and you feel handcuffed and you feel afraid all at once, because how do you start, how do you get going and how do you start to help and move that along? So at the very least, I mean, I think it’s just a bit of speaking out is the minimum to show that you are in the direction of being against this, sorry for the language, but fucking absurdity of it all. So that’s kind of where I’m at.
MV: Right on, Keith.
AH: Very, very long story that I won’t tell right now, but the whole reason I’m in music is because of activism. It’s the only reason. It is my driving force for sure. And it’s something that I’ve spent hundreds of hours planning on how I was going to do it and setting up entire businesses around it, of which there will be more to come later in life. But I got myself into quite the tizzy of “how do I do this, and also get a career going at the same time? How do I keep them intertwined?” And I really, really got myself mentally in a bunch about it for a long time, because I don’t feel like I’m doing anything. I don’t feel like I’m doing enough. I don’t feel like I know how. And a couple years ago I had a little bit of a flip switch in my head of just like, instead of what can’t I do, what can I do?
Anything? Anything. I don’t think this is the first time that artists should be using their voice or platform to do something. There has always been and always will be horrible shit going on. And there will always be shit that artists can do to improve that. But the thought shift of what I can do versus “I feel so helpless” has shifted us to do a couple of things. One of which is following Yvon (Chouinard), the guy who started Patagonia. He pioneered this idea of 1% of your income should go to a charity. Every business should donate 1% of their gross. And so we started doing that years and years ago. We started doing that just to plant trees. And every year we donate hundreds and hundreds of trees planted around the world, just because it’s something, it’s not nothing.
We are at least putting something in the ground that is sucking carbon out of the air to maybe make the future a little bit better. It’s something. And to date, we’ve planted thousands and thousands of trees. We are responsible for a forest like a sizable forest. At 1%, we don’t feel it, we never worry about it. It’s $40, $50 bucks here and there, whatever, $20 bucks. It all goes into an account at the end of the year. We donate it all. And it’s just like this idea of doing something that if everybody did 1% we’d be a whole lot better.
So that’s something we constantly do. And then on the course of just staying on top of it, as things happen, as humans do human things, just saying something on the microphone. Sometimes we have 50 people in a room, sometimes we have 10,000, and it’s like you can speak and say anything, and they’re there to listen. Whether or not they like it doesn’t matter, but they’re there to hear you. So if you’re not taking a second to say something, it’s a missed opportunity. So I try to take at least a few minutes before I get on stage every night to just think about what I care about, what I want people to care about. And even if it’s a minute or two on the microphone, it’s an opportunity. A lot of people feel helpless, a lot of people feel hopeless, and a lot of people look up to artists, for better or for worse; they look up to artists. So the least you can do is try to stand for something that maybe someone else will also stand for.
MV: As you guys mentioned, it is a risk to introduce your personal beliefs to the artistry of it. So kudos to you guys for being brave.
AH: It’s a huge risk not to.
MV: Let’s switch it up and get a little more positive now. What are you guys most excited about for the future? What are some of your plans for 2026?
AH: We’re killing Nazis and ICE while we’re at it. It’s not on the calendar officially, but…
KW: Envision is coming up next week.
SA: Yeah, Midwest run through Cleveland, Palantine, Peoria, and after that Homer HarborFest in Alaska. Fourth on the farm in Pennsylvania.
AH: We’ve gotta bunch of good festivals.
SA: And Dome Fest, as we mentioned earlier, it’s more of a jam fest. So that’s pretty exciting.
AH: We’re thinking about a Philly popup in the spring with a really cool lineup that’s already got some legs. So that’s a really cool thing that we’re hoping to secretly put out at some point.
KW: I’m looking forward to playing.
MV: In that case, I’ll let you guys get to it, as I know you have a rehearsal to get started!
While I’ve met all of them individually, whether it was on the sandy shores of Paradise Lakes, in the smoke-filled haze of One Art Community Center, or at the legendary Warehouse on Watts, I recently got the chance to chat with 5AM Trio all at once.
If there was one word I could use to describe the ethos, camaraderie, and general discourse between Sam Andrus (5AM), Keith Wadsworth (of Wax Future), and Aaron Harel (Zone Drums), it would be brotherhood. It was inspiring to see not just three bandmates, but three humans, three friends, three brothers have so much compassion for each other.
Which is important when you’re spending 10+ hours in a van together.
In our conversation, we chat about said vanlife, the evolution of their sound, the value of collaboration, their particular style of live improvisation, artistic vision vs. audience expectations, and using music as a tool for activism.
MV: This is an interesting time for the electronic scene for a lot of different reasons, one of them being the recent increase in live/jamtronica bands. You guys have been doing this for quite some time now. I’d love for you to bring me back to the moment that you decided to create the trio and how it all came together.
SA: That’s a really great question. So I actually started my performance career trying to do live looping, using a much older version of Ableton along with MaxMSP, my guitar, and beatboxing. So the project looked completely different. Many more of the sounds were live and less prerecorded, and I was just looping my live vocals. It was very primitive and fun. You can actually hear some of it on my Bandcamp, but at a certain point, I decided that I didn’t love the production value of what I was doing and that it sounded a little bit too dirty, dusty, and unprofessional. So I decided to get into production and get my music to sound like the music that I really admired; Flying Lotus, Pretty Lights, Tipper, Opiuo, and over time everything in the glitch and bass scenes.
SA: I really found my sound in that scene. Then, at a certain point, I realized, “Wow, I kind of accomplished what I was trying to do,” which was purely just for my own musical interests. I really wanted to create some music that sounded like my favorite inspirations, and I was able to do that. Upon doing that, I kind of zoomed out a little bit and I was just performing it in a DJ fashion, which I had been doing for years at that point, and I was ready to try and incorporate some live elements.
_____
SA: I remember my manager at the Rust, Francesco had this idea, what if we started a band? What if we started a trio? He was really hype on the idea of the 5AM Trio. And it was right around that same time that Aaron and I met and started playing gigs together as 5AM featuring Zone Drums. We played one set at the Backroom with Mindex.
AH: It was like a garage in someone’s house.
SA: But even for that first set, we’ve always loved the idea of sharing with people, this is what we do, check it out. And I remember we shared some promo for that with him playing over one of my tracks, and it got a great reception. People loved it. They were super into it.
^
After that, Francesco was really excited and wanted to make this trio thing happen, and our friend Zach (Tygris) came through, and he brought his setup and was so hyped. He was like, “Put me in coach, I’m ready!” He had a bass guitar, turntable, Ableton push keyboard, and he was all about the live electronica. And he was also coming from the Pretty Lights world and was really excited about what we could do with this whole live thing. Zach was in the project for many years and is a really good friend of mine. But listening to some of the music that I made during that time, I was just thinking this music could really use a mid-range melodic element.
We had been friends with Keith and jammed with him for years at that point. It was at that moment when I realized these songs need guitar, and I’m not going to be the one to play it. At that point, I was fully headfirst into the keyboard. And so we decided to bring Keith into the project and go headfirst into that jam direction and really double down on all of our passions. So the liveness, the sample-based music, the remixes, the jam music, and just trying to create something electrifying that tapped into all of that – that’s where the inspiration for the trio came from. I love playing music with friends. When I was in college, I was in a band that jammed, and we didn’t even have a drummer. It was a guy on djembe. It is the whitest band you’ve ever seen
I’ve always wanted to play music with friends, and that’s been something that I just have so much fun doing. It’s a value of mine. I want to be able to do it forever just to have jam sessions with homies. There’s no better feeling than when you have been jamming with a group of like-minded musicians, and you’re fishing around for a hook or a vibe or something, and then you find it, and then you chase it or take it, ride the wave of that jam wherever it wants to go. And then after that, you feel this sense of endorphins and “Wow, we really did something.” It’s hard to explain.
MV: An unmatchable feeling. Aaron, what was your first impression of Sam and how did you react when he approached you to join the band?
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AH: I’d been playing with DJs and electronic producers for a long time, actually. It was something I started doing in early in high school, so I was always looking out for that kind of thing. I think I had played with Wax (Wax Future) already a good amount, so I’d already been playing with Keith, doing a handful of things. And then we met at Farm Fest…
KW: As one does.
AH: As one does, we were waiting in line to get paid, as we may or may not have been. And we met there. And it wasn’t so much an approach to be in the band as much as it was like a “Let’s jam,” and then we did. I don’t even remember if we practiced a bunch before we made that video or if we just made that video day one.
SA: Probably a modest amount of practice and then just to press play on the camera…
^
AH: And see what happens, just press record and go for it. Yeah, I mean, I’ve always been kind of wanting to throw myself at projects and be like, “let’s do this, let’s do this.” And I think it flowed pretty instantly. The way that Sam produces drums is very similar to how I play them, so it kind of fused naturally. And we also worked on a sample pack together super early on, which got a ton of use. I still to this day hear people using a lot of it, so that also kind of cemented the sound a little with like, “Oh, there’s live drums specifically made to use in electronic music,” and that’s kind of what they’re doing. So we played a handful of shows, I think literally just a couple. I can’t remember what else we did, if it was just that…
SA: Might’ve just been that,
AH: Oh, we did a psychedelic sleepover.
SA: Oh, that’s right.
AH: We drove up like seven hours to go up to Maine or Vermont or something, played together. We did probably less than four shows just as a duo, and then started jamming with Zach.
MV: So I got introduced to the band when Zach was a member, and although people were excited about the addition of Keith, people were definitely disappointed and curious about the departure of Zach. How hard was it for you to make that decision and what motivated it?
_______
SA: Yeah, it was a really tough decision. I am an indecisive person. I take a lot of time to make decisions, and I am generally a people pleaser. And so it was really hard that day when I met up with Zach and said, “Hey, we’re letting you go from the project and also don’t take this personally.” And it was very easy to feel like I might be making a mistake, or I might be perceived to be the bad guy in the situation because Zach didn’t really do anything wrong. He’s an awesome musician, it was my stylistic decision between having someone who does turntables and bass and having someone on the other hand who does guitar.
And yeah, it was a tough call, but ultimately I do feel like it was the right call because I had been looking for that funky, mid-range melodic element in my music. And since we’ve been able to incorporate Keith into the project, I’ve really felt like it was really a rewarding process. And a lot of the riffs that used to be played by a dinky midi synth, I’ll take that out of the song. I’ll be like, get out of here. And then Keith will play that live and it’ll be a lot more engaging.
^
MV: Was adding Keith strictly a musically/artistically motivated decision, or did you also want him to join the band for his personality?
KW: Don’t hold back now, all gas, no breaks.
SA: When you are thinking about adding someone to a music project, probably 80% to 90% of those decisions are made depending on if we like them. That’s the only way that the trio could have even started was three dudes who were just like, this is really fun. We like each other. This is cool.
AH: He’s also had a ton of road experience. There were many, many factors. Obviously, musicianship and friendship first. It was also a thing where Sam and I were like, “He knows what he’s doing. He knows how to play shows and go places.”
MV: How do you guys feel the lines have blurred between being friends and collaborators? Has it been difficult at any time to balance the two, or does it make the creative process more seamless?
KW: I think that when you’re younger, you claim an idea or part and your ego holds it and you want it to win. You want your idea to win when you’re younger. I’m older now, and I think that even when I joined the band, it was like, “How can I help Sam’s vision? How can I make Sam’s songs more robust?” Yeah, I get to solo sometimes, but I feel there’s a level of being a supporting cast member in a way where it has my moments where the spotlight comes on. And that, to me, to be able to help flesh it out, brings immense joy.
KW: And as far as being friends, I think we’ve just been doing this for so long that we know when it’s time to clock in and we know how to talk when things need to get fixed or addressed. And that’s cool when you see that in motion, when you see the growth. I mean, I’ve been doing this for 15 years, and you see yourself growing up where you would be like, wait, that should be 32 bars of a solo. You are like, no, actually, maybe it’s eight, and maybe I play a melody instead of a solo. It’s a growth thing. I think that the friendship fills that out big time.
MV: How do you guys approach disagreements?
KW: Well, Aaron hates my favorite song.
AH: I’ve never said I hate it (laughingly).
KW: And he’s wrong. It’s called “Calibrate.” No, I mean to your question about, “Oh, is it becoming almost like a red Alert or disillusioned?” But there really isn’t anything like that in what we do because we address issues, we talk about things.
AH: Yeah, we’ve never hit a breaking point.
KW: Yeah, we’re in the car for 10 hours at a time. If you see something or feel something, say something. And that’s been the way we’ve approached thing since I’ve joined.
SA: I will say there was one moment that I remember and I took something away from this, if I could get a little vulnerable here. We were in Wellfleet, which was Aaron’s family’s place in Massachusetts, on Cape Cod, and we were hunkering down to work on music for a week. And we have this track, “Concentrated,” which is one of my favorite tracks, our favorites. It’s super funky, super electrifying, and the sound design on it was some of my favorite. So Aaron and I we’re doing a session together, and he’ll suggest something he hears, and because I’m the producer, it’s my job to actually do it. But the problem is that my brain moves a million miles a minute, and I’m always thinking about potential improvements. Every sound I hear, I’m like, “Oh, fix that, fade that change that, double time that section, create this riser right here. Okay, now reverb that riser out.”
SA: And so one change Aaron might suggest, I’ll do that and then I’ll have this idea. Well, that sounded good, but what if it was a little bit more? And then Aaron’s over here, and while my wheels are spinning and doing my technical thing, Aaron’s like, “Oh, I heard this other snare that maybe needed to get realigned.” And I am like, “Hold on a sec. I’m on my own little rabbit hole right now.” And Aaron’s like, okay. And then he’s like, “Hey, so about that snare.” And I’m like, “Hold on a sec.” And then he walks out of the room, he’s like, “I cannot do this right now.” So what that taught me is if you’re in a one-on-one session with somebody and they’re hearing things and they want to do things with the track, you are the producer.
They can’t do anything. Their to-do list can’t be accomplished unless you do it right now. That’s what the one-on-one session is for. If you want to go down a rabbit hole, do it later. I think that was something where. basically, you have to humble yourself constantly in a band. And a lot of it is like I have my preferences of tracks to play and stuff, and there are tracks that I don’t want to play where at a certain point I’ll be like, you know what? It’s not always about me. It’s also about the fans and maybe they want to hear this song, and maybe there’s a track we may or may not play in the Envision set, and that’s a super important set to us, and we want it to have the best possible tracks that will get the most fans for us.
If I have a track that’s not my favorite, well, maybe we should play it because it’s a lot of people’s favorite or it would really bring the energy up and be more hype, and I might need to swallow my pride about whether or not I enjoy playing it. So those swallowing pride moments and being communicative are key. And you got to know when to hold them, know when to fold them. You got to know when to just be like, this is not one of the battles I’m going to pick.
KW: Dying on that hill
AH: We’ve definitely all gotten better about voicing what we want and letting go of the things you can’t control.
MV: Let’s get back to the introduction of Keith. Would you guys say that you guys hit it off creatively right away? How has your chemistry developed over the years? And were there any eureka moments you can recall?
KW: When Sam and Aaron approached me, I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. I’m like, “Wait, what? And so I didn’t really see Sam’s vision.
AH: It took a minute.
KW: It took a minute and it took some time to actually rehearse. It wasn’t like, oh, three months in, I’m still not understanding. But at first, yeah, I didn’t understand the vision. I was like, what’s happening?
AH: You’re not just playing guitar band. It’s a very specific fold in.
KW: Yeah, and I remember, credit to my wife, we were in the depths of wedding planning, and I was like, I think I’m going to be in another band. And she was like looking at our wedding to-do list and she’s like, “Oh, hell yeah, go for it.” So shout out to her.
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KW: But I think that it was so funny that when I first joined, I went to their old house and I sat in the front room with Sam starting to learn songs, and the first one he throws at me, like a mean person, was this song “Intangible,” which is just, it has an extra bar, it has an extra accent. And it took us like two hours to get it. And I was like, “What have I done?
AH: Did the hardest one first.
KW: It’s so funny because once it clicked, it burned so hard into my memory, that we pulled it out on the Winter Sprinter tour. We took 30 songs or maybe 25 songs with us out on that tour, which is kind of uncanny, you know what I mean? For electronic music, usually the shows are very, very clean, very buttoned, very standardized. We had two dozen songs, maybe more with us, and we pulled “Intangible” out from nowhere, from left field, maybe we ran it once in rehearsal, and that riff has still just been burned into my brain. But to summarize what you’re saying, on my end, I didn’t fully get it. And it took maybe a couple of rehearsals until I was like, “Oh, oh, shit, I get it. There’s places we can go. There are corners of the jam world that we can go that producers can’t go.”
^
AH: Exponentially smoother.
KW: And it did. It grew and grew. But yeah, we can go into these corners, these Lotus or STS9 corners, and then come back with some kind of heaviness that could be in a dark nightclub. So once it all clicked, there was an aha moment, and I would say it was pretty early on for me.
MV: Did you guys get any pushback when you swapped Zach for Keith?
SA: I don’t think we got any pushback. I think maybe this is too self-deprecating or something, but I don’t think we were big enough to get pushback.
AH: We had fans comment.
SA: We were a big deal to a small group of people, and I don’t want to invalidate that small group of people’s feelings about what they felt about the change.
AH: I remember seeing one or two people being like, “No scratches?”
SA: To this day, people will still be like, what happened to Tygris? And I’ll be like, “Hey, in case you missed it, we have a new member now. Yeah, it’s been this way for four years.” And so it’s a major change that over time has felt more and more like it’s been this way for a while now. If anybody’s like, “Oh, we prefer this or we miss that,” it would be some people who like the turntable aspect because it has the same appeal in the Pretty Lights world with Chris Karns and the Tipper world. And I think that when we had a turntablist, our sound could approach what Tipper does differently because there was more space for the noise based scratch element. And that is something where I’m like, “It would be cool to have a scratch solo here.”
But I would say that the songwriting potential of having a guitar in the project and sounding like some of my favorite acts like Koan Sound or acts that use guitar as both a melodic element and an ambient atmospheric element, and having the ability to have Keith fill those elements in, for me, that’s what feeds my soul. But I do think there are people out there who maybe were more inherently interested in a project that had a live turntable. It is more common in electronic music, but our job sought after what we’re trying to do. And I’m excited to talk about how we’re doing it.
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But what we’re trying to do is basically prove the haters wrong that guitar can sit in electronic music. We got to prove our haters wrong. I get like a million tweets a day about it. A guitar, when it’s dry, has a lot of harmonics and it can fill up the spectrum very quickly. But a guitar when it’s processed either with distortion, reverb, and in some cases totally drowning it out with reverb and creating these washy – think explosions in the sky – like big spaces, then now we’re cooking with gas when it comes to songwriting, because you can create atmospheric moments. You can create ambient moments. I’m excited because we’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of that. We’re constantly troubleshooting and upgrading our technical elements. And the last one-on-one that I had with Keith, I was finally like, Hey, let’s increase the time on your reverb to be twice what it is.
^
KW: Huge reverb guy.
SA: Let’s increase the range of length that the reverb can decay for and see what that sounds like. And then I was like, oh, this is something we can use or something that we don’t use that could be useful in certain sections, maybe where I’m soloing, Keith, all of a sudden puts reverb on the guitar. Now there isn’t that sort of clashing moment where the melody from the guitar clashes with the melody from the keys. Now, even though the guitar could play the exact same thing, because it’s in a bunch of space, it doesn’t clash as much in stereo. And these mixing tools can really help with getting guitar to sit in electronic music. And not only electronic music, but it’s very much at home in a jam world. And we’ve been playing these jam festivals.
AH: We’re somewhere in between.
SA: Yeah, yeah. Resonate, Dome Fest, to name a couple, but –
AH: We were the Jam at Gem & Jam.
SA: Yeah, we were the jam at Gem & Jam – us, Sunsquabi, and TAUK. Polish Ambassadors did a Grateful Dead set, and that was pretty jammy. But they’re kind of like the footsteps that we’re trying to follow in, if you will, or we’re trying to appeal to that world of people in the jam scene who might also be into bass music. Because jam and bass have a really long and intertwined history going all the way back to Grateful Dead and before them, a lot of breaks.
MV: It’s been really fun to see the project reimagined and brought to new depths with the addition of a guitar, and I think that really has taken into effect with the release of your 2025 album, Esoterra. Would love to hear how long it took you guys to put that project together and what you were trying to accomplish with its release.
SA: The first track for the album was started probably like seven years ago, “Rise.”
AH: That was the first song we ever played live. The first rendition of the trio at the first show was Rise.
KW: Where was that show?
AH: Sunnyvale.
KW: Oh, Sunnyvale
AH: In New York. Yep.
AH: So it’s been a long, long time.
SA: I always knew I wanted to make an album, and over these seven years, I always knew that song would go on an album and then I’d make another song and say, this one, it’s going on the album. And then I would finish other songs, put out singles, collabs, EPs, that didn’t so much fit, but I was always slowly stacking up. I wanted somewhere between nine and 12 tracks. I really wanted it to all tell a story, fit on the same release, feel in the same sound world, and where if two songs were not really in the same stylistic world, have a new song to bridge the gap or dig up an old song and revive it for the album to bridge the gap, like an old song that hadn’t been put out yet. And I was able to do that. And a lot of the tracks that I had been really hoping could make it on the album did make it on the album. And yeah, we ended up with nine tracks that kind of run the gamut from a bass banger to a chill, downtempo jammy song and everything in between.
MV: With people’s attention spans and the chaotic nature of the digital space, do you guys think that albums have become devalued?
KW: A record is called a record, a record of three people in a room and where they are at that time. That’s why it’s called a record. It’s a record of where they are. You are right, attention span is down without a doubt. I know, from where I sit, that you make a record in spite of that. Plain and simple.
AH: It’s for the people that do listen.
KW: You do it in spite of attention spans and hope people catch on because there’s aha moments in the connection, in the programming of the tracks, in the sequencing of the tracks, there are all these little stories inside the stories. So that’s why you do it. You’re not wrong, though. Your assessment is right. Now we’re seeing remix culture is just, “Hey, I need this clip of the most hyphee thing you got.” That’s a topical clip. So you do it despite the way it’s consumed, because it’s been the canvas in the history of all time. If we’re creating, it’s the way you put the albums out and the joy, I mean, Sam, when that day hit, when we released it, it was just a release. It was like, we did it. We climbed the mountain. And now you have that book, that audio story that people can consume.
SA: When it comes to how you overcome that, we use a method called the drip method, which is basically, it’s got nothing to do with coffee, well, it’s got a little to do with coffee, but basically, you don’t put out the whole album at once. We actually had five singles on a nine-track album, which meant that every new single release was a new chance to capture everyone’s attention span with zero fall off, because they just have to listen to that one track. So we now have nine tracks on this release.
It’s kind of random, and at a certain point, it’s kind of a wash. It’s like, well, maybe these are the tracks that people like the most. “Sprout,” which I know is one of my favorite tracks on the album, has 23,000 plays, the most plays of any track on the release. And it’s also the best in my opinion. So it’s kind of cool how it almost democratized the plays on the album to put out these random tracks from different parts of the album. Now people are like, “Well, I got to listen to this one song that I heard when it was a single, I really liked it. So I got to listen up until I hear that one.” Finally, I think when it comes to album plays, it’s when you accidentally leave an album on that you listen to the whole thing.
AH: And you realize, “Oh wow, that’s the track I’ve never heard,” or “I never listened to the second half of that one.”
SA: And so I just hope that a bunch of people out there accidentally leave our album on.
AH: Or even intentionally.
SA: Yeah. God willing.
AH: It is somewhat a call for patience.
SA: Absolutely.
AH: We have, I don’t know what it is, the run time, if it’s 49 minutes or an hour or something, I don’t know the exact run time, but it takes patience. And not only the album,
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But each song itself is not written like an EDM track, it’s written like a band where things take a minute, they change sometimes, there’s nothing heavy in the track until the second half. Sometimes there’s a long intro. It’s not just a sensationalist buildup and then drop and then build up and then drop. It is written to be consumed with patience. Whether or not people are coming with that, that is the intention that we have for it and gave to it. And honestly something we have to give to ourselves now.
^
We put out this album, and once you release an album, you have to keep promoting it for a year. And we have to be patient with ourselves because we’ve been lucky enough to be touring since we released it essentially on loop. And so we haven’t even really had time to keep pushing the album. We dropped it and then we’re like, “all right, we’re on the road. So we have to be patient with ourselves in terms of the album as a whole.” We’re going to keep promoting it. We’re going to keep pushing it. Ideally we’re going to gig and get gigabytes of videos we haven’t even put out yet. We usually put out the entire album recorded on video in the studio, and we haven’t even had the time to promote it essentially. So it’s like, the album itself, the music, it calls for patience and the release of it even. We have to be patient with ourselves with it. So the hope is that people that want the music, that want to see us do it will go find all this stuff and find that it’s there. And over time it’ll live on in its own way.
MV: I’d love to talk about promotion for a moment. Do you guys ever feel discouraged or even jaded from the fact that the music scene has become so promotion/social media-heavy?
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AH: We have a rule with making content where if we’re not having fun, we’re not going to do it. And we do. We have so much fun when we’re making videos, we typically just press record and then just start going crazy. And it’s so fun. I don’t think we’ve ever produced videos where we are in a studio doing a produced video. We never plan anything. We never try to catch onto a trend. You’re going to lose yourself in trying to do it unles you do it genuinely. If we have the desire to make any sort of promotion, we’re going to have fun with it. That’s the only way we’re going to do it.
^
SA: Some good advice for producers who are trying to get their stuff out there with reels and stuff is get a friend to help you, whether it’s someone to hold the iPhone while you do something silly or someone to edit your video. Because even just having another character in the video or something allows for the fun improvisational tone compared to just you in front of your iPhone. We’ll stand in front of a festival lineup and just be like, “Hey guys, I’m going to lightening in a boot hole.” Just pronounce everything wrong. Be super silly. And I like that approach. But yeah, basically you got to keep the whimsy alive if you’re going to be posting so much, you can’t just be deadpan like, “Hey, I have music out.” You can, but we found it goes really well if you have fun with it.
MV: I think that’s a great approach, keeping it authentic, fun, and doing it for you as well.
SA: I think there’s a lot of power to whatever you do, just put the music in it. I have this strong sense that if the music is good, it will travel well. You just have to put it out there. And so the number one mistake people make who have good music is never putting any out there. And I think that once it’s out there, if it’s like the cream of the crop, it will rise to the top, and so just put music behind your Instagram post. Put your latest track in the background audio of whatever video. If you’re doing a silly video, put the track somewhere. So if people are watching the video, they hear the track, they’re like, “Oh, oh, that’s new music by X artist. Oh, I want to go check that out now. I didn’t realize they had new music out.” So you got to constantly be subliminally sneaking your music into everything.
MV: You guys mentioned that touring is also a great way to promote your music. You guys are currently on the Esoterra tour, and I was hoping you guys could provide some insight into the not-so-glamorous side of embarking on a tour like this.
AH: We only stay in five-star hotels.
SA: So much caviar, dude. Too much caviar.
KW: I have a collapsible cot from the military that I have in case our hotel doesn’t have three beds or even sometimes has one bed or…
AH: We’re staying in a friend’s house with no beds.
KW: We were staying at a friend’s house, who we were very thankful for letting us stay there, but the cot is there. Use the cot as a metaphor for how glamorous it is. It’s a great cot, it’s great.
SA: I also have a roll-up air mattress. The real tech is putting the air mattress on top of the cot. That’s the lap of luxury.
AH: And then in terms of caviar, it’s mostly trail mix and bananas for me.
SA: I’ll say this, it’s peaks and valleys. So people see the peaks and they don’t see the valleys. We were on the Winter Sprinter tour and had someone come and cook us a meal, just a random friend of a friend of Aaron’s.
AH: Yeah, she catered us a ramen meal out of nowhere. Despite the fact that we are not living lavishly, we are living richly. We have incredible experiences. We get put up at stranger’s homes all the time. For example, a friend of a friend’s mom who’s never met us before –
KW: That was very nice.
AH: Who will just let us in in the middle of the night without even meeting us, will give us a code to their house and let us in and let us stay in their house. We’ve been put up in so many places by so many people who’ve treated us so well that yeah, sure, we may not comfortable all the time, but we are very, very often getting to enjoy experiences that nobody gets to do. And we’re super, super lucky to do that. So yeah. Does it suck to get smooshed into a car? We don’t have a tour bus. We tour in a car or we rent a van. We don’t stay in hotel rooms every night. We stay in whatever’s cheapest, whether that’s our friend’s house which is free or a friend of friend’s house or someone we’ve never met before or the worst hotel you’ve ever seen in your life.
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We do not choose comfort. We choose the ability to keep doing this. But in doing so, we get exposed to a ton of really, really rich experiences that I hope one day gets more and more comfortable and a little bit easier. But for the time being, it is a privilege no matter how rough it is. We try to remind each other that, and we try to make the best of it – going to a really good coffee shop, even if we’re in the worst town we’ve ever been in or going for a walk in the woods if we have the time. So we are nowhere near touring comfortably, but we are touring in a way that we are all benefiting from the experiences more than we can explain.
^
KW: It’s incredible. Just the inverse, what you’re saying, people that don’t see on the inside think it’s all highs. Those friends of friends that are sharing their houses, they have some people in the industry they see on the inside, and they know how they can help us. So the catering of the ramen, and the houses that are shared, they can see through a tour flyer with 25 dates and be like, “They need a shower at this date, a meal at that one,” etc.. So seeing how people can rely on generosity and connecting with some really helpful people is part of that. Also, tiredness. Tiredness, plain and simple.
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But I’m telling you, there was a couple of stops on this Winter Sprinter tour where it’s getting off stage just absolutely energized from something we did musically. Some needle we threaded in a jam that we did not expect. And then it’s like you’re getting shot out of a cannon. But setting up at the show, no one’s talking to each other and we’re tired as hell. And it’s something…
AH: We never show up happy.
KW: …we were trudging through the setup, but something happens on stage, some moment where we’re all beside ourselves, we’re all outside of ourselves. We go some crazy place in a jam, and at the end it’s yelling and screaming, hooting and hollering. And so I think it’s high risk, high reward, wears your body down, but if you’re focused on what you love about it, you can get energy. You can glean energy from certain sections that makes it all worth it.
^
SA: It’s like the weather on an island where one minute it’s like a crazy storm and then the sun comes out, and it’s just amazing. Palm trees and a light breeze.
AH: But over and over and over and over again.
SA: And it’s not like good weather every day all the time. It’s not like San Diego.
MV: It’s almost like that sunshine wouldn’t be as beautiful if it weren’t for the storm that preceded it in a way.
SA: Exactly.
MV: So it’s clear to see you guys have a massive support network, whether it’s fans, friends, or otherwise. Would love to hear about two particular members of your team, Johnston Calhoun (Manager) and Sam Hutchinson (Agent), and how they have helped grow the project.
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AH: I mean, there’s no way we can express how unable we would be to do what we do without the two of them. We are maxed out even with their help. If we didn’t have them, we wouldn’t be anywhere. They’re just workhorses. I’ve never seen anyone answer as many emails as Hutch does in a day. Nobody on earth. I would put him up with people on Wall Street. He’s answering thousands of emails a day. We will go to a festival and someone at the end who booked us would be like, “Yo, I love your agent. Hutch is awesome. He was so nice to us.” We hear the opposite of that all the time. So it feels so good to be represented by people we know are loved in the industry, who are just good characters that treat people well, are fair, honest, and would do anything for us. Calhoun has driven hours and hours to save us when flights didn’t come through. They are not extensions of the band, they are members of the band.
^
SA: Yeah, and I will say not all managers are Calhoun in the sense that he will go to a lot of our shows. He’ll see that we’re playing a show or help arrange a show for us, and then the next thing we know, he’s got his itinerary to fly out and see us at that show and help make sure the night goes well. We haven’t really had that level of attention from a manager in the past. And what I will say, to artists who might be wondering about whether they should get a team or have a team and are thinking about making a change or something, is if your team isn’t coming to you, not only telling you ideas and things that they’re going to do, but telling you things that they already did that you didn’t even know about, then you might want to get a new team.
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So we’ve learned through Hutch and Calhoun that your team can actually be working for you when you’re not in the room – having ideas and following through on those ideas when you’re not in the room. So it’s like you can’t unlearn that. Once you have a team like that, it’s going to be hard to go back. Hopefully we never have to because it’s an awesome team.
KW: Cal’s a unicorn, Rhizome. Everyone’s going to say “artist first, artist first, artist first.” He’s in it. He does it. He roots in the ground. Everything that Cal does comes from an artist first mentality. How can I nourish, nurture, build?
^
He had a birthday party. He had a bunch of artists down to his spot where he lives in Asheville. He got all of us under a roof to try to collab and we did sure enough. And that’s really special. So Cal’s great, absolutely great Hutch. Like Aaron said, wall Street’s funny. I mean, he does show us his inbox and It’s hilarious and terrifying. I wouldn’t want that many emails. But yeah, great team. Super stoked.
MV: Killers. Killers.
KW: Their egos don’t glaze them.
MV: So I imagine you have tons of great memories on tour, in part thanks to Cal and Hutch. I’d love for you to share some of your favorites.
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KW: So many. A lot. We flipped a remix of this track, Donkey Kong and Aquatic Ambience, one of my favorite video game soundtrack songs of all time. And in Winter Park we weren’t going to play it. And then mid-jam, I just started playing the motif, the main motif. And it just went on to be this crazy uptempo chaos that is the best, one of the highest highs on planet Earth, is when you nail something that we’re working through in an improv element.
AH: That you didn’t even think was going to happen,
KW: That you didn’t even think was going to happen. And that’s where we’re at with jamming. We’re really touching on this uncharted, untouched snow in the moment and crafting and molding it in front of people live, which is great.
^
I think it was Durango. I was out of energy and I just started singing, “Running Up That Hill” as if I was an Italian mobster, and I rewrote the entirety of everyone’s brains for the rest of the tour. We would all sing “Running Up That Hill” –
AH: But as an Italian mob.
KW: As an Italian mob. But anyway, that’s it. That was just goofiness. You know what I mean? When you’re so out of gas, and you’re not grumpy, you’re actually whimsical, I call it the sleepy hahas, not the sleepy o-nos. Just being in that state for days.
SA: I most fondly look back on the same jam that Keith mentioned, but a slightly different part. I think it might’ve been the “Vibe” jam before you brought in that melody. And then during, but even before, we were completely off the grid, completely off the cuff. So the song just ends and then we are all still playing our instrument, but just with no more backing track. So then it’s just an unplugged off the cuff jam, which can go literally anywhere. And I’m playing synth bass through Ableton, so I can control a lot of the parameters of the synth and Keith’s playing guitar. And we took that jam to so many places, and it all felt so coordinated, even though we’d never played it before. It was that sort of telepathic thing. And the cool thing about that is that later you can go back in, and you can reverse engineer and write songs based on any number of different riffs that we played.
There’s so much digging for new material you can do in those jams. But that particular jam where it’s halfway through, Keith randomly brought back the “Aquatic Ambience” theme and it just worked. And I knew the chords to it. We’d broken it down a couple nights before, and so I was able to quickly – I heard the very beginning of Aquatic Ambience and then I just played the E to the C chord progression immediately. As soon as I heard that, I was like, “I know where we’re going.” And I was able to keep up with it on my bassline that I was playing. And those moments are what it’s all about. I knew Denver was beautiful and had mountains and trees, but I didn’t know it had so many different types of mountains and trees and mountain tree combos and non-tree mountains. Non-tree mountains without trees, just the mountains with flat top mountains with no top.
AH: We saw a variety of mountains and trees.
SA: Lots of really beautiful nature. Nature was on one during that trip. The million-dollar highway was beautiful. It’s just you and nature. It’s literally nothing except just the road and the mountains, not even any guardrails because when it would snow, you got to plow the snow off the road so they didn’t have guardrails. So it was a very slow drive, which gave us a lot of time to embrace and appreciate the nature all around us. But that was the most beautiful trip I’d ever been on. So that’s definitely top tier memory.
MV: Very nice. Aaron, what about yourself?
AH: Well, mainly musical moments, this is part musical part-experiential, but I think our last Denver headline, we brought in a big light rig with Quantum Effects. This dude, Ryan Barry, we worked with him for a while to build a light rig. And I think that whole set felt like some of the most immersive that I’ve ever felt on a stage because we played on really cool light rigs and really cool stages, but this was our rig that we worked on for months to kind of curate with him and build a scene that felt cohesive with the music.
So I think that whole set kind of felt like we’re presenting an audio visual thing that we created, not just performing on a stage where someone’s doing lights. And so that made the music all the more intense for me. That made the whole experience a little more – just like something very…how do I explain it? It felt like we were presenting a very complete product in a way that I was really proud of. And I think we were all really proud of, I think to the biggest crowd we ever headlined to, the most amount of people who bought tickets to see us, not just at a festival or not supporting someone else. And then non-musically, yeah, every minute we were in the van on the Winter Sprinter tour with Sarah McWavy and Nick Phyphr. Every minute was fun. I didn’t sleep. I thought when we had all these drives, I thought we were going to be sleeping in the van. And all of us were just up talking and laughing and learning about each other and just saying ridiculous stuff to each other.
AH: I say this a lot to relatives and friends who talk about, “Oh, it looks like it’s amazing,” this and that. But it’s the moments in between the hour or hour and a half on stage or two hours if we’re really lucky. Those are great and we certainly do it for those moments, but the moments in between is where the overwhelming majority of our time is spent. And yeah, when you get to do it with friends, when you get to spend two weeks around each other and not get tired of each other at all, we all didn’t want it to end. That was crazy. You hear horror stories about tours and you hear people getting sick and tired and this and that, and we were all just on the perfect wavelength together and that was a huge, huge moment.
MV: Do you guys envision visuals and lights taking a larger position within your guys’ live set?
SA: Definitely, yeah. But we’re pretty far financially from that. I think it’s interesting because when I was in college and before I even started the trio, I was always really interested in the fusion of music and visuals and wanting to create an audio visual experience. And the only reason I didn’t was because I got so far into music and just kept making music that I went to school for art, but it took a backseat because I was so obsessed with music. And once we nail anything and honestly even remotely close to the vision for what I have that the project’s potential can be, then I think I’m going to start thinking more about the visual element. But what’s been great is Aaron is really on the same page and he is coming from the jam, live music, and big venue world and wants us to have big production. And so any chance we have budget for lights or VJ or whatever, we use it. And Aaron kind of runs point on coordinating with the lighting guy or the VJ while I prep the musical aspects of the set. And we will sit down and do lighting cues for what color this track should be, what color should that track be, which for me is kind of getting my feet wet with making decisions beyond what visuals might work with this track, which we still haven’t fully dove into. We sometimes let the VJ make more of those decisions. We’ll just give them subtle cues like keywords or things like that.
AH: We did get visuals for Red Rocks too. We commissioned a bunch of visuals from Jonah Parts and he collaborated with Alexis Spady. It was the coolest visual collaboration ever. And so we now have those on a flash drive whenever we have an LED screen we have access to, which happens every once in a while, depending on which stages we’re on at which festivals, but we are starting to incorporate it where we can. But we are definitely far off from having that a consistent part. But yeah, we’ve done it a couple times. We want to do it more. We did it in Philly with our friend Chad. He brought in some great lights for the Philly two night album release run. So it just feels so good to be in enveloped in lights. And is it a goal? Yeah, it’s a huge goal for sure.
MV: I’m excited to watch that side of the project continue to grow. Now I wanted to chat about a not so fun topic that having to do with what’s going on in the US right now. How do you guys approach being creative and promoting yourselves when the whole world seems like it’s falling apart?
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SA: Don’t stop creating. That’s something that I’ve thought of ever since. Being brutally honest about it and not really mincing words – we’re are all lefties. We all hate Trump, the administration, everything it stands for. It goes against everything we believe in, and it’s so unnecessary, disgusting, racis, and just regressive. There’s a lot of very regressive things happening right now, and we see ourselves as wanting to bring positivity into the world.
SA: Sometimes I debate, am I doing enough? Is music enough? Is just making music enough to help the world right now? And on the one hand, I don’t think it is. I would like to be able to raise my voice more and use my voice more. But the only way I currently know how to use my voice is by continuing to put music out there.
^
And so I would say just start with that. Start with creating things and sharing them with your friends. And if you get struck by a bolt of lightning that says this is the answer, then by all means. I would shout it from my megaphone if I really had a thought. I think one of my big problems is that I overthink things a lot. I overthink what I’m going to say, and I’ll start to write a post and share my beliefs and then I’ll delete it because I am playing devil’s advocate with myself about whether someone in my fan base will hear it and say something to me, which will get me embroiled in some argument and I’ll lose half of my day arguing with a random fan on the internet.
And our time is very valuable. So sometimes I don’t share things because I don’t want to spend the rest of my day having arguments in the comments about what exactly I meant when I shared that thing. So I don’t speak too much about politics from my platform. I think there is a tasteful amount that you could talk about politics and put your thoughts and beliefs out there. And I want to, so I don’t do it that often, but I would like to, and I think this is as good time as any to say that.
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I think that if we just let really rich, powerful, greedy people continue doing what they’re doing without worrying about the karmic downstream consequences of what they’re doing because they think that they are above it, we shouldn’t be okay with that and continue to live in a world where terrible, terrible things are happening in our name as American taxpayers…and I dunno, I’m going to take a seat and think even more about what I want to say, but I just have thoughts like that all the time and I’m like, “This is not ready for prime time.” These thoughts aren’t fully fleshed out enough to share. So I don’t, but I really support people who do and I want to see more of it. I think artists should be sharing their beliefs on politics more because art is political. One of the eras of music that I really resonate with is the seventies – artists were sharing a lot of their beliefs on politics.
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AH: Creating art around it.
SA: You could argue that it did result in a lot of reforms in our country because of that.
AH: Keith, I know you I got a lot to say about it.
KW: Years and years ago, I think that the term virtue signaling was thrown around and people would try to bully people into not sharing their opinions because they’re just musicians. “Just stick to music, just shut up and dribble,” all of that. And I think we are so far into absurdity right now with how everything is going. All throughout the Winter Sprinter tour, I know it’s so superficial, but in the microphone, at any point, we would say “Fuck ICE.” Because we are at that point. We are at that point that if you don’t say it, you potentially aren’t passing the vibe check. There’s no virtue signaling anymore.
AH: I was looking into the crowd like, “Who’s not saying this?”
KW: We’re past the point. It’s almost like good vs. evil.
AH: It’s good vs. evil.
KW: You have to, at the very least, make some of your feelings known. It is beyond absurd – the current state of the world for marginalized communities, with the racism, the fucking brutality that’s happening. And it’s beyond pale. And so to answer your question, how do you make art through this extreme, extreme cognitive dissonance, a dizzying level of cognitive dissonance, and you feel handcuffed and you feel afraid all at once, because how do you start, how do you get going and how do you start to help and move that along? So at the very least, I mean, I think it’s just a bit of speaking out is the minimum to show that you are in the direction of being against this, sorry for the language, but fucking absurdity of it all. So that’s kind of where I’m at.
MV: Right on, Keith.
AH: Very, very long story that I won’t tell right now, but the whole reason I’m in music is because of activism. It’s the only reason. It is my driving force for sure. And it’s something that I’ve spent hundreds of hours planning on how I was going to do it and setting up entire businesses around it, of which there will be more to come later in life. But I got myself into quite the tizzy of “how do I do this, and also get a career going at the same time? How do I keep them intertwined?” And I really, really got myself mentally in a bunch about it for a long time, because I don’t feel like I’m doing anything. I don’t feel like I’m doing enough. I don’t feel like I know how. And a couple years ago I had a little bit of a flip switch in my head of just like, instead of what can’t I do, what can I do?
Anything? Anything. I don’t think this is the first time that artists should be using their voice or platform to do something. There has always been and always will be horrible shit going on. And there will always be shit that artists can do to improve that. But the thought shift of what I can do versus “I feel so helpless” has shifted us to do a couple of things. One of which is following Yvon (Chouinard), the guy who started Patagonia. He pioneered this idea of 1% of your income should go to a charity. Every business should donate 1% of their gross. And so we started doing that years and years ago. We started doing that just to plant trees. And every year we donate hundreds and hundreds of trees planted around the world, just because it’s something, it’s not nothing.
We are at least putting something in the ground that is sucking carbon out of the air to maybe make the future a little bit better. It’s something. And to date, we’ve planted thousands and thousands of trees. We are responsible for a forest like a sizable forest. At 1%, we don’t feel it, we never worry about it. It’s $40, $50 bucks here and there, whatever, $20 bucks. It all goes into an account at the end of the year. We donate it all. And it’s just like this idea of doing something that if everybody did 1% we’d be a whole lot better.
So that’s something we constantly do. And then on the course of just staying on top of it, as things happen, as humans do human things, just saying something on the microphone. Sometimes we have 50 people in a room, sometimes we have 10,000, and it’s like you can speak and say anything, and they’re there to listen. Whether or not they like it doesn’t matter, but they’re there to hear you. So if you’re not taking a second to say something, it’s a missed opportunity. So I try to take at least a few minutes before I get on stage every night to just think about what I care about, what I want people to care about. And even if it’s a minute or two on the microphone, it’s an opportunity. A lot of people feel helpless, a lot of people feel hopeless, and a lot of people look up to artists, for better or for worse; they look up to artists. So the least you can do is try to stand for something that maybe someone else will also stand for.
MV: As you guys mentioned, it is a risk to introduce your personal beliefs to the artistry of it. So kudos to you guys for being brave.
AH: It’s a huge risk not to.
MV: Let’s switch it up and get a little more positive now. What are you guys most excited about for the future? What are some of your plans for 2026?
AH: We’re killing Nazis and ICE while we’re at it. It’s not on the calendar officially, but…
KW: Envision is coming up next week.
SA: Yeah, Midwest run through Cleveland, Palantine, Peoria, and after that Homer HarborFest in Alaska. Fourth on the farm in Pennsylvania.
AH: We’ve gotta bunch of good festivals.
SA: And Dome Fest, as we mentioned earlier, it’s more of a jam fest. So that’s pretty exciting.
AH: We’re thinking about a Philly popup in the spring with a really cool lineup that’s already got some legs. So that’s a really cool thing that we’re hoping to secretly put out at some point.
KW: I’m looking forward to playing.
MV: In that case, I’ll let you guys get to it, as I know you have a rehearsal to get started!
SA: Thank you!
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