DG interview @ jambands.com

Randy Ray interviewed me last week for jambands.com. Part 1 was posted today; part 2 goes up next month.

An excerpt:

[Producer Tim Carbone] just understands. We’re in the same general age cohort. I think I might be a year or two older than he is, but we sort of came up in the same time, and we have very similar political and philosophical views, so he totally got my point of view in terms of what I was trying to say in my songs.

I knew from listening to Railroad Earth that these guys would be great sidemen. To me, the most important thing is the song. I don’t care how great your licks are, if the songs suck, I don’t want to hear it. I knew that those guys understood that the role of band members in a band like Railroad is to tell the story. They understand that the songwriter is the main thing, and their job is not to surround him with hot licks and swamp the song in flashy playing. It’s to underscore and support what the song is doing. There’s plenty of room for shredding in a band like that, but I knew that if I brought them in to do my songs, that my songs would be served by these amazing players. They’re all instrumental storytellers of the first rank.

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