“METTLESOME NEUROTICS”: Dan Edinberg, John Zox, Eli Miller, and Spencer Swain are ready to
roll.
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This week, Zox releases its first album for premier indie label Side One Dummy, home to bands such as Flogging Molly and Bedouin Soundclash. The band’s third disc, Line In the Sand, is way beyond anything Zox has done, with pure, stripped-down melodies and better crafted, mature songs. Now together five years, we caught up with the city’s own touring monsters to get a gauge on their expectations and find out what the hell’s been up lately. The band’s frontman and lyricist Eli Miller picked up the phone.
What’s the best part about not being on the road?
Being home lets us become real people again. It’s nice not moving every day, though it took us a while to lose our sea legs. I do a lot of wandering around aimlessly. I’ve been doing some volunteer work in politics and smart city planning, too. One of the good things about being a touring musician is that when you’re away you’re gone for long stretches and when you’re home you don’t have any commitments at all.
Spencer [Swain] and Dan [Edinberg] even got a side project going.
Yeah, they’re in an awesome band called Cowgirl. It’s sort of heavy instrumental, progressive metal, intricate, fast, complex, and intense. They play out a couple times a month.
Do you feel that this is a critical time for Zox?
Yes, it’s a significant time for us. We’ve been doing it for five years full-time and we all feel this one needs to break us into the national scene. We’ve had an amazing run, but we haven’t broken in a way that we’ve liked to, which was the dream from the beginning. At each stage we’re grateful and amazed. I remember saying when we first started that if we could once play Lupo’s . . . But once you attain your goal, you keep raising the bar. We want this album to get us further into the national consciousness and I think it can. This the first time we’ve released an album with this many people involved. That’s a big change for us, with all these cooks in the kitchen.
Was it hard to relinquish control of the things you’ve grown accustomed to handling?
It’s a change and sometimes it can be hard. We’re used to being the decision-makers and we’ve enjoyed that role, but I think it’s valuable for us to get a sense of learning to play nice with others. Obviously, working with people that have experience and have done all the things we’re trying to do is really valuable. They understand we’re mettlesome neurotics and we need to have our hands in everything, which drives them nuts. But it’s good for us to let some of this stuff go.
How do you quantify the differences between the band’s past work and Line in the Sand?
There are a lot of differences. For me, as a songwriter, lyrically, this is the most diverse. The Wait and Take Me Home focused thematically on breakups and relationships, this album has a wider palette, which was not a conscious decision but the songs just came from different places. That probably comes from taking the next step in life and with the band. Some of the songs deal with war, a prison break, a homeless guy preaching peace. Those kinds of narrative songs are new.
From a musical perspective, this was the first album we wrote without live performance in mind. On the last two albums, we wrote songs and played them live for months before recording them. On this album we did all the writing and it gave us a chance to work with other instruments. Dan’s now doing electronica and hip-hop stuff, we’re using keyboard, accordion, sound effects, and we’re taking these new sounds and building songs around them. We’ve never really experimented with sounds like this before.
Has this new approach changed the band’s chemistry?
I think it has. We’re not as tied to the recordings, so we can experiment with changing the songs for live and using different instruments. It’s fun for us to learn to use these new things and change up our performance.
Over the last five years Zox has constantly been on the road. How has the band been getting along?
We’ve come a long way. We understand more about who we are and who we want to be as musicians. You get to place where you understand this [rock and roll] world pretty well and you’re comfortable enough to express yourself in a different way. The band gets along really well. We were all living together in the same house for the last album. We came off the road and there we were, together again. Now we’re all in different places and people are doing different things in their free time. We still see each other almost every day and we have the same group of friends. But we all communicate in different ways, and learning how to communicate with people who communicate in different ways is a tremendously valuable skill. We spend an ungodly amount of time together. Now we’re in a good place in that we have come to an understanding and are pleased with it.