Twisted Pine photo by Jo Chattman
Twisted Pine Love Your Mind Brings The Freedom Of The Road Into The Studio
Twisted Pine are releasing their new, high-energy, and expansive album Love Your Mind on October 18th, 2024, and with it heading out on an autumn tour that will take in the East Coast. Their first album in four years is a follow-up to Right Now, and builds on their roots music, string band, foundations with elements of jazz, funk, and pop. They even include a Frank Zappa cover. In that exploration, Twisted Pine seem to find their own voice even more exuberantly as a contemporary band made of individuals who love all kinds of music.
The band consists of Kathleen Parks on violin and lead vocals, Dan Bui on mandolin, Chris Sartori on bass, and Anh Phung on flute. Twisted Pine regularly play festivals, and festivals as well as focused touring have made a significant impact on Love Your Mind. It’s an album where they felt their experience playing live together made greater experimentation possible and took them to the next level of their combined creativity. I spoke with Dan Bui and Chris Sartori while they were out on the road about the energy and discoveries behind Love Your Mind.
AH: You still have a fair amount of shows coming up this year, don’t you?
Chris Sartori: Yes, we have many. We are exploring the country right now, but then, in October, basically through December, we have our official release tour, starting in the Northeast, and going down the East Coast. We’ll be playing a lot of show until the year ends.
AH: I love autumn anyway, and I think live music in the autumn is a great combination.
Chris: Us too! And fall has a way of always being busy for us. We’re out doing festivals all summer, and before we know it, we’re on our Fall tour.
AH: You’ve had a long time to work on Love Your Mind, but that gave you time to decide what you really wanted on the album. Is this one more considered in that way?
Dan Bui: Right Now, which we released in 2020, was an odd release for us, because it was impossible to tour. We didn’t get to tour until a couple years later. We were super busy playing that album out and traveling. When it came time to make Love Your Mind, all of those hours and years of traveling and playing together came out in that music, in that group of songs that we wrote. It was all very fresh.
We basically wrote it right up until the time of recording, which was last winter. We were still writing and arranging until that time. It still feels very fresh to us, and some of it we haven’t even played live yet. In a lot of ways, the album is the four of us really coming together and reaching new musical synergy and a new level of playing together. It was definitely more collaborative in the writing process, too. All those years have led to the culmination of this record.
AH: I’m so glad that you got an appropriate time to perform Right Now. But that choice then led to a positive development for you. It sounds like you learned new things playing that album live, which then impacted this album. And this is definitely not an album with cookie cutter songs. There’s a lot of variety and a sense of freedom.
Chris: Totally. To your point, there is a lot of dichotomy and balance on the record in that, in some ways, it is slightly more mainstream. We have a pretty much standard country song on there, “Knockout Roses.” We some songs that have an Americana vibe. That’s balanced by some of our songs that are funkier. We have a Frank Zappa cover. There’s a lot there, for sure. We are fortunate in that we are on Signature Sounds, and Jim over there is so supportive in letting us do our thing. He even said to us, going into the record, “Don’t worry about making it any kind of way. Just go and do it, and see what happens.” We really value that support. We emphasize that as we work as a group. We let the organic creativity happen, and then we see what we can do with it afterwards.
AH: It seems like playing so much live must also give you an instinct for what people respond to, so that’s been helpful for you.
Chris: Totally, and at our live show, the audience is a very instrumental part of what we’re doing, and the exchange of energy between the stage and the people who are at the show is essential to what the show is. The other goal that we had in coming to this record was to capture more of what we do live, to see if we could get some essence of that into the recorded setting. That was a major factor.
AH: I sometimes felt like the song structures were reminiscent of live performance, in that that songs would have more surprising turns and explorations. Was that something you were allowing?
Dan: Definitely. But it was song-by-song. We did actually say, while we were making this, “It would be good if we kept some of these songs concise.”
Chris: [Laughs]
Dan: And we did for some of the songs, like “Goosebump Feeling” and “Knockout Roses.” We tried to keep them straightforward, and shorter, by our standards. But being who we are, there are songs that we allowed to stretch out, like “Lonestar.” It has many sections, and an epic feeling. The song “Chanel Perfume” has a straightforward song structure, but then it has a section that opens it up to a more epic, jammy, flute solo section. There’s stuff like that, being concise when we felt that served the song best, and being able to be more open when we felt that was what the song wanted.
AH: The whole subject of the song, “After Midnight” is this live playing environment that we’re talking about, so it makes sense that it would, musically and lyrically, have everything and the kitchen sink thrown in. And keep changing in these interesting ways as it goes. Was there ever any doubt about including such a humorous, self-deprecating song on the album? It feels like it tells people who you are.
Chris: Our filter for silliness and goofiness is very low.
Dan: [Laughs]
Chris: We are of that ilk of letting yourself go and being silly. That is definitely a huge percentage of our personality. I think all of our recorded music has that element to it.
Dan: I think that song definitely has an explicitly tongue-in-cheek sense that everyone can relate to what we’re talking about. Everyone who’s ever done the festival thing, and stayed up all night. It’s very specific, this music scene that we are a part of, but also kind of universal. The fun of it is something that we were looking to capture. People who hear it say they love certain lines and feel “seen.”
AH: Something that really works is that people who have attended any music festivals can relate to it as much as people who are performers. It’s a shared experience whether you’re on one side of the stage or the other, especially “after midnight.”
Dan: Those are our favorite festivals, where the lines between performers and attendees are pretty blurred. After midnight, the stages are all closed, and everyone is just wandering around getting into shenanigans.
AH: The video really captures that. Did you know that you were making a video ahead of playing these different festivals, or did you just have footage being made more general purposes?
Dan: It was really fun. All of the footage was shot at two festivals, and Jay Strausser, who we worked with, happened to be at both festivals anyway, capturing footage of bands. We said that we’d love to do a session with him and told him that we were looking to make a music video for a song about festivals. Jay was really great. He wanted to dive all the way in on this, making it a full-on music video, going around. And finding locations. We were at a festival in Maine and one in Vermont, and it’s a cool mix of him capturing us playing our sets, where we weren’t necessarily thinking about the video, then we’d also get together with him and find places and shoot. Those were more music-video-like bits of footage, and he did a great job putting it together.
AH: I already know that you are very committed to making your music videos from hearing a little bit about making the video for “Goosebump Feeling.” I know enough to know that it wasn’t easy. Did that take many hours?
Chris: Yes, it was not easy. But one of our best friends is a videographer, Blake Hannison, who lives up in Toronto. He’s done a bunch of work for us in the past. We had a concept, and we talked with him about it, so we went up to Toronto to shoot with him. It was one day, but it was the whole day of shooting, which started early in the morning, and it ended at night. We were so exhausted. We’d go one location, then pack up and drive to another. We tried to keep it simple, emphasizing the frame, the dancing, and energy of it. It was an awesome but exhausting experience. That day, there happened to be a dance contest happening in Toronto.
AH: It was a great coincidence.
Chris: Yes, Anh [Phung] knew about it, since she lives up there. She had some buddies who she knew who were there. It was at the very end of our shoot, so we went and poached a couple of dancers. We asked them to dance to this song for a few minutes.
AH: They are shockingly good. It gives you the impression that among every population walking down the street, there is probably someone who could start dancing astonishingly well.
Chris: Yes, that’s what we were going for.
AH: The energy you mentioned is part of the whole experience, which begins with the energy of the song. It never stops! Between that, and “After Midnight,” it did give me the impression that dancing and movement might be something that you want people to associate with your music. Is that true?
Chris: For sure! We get so much energy from people moving and dancing at live shows, and that’s what we try to inspire at our shows. We don’t have a drummer, but we try to make our grooves very danceable anyway. We try to get this idea across that, “Yeah, you’re supposed to move to this!”
Dan: I would say that rhythm and groove are things that we really try to bring to our shows. We all love all different kinds of music, but especially music that was made for people to dance to. We are compelled by that, and inspired by that, and that’s what we’re trying to do with our band, in our own way.
AH: On this album, where you combine different sound traditions, it feels even more outward-facing, welcoming in people who have different interests. And dance is a great way to add to that invitation.
Chris: I think, for this record, it stood out that we talked about that aspect more deliberately and emphatically. I think “Chanel Perfume” is a great example of that. We always have these Funk jams at our shows, but none of them have been captured in a recording setting. It was this record where we said, “Let’s do this. Here’s a Funk song, basically, that we’re going to do in our own way.” That song is so derivative of James Brown and Aretha Franklin and old school Funk and Soul. That was captured on this record more deliberately.
Thanks very much for chatting with us, Dan and Chris! Find more information about Twisted Pine here on their website: https://www.twistedpineband.com/
