Ampline "Rosary" (Shake It)
By Dave Schutz
Monday. Jan 08, 12:01 AM
An interview with drummer Rick McCarty.

The big surprise for me is the auspicious addition of vocals: did that have anything to do with you and (guitarist) Mike (Montgomery) strongarming (bassist) Kevin (Schmidt) into it?

Not really, actually. It was really Kevin and Mike. Throughout the writing process, I don’t want to say they were looking for a new voice or anything (to use a bad pun), but we went from playing with (guitarist) Jeff (Albers) and Mike and Kevin and me. And when Jeff left, we kind of had to reevaluate the way we approached everything. The songs we had been playing as a four-piece, we realized how we could play them as a three-piece, if we were going to at all. And we wrote a lot of new stuff. And throughout that process, Kevin and Mike would just kind of look at each other and say, “You know, some words might be cool there,” as a different texture, you know, as opposed to getting a fourth member or a different instrument or anything like that. So it was just a way to have a different texture that would be probably the least expected thing from us.

Was my grand musicological assessment of your motives regarding vocals somewhat correct: my idea that so much of what you hear just feels tacked on to me? And there are people I know who really do just tack it on, so why do it if that’s the way it is, just to fit in?

Exactly. And the vocals on there – it’s difficult to tell in the mix – they’re all actually Mike and Kevin. It’s never just Mike. I think Kevin, having never voiced his vocal presence at all, he was really, really nervous about having his voice on there. He was very unhappy with it all the time, so Mike just kind of mixed it lower, but it’s pretty much always the two of them together.

That’s cool. And you do that live too?

Yeah.

And it worked out well with Mike’s voice, you know, kind of in and out of the mix. I guess I’m a fan of the voice sitting in with the mix, rather than being out front.

Yeah, it’s weird… the more I play with Kevin and Mike and the more instrumental bands that I either come across or we get squashed on a bill with, it seems like the less patience I have with singers anymore, just in general. It’s so hard to have a unique voice anymore.

Up to this record, are there specific ideas in mind – nonmusical concepts – when you write the songs?

With this there were. We tried to keep it fairly open-ended and open to interpretation from the listener’s perspective. We didn’t want to seem like we were trying to put forth a message, but there are definitely some concepts and themes that run throughout: things that we’ve been dealing with personally for the past year-and-a-half or so. Some of the isolation: several of us have been dealing with some close people to all of us, respectively, who have died just in the last year and a half – it’s actually a frightening number of people – that have either been friends of all of us or individual friends that we’ve been losing, so that’s kind of impacted us all. Kevin and I both have two close family members who have been dealing with cancer lately, so I guess mortality is an overall theme. It’s kind of one of those big things we’ve been dealing with. But again, it’s one of those things where we don’t want to say this is about such and such topic. But there are definitely some concepts that permeate the record as a whole. And we would hope more than anything that the whole record would be more of an instigator for people to think about certain things that they need to experience and are feeling more than thinking, “Oh wow, bet these guys are thinking about somebody that died.” That’s really our only goal with all that.

Did that also play into adding vocals, aside from just trying to add a new element?

Yep. Definitely.

And for me, with the new record, it’s not just that, but you guys seemed to branch out a lot musically too. What kind of stuff were you drawing from?

Obviously, it would be the various things that we listen to and get exposed to from our own record collections and traveling and meeting new bands and stuff like that. But a big part of it for Mike and myself, honestly, has just been getting… not out of Thistle, because we’re still very active with Thistle, but being in a different environment than Thistle is a very big change for us. The dynamic that exists between Kevin and Mike and I couldn’t be further from what we do in Thistle, just in terms of the way we write and the way we come up with things, because it’s completely democratic and everyone has equal input at all times when we write, which really hasn’t been the case in Thistle. That’s very much more a song-oriented band, where someone usually comes in with either an idea for a song or a completed song in the past. Actually, playing with Ampline kind of got Mike and I to try to take a different approach with Thistle as well.

We also play in this other band that’s more of – I hate to just say an “alt-country” thing – but it’s definitely a singer-songwriter oriented band, so that has a big impact on how I view my role as a musician, and Mike has the same kind of attitude about it.

Which band is that?

That one is called The Light Wires. We put one record out a couple years ago. The new Ampline record was the first record we finished recording at our new studio we built. When we got back from a big tour we did in late 2004, we kind of looked at each other and decided that we needed to focus on making some new music because we were pretty burned out from traveling as much as we were and playing the same songs, so we kind of holed ourselves up. And we recorded the Ampline record, and then we recorded The Light Wires record, and then we recorded the Thistle record all in a row, which took about a year and a half. Since we finished all that, we’ve been trying to find labels to put it all out. The Ampline one was the first one where we found a suitable record deal that we could work with.

Are you not really doing Tiberius Records anymore?

We are, but we’re trying to get away from focusing on our own stuff on the label. It’s too draining financially and in terms of the workload we have. We got so poor we realized that with our own music, there’s got to be somebody out there that can do more for it than we can ourselves. It’s too draining for us.

Shake It is an interesting label for you guys to be on. It’s very good company, but there’s definitely a lot of garage rock and that kind of thing on there. How did that happen?

Shake It is also a record store here in town, and for my money it’s as good an independent retailer as I’ve ever seen anywhere in the country. It’s right up there with the Amoebas and Ear X-Tacys and those kinds of people. That’s how I got to know those guys, originally, just from going in there. And we’ve had a really good relationship with them in terms of them supporting our Tiberius releases in the past. They’ve done a really good job helping us promote that stuff, and they’ve always kind of said how much they like what we do. And I got to talking to them one day and thought it seemed – like what you just said – when I looked at their roster, I was like, “Wow, all these bands kind of seem the same to me.” And I got to thinking, maybe they’re looking to have some people on their roster who are doing something a little different, diversify a little bit. And sure enough, the owner was definitely hip to that idea. And when he realized how much we had been involved in our releases through Tiberius, he seemed pretty impressed with not only how much work we did but how organized we were, how many people we worked with who were contemporaries of his and how deep we got into promoting our stuff on our own. I think he was looking forward to working with somebody that wasn’t just going to come to him and say, “Hey, we need to put a record out. Can you design it for us and take care of everything.” We pretty much handed him the finished product. It was fully mixed and mastered and a friend of ours laid out all the artwork and the design was done, so we just handed him the whole thing and he had it pressed and we went from there.

You guys getting out on this record soon?

Yeah, I’ve been sending press kits out to all these booking agents as of late and I’m trying to solicit a decent agent for us, but in the meantime, I’m starting to work on some dates for the spring of this year. So hopefully in February and March and April we’ll be touring a lot more.
www.ampline.net
www.shakeitrecords.com

Dave Schutz

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