ALO continue to spark our imagination and inspire us to get lost in dance
Photo courtesy of Brushfire Records. Photo credit: Jay Blakesberg.
Ahead of the band’s new album, “Silver Saturdays”, which will be released March 3 via Brushfire Records, Daily Reggae caught up with ALO to learn about their new music, preparation for live shows, and creativity process!
Wow, 25 years as a band! That’s absolutely amazing. Congratulations! It’s so cool ALO formed when you were all just middle school students. How has the band’s sound evolved over the years?
Steve: Zach, Lebo and I played our first show together in 8th grade, we were the intermission entertainment for the school play. We'd worked up some covers, had some friends join in on background vocals. It might have been a 7-piece outfit or so, and we played "Walk Don't Run" (The Ventures), "R.O.C.K. In The U.S.A." (John Cougar Mellencamp), "Centerfold" (J Geils Band) and "Get Off My Cloud" (Rolling Stones). We were pumped, it was such a thrill.
Throughout high school, we got better and better at covers - Van Halen, Ozzy, Billy Joel, Pearl Jam. We loved pushing ourselves musically, and we loved picking tunes we loved, and knew people would also love. Oldies, classics, contemporary stuff on the radio. We actually developed a pretty well-rounded Pop/Rock repertoire And then we started writing our own songs, and probably all those influences played a part in that. We had a song that sounded a little bit like Rush, a power-ballad that maybe had a little Elton John in it, a heavy vocal harmony one that resembled Kansas. It wasn't that we were trying to sound like those groups, we were just using all the tools we had and searching for our own sound.
As years went on, we kept listening to a lot of everything. I think that might be a unique quality to ALO, that we love and appreciate so many different styles of music, so we rarely settle in one exact place. So yeah, we started out pretty Pop/Rock, but then after playing college parties and our Summer road trip to meet James Brown, we decided we really wanted to be a Dance band. We wanted to throw dance parties. And that's when ALO was really born. We had a 5-piece horn section and we really leaned into the freaky dance extravaganza. And now that puts us at 25 years ago.
I feel like the evolution of ALO (1998 to now) has been more subtle, since we sort of honed in on a basic sound leading up to that point. We'd found our voices, at least our younger-selve's voices. We've toggled a bit between dance and song, but I think those two elements are really what define the band. We've always wanted to make great songs, with interesting and inventive music coupled with great lyrics that spark your imagination, give you hope and maybe even make you laugh a bit. And, we've always wanted to make music that bounces, that grooves, that gets people moving and shaking. Our favorite thing is a concert where people lose themselves in dance and also sing their hearts out along with the song. We love to jam, more than ever. And we love to connect with our audiences, and each other of course. The sound is ever-changing, the more we discover, and for now Silver Saturdays is where we're at.
I had the chance to see you play at The Fillmore in San Francisco year backs, and I was mesmerized by your band’s energy and showmanship? How important is it to practice with that high energy to be able to nail the sound in live gigs?
Ezra: We're all so used to playing gigs that I wouldn't say rehearsals necessitate "show energy". Usually the show energy takes care of itself at a performance with the enthusiasm of a crowd, the energy in the room and on stage, the adrenaline and fun that comes with getting to do what we love and create music with an audience. In rehearsals we tend to focus on the finer details, such as the subtle vocal harmonies that are not always as easily heard in the context of a rock n roll show, the rhythmic subtleties in a song that we've been playing for years but still are able to discover something new in the interplay between the bass and drums, working on playing with a lot of energy but still at much softer volumes to expand our dynamic range potential (and be able to rehearse for a long time without exhausting our ears). We try to take care of all the more overlooked details and nuances of the music so then when we get on stage we don't have to think about any of that and can just have fun and let go.
How was the recording process different in your new album? Were there any new musicians, or the producers that the band teamed up with?
Lebo: For this album, we had a few goals, but top of the list was to just capture our sound when we are all in a room playing together and interacting with each other. Sounds simple enough, but here in "the future", so many recordings are piecemealed together with people sending tracks back and forth and sometimes never even meeting each other. This phenomenon became especially noticeable here in the time of Covid, so I'd say that this album is somewhat of a reaction to that. And the result is..... I hope we do every album this way! It’s a palpable feeling when the four of us are in a room together creating music having our individual sound waves collide as they transform and morph into one before even getting captured by the microphones. My hope for the listeners of ALO’s 'Silver Saturdays' is that they get to experience a bit of this invigorating feeling—and better yet, that it stirs up some inspiration of their own!
“Hot Damn” is such a vibe! What’s the background on that track and can we expect to hear that one when catching ALO on the road?
Zach: Hot damn is a fun thing to say when you discover something awesome. It’s the kind of thing you want to yell, when you're playing music with your friends and the groove is really sizzling. I think that was the feeling we were after. We’ve played it a few times live and it’s really fun, to me it feels like the kind of song we could play almost every night.
