“Constantly being tired or hungover or both is kinda rough. But overall, it’s a dream and I’m having the time of my life.”

So how has the new material been received thus far?

We’ve actually been playing songs from Only Good Thoughts Can Stay for nearly a year now live, road testing them to make sure all the arrangements and progressions and cycles and whatnot worked together. So the songs have all been well received, but have also kinda been out there in demo form for a while. This is the first time people have heard these recordings, though, and they seem to be digging them. It’s exciting because we’re finally playing the songs in the same way they were recorded, whereas with our last album, Caffeine, Alcohol, Sunshine, Money, there was always such a revolving cast of players in the live show that the songs were always changing depending on what instruments happened to be played that night. We’ve had 26 different members in the last three years, playing tons of different instruments with different styles and personalities, which is fun because you’re rarely bored. But it’s also nice to have something to depend on, too.

The new album has a very upbeat, positive feeling to it. What inspired you as a songwriter?

I’m glad that it ended up being a positive album in the end, because I never really set out to create that. As a weird juxtaposition, it was depression, anxiety and fear of death that really inspired this album. Pretty morose, melancholy themes that I was dealing with during the writing process of this record that somehow were turned on their head in the end. I didn’t really set out for it to happen that way, but I can say that I’ve always been more inspired by a song that can say something positive or uplifting without being cheesy. Downer songs are soothing too, but ultimately, I really get that cathartic kick out of juxtaposition and paradoxes between the downer and the upper. In concrete terms though, my inspiration for these songs was the same as always. Taking true, beautiful, visceral, scary, overwhelming experiences, emotions, hardships, victories and the like and trying to make some semblance of order out of them. Telling or re-telling the stories in some imaginative, snappy way that has some charisma that a wide variety of people can relate to. It is a fun challenge, and a lot of the songs went through a half a dozen different forms or arrangements, both lyrically and arrangement-wise, before we landed on what we recorded.

You have said that about half of the songs on the album are “first person narratives of someone else.” Can you tell us the story of the most important of those people? How fully formed in your mind are those characters? And do you write down the stories before creating the song?

Well all these stories go through a bunch of drafts, but the narrative ones usually get the most scrutiny. I don’t actually have the plot written out or anything, but I generally know what I want to say because I have all the details at my fingertips. A lot of the details are fabricated, but the meat of the story is generally from something that actually happened. The story that is probably closest to my heart is the song “Billy Bird,” which is the story of my brother and me coming to terms with loss as little kids. Like getting what words like “death” and “leaving” meant. The story basically happens in two movements, both told from the perspective of my younger brother. In the first, he tells of finding a baby bird that he and his brother put into a box and named Billy, after Billy the Kid. The bird has fallen from its nest and since it’s only a baby, dies rather quickly. Once mom and dad have come home from work, the family goes to the aspen grove with a small cross and digs a hole together to bury the baby bird. It’s all brought together when the narrator asks his mother what happens next and she replies, “Now he stays here, and we go home.”

It is always a challenge with these types of  songs to tell a story that is both personal and at the same time communicates to an audience in a way that seems like it’s about them as much as it’s about the narrator. I try not to boil everything down at the end of the story, but sometimes you have to expound and expand a bit in order for people to be able to translate it in four or five minutes. Narrative short stories and novels have the luxury of their form being a solely written or spoken medium with no expected length. It’s okay if you read for 20 minutes or 20 days.  But with a song you basically have four minutes to cram in an awesome intro instrumental section, two verses, two pre-choruses, two choruses, a bridge, a re-visitation of the intro with a different take on it, and a coda that brings it all together…and make it decipherable and relatable and clever and interesting…which I guess explains why our songs are rarely four minutes.

Where did you record the new album? Can you tell us about your recording process?

We recorded this album with Adam Selzer at Type Foundry in Portland, Oregon. Type Foundry is this amazing studio with a huge room, a medium room and then two smaller rooms. All the reverb in that place is totally natural and all the gear is rad and analog, and an audiophile’s wet dream. They have almost any awesome amp or organ or percussion thing you’d want to use. I’m actually not a big studio geek so I really had no idea what Adam was talking about half the time. But it sounded amazing and that’s all that really matters, I guess. The recording process was basically drums, then bass, guitars, pianos, organs, percussion, strings and then all the inevitable pick-ups. Mixing took a long time as we ended up having to go back and redo some things on a couple songs. The whole process took about two months, off and on, but was well worth it. It was largely a group effort. I am just one of five people, six counting Adam, eight counting the string guys, Gabriel and Eric, who put a ton of effort into making this album. I never could have made this on my own. I believe it’s far better than anything I could have come up with myself. Though I wrote the song structures and lyrics myself, the arrangements were totally a group effort. For me, that’s what makes this record – the fact that it’s a hive-minded type album. I think that really comes through on the recordings.

What has been the best part of touring? What has been the most challenging?

We just got this great big airport shuttle bus called Ol’ Yeller that makes touring a lot more comfortable than the old vans we’ve had in the past. You can sleep in it and stand up and stretch out. It’s amazing what a difference that makes. The real challenge is just doing it, day in, day out, over and over. We don’t really take days off on our tours, so it becomes really grueling around the third week. At least for me it does. We all have pretty decent synergy on tour, though, so the disagreements are usually few and far between. Just the lack of sleep is probably the craziest for me. Constantly being tired or hungover or both is kinda rough. But overall, it’s a dream and I’m having the time of my life.

As a musician, what role does the label you own, Tender Loving Empire, have in your life?

It’s my job. My wife Brianne and I have been doing it for about five years now. I used to run the label by myself but these days it’s a four person job that includes the Tender Loving Empire Store in downtown Portland.  It has been a little weird this time around as I’ve had to wear both the label owner cap as well as the artist cap simultaneously. This spring we’re not only putting out the Jared Mees & The Grown Children album, but also the new albums by Typhoon and Loch Lomond, all in one three-month period. It takes a lot of discipline to not get so focused on the music that the business stuff goes by the wayside or the other way around.

Is it difficult to own a label as a musician, knowing that there is music you’ll love and it’s unrealistic to put it all out? How does being a musician make that different?

Yeah, we realized very early on that we just didn’t have the money or the energy to put out every album we fell in love with. The case with tons of bands is it’s either the right album but the wrong time, or the wrong album but the right time, or the right album and the right time and the band just can’t get their act together to tour or manage their affairs. It really takes a perfect storm of music, circumstances, and organization in order to release an album effectively. We have kind of staved off the pain that causes us by putting out these yearly two-disc compilations called Friends and Friends of Friends featuring one song each from a bunch of bands we love. Being a musician makes it really painful, as I’m often given to whims of fancy that we have to put out this record or that record when it’s just not realistic. I’m constantly being brought back to Earth in that regard. The litmus test now that we have four people, though, is that if three out of four think it’s a go, then we can tell we should move forward. That keeps it a little more sane.

www.jaredmeesandthegrownchildren.com