Performer Magazine’s Amanda Macchia and Gabriella Thurman sit down backstage with Karl Denson at All Good Music Festival to talk about his not-so-tiny universe of musicians, new ways of writing music, and following Primus on the main stage.
Gabriella: Thank you for being here! So, where are you coming from, you’ve been on tour since June correct?
Karl: [laughs] Well, I’ve been on tour since 1990. This summer has been all Tiny Universe, we’re coming from….. ahh…. um….. Where the hell were we? We had fun. It was a good show! Um….
Amanda: I think its pretty normal if your touring a lot… What did you have for breakfast?
K: Oatmeal! Thank you that makes me feel better…But I’m trying to think of where we were yesterday .. we went form home to … Vegas! We opened for Wide Spread Panic! It was a great show.
G: So, you have Karl Denson Trio, The Greyboy Allstars, and you sit in with a lot of other musicians. What is KDTU to you in the scheme of it all?
K: This is my main thing. The Trio is when I took a break from all of this and that was really fun, but this is my main interest and my main tool.
G: Last week we actually did an interview with Lettuce, but I know you did a project with Soulive. How was that? Can you tell us a bit about it?
K: That was really fun, those are some of my favorite guys and I had a really fun time working with them. I did some recording with them, hopefully that is going to be coming out soon.
G: Now, what’s your dream band? Do you have it right now or what is the combination of musicians you would like to work with, in your wildest dreams?
K: It would be a band with Patty Griffin, Bjork, and Corrinne Bailey Rae. That would be my dream band. I would be a member of that band. I love the female voice, so it would be those three women singing. Oh and Susan Tedeschi, it would be those four.
G: What should we expect from your set tonight? We also heard that maybe Zach Deputy might sit in with you.
K: That is the plan. Coming out of the Primus set we are going to start off with something really as close to a Brontosaurus-rex as we can. That’s a Brontosaurus with a larger head and a shorter neck.
G: Now, does it have big teeth?
K: Yes, fully prepared to slash, claws and everything. Looks like a herbivore from the back but from the front it looks fully deadly, but it’s not really fast. He lumbers.
G: What’s on the horizon for you musically with KDTU?
K: Well we just kind of started on a period of writing together with is really nice. Because up to this point I’ve been kind of the main writer and I kind of write everything and teach it to the band. But the last few months we have been getting together and just writing together which has been really fun. So we have a bunch of new ideas, and Chris Thile we will have, he’s from the Greyboy Allstars, he’s been here for a couple of years now. That really put a whole different twist on the band. Now we got kind of, you know… he comes from a sort of soundtracky, rock-and-roll thing, which is really cool. So we have been collaborating a lot now.
A: Are you guys going to be making an album?
K: We are, we’re working on it right now. It’s about half done.
A: Do you have a release date?
K: No but we are hoping for early to mid fall.
A: Awesome, thank you so much for talking to us! We really appreciate it.
K: My pleasure!
journalism by M E G A L O M A N D E E