I had the pleasure of sitting down with Tanner Merritt from O’Brother over the weekend during their first headlining tour to talk about everything from strange recording techniques to walking around in Juarez, Mexico for fun. We sat down in front of the stage in the dark backroom of The Bryan Street Tavern while Fun played over the loud speaker.
So, how has the tour been?
Tanner Merritt: It’s been going really well. The past few days have been rough because everyone has been sick.
How has the co-headlining this tour? How has that been different from your last tours?
TM: This is the first co-headlining tour that we’ve done, and the last tours we’ve done were supporting tours, opening for bigger bands. It’s interesting, I mean they’re obviously much smaller shows, but it’s cool because we have a lot of kids coming out to see specifically us. Yeah, so it’s a different animal altogether.
Okay, so let’s talk about Garden Window. I understand you spent a lot of time recording it—do you think that contributed to the album?
TM: It definitely contributed to the album. I mean, we did a couple of short tours between recording songs and stuff, and we were able to step away from it and come back to it with fresh ideas. It’s not like we were working with someone who’s a big name producer, so everyone was in it as a trial and error experience. We were all kind of working at it and trying to make it work because it was the only means that we had available to us at the time.
You recorded it with Favorite Gentlemen again, right? Andy Hull and Robert McDowell (of Manchester Orchestra) recorded it?
TM: Yeah, and Robert had some engineering when he recorded his own solo record, Gobotron. Michael, our drummer, also had some engineering experience.
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You said in a past interview that you wanted your album to sound dirtier and to transcend genres. What made that change in your playing?
TM: I think it was just the way we progressed as a live band. We were constantly getting louder and more aggressive, but chilled out at the same time. We kind of wanted to go in all those directions at once.
We there any songs in the album that gave you a particularly hard time, or songs that you liked more than the others?
TM: The last song (“Last Breath”) gave us some trouble. We had to fix things and restructure it a really long time before we were really happy with it. There were a couple of songs that we had to go back and re-track all of Anton’s bass parts because we recorded it wrong. Not that he played it badly. (Anton walking by: "I played that part fine, dude!") I’m being nice right now, Anton. It was terrible.
As far as songs that I’m really happy with, I think “Easy Talk” turned out really great. We did a lot of weird stuff on it and I was really stoked with the way that it came out.
What do you think is your favorite song to play live?
TM: “Poison!” I like things with more dynamic range.
I know the album just came out, but have you started making anything for another album possibly?
TM: We’ve really just been touring, but we’ve jammed a couple of times. When we get home from this tour we’re planning on writing a lot more. Right when the album came out, I was just ready to make another one, we had just been working on it that long.
Back to the tour. I was wondering how you got to doing supporting tours with Thrice and Manchester Orchestra.
TM: We knew Manchester from playing in town because we’re both from Atlanta. We knew them before they were big. Before this final line-up of O’Brother came out they were just really supportive and wanted to help us in anyway they could because they were just blowing up. Manchester’s booking agent also books Thrice and now he is our booking agent. So that’s kind of how all of that came about. When Thrice wanted to do a tour with Manchester, Andy (lead singer of Manchester Orchestra) said “we need to take out this band O’Brother, they’re on our label.”
I see you guys have a pretty exciting tour life.
What is your weirdest tour story?
TM: We’ve played some really weird places… Oh, there was this one time we were on tour with Manchester and we had a day off. We booked a hotel in El Paso, Texas and we realized none of us had been to Mexico, so we decided to cross the bridge into Juarez, Mexico. There were people standing around in the streets with AK-47’s. We found out later that it was actually the most dangerous city in the world that is not a warzone, and there’s like little kids tugging on your pants asking you for money. It was scary and we were all like “we need to get the hell out of here.”
At least you didn’t get stopped by border patrol or something.
TM: Yeah... well, actually, no. On the way back in to Texas... Now, you don’t need a passport to go in to Mexico, but to come back out you do, and I was an idiot. I did not have a passport at that time, so they gave me a lot of shit about that. They just gave me a talking to for a minute. I mean, I’m pretty American. I don’t know if you can tell, there’s not much of an accent here. Just your normal Caucasian, English speaking guy. I probably would have lasted… maybe two hours over there.
Also be sure to read our review of O'Brother's latest release, Garden Window. Check out a sample on Spotify below.
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