Photo by Brian Harding
Futurebirds with special guest Joelton Mayfield perform at Ace of Cups on Saturday, August 29. Doors at 6pm. Advance tickets can be purchased here.
Earlier this summer, I had my first Futurebirds live experience at the Winnetka Music Festival in Illinois. The band headlined the second stage on the second, and final, night of the two-day festival and were up against Father John Misty on the main stage. Taking nothing away from Father John Misty, I noticed that as the Futurebirds set went on, more and more people started showing up to the second stage and by the end of the set, there must have been thousands of people who got to witness a highly energetic set of southern rock with elements of Americana, country, folk and even jam band stuff thrown in. It was truly a highlight of the festival and made me wonder if Ace of Cups is big enough for the enormity of Futurebirds sound.
For those who attend shows regularly, you know that we’re often cursed with multiple shows vying for attention on the same night and Saturday could cause some people to make a difficult decision as hometown heroes – and, coincidentally, former Futurebirds tour partners – CAAMP perform at the Schottenstein Center just a few short miles away from Ace of Cups. I suspect sets will start around the same time so I can’t imagine either will show up on the other’s stage in a guest appearance, but if there’s any two bills happening in Columbus on the same night where this is even a remote possibility, it’s these two shows.
A few months ago, I had the chance to speak with one of Futurebirds three singers, Carter King for BigTakeover.com. What follows is an abbreviated version of this conversation.
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A good album will transport you to an alternate universe. My first listen of Futurebirds’ latest record, Far Out Country I & II, took place on a beautiful spring morning about a month ago while I was mowing the lawn. It was the kind of blue-sky day that hinted at warmer weather to come but was still just chilly enough to warrant a hoodie. As soon as “Sienna Life” kicked in, I found myself dreaming of watching Futurebirds play live; an afternoon set, beach-side stage, nothing but blue sky above and endless miles of sand beneath my feet.
And as the album continued, that feeling persisted. I could picture the concert so clearly it was as if I were standing ten feet from the stage, watching the band run through their summery Americana rock, a sound that weaves in threads of alt-country, folk, indie, and jam band DNA.
While not exactly what I was picturing, this comes pretty close.
Core members Carter King, Daniel (Womz) Womack, and Thomas (Tojo) Johnson formed Futurebirds in 2008 while studying in Athens, Georgia. Six full-lengths and a handful of EPs later, the band has built a well-earned reputation as a live act. Their loose, free-flowing shows feature all three singer/songwriters rotating roles throughout the set, and as devotees of bands like the Grateful Dead, they’re known to overhaul their setlists night after night keeping both themselves and the audience on their toes.
The story behind Far Out Country I & II is an interesting one. The band recorded enough material for a double album, and in my conversation with King, he walks through the release strategy: both records out on vinyl today, but only the first hitting digital platforms now, with the second following in September. It’s too early to call it a success, but for fans of physical media, it feels like something special.
Futurebirds have a full summer ahead: outdoor festival sets of exactly the kind I was picturing on that first listen, plus a run of club shows (dates at the end of this piece). Balancing the demands of a newborn and his role as Futurebirds singer/guitarist, King joined me on a video call from the front yard of his new home in Nashville.
This summer you’ve doing a mix of outdoor shows, festivals, and club shows. Do you have a preference?
CARTER: No, not really. I think that getting to change scenario and setting is what helps keep it fresh and interesting for us. The daytime, afternoon festival slot, where a bunch of people have no idea who we are, let’s just hit them with the upbeat, fun ones, the summery tunes. And then I love going into a big, long night show in a club with the lights on, and play the darker, weirder jams, and stretch it out a little more. There’s not an ideal show. I like spreading it out and getting to change gears. We do a lot of acoustic duo and trio shows as well, and that’s a whole different muscle: small crowd, super intimate, more storytelling, and no guitar pedals to hide behind. I love just being able to change it up. I think we all do, just to keep all those muscles fresh.
Outside of the South, is there another part of the country that you feel sort of at home in?
CARTER: Yeah, absolutely. A lot of them. We always joke that we have, like, a thousand hometowns. But we love being in the western mountain states, just because we’re all pretty active and enjoy the outdoors: fishing and hiking, finding swimming holes and getting on rivers and stuff. We’ve garnered a pretty great little following in Colorado, and I think that comes from just a decade and a half of wanting to be out there. We’re just gonna keep coming and bashing y’all in the head with our music until you accept us, because this is where we want to be hanging out. Denver is a great music town, always a fun time there. And then we love getting into New England, we don’t get up there much past New York, and especially when it’s the dead of summer in the South and just so oppressively hot. We played on Nantucket a few times over the past few years, and I feel like everyone’s on nitrous, just all smiles all the time. The Mid-Atlantic has always been great to us. We’re in North Carolina and Virginia a whole bunch. We love getting all over this continental U.S.
You do a lot of dates when you tour.
CARTER: Yeah, we stay busy every year for sure. Now that we’re getting on a little bit more, and there are a few kids in the band, we don’t do the behemoth six-week runs that we used to. We try to keep the actual runs a little more concise. This summer we’re doing a handful of three-week runs, and then some shorter one-off stuff and weekend stuff. But yeah, we stay busy. This is how we all pay the bills, so we get after it.
How do you travel on the road?
CARTER: We’ll be traveling in a van. We’ve done some bus tours, which is just great elegance. But most of the time we’re road-dogging it in van and trailer.
From that perspective, is it autopilot? Like, when you get in the van, is it just muscle memory? “We’re going to New York, I can do this with my eyes closed” or is it, “Oh god, we’ve got to get in the van again and it’s another 8 or 10 hours”?
CARTER: It kind of goes both ways, depending on where you are in the tour, how the shows have been going, and all those variables. But yeah, it’s pretty motor memory at this point. We know what to expect and how to get in the right headspace, that meditative, all-things-must-pass kind of headspace.
Far Out Country I & II is a double album, the first time you’ve done a double album. It’s out physically in June and then getting split digitally with the second part coming out in September. Is that a nod and a thank-you to people who are buying physical stuff?
CARTER: Absolutely. You saying earlier that you like to listen to albums top to bottom, you’re a rare breed. I like to do the same. With the way things are these days, attention spans being so short and just the blast of content online, in the digital world, let’s stretch this out. Don’t dump 18 songs on people’s heads at once and then two weeks later be going, “Hey, remember that record we put out?” On the digital side, let’s stretch it out and give the bite-sized people a chance to take it in over a longer period of time. And then, yeah, let’s reward the people who want to buy their record and listen to the whole thing. You get it before everyone else. We’re gonna be playing songs off both on the summer tour, so if you’re the one in the crowd who knows the words to one of the songs while everyone else is looking confused, you get those street cred points.
And it’s still such a fresh, new environment and landscape, so it is just experimentation, see what works, and the best way to service all your different levels of fans, whether it’s the people that just want to listen to a couple Futurebirds songs in a big playlist, or the people that are die-hards and want to go top to bottom. We’re just trying to play with the space a little bit and see what works.
Futurebirds is unique in that there are three singer/songwriters in the band. Do you all write the same way, or do you have different writing styles?
CARTER: Well, we do have different styles of songwriting, for sure. But also, especially 15-plus years into doing this, there’s definitely a groupthink that happens. You’re heavily influencing each other because you get so invested in the other guy’s songs. “What can I bring to that?”, or “How can I try to make this better?”, or “Stay out of it” and not step on the toes of something that’s already doing great. These guys are still to this day blowing me away with, you know, either turns of phrases, or how they string some chords and a melody line together, and you’re kind of like, “Oh man, wish I had done that.” And then you find yourself a few weeks later with something that sounds, you know, not the same, but maybe a little subconsciously influenced by what they were doing. So there’s definite overlap.
We’ve got Daniel Womack, Womz, and he’s our hit machine. He’s got all the songs that everyone loves to sing along to, and he loves an upbeat sing-along chorus that everyone can latch onto. And then Tojo on the other side, Thomas Johnson, he’s our bummer jam guy. He’ll be the first to tell you he’s got some awesome heavy rock and roll songs as well, but yeah, he’s coming from the more serious place, like, “I’m gonna make you work for it a little bit” on the listening side. And I’m maybe somewhere in the middle between the two.
Our individual influences are what we grew up on. There’s a lot of shared stuff there for sure, and then in the last 20 years we’ve been friends, you’re sharing music, listening to stuff together in the van, so those influences come more and more together. But you can definitely hear our core influences a little bit differently, underneath everything.
When we get together and start recording these songs, it was early in the band’s history that I learned you have to kind of get over being too precious with your own material. When you’re recording it with the band, you can show up with a fully fleshed-out demo — here are all the guitar parts, here’s how this part goes, this is what you’re playing — but everyone still puts their own spin on it, maybe twists the melody a little bit. And I think that’s what makes it special, getting everyone’s individual flavors in the pot. That’s what makes it a Futurebirds record at the end of the day.
You’ve been doing it long enough that you seem to be pretty evenly split on songs too.
CARTER: Yeah, and that’s ebbed and flowed through the years. But more recently, everyone’s output has just increased in a big way. I think we made a point on Easy Company because we’d never put it front and center like, “Hey, we’re a three-headed monster, we’ve got three lead singers.” On Easy Company, we were like, “Alright, let’s really showcase that and make it a front-and-center aspect of this record.” So that was even stevens between all of us.
This one is close, but yeah, there’s no shortage of material, and it’s really nice. To be in a band with three songwriters, if you can figure it out, because it’s obviously a double-edged sword, figuring out the egos and everything and getting to where you can coexist in that world, it’s really nice to be able to say, “Hey, we’re gonna make a new record, and really all I need is three or four of the best songs I’m working on.” It’s not like, “Oh my god, I need 12 songs.” We have a running demo folder of all the ideas, and some of them stretch way, way back and haven’t seen their day yet, but they still exist. There’s no shortage of material to start from, which is really comforting. And on stage, it’s the same way. I’m singing this song, driving the train, doing the thing, and then on the next song I just get to sit back and be a guitar player in the band. It’s good to be able to switch gears there as well.
When you came into the new record, was the idea that it was gonna be a double record, or did you just have so many ideas that you didn’t know where to cut?
CARTER: Yeah, that was pretty much it. A lot of this stuff was still left over from when we made Easy Company. We were thinking about making that a big double record because I think we recorded 20-something songs out in Texas. And then we were working with Dualtone for the first time, and their advice was that in this new world, more concise is better than just dumping a whole bunch of awesome material on ears that are only gonna take in so much of it. So we kept that one shorter, and then kept recording songs for this next one, and ended up with another 20-plus songs. We’re like, “Alright, let’s figure out a way we can do the double record this time, and not have stuff that’s just gonna have been sitting around for five years.” Because you’ve gotta get stuff out there when it’s still fresh and meaningful to you too. We’re the ones who have to go out and get people excited about it and talk about these songs and play them with energy and enthusiasm for a crowd. I don’t want to be singing a quote-unquote new song about a relationship I got out of 10 years ago.
In what I believe is a running joke, Daniel said this is the best album Futurebirds has released. The joke being that he says that every time a new album comes out. I’m not going to ask you to sell me on that premise, but I am curious about the quality control within the band that you practice to make sure that the songs you put on an album are the best songs you’ve got rather than putting on some filler or some songs that you’re not as proud of.
CARTER: It is a democratic process for sure. In terms of song selection, there’s a little bit of telepathy between us all. You can read the room when you’re pushing a song you think has a lot of promise and you see the blank stares around the room, and you’re like, “Alright, maybe this isn’t as good as I thought it was.” You’ve gotta have a real-time sounding board. There’s also been the situation with all three of us where it’s like, “No, you guys just don’t see it yet, I’m gonna drag you through the mud on this,” and then at the end of the day, people are like, “That actually turned out really awesome, didn’t think that was gonna go that way.”
As far as the new record being the best record, obviously it’s the newest thing, it’s the thing you’re most excited about. I’m so excited we’re going down to rehearse for the summer and get all these songs in their live forms. It’s just so exciting because it’s like, alright, we’ve got all this fresh blood for the stage. The songs we’ve been playing, we’ve got tons and tons of songs, but, you know, we’ve played some of them, like, 5,000 times. You can find yourself on autopilot on stage, and not on that tightrope of “is this gonna pan out, or are we gonna end up with our faces on the floor?” That makes it really exciting for us.
I think all our records are the best records. It’s like picking your favorite child. There are probably ones I think are more important to our history than others. But if the idea is that we’re getting better, we’re growing as musicians, as people, our bonds together — we feel like we’re in a place where, alright, we’ve got this machine cooking with gas right now. We’re better than we’ve ever been as a band, so the output we’re making right now is reflecting that, in our opinion. Who knows if the world will agree, and there are tons of other variables that go into that. But yeah, this one is absolutely the best record (laughs).
Do you keep your setlist pretty loose? If someone sees you two nights in a row, will they have two different experiences?
CARTER: We like to switch it up for sure. There’s a handful of songs that are kind of go-to’s every night. If we’re playing two nights in the same place, it’ll definitely be more variant than if you came and saw us from two different cities four or five hours away, where they might be more similar. But even still, there’s a lot of variability in our setlists. We’ve done some opening support tours for bigger bands, and we’re like, “Alright, we’ve got 45 minutes, let’s stick to a setlist, keep it tight every night, minimal changeover time between songs, get the most music in those 45 minutes.” We’re playing for people who probably don’t know who we are anyway, so it’s kind of a sampler set. Then a week into doing that, we’re like, “Alright, screw this, let’s change it up. I’m feeling stale on stage, we’re not showing our best selves.”
There are a lot of great bands that play the same set every night, and it’s always exciting, and they have the lights and audio-visual stuff all timed up to it. We’re not opposed to that, and we’ve been working on some aspects of our show for the summer. But there’s no getting around that we’re gonna wanna be changing up the setlist every night. When you’ve got 18 new songs to play, and maybe 20 songs that you’re gonna play in a night, you’ve just gotta keep it fresh to get all of it out there.
I was on the “Fly On” video reading the comments. One comment said something like, “Picking up Dinosaur Jr, Weezer, 90s vibes,” and then the next comment was, “I’m picking up Grateful Dead vibes.” I’m curious — in your mind, what is the Futurebirds intersection? If you were to describe it from a cross-street intersection, what would you describe it as?
CARTER: It would be a traffic circle you could never get out of. It’d be like that National Lampoon: European Vacation scene. Following them around. Yeah, no, it’s all over the map, and song to song it’s different. The Dead thing, that was big growing up for me, and Brannen Miles, the bass player, and I and everyone else are fans as well. That was the thing when we were younger and learning guitar, and I had an older sister who was always on tour and going to see the band. So that one’s hard to escape, I guess, on more songs than not. And then kids growing up in the late 90s and early 2000s are also gonna have all that 90s alt-rock. That’s all high praise, in my opinion. It sounds like Dinosaur Jr. meets the Grateful Dead? Alright, we did it.
You said the four of you that have known each other the longest have a common ground of influences. Is there anything anyone in the band listens to that you’re just like, “I don’t get it, I don’t understand why you like this”?
CARTER: Yeah, okay. Tojo, Thomas, he grew up heavy into, like, the Midwestern emo stuff. So there are some bands, and it’s not like he’s pushing it on the van, but there are a few things where you’ll hear it on the radio and he’s singing every word, and it’s like, “Interesting, you know?” I don’t think loving anything is below loving anything else when it comes to music or art. But I think there’s a window in your life where if that doesn’t take, it won’t later. You have to have a certain amount of teenage angst still in your blood for that to catch, and I just missed that window. But nothing that’s like, “Oh, you need to turn this off.”
There’s no secret Slipknot or Korn fan in the band?
CARTER: We’re all Korn fans. “Freak on a Leash.”
