Moe., better blues Invading the State Theatre for recording purposes BY SAM PFEIFLE
	It’s the Joyce Andersen show If you make your way down to Inn on the Blues most Sunday nights, you’ll find yourself a guest of Joyce Andersen – and a few other top-notch Seacoast musicians she’s asked to tag along. A big-time fiddler and singer/songwriter, Andersen has basically settled into the life of the independent musician in northern New England: You can’t really expect a whole lot in the way of big crowds or media attention, but you can do pretty much anything you want and you can have a good time doing it. This week, Andersen puts her third solo full-length (she’s also released a couple of collaborations with partner Harvey Reid, who’s just about the expert when it comes to carving out a living pushing his own product). Love & Thirst – the name alone reminds me of a Bob Dylan album – is and isn’t just what you might expect. Sure, if you load it into iTunes, it’ll be categorized as folk, and the performances are crisp, impressive, and well captured. But it’s also a blur of blues, gospel, alt-country, plain-old-country, and sweet-voiced girl-and-a-guitar tunes that are as warm as the summer that never seems to come and as inviting as that down comforter’s been on these cold, rainy nights. "We check our desires/ Measure our paces," sings Andersen on the opening "Riding on a Train," somehow managing to bring a young girl’s voice to the experienced veteran’s lyrics. On the album’s second track, she allows that "The lord above might save your soul/ You might live for rock and roll." Is that why she seems to be having the most fun I’ve ever heard her have? Has she given herself over completely to rock and roll for the first time? What’s up with all the electric guitars? Didn’t Dylan get thrown out of folkdom when he busted out the electric? Oh, who cares? Andersen can still do a seven-minute piano/vocals ballad when she wants to ("For What Was Gained"), and it’s not like she’s joined up with the screamo crowd. She just lets her hair down from time to time – or wears it in pigtails. The musicians she’s collected for this disc probably helped her rise to the occasion: guitarist Duke Levine (who also makes Carol Noonan’s discs sound great), guitarist Pete Huttlinger, and, on drums, the very big-time Dave Mattacks, a Fairport Convention member for two decades and a guy who once backed Jethro Tull. Like a lot of independent releases from these parts, this is a major album coming from a group of very talented musicians — it just doesn’t have the hype associated with the latest Alison Krauss project. —SP

We’ve lately been talking jam bands. Percy Hill aren’t interested in the label. Pete Kilpatrick lampooned it. But moe. are one band who openly embrace it. That’s their thing. They go on big, long tours. They cultivate hippy fans who sell grilled cheese sandwiches in the parking lot to pay for their nitrous balloons (maybe that’s gone out of style now – it’s been a while since I was on tour).

They think and plan like a jam band. That’s their job. Talking with moe. bassist Rob Derhak in Arabica the other day, that’s what I kept thinking about. He lives outside of Portland, in the burbs. He’s got three kids and deals with them having strep. His wife and other wives have playdates together. He could be an insurance salesman or a dentist or a pizza delivery guy, but instead he plays bass for a living with a band who’ve done a pretty great job of carving out a fanbase amongst a crowded field of – to the untrained listener, anyway – similar bands.

Moe. remind me of a pro baseball team. One guy lives in Cincinnati, a couple in upstate New York, one guy in East Springfield, Massachusetts. Then, when it’s time to tour, they all pack their bags, say goodbye to the wife and kids, and go out and live out of their suitcases until it’s time to bring the bacon home. Maybe they’re more like guys on the PGA Tour — they don’t get spring training.

When do they write? "Whenever we can squeeze it in," says Derhak. "But my life’s too good now," he laughs. "I’ve got nothing to write about."

Still, they’ve got material enough to want to record what Derhak calls a very overdue studio album. You know, something to tour behind. But studio albums aren’t exactly the stock in trade of jam bands. Phish? Their studio albums just never seemed to work very well, except for maybe Rift, but that’s debatable. The Dead never made much of an album after American Beauty for my money, though they made plenty of their own money with whatever horrible ’80s album "Touch of Grey" appeared on (I could look it up, but do you really care?). Widespread Panic, String Cheese Incident, Deep Banana Blackout? I’ll give you Widespread’s Space Wrangler, but that’s about it for discs by those bands that find their way into my CD player on any kind of regular occasion.

And, truthfully, I don’t own a moe. disc, despite their local affiliation and my extended jam-band phase, but I’ve seen them live and enjoy their music (I’m fairly certain — things get hazy). This next album, though, I might be interested in. At the State Theatre on June 10 and 11, moe. will be recording what will end up being their next studio album. It’s not going to be released as a live album, or a DVD, or a bootleg. Rather, the band will play songs as though they’re recording in the studio, take the stuff they like, throw out what doesn’t work, and then lay in other tracks as they see fit so as to produce a product that is in all respects a normal studio album to the uniformed listener, but which retains, says Derhak, that "live vibe."

"It doesn’t have to be the best show in the world. We’re not going to try to capture the best guitar solo ever live — and we don’t mind being sloppy," says Derhak. They just reason that feeding off the energy of a State Theatre crowd will lead to better recordings than feeding off the energy of some nerdy studio engineer sitting on the other side of a soundproof glass window.

They’ll be doing a fair amount of pre-production, figuring out which breaks go where and how segues to new songs will work. They won’t improvise quite as much as they normally would. In fact, they might even repeat exactly a set on Saturday that they played Friday, just to see if they can do it a little better. That simply doesn’t happen in the jam world, where acts like Avril Lavigne, who recently covered Green Day’s "American Idiot" on every night of her tour, are looked down on for their lack of originality in a stage performance that might as well be watching a concert DVD in your living room over and over again.

But if you release a live album, "the sound of the recordings changes from place to place," says Derhak, and if you release a show as its own disc, it’s just another live recording, a bootleg like the sometimes hundreds of others your fans already get for free. So, to occupy the State Theatre for a couple of nights, then go play with the tapes in a Chicago studio later on, gets you the best of all worlds.

But the State Theatre? Isn’t the sound a little iffy in that place, a little unpredictable?

Derhak allows the place can be a bit cavernous when it isn’t packed (though it sounds fantastic with a full crowd), but he notes that "when you’re playing to the room and you don’t have to worry about what it sounds like to the crowd, the mix starts to change." What you hear live is one thing. What gets recorded is another. Derhak says his bass always sounds really good in State recordings.

Oh, and when they get to Chicago moe. will record a whole bunch of tunes they’ve never played live before. So the end result will be an album that can draw on two nights of three-hour performances (I’m guessing), along with a slew of surprise new material.

It sounds like a big project, I say.

"We’re shooting for a double album," Derhak says with some understatement, like he’s talking about the new product line his company will be putting out, or a new sandwich/drink combo the restaurant’s going to start pushing. It’s part of the job, just like spending all summer opening up for the Allman Brothers or passing up Bonaroo because that’s the weekend they’re looking to record in Chicago.

Anyway, he’s got to get back to the kids. They’re home sick, you know.

Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam@phx.com.

Moe. play the State Theater, in Portland, June 10 and 11. Call (207) 775-3331.