January 27, 2020 – Sometimes you never know where a conversation will take you. Going into my chat with Jeff Schroeder, guitar player from the legendary Smashing Pumpkins, I expected to talk about his guitar set up and recording notes from the bands last album Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun. But as we met up for our interview he told me that his band mate from another band he is in – Night Dreamer, was in the other room. I was pleasantly surprised since I spent the last week or so losing myself in singer Mindy Song’s voice. Give their song Another Life a listen. Seriously, go now. I’ll wait..
What happened next, was me pretty much ignoring the questions I had on my yellow legal pad and flowing into a long conversation with two stellar humans. We took a journey into their musical lives that exists in and out of both the Smashing Pumpkins and Night Dreamer. Getting perspective from someone that is in an enormously successful touring band and also in a band where he carries his gear from show to show without the benefit of a roadie team that has everything in place before his arrival at the next venue.. is very interesting.
Jeff Schroeder tells Sound Vapors, “We’re just getting this new band (Night Dreamer) off the ground and things like.. we’re an electronic band so we have to carry around a backing track system and I’ve been spoiled living in Smashing Pumpkins world where there’s roadies and I don’t touch anything. Stuff just appears in the next city, set up. But now, her and I, we’re back to square one. We’re playing gigs and I’m lugging my own shit around, setting up my own stuff. So we have this rack with our backing track system and it’s just gotten destroyed during flying. So we went to the company and said Hey! we’ve been using your gear and they said, “you shouldn’t be using that one for flying and we actually make this better one you should be (using).” Two completely different worlds but the love of music and playing live shows won’t stop these two from getting it in front of a larger audience. Even if that means starting from scratch.
While I did manage to ask a few questions from my original list – Things like his guitar preferences and some production notes on songs like Solara (which I told Jeff was one of the most bitchin’ things I heard in 2018) from the last ‘Pumpkins record – I was very much wrapped up in Night Dreamer’s EP – Treasure. I wanted to know if there was ever any discussion about using live drums instead of electronic drums. For the record – I believe they made the correct choice in terms of percussion. Mindy walked me through the though process and I was surprised to learn that during recording, some of these songs had acoustic drums on them.
Mindy Song says, “You’d be surprised, though, because it has such a different feeling and I’m so glad that we moved onto more electronic sounds because if you listen to the song with acoustic drums.. I hate to say it but it sounds dated. I love acoustic drums and I love the sound of that era but the different tones you can get with electronics beats.. it’s just a different world.”
So I wondered what that conversation or time line was like in the decision process to use electro-beats instead of live drums. Mindy says, “At some point Jeff had to go back to Chicago and I was listening to the music and it wasn’t something that really drew me in.” Jeff says, “It’s not really something that she would listen to.” Which both Mindy and Jeff agree was important to her. Mindy continues, “So at some point I just asked Jeff if I could play around with the music. So then, I worked with one of the engineers/producers, Andy Toy and we came up with the beats together. I’m not a trained beat maker but I know what I like.” Jeff tells me, “She has very sophisticated taste and that was really more her and the aggressiveness of the sounds.. like everything’s fucking jacked up and super distorted and punchy..” Mindy jumps in to say, “I’d have even more if I could!” :laughs:
Jeff recalls when she first sent over the tracks and said, “Ok I think we have something to send you.. and you may never want to talk to me again after I send this.” :laughs:
We went on to cover many other topics including social media, the future and all of us having Korean Heritage. These were two of the nicest people I’ve had the privilege of interviewing. It was one of those moments where you go off script and it turns out to be a better talk than you originally imagined. You can listen to our entire jammed packed conversation by clicking on a link to your favorite place to listen to podcasts.
-Tommy Marz
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