rob's wild years: a decade in music

Hello, friends!  Rob here.

About a year ago this time, I posted my umpteenth-annual year-end-playlist and walked through it.  It was fun.  I wanted to do it again, and use it as an opportunity to look back at our 2019, but honestly, Nola.com's Keith Spera beat me to it with this fantastic recap of the year.

So I thought, okay then.  Decade?

I'd like to start by saying that this was utterly impossible.  To condense an entire decade into two hours of music- it just can't be done.  While all of these songs became meaningful to me sometime in the last ten years and are so today, this shouldn't be viewed as a TRL-style “top 20 (or so) jams of the decade” or anything like that.  It wouldn't be accurate to say that these represent my “best of,” or “top” howevermany songs.  In fact, very few of the artists I consider my absolute favorites are even on here.  However, I do feel these are the songs that best represents my decade.  Please enjoy:

(This is a Spotify link if you'd like to follow along.)

The Flaming Lips – The Spark That Bled:
This was my personal theme song for my first tour with The Revivalists in the early summer of 2009. (The official theme song of that tour was probably “Freak Though” by T.I. and Pharrell, so honorable mention for that one.)  I'm not even going to try to glean a sense of authorial intent from the byzantine haze of Wayne Coyne's lyrics, but something about this song- particularly the “I stood up and I said 'yeah'” part-  makes me think of a certain feeling that I have trouble putting into words.  It's like, you're onto something, and you know you're onto something, but you don't really know how much you're onto something.  It's like getting your hands on the tip of an iceberg without knowing how far down it goes.  It's like staring at the Grand Canyon.  You know when a dog likes chasing cars and its owner asks it, “what are you going to do if you ever actually catch one?”  It's kind of like that.

PJ Morton – Sticking to My Guns:
In April of last year, a private equity firm bought out one of my favorite internet places, reneged on promises to promote from within and rounded out the upper management tiers of the new corporate structure with cronies, and refused to understand the company's existing culture or what made it special.  How'd it go?  The entire editorial staff resigned en masse, new management has had difficulty coaxing writers across the picket line, and the website hasn't had posted any new content in over two months.  Deadspin was a lot of things- a sports website, a gossip rag, a hotbed of investigative journalism, a progressive echo chamber, a place to find a definitive ranking of the worst people to overhear having sex- it was an absolute minefield of ideas.  But Deadspin always had a sharp, consistent voice, a nose for good stories, and a propensity for speaking truth to power.  I find it particularly devastating that the place was done in by a managerial directive to "stick to sports," because the thing that appealed to me and affected me most was that they didn't stick to sports.  The grab-bag nature of Drew Magary's weekly NFL preview was a great source of inspiration to me once I ran out of novel ways to write, "we went to Nebraska and played music and had a good time.  But then- look out!  Car trouble!"  So when the blurbs for like half of these songs have nothing to do with the song itself, consider that my salute to the roughly twenty Deadspin staffers who were ordered to stick to sports and replied, "why don't you stick to go fuck yourself?"

Modern English – I Melt With You:
When you first-dance to a song at your wedding, it gets included on your end-of-decade playlist.  I don't make the rules.

Muse – Madness:
I'm sad that football is almost over, but if we live in a just universe then at least the end of this season will also bring us the end of those insufferable Amazon "catch probability" ads.  Playing any sport at the professional level is already mystifyingly difficult- that's a big part of the appeal.  We don't need a commercial telling us an impressive thing is more impressive because it only had a 6% chance of happening (a probability that the ad above describes as “impossible,” despite being literally the opposite of impossible).  Besides, there's no way that system of calculation is adequate.  The commercials show some of the variables involved in calculating catch probability- factors like the distance the ball travels in the air, or the amount of separation between the receiver and the defender- but a reception in football is an unfathomable symphony of minute mechanics and butterfly-effect causality.  Any number of imperceptible factors- a twitch in the quarterback's footwork, a shift of the wind, a bead of sweat on a receiver's fingertips- could be enough to differentiate two ostensibly identical plays.  There are too many variables.  Catch probability is a needless attempt to quantify something that neither can nor should be quantified.  We don't need football midichlorians.  Just say “wow, that was cool” and move on.

The Revivalists – Wish I Knew You:
I struggled with whether or not to include any of our own music on this playlist, because while I love our music and I'm proud of what we do, you have a different relationship to music when it's yours.  If you hooked me up to an EEG and had it map out my brainwaves while I was listening to randomly selected music versus music by my own band- particularly our most well-known and ubiquitous song- I guarantee you'd get completely different results.  Nevertheless, I felt the story of my 2010s wouldn't be complete without The Song That Changed Everything.  I'm not saying we wouldn't or couldn't have gotten to where we are today without WIKY (yes, we use the acronym internally, it's canon), but, in the world of things that actually happened- the world where I got to sell out Red Rocks and open for the Rolling Stones and play the 100 Club and watch Bob Saget make a dick joke on our stage and hang a platinum record on my wall- those things wouldn't have happened the way they did without the moonshot success of this song.  If this playlist is a story, then “Wish I Knew You” is a chapter unto itself.

The Who – Baba O'Riley:
Sometime early in the decade, a friend asked me what was my all-time favorite song, and I waffled.  I just couldn't think of a straight answer to give him.  A little while later, I realized it was “Baba O'Riley.”  A year or two after that, we covered it.  I learned the violin solo note-for-note on alto sax.  It became a staple for a while.  We played it at Voodoo Fest.  We hit it for an encore one time at the Paradise Rock Club in Boston and just about ripped the place in half.  I love this job.

River City Extension – Friends and Family:
(Ed. note:  this is the first of two songs on this playlist that wasn't available on Spotify, so the title above is a YouTube link.)  When we first started touring, there were a hundred bands, all of them just as young and hungry and friendly as us.  We shared highways and stages and dingy green rooms.  Now, ten years down the road, some of them are still grinding it out in vans.  Some had pretty much the exact same trajectory that we did.  A few (like the Alabama Shakes, who hilariously opened for us in Tuscaloosa one time) blasted off and never looked back.  But many of them hung up their cleats years ago.  It would be blasphemous for me to compare anything about my job to serving in the military, particularly since most of the people I'm talking about just like, had kids and got day jobs. But when I remember the sheer volume of promising, or, as was the case with New Jersey octet River City Extension, downright fantastic bands that just couldn't, wouldn't, or didn't make it work (for reasons that were never lack of talent), I can't help thinking of an old cliché: “we lost a lot of good men out there.”

Foxy Shazam – Oh Lord:
There's this whole playbook now where comedians can spend half an hour complaining about how you "can't say" this or that anymore and then spend another half hour saying all of the things they just got done complaining that they can't say anymore.  I'm over it.  The whole "oh, sorry did I... OFFEND YOU??????" thing is just beyond tired.  There's nothing brave about painting by numbers, especially when it's the same faux edgelord routine that got Carlos Mencia eye-rolled out of the limelight fifteen years ago.  Dave Chappelle and Bill Burr are fantastic entertainers, but isn't it a bit disingenuous for guys like them to moan about how hard it is to do their jobs under the oppressive shadow of politically correct cancel culture when you can find all of their latest work on Netflix- a platform that shelled out millions of dollars to produce these specials- by typing "politically incorrect" into the search bar?  There's still a huge market for these guys, and we all know it.  Hell, I liked Sticks and Stones, for the most part.

Don't get me wrong- comedy is inherently difficult.  Soul-crushing, even.  With the exception of tour-managing an eight-person band, it's probably the single hardest job in all of show business.  But that has always been true, and it's not because of political correctness.  If anything, the toothless overreactions of bed-wetting PC scarecrows are probably making comedy easier.  They're certainly making this subset of comedians lazier.  The fact that Chappelle can't muster somebody more downtrodden than Kevin Hart- literally the most bankable comedian on earth- to use as a poster child for the victims of cancel culture should tell you just how hard it is out there in this brave new world.

Political correctness may very well have overplayed its hand, but the thing a lot of people seem to miss is that that hand is, like, a pair of threes at best.  The "PC police" are never going to kick down your door and arrest you, because they can't do that.  They aren't the actual police.  Nobody's rights are being violated here.  Criticism isn't censorship. Free speech isn't wilting just because certain groups of people finally feel safe and accepted enough that they can live in the open and be themselves and even raise their voices from time to time.  I, for one, am thrilled that more and more people are choosing to participate in a culture of empathy.  Other people's feelings kick ass.

Michael Brecker – Delta City Blues:
Over the years, our workflow in the studio has shaken out to where I end up with a lot of time to kill.  When we were tracking "Gold to Glass" and "Wish I Knew You," I used that time trying to learn the head to this song, because it's A) rad, and more important B) stupidly complicated, employing a challenging series of overtones and vertical leaps to outline harmony and melody simultaneously on an instrument where that's supposed to be impossible.  It took me about four days to get 21 seconds of music under my fingers, and it was well worth it.  To this day it's still a tremendous workout and one of my favorite tunes to boot.

The Early November – I Want to Hear You Sad (Acoustic):
I was never an emo kid in high school.  On the contrary, my friends and I used to roll our eyes at those raging scenesters with their asymmetrical jet-black coifs and their crate-loads of eyeliner and the petty melodramas that played out on their red text/black background xXx~*~myspace~*~xXx pages.  But I could appreciate the music.  At its best, emo music is just relatable stories about heartbreak that feel cathartic to belt in the shower.  At its worst, it espouses a particular attitude- an unhealthy mix of slavish devotion and searing resentment- which is invariably directed at some nameless, faceless woman.  I won't denounce an entire musical genre as some kind of misogynist gateway drug any more than I would blame video games for gun violence.  (PRO TIP: If they have it in Japan, it doesn't cause mass shootings.)  But the underbelly of emo does dovetail with the concept of the “toxic nice guy.”  That's why I appreciated it as a teenager.

I've been a Nice Guy.  Not like, just a person who is nice to other people, but rather the manipulative, unwarranted “nice” that is only done as part of a presumed transaction.  I could be nice, but only to the extent that it is nice to shovel the snow out of someone's driveway without them asking and then ring their doorbell and demand payment.  I mistook tepidity and requisite human decency for an engaging, actualized personality.  I harbored obsessions.  I never went off the deep end like this guy, but I did in my younger days shoot off a handful of florid late-night texts.  I internalized several tenets of Nice Guy-ism:  “I'm stuck in the friend zone.”  “Girls only go for douchebags who don't respect them like I do.”  According to David Wong, who articulates some of the forces at play here in the first section of this oddly substantive listicle, “there are two ways to dehumanize someone: by dismissing them, and by idolizing them.”  At its worst, emo does both.  So did I.  I'm not proud of that, but it's the truth.

What happened?  How did I make the face-turn from borderline incel to virtue-signaling Online Male Feminist?  I don't really know.  I've got a handful of false-start drafts on this topic, dating back at least a few years.  It's hard to write about it.  It's not that it's revealing, or because it paints me in an unflattering light- it's just hard to connect all the dots and put everything in order.  I'm sure Amazon Web Services could dream up some half-assed algorithm to computate Nice Guy Probability(tm) as a factor of bashfulness, media consumption, teenage rejection, and forehead size, but in the real world, the Toxic Nice Guy is both symptom and disease in a sprawling ecosystem of feedback loops and co-mingling power structures with no beginning and no end.  I do think that a lot of this stuff boils down to internal well-being.  It's probably not a coincidence that my Nice Guy-ism began to taper off around the time I went to college and started becoming a broader and more confident individual.

Anyway.  It feels weird to talk about my bitter, heartstruck days when I've been in the same wonderful, nourishing relationship for almost half of my entire life, which I suppose begs the question: what the hell is this song doing here?  Sure, it's nice to revisit the days of teenage emotionalism when every drop of rain was a monsoon and everything MATTERED, but I think the reason this song stuck to me is that it's not just another tale of spiteful binge drinking and reductive sexual politics.  It's about owning your mistakes- whether those mistakes are internal or external, shared or individual, action or worldview- and moving past them.  Maybe I'm just keeping it as a reminder that who you were yesterday doesn't have to determine who you become tomorrow.  That no person is above taking a wrong turn.  That no person is a lost cause.  That you can come close to the edge of some very dark places- even step over- and still find your way back to the light.

Maybe it's just stuck in my head.

Trampled by Turtles – Wait So Long:
This probably isn't the greatest song ever written.  But it's a damn good one, and for my money, it may well be the greatest recording of music in all existence.  Brilliant, desperate lyrics meet a furious performance full of blistering violin solos and breakneck chords.  It's the perfect marriage. 

Avicii – Wake Me Up:
Every couple of years, someone will put out a fist-pumping club banger like this one and, for reasons I can't really explain, I'll project a deeper meaning onto it than “we're young and horny, everybody taste some alcohol.”  Given Avicii's tragic end, the sentiments here- of being overwhelmed, of sleepwalking through one's own existence- feel very real.  A stellar vocal performance from Aloe Blacc certainly doesn't hurt.

Mal Blum – New Orleans:
I don't like this song because it's named after New Orleans.  It's not even about New Orleans.  It's just beautiful, and devastating, and really good.

Blackway & Black Caviar – What's Up Danger:
I don't know if it's just because I watched it on a transatlantic flight, but Spider Man: Into the Spider-Verse hit me pretty hard.  It's such a vibrant, kinetic film, and it carries a beautiful, timely message about inclusion and diversity without getting too heavy-handed or losing its sense of self-awareness.  I got misty-eyed several times, including the scene set to this banger.  IT'S A LEAP OF FAITH, MILES

Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue – Suburbia:
Our good friend Ben Ellman's producer cred reached critical mass in 2010 with the release of Trombone Shorty's Grammy-nominated crossover album Backatown, as well as his own band's Ya-Ka-May.  Impressed with his clear mastery over the dark forces of studio tricknology (to use an old Dr. John-ism), we approached Ben to produce City of Sound, thus setting a number of things in motion: opening tours with Galactic, David's various collaborations, Men Amongst Mountains, that time we were playing Vertex Festival and Ben trolled the comments section of the livestream during our set...  Good times.

Every once in a while you'll hear something about how our government should be run more like a business, and how businesspeople are therefore best-suited to the role of governance.  The logic behind it is certainly enticing: CEOs, entrepreneurs, captains of industry- these people are the living embodiment of the American Dream.  They work hard, they trim fat, they don't abide nonsense.  They know how to make stuff work.  If being good at America makes you a Good American, then successful businesspersons must be the best Americans.

But that's exactly what makes your everyday billionaire a poor fit for office.  A person who has achieved that level of success with things as they are is going to be invested- both figuratively and literally- in keeping things the way they are.  They're not going to move the needle if it means reaching into their own pockets.  I'm all for rethinking our government, but there are better ways to rethink our government than “grant Amazon 501(c)(3) status.”  That's why we don't need a CEO running the country- we need a record producer. 

A record producer is a true outsider.  Perhaps the greatest value of a producer is their ability to cut through “demo-itis,” which is a tendency bands and songwriters have to get stuck on the idea that a song has to be the way it is because they've heard it and played it that way a hundred million bajillion times.  A good producer has keen sensibilities and, above all, a fresh perspective.  They aren't afraid to make tough choices.  They'll tweak the structure of a song to make it more impactful.  They'll ask if you really need that second verse.  They'll tell you when not to play.  This process can be painful, but it's how good songs- songs that, though flawed, come from a place of truth and love- turn into great songs.  If you let yourself get hung up on “that's how it was written” or “it's always been this way,” then you're just gonna end up wasting a lot of tape.

What I'm saying is Ben Ellman should be President.

Snarky Puppy – Lingus (featuring Chris Potter):
As with “Friends and Family,” the title up above is a link to a YouTube video, because, as far as I know, that's the only place this exists.  The Revivalists have a long, warm history with Snarky Puppy, and they're one of my favorite bands out there.  But more importantly, Chris Potter's work here is beyond reproach.  I know it would be hipper to cite something lyric and tasteful, or a piece by one of the Great Old Masters, but, truth be told, this is probably my single favorite piece of saxophone work.  It goes way beyond Potter's technical aeronautics.  His improvisation, which comprises the entire length of this almost nine-minute video, has the taut pacing of a Chuck Palahnuik novel.  There's such a clear sense of movement and shape and intent to that it never feels boring or wanky.  Just thinking about this solo makes me play better.  While we're here, here's an extremely rough and non-comprehensive all-saxophone decade list (featured saxophonist in parentheses if not title artist):

Ellis Marsalis – Cochise (Branford Marsalis)
Tower of Power – Back on the Streets Again (Skip Mesquite)
Astral Project – Too Close for Comfort (Tony Dagradi)
James Carter – Freedom Jazz Dance (Live at Baker's Keyboard Lounge)
The Brecker Brothers – Not Ethiopia (Michael Brecker)
Kamasi Washington – Final Thought
Bruce Springsteen – Jungleland (Clarence Clemons)
Ben Webster – Stardust
Matt Garrison – When Eyes Meet
Johnny Griffin – Mil Dew
Maria Schneider – Home (Donny McCaslin)
Michael Brecker – Delta City Blues
Dave Matthews Band – #41 (Listener Supported) (LeRoi Moore)
Herbie Hancock, Michael Brecker & Roy Hargrove – Naima (Michael Brecker.  What can I say?  Brecker was the GOAT)
Pharoah Sanders – You've Got to Have Freedom
Matt Harris – Cherokee (unknown)
Kyle Eastwood – Café Calypso (Graeme Blevins)
Frank Mantooth Jazz Orchestra – Wichita Lineman (Steve Eisen)
Blue Cranes – Everything Is Going to Be Okay (Joe Cunningham)
Happy Apple – Western Motel Girl (Michael Lewis)
Brad Walker – Towers
Whatever the fuck this is
Snarky Puppy feat. Chris Potter - Lingus

Brandi Carlile – The Story:
Fun fact: This is the newest (to me, at least) song on this list.  Compared to stuff I was really into ten years ago, I found it much harder to evaluate music that only recently came into my orbit.  People have an innate thirst for novelty- that's why it's so easy to get addicted to internet porn or fresh Apple products- so it can be hard to gauge what's just exciting because it's new to me versus what will stand the test of time.  This one feels safe though.  I mean, come on.

The Pogues – The Body of an American:
This song, which makes for a significant repeated punctuation mark in The Wire, meant a lot me at the outset of the decade.  It was a transitional period- I had so many notions and longings and preconceptions about how my life would look or who I would be, and in retrospect, it's clear that I was feeling a lot of push and pull between the need to dip my toes into Grown-Up World and the desire to recede into that hazy collegiate existence when I was beholden to no one and free to be- at times, even celebrated for being- an absolute moron.  Time sucks.  It's frustrating having to exist on a one-way-track.  The things you regret doing, the things you regret not doing, the things you wonder about- some of them don't ever go away.  They're as much a part of you as the things you're proud to have done and the mistakes you were wise (or lucky) enough to avoid making.  I think part of growing up is accepting those things for what they are and learning to carry them.

Tom Waits – Come On Up to the House:
Play this song at my funeral.

King Britt & Sister Gertrude Morgan – Precious Lord Lead Me On:
Brace yourselves.  What follows is my absolute, number one, nuclear-bomb-Chernobyl-Hindenburg of a take.  My final attack.  Here it comes:

Toilet seat covers are grosser than just sitting your bare ass on a public toilet.

I'm not sure why this is true, but I have some theories.  It could just be that the covers themselves- the texture, the material- are somehow inherently repellent.  It's also possible that it's a Wile E. Coyote situation.  You know how he'll run off the edge of a cliff, and everything is fine until he looks down and realizes there's no ground underneath him?  It's like when you try to defuse an uncomfortable situation by saying “awk-waaarrrd,” only to make it worse by pointing it out.  The toilet seat cover is an extra reminder that you're in an inherently gross place.  And it's supposed to keep that gross off of your butt, but instead it just puts the gross inside your head.  It could also be the waste factor.  The new New Orleans airport has these futuristic toilet seats that cycle in a fresh cellophane cover with the push of a button, which is an extraordinary waste of money, plastic, and electricity in exchange for a borderline nonexistent hygienic benefit.  Not to mention that unless the lid- a feature most public toilets don't even have- is closed every time the toilet is flushed, literally every inch of every public restroom is covered in feces- as are you, your home, your car, your lunch, everything you own, everyone you love, and all the rest of the world.  Best to just make peace with it and get on with your shitty life.

Eliza Rickman & Jherek Bischoff – Riches and Wonders:
Do we have female equivalent to “guy?”  Like, if you're talking about just kind of a generic person, roughly your age, some so-and-so, what word do you use?  “Woman” seems too formal- like, calling a driver who honked at me for backing into a parallel parking space “some woman” makes me think of a fop with a pencil-thin moustache who's positively affronted because someone had the nerve to scoff at his cravat in the tea room.  Intuitively, I would think to just use “girl,” which was probably codified somewhat by its use in the title of popular-ish ABC sitcom Two Guys, a Girl, and a Pizza Place (which was later shortened to Two Guys and a Girl after the pizza place bowed out over creative differences).  But “girl” has a lot of baggage (the reason this is on my mind is that I was recently corrected for defaulting to it in this context).  There just isn't a middle option.  There isn't a “guy.”  The English language is missing a word.

Sigur Rós – Starálfur:
I got to see Sigur Ros when they came through here in the summer of 2017.  It was a totally spontaneous thing- I happened to walk by the Saenger Theatre the afternoon of the show and notice their name on the marquee.  It was really powerful to see this song live, because it had already held a special place in my heart for many years.  Like two days later I was going through a list of potential songs the string duo at our wedding could play during the procession, and this one was on it, to my deep excitement.

Side note: for such a haunting song, the lyrics (at least according to whatever English translations I could find) are pretty underwhelming.  Maybe something just gets lost in translation, but I think it's also possible that Jon Thor Birgisson was using language in Gertrude Stein-ish sort of way, where it's not about the definitions of the words, but rather the sonic texture created by their syllables and phonemes.  After all, these guys abandoned language altogether on their very next album.

The Beatles – I've Got a Feeling:
2013's year-end playlist was named after a line from this song's outtro: "everybody had a good year."  It was half-ironic.  2013 was The Year We Played All The Festivals.  We were deep in it: long tours, really getting to know the festival scene- it was also the year we got SiriusXM in the van, so I probably spent well over a thousand hours listening to Jam On (which is why this slot came embarrassingly close to going to Phish's “Prince Caspian” instead).  We went on one tour in 2013 where we brushed against all four of the United States' borders: we drove through El Paso and gazed across the Rio Grande, we saw the Pacific Ocean in California, we took a spontaneous detour to Niagara Falls (my phone actually pinged a Canadian cell tower and I had to worry about roaming charges the whole time we were there), and we hit the East Coast before looping home.  In short, 2013 was when our shit started to get real.  It was a true step forward.  But with that progress came real adjustments- there's a certain amount of seasoning and toughening up that you need to survive the road.  We were living out of suitcases, driving overnight, sleeping in sketchy motels and on strangers' floors.  It's easy to romanticize, because it really WAS romantic, in a way, but it was also hard to get used to.  There's a deep homesickness that creeps up when you don't have a sense of anchor.  It put a strain on my home life.  It was a hard year.  It was also one of the best years of my life.  We went to fucking India for some reason.

Joe Cocker – Space Captain:
“Here comes the 'it takes a village' speech,” I thought.

Before the most recent Revheads Ball, we were all clustered in the green room upstairs at Tipitina's.  It's a place we've been countless times in a variety of capacities: waiting on sound check, getting ready to go on, visiting old friends, drinking some other band's beer, laughing, working, primping, shooting a scene for a primetime cop show, and heaven knows what else.  There are a lot of New Orleans musicians who can say this, and I'm proud to count myself among them:  Tipitina's is our Cheers.

The whole band was there, along with most of our significant others, a few close-knit booking/management types, and a handful of assorted friends and family.  George will often be the one to say a few words in commemoration of certain milestones, so when he asked for our attention on the night of this family gathering at the end of a long and eventful decade, I thought I knew more or less what to expect.  Look how far we've come.  Thank you to management and the crew and all the people who keep the gears turning in ways you don't necessarily notice from out front.  We're a family.  It takes a village.  To my abject surprise (and after an agonizing buildup that made it sound like he was going to quit the band), George was actually announcing that he and his wife had a baby on the way.  It was an emotional roller coaster.  He had us going.  And bottles did pop.

It really does take a village, though.

A lot of people called out 2018's Bohemian Rhapsody for being inaccurate, but in one scene, bassist John Deacon (Joseph Mazzello) drops some straight-up truth: "statistically speaking, most bands don't fail.  They break up."  So much of this job is about intimacy and downtime, particularly in the early stages.  I could never count all the the roadside dinner stops, the hours on top of one another in the van, the broom-closet green rooms.  I've been asked a lot of times how we've managed to make it as far as we have, and I really think the most important thing for us is that we found each other- a whole bunch of guys with the same level of commitment and dedication and the ability to get along and love one another and coexist in tight quarters for years on end.  That's rare and special, and if you're trying to make a band work- a true band, rather than a solo artist backed by a revolving door of hired guns- chemistry is just as important as talent, if not more so.  I don't think you can really say there's a “formula” to lasting success in this industry.  But for us, a big part of it has just been about keeping turbulence in perspective (there's always turbulence) and staying friends.  Family.  A village.

That's it.  Good luck in the coming decade.  Keep it together, everybody.