Beginning as an offshoot of the mighty Spock’s Beard, Pattern-Seeking Animals have truly grown into their own with the release of their third record Only Passing Through. John Boegehold, Ted Leonard, Jimmy Keegan, and Dave Meros have put together what is sure to be one of the best albums of the year and cemented their place in the upper echelon of modern progressive rock. Keyboardist and songwriter John Boegehold recently made a return trip to the site to talk about the record and more.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacedStraws.com Conversation with John Boegehold –
On if the record released now is the same as when he began writing it two years ago – Kind of, because at that point, I had written most of the material that I thought was gonna be the album. I don’t believe we had recorded any of the drum tracks yet, so it was still in demo form, and by demo form, that’s the actual songs, but we build them up as we go. So what happened was when the pandemic hit, obviously there’s a lot of things just scheduling that got really tricky, so it took us a little while longer to be able to get into the studio, record drums, get everything done here, a lot of technical issues getting people together, not together, but at least getting tracks together in writing and all sorts of the usual stuff that you hear from probably most musicians. So in the time, it gave us a little more time, so I wrote a few more songs and refine some of the sounds and a couple more influences in there. A lot of the songs are the same, but there was a few more added, maybe it changed some of the influences and textures and things like that as it went by, just because I had more time to mess around and experiment with stuff. 1:00
On if the pandemic was an influence on his lyric writing – No, it really wasn’t. I made a conscious effort to not put anything that was influenced by Covid and the pandemic. Because I just figured, there’s gonna be millions and millions of musicians writing, and I’m not interested in listening to any of their stories, and it’s nothing personal, but I just don’t care. So what, “Oh yeah, you were stuck in your house for a few months”, tell me something that doesn’t happen to everybody. I’m just not interested in hearing that stuff, so I made it a point, not to write about that. But with Pattern Seeking Animals from the beginning, I always am fascinated with mortality and death, and again, not in a morbid way, like you said, but just because it’s a part of life and there’s so many mysteries about it. On Prehensile Tales, the whole epic “Life Boat”, that was what it was about. So I tend to gravitate toward that topic because it’s fascinating to me. 2:23
On the album title – I think of the title Only Passing Through, which I liked. I originally had a bunch of song titles, and it came down to Only Passing Through, it’s one of the songs on the album, obviously, and look at some of the lyrics, “Said The Stranger” and then “Time Has a Way”, there’s elements of that “only passing through”, whether it’s a stranger passing on the road or in a Western, a guy passing to an old western town like you hear in the old movies, “Only passing through, Ma’am”. You can use it in a metaphysical sense, whether Hinduism or all the reincarnation elements of religions and things, so there’s lots of interesting angles to mine from that whole concept. 3:37
On the evolution of PSA from a Spock’s offshoot to its own band – You have to ask the other guys on that, I believe they are, because that’s where the focus is at this point. To me, I’ve always been doing my own thing, and it’s funny because someone asked me the same thing, “Is this is the side project of Spock’s Beard?”. I said, “Well, no, Spock’s Beard is kind of like a side project to me”. I wasn’t in the band, it was something I did on the side as to all my other stuff and I love doing it and it turned into me writing a lot of music with them. But this is my main vehicle, this is it. The other guys, right now we’re getting set up to play live and they’re all gung ho about it. Spock’s, I just don’t know. They had some things scheduled in like February, maybe right, right around now that were canceled because of the pandemic in Great Britain and one festival, they had to cancel it for the same reason, a lot of people have to cancel things. So, to me, this is the band, this is it. As far as the evolution from the beginning, the first album, because it wasn’t meant to be a band in the beginning, it was a collection of songs, a couple were left over, I had written for Spock’s, and then there was some new stuff which I re-did. Then when the record company was interested, I decided, “Okay, we’re gonna make this an album”, and so I’m happy with the way it turned out. But if it started to be a group and an album, I would have been a little more conscious about the overall group sound. I’m totally happy with the way it turned out, that’s not the issue at all. But then with Prehensile Tales, it was like, “Okay, here we are at the starting point, I have a certain sound in mind and I’m gonna shoot for it”, so you’re right. Not necessarily intended to make it our own identity and not like Spock’s, but there’s just certain things in my mind that I wanted it to sound like. 5:17
On using different instruments and arrangements – First of all, there’s no string sections on this album, there is a violinist, who we used on Prehensile Tales, I love her sound. It was all done remotely because she lives in New York, but again, most of the album was. The other instruments, the trumpet, the same trim trumpet player from Prehensile tales, John Fumo, and he lives locally here in LA, so we just got together at Riches and recorded all his parts on “Time Has a Way”. Aside from that, the other oddball instruments are ones that I played. During the pandemic, I started listening to a lot of Latin American folk and pop, reggaeton, and all that. I just really got into it. I always wanted a charango, which is that little 10 string, it’s kind of a mandolin with nylon strings in five courses, so I found one of those online, I got that, then just some odd instruments I started laying into the tracks. I thought, “Well, this is a cool texture that you don’t necessarily hear”. I had already been playing mandolin on tracks on the other stuff, but it gave a kind of a different vibe, which I think turned out really well. 7:34
On not necessarily writing convention prog songs – I think that actually can be a trap. Because I understand it when you start working with prog music, I’ve been a prog fan for 50 years or whatever, so I know the ins and outs of it, and I think when you’re a band doing that kind of stuff, you think, “Okay, we’ve got to have an epic, we’ve got to have a 20-25 minute song and we gotta have a double album”, or whatever. But my background and my real love us also in pop music. So a song, no matter how long it is, has to flow and there can’t be any dead spots and there can’t be any filler. I think the problem a lot of prog acts get into, from my viewpoint, anyway, is to say, “Okay, we’re gonna write an epic, it’s gonna be 25 minutes long”, and you get up to 25 minutes long, anyone actually listening to it says, “Yeah, it’s 25 minutes long but there’s this whole section which you could easily take out”, which really means it’s not interesting, this song, and you could take 10 minutes out of the song immediately and make it better. I think a lot of people think the sunk-cost fallacy, it’s like throwing good money after bad. It’s like, “Well, I’ve already spent all this time writing that 10-minute section, I don’t wanna get rid of it because I already invested two weeks writing and recording it”. But I think that you have to learn that as a writer and a producer, you have to be able to just be ruthless and cut stuff out, because if you don’t, people are gonna listen and think, “That’s kind of nothing”. So, I think it’s just learning as you go, and luckily, I’ve been fortunate so that I never have writer’s block and I can just write continually. So it’s not a question of having to wait for influence or having to wait for a reason, I just write. I get up every day and I write stuff or do something because I just love it so much. So it’s easy for me to say ,”The Song isn’t working, to the trash bin”, because it’s okay, I’ll write something else. It’s fine. 9:20
On bringing pop sensibilities into prog music – Oh yeah, “It’s Just Another Day at the Beach” is a song I’ve had around for a few years. I wrote it with a friend of mine, who I have written with for 30 years, and mostly country and country-flavored pop. That song started out to be a country thing, but we thought, “Well, it’s turning into a more Beatle-y whatever”. And it was sitting around for a couple of years, and I just wanted to try it, just producing as much of a straight-ahead pop, but interesting song as I could. Because I love pop so much, it’s like when I’m writing for an album, to me, it’s like if it’s good at belongs on the album. When I was writing for Spock’s, I would write something and think, “They’re never gonna do this”. I put blinders on myself, I was like, “Okay, I can’t write stuff like this because this guy won’t wanna do this, and this guy won’t wanna play this”. With me, it’s just whatever. If it sounds good, it is good. And the calculation on that song is whether to put it on the main album or not. Because we had to come up with at least one bonus song, and I was trying to keep the album maximum around 50-52 minutes because I just get tired of long albums, it just drives me crazy these days. I don’t have the patience to listen to them. I went back and forth is putting that one on the main out, but then I thought, “You know what, I’ll just put it on the bonus”, and it’s still a good song, and it’s still there and It’ll work…It’s funny with prog, there’s kind of a love-hate with pop music. A lot of prog guys will just turn up their nose at anything remotely pop, but if you go back and listen to interviews with Yes or Genesis or on the classic groups back then, they would say, “Well, yeah, we all love pop music, we just wanted to expand on it and make it so it’s something different happening”. I remember reading an interview with Jon Anderson, he goes, “Yeah, I was listening toCrosby, Stills, & Nash, and the 5th Dimension, and stuff.” I think what happens with a lot of prog music is because the people writing it in groups, they only listen to prog, so it becomes a bit kind of inbred. It sounds very similar. It may sound great. Some of the greatest stuff I’ve heard has been really derivative of old Gentle Giant or Yes, so I love that kind of stuff, but to really advance, a lot of times I think you need more influences going into the creative hopper 12:15
On the emergence of Ted Leonard as a guitar player – I’ve always loved Ted as a guitar player, and when I would see him in Enchant and then when he was in Spock’s later, there was always another guitar player, there was always the main guy. Ted would occasionally play something in the back, and I would think, “Wow, he’s really good”. Then I would hear him play her stuff and think, “Well, he’s great”, because he has a melodic style, which I really love. He’s a great soloist and comes up with great parts of sounds. So that was one of my main things when forming the band is I wanted him to be both the lead singer and the guitar player, which he was happy with because again, he’s always been behind, he’s been the second guitar player in the band with other great guitar players. That’s the thing, there was no reason for it at the time, but yeah, he gets better and better with each album. You give him parts or give structures and say, “Okay, play something cool here, or play a solo here”, and every solo, I’ve never had to go back to say, “You know, this one didn’t really work”. It’s always the perfect solo. It’s always right, so I’m really happy with that because that’s hard to find. 15:33
On touring – When the pandemic hit, we were gonna be playing at RosFest in Sarasota, Florida, but that was canceled, so now we’re booked for RosFest this year on April 17 and then Cruise To The Edge. So we’re booked on that. I’m not in the live band though, because, for a couple of reasons, one is I’ve never been a real fan of playing live myself, and also I’m just not as good of a player as the other guys. I have trouble playing a lot of the stuff that I’ve written. I think I just look at it like I play enough guitar and keyboards to write with, and then I can make it sound good. But it’s just not really my thing. So we have a couple of guys in addition to Jimmy, Dave, and Ted, two fantastic players in the band, so that’s gonna be pretty cool. 17:13
