(LOOTPRESS) – Led by brothers Alex and Ben Morrison, San Francisco string band The Brothers Comatose have been forging a distinct path in American music for well over a decade.
With their unique, genre-bending takes on both original and classic material, The Brothers Comatose offer a strikingly effective blend of traditional and modern elements which coalesce into a sound all their own. Less than a year after the release of 2023’s Ear Snacks, the West Coast outfit is touring around the country and is already in the process of recording new material for a follow-up.
Singer, songwriter, and guitarist Ben Morrison took time to chat with LOOTPRESS ahead of the upcoming Brothers Comatose performance at Mountain Stage, scheduled to take place this month. During that conversation, the musician discussed songwriting, musical influences, the impact of streaming in the industry, and much more. The exchange can be seen below.
You came up in a musical family, as is often the case with these sort of sibling sets, sort of like the Van Halen Kings of Leon dynamic. You guys come up together and ultimately form a group and you guys landed stylistically pretty close to the traditional roots of the stuff you heard as kids. But often that there’s a certain deviation from that during like the teen years, the angsty years. What sort of stuff were you cutting your teeth on at that time, and how has it informed or sort of lent a certain flavor to what you guys do now?
You know, it’s funny right? I feel like you grow up listening to the music that your parents listened to generally, in the early years. Our parents were musicians and in bands, and doing harmony singing like Crosby, Stills and Nash, that folky kind of stuff. That was amazing, that’s kind of what got our feet wet a little bit when we were kids. Because we would just sit and watch our mom and her band rehearse. Then, as we got a little bit older like you’re saying through the teen years, I was going through all sorts of stuff, and my brother too.
[It was] more grungy stuff we were listening to. I think I was listening to Soundgarden and things like that. We all went through different phases of all sorts. It wasn’t just like grunge stuff. We were probably listening to Red Hot Chili Peppers and Sublime and stuff at the time. Whatever newer stuff that rocked harder than the stuff our parents were listening to, basically. We listened to that kind of stuff for a long time and then eventually formed a band and started singing harmonies and playing folkier type music again. So, kind of going full circle, which I think is kind of a natural progression.
I can kind of hear that. It’s like hyper-charged bluegrass almost. Like the energy of the 90s. I can pick that up.
BM: Yeah, a little bit of rock’n’roll in there, I guess. Totally.
I wanted to talk a bit about the recent project, Ear Snacks, which was done sort of DIY style – kind of throwing up some mics, getting musicians together and seeing what sticks. You drew some parallels, not necessarily stylistically, but process-wise between that record and Kind of Blue – Miles Davis, obviously perhaps the most highly regarded commercial jazz album ever. That’s a really neat dynamic. They say Miles would like to keep his guys on their toes – almost like Bob Dylan.
They say he’d come in with like little pieces of paper and pass them to the musicians [and say] “here’s your part,” and it’s just like a set of [chord] changes. What was that process like, and was it a distinct deviation from the way you normally do things? I don’t see you guys obsessing over autotune and perfection, but how far off the usual path was that recording process?
Yes, that’s a great question. It’s funny because I think I’d heard a podcast recently about one of Tom Waits’ guitar players and talking about – I don’t know if it was Bone Machine or Mule Variations – one of Tom Waits’ albums and the process. He just gets really good musicians and then they get like one or two takes and then that’s it. It’s like, before they get a chance to think about it too much or develop their part too much, he kind of wants… not a childlike, but like a simplified version of what you would normally do.
Like an instinctual response.
Totally. Keep it simple; don’t overthink it; if the performer or the musicians are good and well-practiced, then, hopefully anything that comes out is going to be cool, and maybe you just want that raw performance and it’ll have the most feeling and thoughtlessness to it. But that record was not intended to be a record. [The Brothers Comatose] were getting together and making collaboration videos at the time.
It was all just meant to be video with pretty good sound, basically. We were outside in different areas and gradually inside. and we’d set up – sometimes just one mic, sometimes it’s like four or five mics just going into a Zoom recorder – and it was just intended to be [a case of] mix it together then slap it on video and then release the video. So, we never thought about it as a recording or release or anything like that.
I think that really kind of made some magic because we weren’t thinking about perfection. We weren’t worried about anything like nailing it or “oh, we have to do that again. I messed up on this part.” We just kind of rolled with some mistakes and that was just a really beautiful thing. Then eventually we’re like, “oh, these turned out really good. Let’s put a few of them together and release a record.” It was a record that wasn’t really supposed to be a record that ended up sounding awesome. There’s some sort of magic to not caring that much, I guess.
For sure! It’s almost cliche, but it bears repeating that a lot of the best stuff just comes about organically that way. I’ve heard those stories about [Bob] Dylan too. He’ll do a take and then come back and, for take two, the song is in a different key or he’s just radically changed the tempo, and [it’s like] “how do we keep up with this?” So, I guess you have to be sharp in those situations.
Yeah, wow. I didn’t hear about that. That’s pretty funny, though. I like that.
You’ve done some solo work. Which, it’s not uncommon for members of bands to sort of explore those avenues. Every artist seems to have their own motivations behind that. What would you say is the biggest difference creatively in your approach to that material and the material with the Brothers Comatose?
Well, it was a difficult time with the band. I think as any band goes, there’s bumps in the road and things like that. We had a little shake up in personnel at the time and didn’t really know what the future was going to hold for the band. Our bass player and mandolin player left the band right around the same time, and I think, for me personally, I just kind of needed to do something completely different. I had some other friends that were drummers, bass players, and electric guitar players. I [was] like, “I kind of want to play some loud rock ‘n’ roll and just do something that doesn’t sound anything like The Brothers Comatose.”
It was great! It was really freeing, and I didn’t know what that project was going to hold as far as the future of it or anything like that. But it was a really cathartic process. I think I just needed to get some of that stuff out and it was really nice. I did some shows and did some touring, and now I have that. I still have that record and it was really fun, and I can do those shows every once in a while.
But as far as The Brothers Comatose goes, we found some really great bass and mandolin players that joined the band and we kind of started that back up again. It felt really good, so we just kept pursuing that. The solo thing isn’t really happening right now, especially because I’ve got two kids and a full-time band in The Brothers Comatose, and I also play in a band with my wife, like a folk duo.
Nice!
Yeah man, I’ve got my hands full currently, which is awesome. That’s kind of the best place to be.
It’s a good problem to have, for sure.
Yeah, absolutely.
I stumbled upon some video of you guys with Grahame Lesh – son of Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh. You guys did some Dead tunes, and that made a lot of sense to me because I feel like there are a lot of parallels between you guys and the Dead in that you write this great, original material, but you’re equally adept at churning out these thoughtful interpretations that take existing songs to entirely new places, almost the way the jazz guys would approach interpreting a standard back in the 40s and 50s. What is your relationship with the music of the Grateful Dead? Do you go deep? Are you digging through bootleg shows? Is it more of a general appreciation? Because it’s not an easy thing to wrap your head around, necessarily. It took me many years to fully appreciate it.
You know, I do have an appreciation for the Grateful Dead. It’s like it’s in my DNA, being from the Bay Area. I mean even our band got its start on Haight Street in San Francisco, just a couple blocks from Haight Ashbury. We lived on 8th Street and that’s where we would have all of our early band rehearsals. The Grateful Dead is like the Bay Area music, so it’s definitely in there.
But I never did a deep dive. I definitely appreciate it and I know a lot of Grateful Dead stuff. I’ve played a bunch of Grateful Dead music and had the super great fortune to play with Phil Lesh and Bob Weir on stage a couple times and Grahame Lesh. It’s so awesome to be from the Bay and have that music be from here. But I haven’t gone down the rabbit hole of listening to1973 and you know, and I’m trying to just drop at like a live show or something like that. I’m sure it will come someday, but it hasn’t yet.
That’s how I feel. It gets you when it gets yet. I didn’t understand it at all, and I became one of those obsessives. Not to be that guy but ‘73-’74 is where it’s at.
Okay cool! Well, I know it’s coming. I know it’s coming someday, and the light bulb will flip on. But as far as the cover thing too, I feel like they did a lot of the same kind of thing. They wrote some great, great songs. It’s almost like some of those old standards or some old folk songs or bluegrass songs or things like that, that are just part of their lexicon too. I feel the same way, man. It’s just like, there’s so much good music out there. I know some people like just don’t even want to touch covering songs.
I don’t know, the way that I grew up with music and my brother who plays banjo in [The Brothers Comatose], it was just like we would sit around in the living room, my parents would throw music parties and all their musician friends would come over and they would just pass songs around and be like, “oh, let’s do that; this song; this Dylan song; this Grateful Dead song, it’s in G and it goes like this.”
We would all just do it and sing it and sing, trying to sing harmonies on the spot. It was just a magical thing and it felt like such a natural way for music to be communicated. We never studied music. I took some guitar lessons and things like that, but that felt like such a pure way to share music and I guess that whole ideal just continues on through our band.
We just take music that we like, and we learn it and we play it just for fun, for practice, for studying things that we really like, and for collaborating with other people. I love that aspect. I love collaborations and I love learning about music, the history of music, how it’s created, what makes it special, and what makes it interesting to me. That just feels like a natural thing to do.
That’s so cool! It’s really beneficial to have that type of exposure, and I feel like it’s something that maybe younger folks with the Internet and stuff are missing these days. Because it’s not – you hear or see or take in what’s available – Everything is so hyper-personalized and it’s exactly what you want in the moment. Whereas before, it was like whatever is on TV, whatever is on the radio, and it created a sort of broader range of influences I feel like, for artists coming up in those times.
Totally, yeah! It’s like when you have access to everything all the time. It almost narrows your focus a little bit because there are so many choices that it’s really hard to focus on one particular thing. I was thinking about it too, because we have a 3-and-a-half-year-old and we’re trying to keep her off screens as much as we can. We got her this old-school Fisher-Price cassette player and got her some books on tape and some different records and things like that and.
She just listens to the same thing over and over and over and over and over again. I noticed that, when I go on Spotify, I’m like, “oh, I listened to that record last week or I listened to that thing already. I’m going to find something else.” So, I don’t dig in as deep as I used to when I had fewer options, and I think that might be kind of detrimental. I mean, it’s a beautiful thing to have access to anything, to everything ever created at the tip of your fingers. But also, it’s like I don’t have the same connections with certain records because there are so many choices. There is a beauty in limitations, I guess.
100%. Not too long ago I started buying CD’s again because I had a car with a CD player which has since broken. So, I would be limited to the five CDs in my console. So, it’s not like, “what do I want to listen to from the entire universe of recorded music?” It’s like, “which of these five speaks to me the most right now?” And you find different things that way. It’s really neat.
Yeah, and you really dig in and it’s like you can connect on a deeper level with artists because you’re really like digging in and really paying attention instead of kind of glossing over.
It’s like how you form friendships with people you go to school with because it’s like, “we’re both stuck in this building together.”
Kind of, dude, yeah! That’s a great analogy. I like that.
But on the subject of family, in my experience, becoming a dad really revealed to me just how little perspective I had on everything. Did becoming a dad affect your creative process at all?
Well, it’s kind of hard to say, I guess, A big part of it is time, right? Now that I am a dad and I have two kids and I, I have very little free time when I’m not touring and things like that. So, I have to be very, very particular about what I do, when I do it, and how quickly I do it, because there’s not a whole lot of it. I think that made me a little more…precise about it maybe? It’s like, “okay I’m sitting, I have 20 minutes to work, like to start a song and I need to get creative. [I need to] put myself in the zone and really and dig in because I have a cut-off.”
Yeah, there’s not a lot of waiting around for inspiration. It shows you what you can get done with an hour or whatever it is.
And dude, I have never been more productive in a short amount of time than since I’ve become a dad. It really does help because it gives you that perspective. But also, you have to learn how to work on very little sleep, which is hard. It’s hard to do, man.
Coffee is your friend!
Oh, big time, big time! I drink a lot of it.
The Brothers Comatose are coming out this way to play Mountain Stage out in Charleston. Have you all been out of this way before?
We have! We did Mountain Stage years ago, probably six or seven years ago. It’s been a long time and I’m looking forward to doing it again.
It’s funny, you guys are from out west. But musically, I feel like you fit right in with the vibe here. I’ve been putting folks on to your stuff and, if you guys play “Feathered Indians” I bet it kills. Because people love [Tyler] Childers out here.
I love Tyler Childers! Yeah, we have covered that before. But yeah dude, we’ve been touring a lot and kind of find a lot of our people are out there. It’s been like a super nice, very warm welcome to come out east and to the south and stuff. It’s great! It just kind of goes hand in hand.
Nice! You got some shows lined up; about to hit the road. What is next for the Brothers Comatose? Have you got anything in the can as far as new material, or are you just taking it as it comes?
Oh yeah, we have. We’ve been in the studio here and there. It’s a little bit hard to get studio stuff done right now because our band is kind of spread out. Our fiddle player lives in Mexico, our mandolin player lives in L.A. and the rest of us are in the Bay Area. But we have been in the studio, and we’ve got four tracks that are being mixed right now. We’re going to get in the studio in the next month or two and finish out a record, I believe. Then, who knows how long it’ll take to finish that and get it mixed? But we’ll start releasing tracks in the next month or two.
Awesome, man. It’s been an absolute pleasure. Thanks so much for taking the time!
Thank you for having me, I appreciate it!
Good talking to you! Best of luck to you guys on future endeavors with the new record, the new shows. Looking forward to the new Brothers Comatose material.
Thanks a lot man, I appreciate it.
