2020 has been a make or break year for many artists across the country and in the Charlotte area.
A global pandemic has put the touring industry on hold and local music venues are still closed 7 months into this mess. Many artists are taking some much needed time off, some have been working on new material, and others live streaming shows. At the same time, there are many who are struggling to hold it together. Especially for those that have work tied to the touring side of the music industry.
For Charlotte jam/soul sextet Pluto Gang, plans of finally hitting the road to tour the Southeast vanished in March when things started to take a turn for the worst.
So the band decided to take things into their own hands and pivot their focus and direction.
Keyboardist Joe May decided to dive head first into music production and the gang released 3 singles across all streaming platforms. At the same time, the band convened to the mountains of NC in the spring to start arranging and recording their compositions for what would become their debut album, Better Out Here.
At that point, they realized that things were, in fact, better out there — together, creating music, and discovering their sound.
The album’s upbeat warmth and danceable instrumental sections are woven together through reflective, introspective, sometimes dark, and often cynical subject areas. Perhaps a nod to the late Walter Becker (Steely Dan), master of the tongue-in-cheek.
Better Out Here displays the band’s conglomerated sound, as the pieces draw upon the members’ diverse catalog of influence.
In addition, London-based Alexander Bone, frequent collaborator of Tom Misch and Cory Wong, contributes an enthralling saxophone lead during the bridge of “High Tide”. From the Allman-invoking guitars on “Wildfire”, the sexy, soulful vocal intonations of “Free Time”, to the baião, seven-part Brazilian percussion section in “Window to Your Soul Remains”, the band delivers it’s self- titled, “high-energy jam soul” sound to every listener. A sound unencumbered by the boundaries of genre and relentlessly exciting to hear.
A sound they are excited to finally share with you.
We sat down with Pluto Gang this week ahead of their limited capacity, album release show at Unknown Brewing on November 20th.
Records On The Wall: As a young band, hitting the road for your first tour is always exciting. You guys were planning a tour of the southeast this year and then were hit in the face with a global pandemic, effectively shutting down the touring industry as we know it. How have you guys stayed resilient through all of this while recording this album?
Joe May: In many ways this pandemic has been the best thing that could have happened for the trajectory of the band. When the negative impacts on the music industry started becoming apparent, all we saw was a huge window of opportunity. National bands were no longer able to tour, so local scenes were starving for music. However, at the same time many established local acts went radio silent and opened the doors for us to start grabbing attention online. We saw the gap and jumped straight to producing digital content, releasing music, and getting our name out there. Basically a huge game of catch up so we can do it bigger and better when things resume normalcy. If ever, that is.
ROTW: You mention that live performance and improvisation will always be the north star of the group. Many artists are solely focused on selling as many albums/singles/streams as possible. Why is focusing on the live performance so important to you?
Pat Rogers: For me it’s interacting with the crowd. It’s the adrenaline and excitement that comes when you play in front of people. I look to the musicians who have inspired myself and the band as these great live performers. Furthermore, those moments of witnessing improvisation allow for those rare glimpses of raw creativity. If nothing else it’s an extremely authentic way to attract new fans and spread our brand.
Dillon Crawford: Certain things happen when playing live and preparing to play live that you, as the performer, would never expect. New ideas flow in the moments of improvisation. New jam structures emerge. It’s those happenstance moments that always get recirculated or brought into a song — it’s those magical moments that always form the most memorable moments for me.
JM: @Dillon: I believe Jack Kerouc saw Charlie Parker playing in a club in NYC and called those exact moments, “It”, with a capital I.
ROTW: It’s no secret you guys are well versed in the jam scene and are big fans of Phish, Tedeschi Trucks Band, JRAD, and Goose, among others. You also pull inspiration from younger contemporary artists like Allen Stone and Tom Misch. What is it about that scene and those artists that connect with the band?
Brennan Beck: Music in the jam scene was my first love, and definitely what brought the band together. Improvisation on stage and figuring out how to stretch songs out in different ways is what makes this band fun, so the jam inspiration is definitely a huge part of Pluto Gang.
However, growing up a singer, I pay attention to the vocals in music foremost, which the jam scene did not provide much of until recently (with bands like TTB and Goose). Therefore, I’ve turned to the younger contemporary artists to provide that part of the inspiration. I’ve always been intrigued by vocal harmonies as well, which is what these artists are great at and what I try to incorporate into our style.
I would say personally, my biggest inspiration singing wise comes from gospel/R&B music, which has gravitated towards me listening to artists such as Allen Stone, Frank Ocean, and Stevie Wonder, amongst others. I think the combination of the jam style as well as focusing on good vocals/harmonies is what makes us unique in the jam space.
ROTW: As I write this, your Spotify numbers continue to defy gravity (4 singles with 330,000+ total streams) especially for a relatively unknown high-energy jam soul band from Charlotte. How do you view your streaming numbers on Spotify so far?
JM: It’s weird. We recorded 90% of our first single, “Moggy Oxvine”, in one weekend, in my bedroom. Then about two weeks after we put it out, Spotify just picked it up and ran with it. Discover Weekly suddenly started blasting that song into ears around the world and just started a positive feedback loop which hasn’t slowed down. It’s really cool when we get messages from Italy, Australia, etc. of someone saying they loved the song and wanted to know when we are putting out more. If anything it’s all just further incentive to refine the craft and put more out there.
Wood Britton: Definitely cool to see. There will always be people that don’t like our tunes, but you got to think that somewhere, at any given point, one of these tunes might have helped brighten up someone’s day. That’s enough reward for me.
ROTW: Take us into the actual recording of the album. You got together to record and arrange in the mountains of NC but were all of the songs written at that point or did some still need to be fleshed out?
WB: The purpose of this trip was to aggregate our individual ideas into the “Pluto Gang Sound”. One of the great parts of composition and collective input is the organic evolution of pieces. Good example: “Wildfire” was a song I actually wrote six or so years ago. It was an acoustic piece with a banjo. The only similarity at this point are the lyrics, general progression, and meaning of the song. We tracked the skeleton of the track in the mountains and spent 6 months perfecting it and evolving it to what ended up on the album. Everything from the solos to the harmonic inflection of Dillon’s annoying voice were tracked repeatedly until that framework evolved into our final cut.
Interestingly enough, the first solo and outro solo on the recording were tracked about 5 months apart. Hopefully we can sneak another mountain weekend this February. I’m pumped to see what else can be created out of these future sessions.
DC: All but one song was fully written, with demos recorded, going into that first trip to the mountains, so we had a pretty good idea of structure at that point. However, we had only played three of those songs together, so there was a cool period that followed where the band got to really shape the compositions that everyone brought forward. The final writing for “Window to Your Soul Remains” was finished in quarantine, while we were all isolating with family in different cities. Joe and I had a Zoom call to go over the structure and after that Joe began working on the base tracks and Brazilian drum tracks himself in his Dad’s drum room in Raleigh.
A lot of arrangement and instrumentation choices were made on the fly along the way. I would say “we need more texture here” and add an ambient guitar part, invoking guitarists such as The Edge. Similarly Joe would suddenly decide in the middle of the night that we needed multiple high pitched, delayed keyboard tracks filling space in the background, or Brennan would come in and completely rewrite the vocal melody for a song, to really sex it up. It was all living, iterative work for multiple months. I guess that’s the beauty of self-producing an album, we were never constrained by time limits, there was always an option to try that crazy idea.
ROTW: Other than Alexander Bone (Tom Misch, Cory Wong) who guests on saxophone, did anyone else outside of the six members contribute to the album?
JM: First of all I just wanna say that working with Alexander was just a treat. We reached out to him and sent him our singles and the demos for “High Tide” and he was extremely receptive. We chatted for a bit about our sound and I was impressed that he also wanted to dive into my musical background to understand and capture our influences. He then absolutely just laid it down on “High Tide”. He actually sent two different solos, the other one with some reeeallly cool, with way-out-there jazz runs. Maybe one day I’ll share that version. We were really stoked at the ability and ease of collaborating with an artist we admire, who plays directly with some of our biggest influences, and how easy it was to do so between London and North Carolina, during a global pandemic.
In addition, my dad used to be a studio musician and tour ‘mercenary,’ as he would call it, back in the 80’s and 90’s. He was deep in the Latin and jazz percussion scene back in his Berklee days. Do a Youtube search for “Gringo Dogs” and you’ll see some hilarious videos of him playing some hilarious Zappa-meets-Buffet absurdist original songs, executing them to a tee, and getting interviewed on Nashville TV. Him and I added all the percussion elements into the album during a really fun weekend in our basement.
When Dillon sent the first demo for “Window to Your Soul Remains” I had this idea to add a Northeastern-Brazilian Bãiao percussion section to it. I was born and raised in Rio and had always wanted to bring that sound into our catalog, without it being those cheesy Bossa Nova songs you hear all over the world except for on the streets in Rio. Dillon liked the idea and greenlighted us tracking this zany concept on his 9+ minute guitar rock piece and somehow, I feel like it worked out. Within that one day we recorded 22 percussion tracks that went into the final version, including instruments like sabumba, shekere, two different pandieros, triangle, a few different shakers, two different agogos, snare drums, cymbals, wind whistles, and a handful of goat hooves for that rustling sound during the acapella section.
Lastly, I co-write all of my songs with two dear friends, Kevin Eberhardt and Stephen Walsh. The three of us went up to a cabin in Virginia last year, where we wrote and recorded demos for “Failure to Communicate”, “Free Time”, “High Tide”, “Plasmodesmata”, and a few others all in a three day writing period. It’s cool, the album is actually coming out almost exactly a year from that session, where at the time a full length album wasn’t even a thought yet. Other than that all of the arranging, recording, mixing, mastering, publishing, distribution, and promotion was all done by us for us.
Pluto Gang is:
Brennan Beck – Lead Vocals
Dillon Crawford – Guitar, Vocals
Wood Britton – Guitar
Joe May – Keyboards, Vocals
Pat Rogers – Bass
Wilson Smith – Drums
LISTEN TO BETTER OUT HERE ON SPOTIFY