Photo Credit: Kaja Sigvalda<\/p>\n
Interview by Margaret Corona<\/p>\n
I spoke with Jay Cobb Anderson, one of three lead singers of the Portland, Oregon, band \u201c<\/span>Fruition<\/span><\/a>.\u201d Anderson and his four bandmates \u2014 Mimi Naha, Kellen Asebroek, Jeff Leonard, and Tyler Thompson \u2014 celebrated the release of their newest album this August. On his way to Burlington, Vermont, for stop 20 on their \u201c<\/span>How to Make Mistakes<\/span><\/a>\u201d tour, Anderson and I spoke on the phone about the band\u2019s post-pandemic reunion, sources of inspiration for the live record, and our mutual appreciation for the western U.S.\u2019 sprawling Green River.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Margaret Corona (MC)<\/b>: \u201cFruition\u201d started as an Oregon-based busking string band. How has this origin shaped the sound of “How to Make Mistakes”?<\/span><\/p>\n Jay Cobb Anderson (JCA)<\/b>: Well, I guess there’s a lot of things that you learn from playing on the street … Sometimes we’d be out there for, you know, anywhere from three to, like, seven hours, and oftentimes we’d do it day after day. So, I think that the beginnings of the busking was definitely integral in us learning how to work with each other and what our strengths are and how to perform and how to catch people’s ears and attention. And I think that that was just a great way to start the band. And how it has, I guess, affected the newest record, all of that playing was kind of a foundation for everything we’ve done. But it does feel like a pretty refined version of that kind of approach.<\/span><\/p>\n MC<\/b>: That’s great. How did your time apart during the pandemic influence the band’s dynamics and the musical sound when you reunited?<\/span><\/p>\n JCA<\/b>: Dynamically, we were all living in different places, so we had to stay in contact with each other, like a lot of people did … So by the time that we got back together and started playing together, it felt so good. There were moments where it was kind of scary, kind of felt like, “Are we done? Is the band over?” but once we got back together the second week and started playing together, it was very obvious. It was very obvious that there is still the magic there.<\/span><\/p>\n MC<\/b>: Your new record was recorded completely live with no overdubbing. What inspired you to take this approach?<\/span><\/p>\n JCA<\/b>: There’s a few things that inspired that. We’ve always been considered, at least by our fans, as being a live band anyway. And we’d never quite done a record fully live without overdubs before, and another thing that really influenced that was, me and Tyler Thompson, who’s the drummer of the band, we play in another band called “<\/span>TK & The Holy Know-Nothings<\/span><\/a>,” and when we’d do records with that band, we did them live and we realized how great it was and how easy it was and how much it sounded like the band … When we started recording the songs, not everybody was thinking of doing this live, and I was kind of pushing for it, but we had 17 songs that we wanted to record in seven days, and really the only way we were going to get through this week is if we did it all live. So, we got through, like the first day and a half, and I think by the end of day two, everybody was on board. So, that’s how we kind of got that.<\/span><\/p>\n MC<\/b>: Where did you guys take your album cover?<\/span><\/p>\n JCA<\/b>: Oh! So we took those pictures in Iceland. Yeah, we did this festival. We did a couple of shows in Iceland with <\/span>Greensky Bluegrass<\/span><\/a> and the <\/span>Lil Smokies<\/span><\/a> and forgetting who else was on that. But yeah, we went, we had an opportunity to go to Iceland, and we stayed a few days after, and we did some photography, and the <\/span>photographer Kaja<\/span><\/a> was incredible, and it’s all film photography, and it turned out really lovely.<\/span><\/p>\n MC<\/b>: Yeah, that’s incredible. So cool. I love how this record embraces imperfection and authenticity. How does this philosophy play out both in your music and your personal lives?<\/span><\/p>\n JCA<\/b>: Oh man. I mean, I think in any, any kind of performing art, you know, that’s where the magic happens. You have to take chances. If you take chances, oftentimes, you’ll fall on your ass, you know. And it’s how you recover from that, you can sometimes find a whole new thing, and embracing imperfections has been like a very integral part of my life, from the time I was really young. I had a guy give me a book on wabi-sabi, which is an Eastern philosophy that is exactly that the imperfections are what make life beautiful. I think I was 18 when I got that book? From that point on, it’s always been an integral part of my life, and I’ve always really resonated with that idea. So yeah, but, being a musician, too, is all about that. When you’re up on the stage, things go wrong constantly. I mean, last night on stage, things went wrong [laughs] and there are moments where you just have to learn to embrace it sometimes, and if you don’t, it’ll stifle you. But if you do embrace it, then, like I said, sometimes you unlock new powers that you didn’t know existed.<\/span><\/p>\n