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According to singer-guitarist Al Schnier, there's a reason why the members of Buffalo, N.Y.-bred rock outfit moe. cross the Hudson River time and again to play the Garden State.
"There's a lot of love for moe. in New Jersey and I think in a lot of ways it's a lot like . . . Buffalo where we started in that it doesn't have the same sort of pretenses that you find in some areas," he said. "A lot of New Jersey is just sort of a lot of normal people ... and I think maybe that's why we get along so well with the folks in New Jersey."
moe., whose previous Shore shows included a two-night New Year's stand at Asbury Park's Convention Hall in 2001, will return to the city to ring in Independence Day with performances at The Stone Pony on Saturday (July 4) and Sunday (July 5).
Schnier's fellow singer-guitarist Chuck Garvey said the band paid its dues playing "Dionysian blow-outs" at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.
"They were always these gigantic throw-downs that took two days to recover from, it was a lot of fun," Garvey said. "That's another reason why (we come back), a lot of shows in Jersey just seem to have a different energy. . . . You walk away with a bunch of really good stories. I don't know, it always happens that some new myth is born. I think that's the sign of a good rock and roll show, if a new semi-truth is born from it."
moe. will be hitting Asbury Park in support of its newest studio album, last year's "Sticks and Stones," a crisp and catchy effort that demonstrates a change of pace for the band, whose members sequestered themselves in a former church in New England for three weeks, determined to write and record brand-new material together.
According to Schnier, "It (was) like, 'We're gonna go into this room and no matter what you hear, no matter how much I scream, don't open the door. When we come out, there's gonna be an album.' That's kind of what happened and it was a really cool process for it. But at the same time it was a little bit awkward to start that way, because it was just kind of different for us."
"It wasn't a long tinkering process like what happens with our live songs," Garvey explained. "Usually we write a song, we demo it in front of an audience and we're tinkering with it for a year and different parts come and go. This was a different way of looking at it."
One example of the type of stripped-down songwriting on display on "Sticks and Stones" is the album-closing "Raise a Glass," a drinking song featuring backing vocals from fellow road warriors Umphrey's McGee.
"That's a prime example of something that is the bare necessities of . . . three chords and intonation is optional, you can just slur along with all the lines, but it gets the point across," Garvey said. "It's something that's memorable and the idea stays even though it's not something that's meant to be viewed under glass with armed guards. It's not precious at all, it's something that hopefully you walk away and you keep part of it for yourself."
When asked what an audience member can expect out of their first live moe. experience, Schnier said to "expect a little bit of everything. … I think often people are surprised at just how energetic or how rocking the show is, just because of the whole mind set that comes with being labeled as a jam band.
"I guess they expect the music to be mellow maybe or to be more like the Grateful Dead, whom I love, but our music tends to be a lot more frenetic or a little more high-powered," Schnier explained. "While we may embody some of the same principles, we also grew up on classic rock, so there’s this whole element of Black Sabbath and (Led) Zeppelin and punk rock and everything else in what we do that was sort of absent from the whole Grateful Dead scene."
Garvey was also careful to not strictly classify moe. as a jam band. “moe. is basically a rock band,” Garvey told Jersey Shore Meromix. “We improvise, therefore, we’re a part of the jam band scene.”
According to Garvey, jam band wasn't always the term of endearment which some people consider it to be today.
"For a while, (“jam band”) imparted this low-quality knockoff of the Grateful Dead, like in the mid-90s or the later 90s. That’s not what we aspire to," he explained. "We were hoping to be the next Frank Zappa or the next King Crimson or something like that. But really, we’ve always been really into songwriting almost on more like a pop level, like Elvis Costello. The lyrics and the core of every song are really important to us, that they work on their own. The improvising thing kind of comes later, (then) we can stretch everything out."
