I shouldn’t start out with this question because it’s the quickest way to insult someone, but are you guy’s ok with the term jam band? LUKE TOP: Don’t worry we don’t insult easily, if people are into jam bands and to us then that’s great. LEWIS PESACOV: I’m ok with it, I’m not as scared of it as some other bands are. I mean, don’t electronic bands jam? Because some of their songs go on for ten minutes but people don’t call them jam bands. LUKE TOP: The guitar is what makes people associate it with jam music. LEWIS PESACOV: Yeah but I don’t think we sound like Phish. We’re more of a dance band than a jam band… but I do like to jam (laughs) Ok well watching sound check It reminded me of my old office job where the first part of the day was just getting through paper work, is sound check like your paperwork? LUKE TOP: No it’s still fun. There are elements of stress that come into it when you’re not familiar with the room, but the whole point is to play music, so after driving all day a sound check feels really good. LEWIS PESACOV: Yeah, you dial everything in during sound check so you can just enjoy yourself when you play. LUKE TOP: It’s like doing the paperwork and then getting your paycheck right after. (laughs) So it’s been hard for me to figure out exactly how many people are in the band. Is there a set number of people because I see there’s seven people here tonight but I’ve heard of numbers like ten or twelve. LEWIS PESACOV: Traditionally in LA we’ve been twelve, but this is the first tour where we’ve started to whittle it down and this might be the beginning of us becoming a seven-piece band. I think we’re really enjoying having some consistency.
Before there generally wasn’t much consistency, kind of a free for all. LUKE TOP: The beautiful thing about this band is we’re capable of changing up the numbers when needed, but it’s rarely twelve, we really only do that in Los Angeles, LEWIS PESACOV: I really love having four guitars; it’s completely indulgent I know. Everyone in the band also has other projects going on, how do you even manage to get twelve people in the same room? LUKE TOP: We’ve been blessed with the fact that people kept coming to rehearsals and kept playing at the shows. There was never any formal discussion or pressure put on anyone. These days there’s really just the question of, “Okay, so who wants to go on tour?” So how many musicians are featured on the album? LEWIS PESACOV: Everyone and then some were on the record. Honestly, I think there were probably seventeen people at one point. That’s certainly more than I thought. LEWIS PESACOV: Well I was thinking about this the other day, there’s this band from the Congo that I love called The Kasai Allstars. They have like twenty people in their band and I was just thinking, “Damn, that’s cool.” Speaking of that, the first thing I ever read about Fool’s Gold is the African influence. Do you feel that there is too much focus on one particular influence because there are definitely others in your music. LUKE TOP: You can’t deny the fact that it’s a definite part of our sound, but it would be somewhat limiting to just say we’re an African band. At the same time there are a lot of other factors at play. All of us with have very specific, different backgrounds and we bring different things from that into the music. LEWIS PESACOV: I mean it de-
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pends what people want to say about the band. Because if they want to sum it up in one word they can do that, but if they want to delve into the songs and want to talk about the songs then there’s way more than people can say. LUKE TOP: The influences are there and we’re not trying to hide that. LEWIS PESACOV: Far from it. LUKE TOP: We love this music and we want to expose people to it. We filter the music we love through our songs and that’s why we do it. So you feel a responsibility to educate people? Because world music and ethnic influences are starting to come back into indie music a lot more but there’s not a whole lot of attribution taking place. LUKE TOP: I think it’s important to honor your heroes and honor the music that influences you. LEWIS PESACOV: Whatever it is, whether it be world music, folk music, or whatever you’re inspired by. LUKE TOP: I mean with whatever art you’re making; ideally you should be aware of the context of what you’re doing in history. The greatest artist of our time have to know the history of what they’re doing, or else they would think they were the first people to do it. You need to know enough to know your place in the spectrum. That makes our music more informed, more honest. LEWIS PESACOV: I think we’re doing exactly what we set out to do, in a sense. It wasn’t accidental; we’re playing exactly what we want to play. I would like to think that we’re honoring it by showing people this music. LUKE TOP: we’re also starting to do DJ gigs and that’s a great way to show a little bit of what we like. LEWIS PESACOV: We’ve been doing interviews where we list ten tracks for people to listen to and we love that, we recently did a list for Zune as well, so it would be cool for people to read that and get the music and enjoy it. I’ve always made
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