Did you actually immerse yourself with a guitar, or was that just an effect in post-production?
That was really me and my old guitar! The pool was really deep, and to get the shot, we had to sync it up. We had a crew guy holding speakers underwater so I could lip sync to the song. So we'd count to ten, take 5-10 seconds to get to the bottom of the pool, and then they'd play the music. By the time we'd play five seconds of stuff, I'd start to lose my breath because I was singing, and then we'd have to shoot back to the top and do it again. It was fun, but definitely harder than I thought it would be.
Does it raise the bar for the next video?
Yeah. Whether you're making a record or making a video, you never want to go back. You want to write a better song, you want to sing better, you want to have a better video, you want to have a bigger show. You never want to go back. I'm terrified of going backwards. It doesn't accomplish anything.
Your music kind of fuses a few genres together. Do you remember, Donny and Marie Osmond used to sing that one song...?
"I'm a Little Bit Country [I'm a Little Bit Rock and Roll]," yep.
Do you feel like that?
Well, St. Louis is a neat music town. I think there are a lot of country twang things that came through here, and a lot of R&B like early Otis Redding, James Brown or Ike & Tina Turner. And I've never really thought about the boundaries between them as much as just playing what I like to play.
I think now, people are more open to not having genre boundaries. You know, when you have a band like Mumford & Sons sell a million records, that is so far from mainstream, but it's real. People sense that, and I think they just want to feel something that's legit and real and emotional and passionate. I think those are the things I care about as opposed to weather it's country or rock. I always just try to do emotional music.
Be that as it may, if I begged you to perform "I'm a Little Bit Country," would you?
[laughs] We'll see. I'm trying to think about how it goes and how we would do it. I'll think about it, I promise. [laughs] Donny and Marie. Yeah, she does all those weird commercials now, but hey, they had their moment.
So are there more songs in the can? Will a full album come out?
Oh, there are a lot of songs. What I'm trying to focus on right now is who to do it with and how to finance it. Like I said, I don't like going backwards, and I'm very proud of the way "Spinning Wheel" came out. And to do something with producers and engineers and guys who master, it's expensive.
This has been the first time in, like, six years where we haven't toured a ton. We were doing 80-110 shows a year, and that was great. But I've just been doing a lot more writing in St. Louis and Nashville and fewer shows lately, which has been different. But by playing less, you're also bringing in less revenue, so we'll have to crank up the touring again if we're going to make this album. I've really enjoyed the writing stuff, but I'm ready to go back to playing more.
