I’m very familiar with many of your songs over the years. Yet, if I asked you how to describe the overall vibe and sound of 10,000 Maniacs…what would be your response? That’s a good question and it’s not always easy to answer,
I refer to our music as wimp rock. We don’t really play any blues notes, we play a lot of major chords. It is kind of pretty…like green and purple, if you’re that kind of person. It’s sort of odd, but there is some beauty to it, it’s pretty Americana. We’re also sort of big with tone in our band. We’ve always felt that the overall sound and collective mix of all the instruments was more important than the individual pieces of the music. There is never a lot of soloing going on… it’s this one kind of vision. Part of the distinctiveness of the music, is that it is largely influenced by the viola. Mary Ramsey is so skilled on the instrument. We’re not stupid (laughter). The woman can play and
we’re going to let her play. I certainly don’t play solos…it’s beyond me. Yet it all blends together so well and that’s the mystique of your sound. You could say Bluegrass or whatever, yet that viola is a signature of the group. We’re not a Bluegrass band and have never claimed to
be. We are fans of of the genre and have played songs that resemble Bluegrass whether they were written by us or written by someone else. Certainly, when we started the band, it was a big influence on certain members of the band. When we started together and formed our sound, it was all influences that we brought individually. It is all that sharing of what we were fond of that made our sound. As this is the 30th anniversary of the band, will you share some high points of your career and a low point in the band that you got through? Well… most of all it was all just high points. We had a re-
ally great time and we are still having a really great time. We enjoy each other’s company. There weren’t many low points though obviously at the beginning of our career, it was a little more difficult. Living on five dollars a day, I was homeless for a while. I couldn’t afford to have an apartment because I was gone most of the time. The band wasn’t making any money. We paid ourselves five dollars a day. I couldn’t keep a job at home because we had to be ready to go on the road to start playing more gigs. It can be pretty difficult when you are go- ing for months on end. That was pretty depressing. We were always sort of a gang. We were friends and we relied on each other, helped each other and supported each other. As for high points, I think a great benefit of being a profes- sional musician and one that has had some success is that you get to travel. I’ve always been fascinated with maps since I was a kid. To go to Brazil or go to the Middle East or something, I’ve been to those places now and it’s really awesome to see how other people live. To realize that the world doesn’t revolve around the band or revolve around the individual…we’re all in it together. What would come to mind as one of your most exciting gigs? Probably one of the most exciting experiences was since
Mary was in the band. That was in 1999 and we played USO shows in the Middle East. We were in Kuwait City and we
MARCH 2011 | RAGE monthly 35
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