![]() It’s just that the stamina gets harder the older and fatter you get. You surprise yourself when things come back in a natural way without you even having to think about it. The two at Red Rocks, that’ll be tricky because I imagine we’ll be changing the sets. We have a 15-minute (intermission) which is good because you just need to go to the toilet, drink some water and stuff. The three-hour things are obviously very turbo. I’m really scared about that one, to be honest. How do you guys play these marathon shows, including opening with your other band the Murlocs at Red Rocks? I think it’s something we always lacked a bit, having a lighting person to complement the visuals. We’ve also got a lighting person I’m super excited about. … It’s a bit more of a symmetrically mirrored look on stage, and then (Jason Galea, the band’s longtime collaborator and visual artist) is doing projections. But, yeah, there’s a few different, funny worlds thrown in there as well. “Ice V” is pretty dancey, so I think that’s why we were all set on that to be a single, the first single. … There’s definitely some slight rockier moments, but it’s still pretty funky really, actually. So he came up with the titles and what each song was gonna be about, and then we all just researched it, and threw in our perspective on it. By the time all the music was getting formed into these songs, everyone wrote lyrics collaboratively, it was like this is the most collaborative record we’ve done, so why don’t we all just try to write lyrics together? Stu was very into that, so we all just started putting our two cents in about what each concept was. Which was hard because you could never go back. Because of all the time he’s cutting things up and then it would just be a two-track layout of stuff. And then Stu would take the four or so hours, and cut it up and condense it into a song with all the best bits, which I think drove him a bit insane as well. We would go in for four or five hours a day, pick a key and a mode and, yeah … just jamming. What I like about the process is that it seems very collaborative, and open to - maybe criticism isn’t the right word … contribution? You can’t always polish a turd, but you can make it pretty nice. It comes in all different shapes and sizes. I’ll hear him out, or I’d run into - I call this the Shrimp Dungeon, where the magic happens - and start squealing until all this comes out. A lot of times I would be a soundboard for him. I would just come to the studio everyday and me and Stu would sit down and he would show me something that he and Cavs jammed on the day before and then he would talk about how it should be arranged. But I think we just all kind of know what we’re good at, what our tools are best used for. All this time at home recording and creating has pushed me into another realm, to feeling like I am a musician. I always just considered myself more of a performer rather than a musician. Being more of a part of the band in a sense, really. The pandemic kicked me into gear to start contributing more in the recording sense and songwriting. It marks King Gizzard’s fourth time playing and second time headlining the boutique festival, which started as an 11-day showcase of mostly local bands at a Desert Hot Springs roadhouse and has evolved into a three-day, mind-altering playground with a very eclectic, high-profile lineup. This Friday, the band will headline the opening night of the 10th Desert Daze at Moreno Beach in Lake Perris alongside Tame Impala and Beach House (a last-minute replacement for Iggy Pop, who had to bow out of the festival due to visa-related issues with his band). They’ve linked their albums too, creating a nebulous realm called the Gizzverse - a place filled with people vultures, rattlesnakes, tetrachromats, trapdoors, gators, fishies, garden goblins and various other strange creatures and out-of-body experiences. They’re known for linking multiple songs in labyrinthine ways (start with “I’m in Your Mind Fuzz,” then graduate to “Murder of the Universe”). An earlier version of this post gave incorrect release dates for two albums.
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