We had the opportunity to grab this interview with skip duglas to discuss the making of Change Together which was produced in a cabin in the woods of northern Georgia. Check out this cool promo video.

Let’s break the ice. Who are you? Where are you from? What style of music do you create?

Well, we are skip duglas, rock/alt rock/indie rock/ all things rock, band from Birmingham, Atlanta and Nashville. Been together since 2001, we’re friends, more like brothers, we’ve played all over the country (Tim’s played all over the world) with other respective bands, jeremy and i lived together for like 5 years, we all have full time jobs, rick and tim each have wives and kids.

Rudy- Birmingham, Guitars, schooled in Nashville in Audio Engineering/Producing and playing for tips.
Rick – Atlanta, Vocals, lives on the Paleo diet, trout fishing and duck hunting
Jeremy- Nashville, Drums, my old roommate (rudy), has his own Edwards Jones Branch in West End
Tim – Birmingham, Bass, has a college degree from University of Alabama in Bass. Plays with Birmingham band “Act of Congress” he’s famous in Birmingham

You recently went on a journey through the Mississippi Delta. What were you searching for? What did you find?

The Delta is kind of a mysterious place. I had a friend a while back, he’s since passed away, but we always talked about going to try to find the Crossroads from the Robert Johnson story. Rumor has it that all the great bands have gone and found the Crossroads (zeppelin, clapton, hendrix) when they first came to America. So obviously that added to the mystique. I guess its been more of a bucket list item.

When Rick and I talked about recording a full length album, I was having trouble getting into it, and I decided to head to the delta finally and find some inspiration. I drove from town to town hitting landmarks, windows down, cornfields as far as the eye could see, blaring Son House and Robert Johnson.
I found Johnson’s grave site in an old church graveyard, it was surreal, reading the handwritten note carved into his tombstone, the message spoke to me and I had a moment. I went on to find the “crossroads” where he was fabled to have met the devil and my inspiration.

How did this voyage influence the new album, Change Together?

While on the journey, I had the idea to rent a cabin to track the new album, completely inspired by the organic and real sound of those old delta blues recordings; the sound of the room and the rawness just kind of pulls you in. I came back from the delta, sat down, wrote like 16 songs in two months. Some of the best and most coherent material I have written to date and I’m really proud of the result.

Describe the recording process for this project. I understand you ran away to the Georgia woods to fight bears and make music?

That’s right lol. We rented a cabin, we looked for a long time for the perfect room, it had high ceilings, about 500ms of natural reverb, it was secluded against the side of a mountain, the front yard was a huge valley with a trout stream running through it.

We wanted to capture a completely organic sound, used no beat detective, very little auto tune. We set drums up in the great room, Jeremy and I tracked live, I had amps running in the bedrooms, Rick was set up in the basement with the Pro Tools rig singing. We had mic’s set up to capture the room sound, and even recorded an amp in a bathroom. We spent some time practicing the tracks and this style of recording (its tempting when tracking with Pro Tools to just record separately and not live). There are some overdubs, I bought a couple of new amps later on in the project I wanted to track, and there’s some keys for filler in there. Tim wasn’t able to make the trip, so he recorded bass later.

It was just a great experience, grilling out for every meal, hanging out watching football, and recording/writing around the clock. We definitely were exhausted but kept going on Mio Energy and lots of coffee.

Tell me more about the caffeine induced trip to the ER and what the rest of us non-sleeping musicians should do to avoid a similar situation.

That was kind of funny after we got over the fact that we wasted half a day not recording. But the first night Jeremy kept chugging Mio straight out of the bottle, not mixing it with water, we warned him you have to dilute it, but he thought he was being funny. We tracked all night and stopped at 5:30am to go to bed. At 6 Jeremy was standing in my room complaining that he thought he was having a heart attack. I told him to go to bed, which he did for an hour but got back up sick, throwing up etc. So we rushed him to the ER and told them he was having a heart attack. Rick and I left him there to get lunch.

Several hours later we went back to get him, all they did was drug test him, pump him full of xanax and give him some literature for stress management and panic attacks. lol.

Yeah if you’re going to take caffeine you need to do it responsibly, it is a chemical too, not to be abused.

When we press play on Change Together, what should we expect?

Something completely unlike everything else that’s out there right now. It’s an attempt to capture an experience between friends that we hope the listener gets to share in. We grew up a lot in between the EP and Change Together, its a much more mature sound for us.

We tried to get away from the current sound of rock bands right now, i mean why spend six months working on something that sounds just like everybody else? It’s not perfect, but its perfect to us. Its organic and we hope people enjoy it, but we wanted to have something that we were proud of and if no one else ever heard it, we’d listen to it forever.

Where can we find your music online? Where can we connect with you?

We are on iTunes, and all the digital retailers, we are also setting up an online store where we’ll have Vinyl and Cd’s available.

Our social media is at:

• www.facebook.com/skipduglas
• twitter: @skipduglas
• and we’re in the process of launching www.skipduglas.com where you can meet the band, check out videos and photos, listen to music and keep up with us.

Any last thoughts? Shout outs?

We’re as big of fans of our fans and they are of us. We love people and we try to respond to all of our emails with personal responses. We love people to keep up with us, but also like to know what’s going on in people’s lives.

And Thank you guys for checking out the album, we hope you dig it!