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That song is named after Phil Kaufman, who was Gram Parsons' manager. So we send a record to these guys at HomeTapes and talked to them on the phone and it was like we were instant best friends. He had been putting out archival stuff for fifteen years, and we needed a label that was energetic and adaptive. We were on this little experimental label called Table of the Elements at the time and the guy who ran it was really sweet, but he wasn't really set up to have an active band. He liked our stuff and saw the guys from HomeTapes at the Pitchfork Festival three years ago and told them about us. He's got a friend who's a stock broker, who bought the building because he wanted some office space. How did a 23 year old get his own recording studio? We started writing in mid January and it took about five weeks intermittently to work on stuff and experiment and get stuff down. We didn't have a ton of time and he just took care of all of the busy work. He has this amazing understanding about recording. It's run by this 23 year old prodigy B.J. We recorded it at this new studio Flying Tiger Sound in North Carolina. It really captures improvisation as a concept. It's a fully improvised piece that we layered a string quartet on top of and then added horns from Denmark and then piano and a bunch of other stuff. We've got a twelve minute instrumental track which I am very proud of.
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It's got six tracks instead of five and it's thirty five minutes long, which is actually longer than certain friends of mine's full length LPs. What is the heck is a mini-album? How is that different from an EP? Well "heretofore" means up until this point and we thought it was a great way to express how we felt about those songs. So you have this mini-album, Heretofore, coming out. Someone brings in some sort of direction, but when we create this new song it's all collaborative. People usually bring an idea and then we'll work it out together. We had seen pictures of North Carolina and thought it looked like the Wisconsin of the south. We just wanted to get out of the cold, but didn't want to go too far west. We just went and visited and decided it seemed to be a nice place to live. I heard that you all grew up in Wisconsin, but formed in Durham. We still play shows around town as a jazz trio with an upright bass and everything. Although probably not at this point in time. So it's not unlikely to expect a jazz album out of you guys some day? Jazz music was massively important to our development. That's where we met Joey (Westerlund), our drummer, and Justin (Vernon). Sophomore year in high school we all went to jazz band camp in northern Wisconsin. How big on an influence was the high school jazz program on your music? While he was healing he started writing songs. He was this North Carolina basketball star and then he broke both of his wrists dunking. One of my roommates now is in The Rosebuds and the same thing happened to him in college. I figured what the hell, I can't do anything else, so I learned it over the summer. My brother was a star musician in the jazz program at school. It took me nine months to recover and during that time my older brother convinced me to pick up the bass guitar, so we could start a band. I had always been a sports kid up until that point, and then I broke my collarbone downhill skiing. When did you first pick up an instrument? We caught up with Brad Cook, before his show in San Francisco last night and chatted about what a mini-album actually was, his jazz ambitions, and Gram Parson's corpse. Become a sponsor Bon Iver's Justin Vernon) in 2006, the trio: brothers Phil and Brad Cook and drummer, Joe Westerlund, have acquired a reputation for raucous live shows that are heavy on audience participation.