SWANZEY, NH – The music festival season has just begun, and there’s going to be a ton of them happening all over on a regular basis over the next few months. For the past few years, the Northlands Music & Arts Festival has been bringing an abundance of bands and musicians to the Cheshire Fairgrounds in Swanzey. This year’s edition is taking place from June 13 to 15 with the likes of Residual Groove, One Time Weekend, Lespecial, Lettuce, Andy Frasco & The U.N., Cory Wong, The String Cheese Incident, Moe., and many others taking part. The main headliners of the festival are the multi-dimensional rock act Umphrey’s McGee, who originally hail from South Bend, Indiana. They’re going to be closing things out on the Mountain Stage as part of Northlands’ final day with a two-set special starting at 7:15 p.m.
I had a talk with keyboardist Joel Cummins ahead of the performance about the band utilizing video recordings, having various collaborations on stage, loving to come up to the area this time of year, and working on bringing in a new full-time drummer.
Rob Duguay: The past few years have seen Umphrey’s McGee take a multimedia approach to releasing their music by uploading a ton of videos of live performances on your YouTube channel, with some of the most recent ones being from the Daze Between festival in New Orleans that took place back in April. When it comes to picking and choosing with performances you guys want to have filmed and selecting the videos, how do you guys go about it?
Joel Cummins: The professional ones we will do through Nugs.net, and we have a few different people that we like to have out with us. Z Roll Productions is one of them and there’s also Keith Griner, who will do a lot of our Midwest stuff. When they’re not available or convenient for a gig, so many people are doing video and stuff that we’ll be able to hire someone local to do it. I think more than ever, the more things we can document, the better. If we had the ability to stream every show on a reasonable budget, that’s certainly something we would do.
There’s still some venues that don’t really have the wi-fi capability to do a really high quality livestream, so in those instances, a lot of times we’ll document the event, record it and post it at a later date. We’ve been doing more and more with Nugs.net, who also hosts all of our live recordings, and we’ve got almost 2,000 different concerts up there that are available now. It seems like that’s been a great place for our fans to centrally locate where to listen to us and to watch us, so we love being able to include those video streams for subscribers.
RD: Some of these videos have some live collaborations with the likes of Jason Bonham, Sam Bush and Jennifer Hartswick among others, so how do these usually occur? Is it a spur of the moment thing where you all interact before a performance or is it more planned out than that?
JC: It really depends on the instance. In the case of Daze Between, which we did with Jason, Jennifer and Jeff Coffin, that was something that we had announced and it was planned. It was kind in the spirit of the Jazz & Heritage Festival in New Orleans, which encourages musicians to collaborate, create something new and see what happens. We’ve done a few different shows with Jason and we’ve absolutely loved doing the [Led] Zeppelin stuff with him, it’s always an exciting time. Some of the stuff is planned and if we’re somewhere and a friend happens to show up there, we like to invite them out on stage too.
RD: That’s awesome. You guys have a wide range of influences that range from rock, funk and heavy metal to country, jazz and blues. Do you think this multi-dimensional approach to songwriting makes the process easier amongst the band or does it have its challenges?
JC: Each song kind of feels like its own thing. Depending on whether we’re working on a song to just add to the live batch of things that we do, or if we’re working on an actual album where we have something that’s a little more thematic, those sorts of things inform how we approach a song and I think you can kind of hear it. For the most part, we have a few albums that are fairly eclectic and the song styles go all over the place. Most of our recent stuff kind of has a little bit more of a theme around it, and you can hear that on “Asking For A Friend”. It’s a little bit more of a dream pop thing, and there’s even some things I do on keyboards that try to link the songs together or give it more of a cohesive feel as an album, but you’ll hear a lot of similar melodic themes and instrumental things going on in the songs.
It just depends on what the goal is, and I don’t think that there’s been times where a roadblock occurs because there’s always plenty of solutions, let’s put it that way. Whether we choose the right one or not, that’s another question. (laughs)
RD: Yeah, I get that perspective. What are your thoughts on coming up to New Hampshire to perform at Northlands?
JC: We love coming up to the entire New England region, especially in the summer. It’s a great time to be up there, and I think we played this stage a few years ago during the pandemic when they were doing some socially distanced shows and it’s such a great vibe. We got to stay in Keene and kind of check that out, it’s one of those places where you feel like you’re just dropped into nature. It’s a really nice experience for us, so anytime we can get outside, get to play for people and enjoy the beauty of nature, we look forward to it.
RD: After the festival, what are Umphrey’s McGee’s plans for the rest of the year? I know drummer Kris Myers recently left the band after 22 years, so is the major focus going to be finding a new person to take on that role full-time?
JC: We have a good friend of ours who’s one of 17 drummers that played with us when Kris had shoulder surgery two years ago, Scotty Zwang, who is going to be filling in for us until at least the end of the year. He’s somebody who grew up as an Umphrey’s Fan and he’s played with a lot of great bands over the past 10 years or so. He’s kind of been the Josh Freese of the scene, but he’s played with Dopapod, Ghost Light, Sunsquabi and a couple other things. We’re really excited about what’s going to happen with him and where that might take us. At the same time, I think we’re having open minds about what other possibilities will be there.
We really want to make sure that we have a long-term solution and get it right. I’m of course hoping that Scotty is that guy, there’s a good chance that’ll be the case, but believe it or not, we actually have two albums pretty much in the can right now that we’ve been working on for the past two years. One of them is sort of a live album, but not really, it’s kind of a hybrid. The other one is going to be an album of all new material that we’re getting pretty close to finishing.