Daniel Greene - Mountain Movers Interview
Are you originally from New Haven, CT? When did you first begin to fall in love with music? Was this something that was relevant around your household growing up? Do you have any siblings? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years?
The other three members of the Movers— Rick, Kryssi, and Ross— were all born and raised in the New Haven area while I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. I am the youngest of seven kids and my Mom played piano— mostly a piano medley of songs from the 40’s. Sometimes guests at parties or my sister would sing along to her playing. The 70’s were free flying and fun. The hi-fi stereo in the living room and records all over the floor. We would all drive around in a big station wagon with the windows down blasting the FM radio hits as we drove around town. My oldest brother played guitar in a cover band that would practice in the family room. The band would set up the drums, amps and rip sloppy versions of tunes by Bowie, Queen and Zeppelin while I sat mesmerized by the volume and power of loud music right in front of me. My brothers and sisters were going to arena concerts. I wanted to as well, but I was still too young. I used to stare at the art on famous record covers— especially the gatefolds. When I hit my teens, I began recording college radio shows onto cassettes and picking out songs and bands I liked. I began reading zines, ordering VHS tapes online, swapping mixtapes with my friends, buying cassettes and records. I remember hearing “Double Nickels on the Dime” by The Minutemen on double cassette the week it came out. Life changing. I fell headfirst into the underground world of music.
When and where did you see your first show and what ultimately inspired you to pursue a life in music? What was your local scene like during those years? Did you participate in any groups, or projections prior to MM?
My first show was a local punk gig at a Worcester factory space. I had a best friend with an amazing collection of punk, hardcore, and reggae records. He spent every dollar he made working at a convenience store on records and gigs. I realized that this is what I had to do with my job money too. After a few shows, I felt more at home with this crowd. Most of the acts were local bands, but sometimes bands from national labels like Dischord would roll through. Most of the local bands were punk, not hardcore. The shows were sparsely attended. It wasn’t until I started to go every weekend with my best friend to The Living Room in Providence, R.I. that I began to see touring bands like Bad Brains in packed rooms that would erupt into chaos from the first note. In between sets of the bands, 80’s hip-hop would come blaring into the PA speakers and I began to get into hip-hop records and 12” singles. Though I was learning to play guitar and would play with a few friends in a basement, I was never in a band in high school. Sitting on the stage while watching The Feelies on their Good Earth tour inspired me to want to play music like them, Neil Young and the Velvet Underground. Watching that gig made me realize I could be in a band too. I went to college in upstate New York where I became the New Music director of the radio show.
We would listen to all the new records as they were released and I became familiar with the network of small indie labels. Though I played a lot of guitar, I was never in a band during college. After graduating, a friend in CT said, “Move to New Haven and we can start a band.” So I did. New Haven had a lively music scene with active venues and DIY spots to see tons of bands. There were punk, ska, hardcore bands, folk projects, and a jangle rock indie scene. I lived in a factory space down by the harbor during the 90’s. My friend Jeffrey Greene (no relation) and I began playing as Bug—- we had acoustic guitars with pickups into Univox amps. Soon we had a stand-up bass player and a couple of different non-drummers who switched off gigs. We started by playing most of our gigs in Middletown, CT at a community bookstore opening for avant-garde artists like John Zorn and Eugene Chadbourne. There was a strange collective of freaker kids in Middletown who called themselves The Lettuce Leaves that walked around with tape decks strapped to their belts and a collection of odd noisemakers and instruments. Every time we set up to play, their collective of 8-12 people would set up right in front of us and play discordant noise and tape decks while we played our sets. They would also throw pieces of lettuce around saying “Let us love”.
The two sets clashed so roughly, but we enjoyed their sabotage. They would send us a tape of “our'' gig but it would be their wall of noise with the faint sound of our songs in the background. It was absurd, but free. During this time we became close friends with Mark Mulcahy and Mr. Ray of New Haven’s Miracle Legion. We impulsively changed our name to The Butterflies of Love while listening to the song by that name by Bob Lind on the car radio. When we went to record our first 7’ and LP, we had Mark play drums on it (he was once a drummer in The Saucers) and produce the record. He taught us a lot about how to record in a studio and also about gigging and touring. When we finished our first 7”, I drew all over the cover and we sent it to John Peel in London just because he was our hero. We forgot about that until he played it on the air and then applauded on air after the song was finished. We got a call from a London label called Fortuna Pop! and he said he wanted to put out our records. We got a five-piece band together that included the drummer from Van Pelt and spent the next 8 years touring the UK and Ireland. We were a singles band— putting out ten singles and three albums. We played all the BBCs, got featured in Melody Maker, NME and even did a Peel Session. But we self-destructed and began winding down as a band in the mid-2000s. That’s when I found myself starting over.
How did you initially meet your bandmates and what led to you guys forming the band in the early/mid 2000s? Tell me about writing and recording the bands ‘06 debut on Safety Meeting Records entitled “We’ve Walked in Hell and There is Life After Death”. How did the deal with those guys come about and what was your experience of writing and recording this album during that time?
I met the bass player and co-founder of Movers, Rick Omonte, in New Haven when we were both leaving long-running bands. We started hanging out and I made him a mixtape of my home recordings. Inspired, Rick and I started jamming together and then decided to get local musicians to record some songs—- more as a fun project than trying to form a band. We recorded a bunch of songs around the same concept and a New Haven label Safety Meeting Records put it out. When I was writing those particular songs, maybe ten years before we recorded them, I was editing poetry written by poets locked up in prisons for the CT Prison Association’s annual journal of art and poetry. I was also helping install exhibitions of prison art around the state. Seeing the poetry and art coming from people locked up inspired me for life. It made me want to make art to understand my life, write poems to make sense of my world and sing songs that dealt with themes of transcendence, love, death, grief and loss. The impact of that is still there. Now I draw and make music every day. The themes of the artwork sometimes merge with the themes of the songs. When I was young, I was terrible at writing songs because I was always writing poems. Then I taught myself how to write songs with hooks and choruses. As I get older, my songs feel more like poetry.
‘08 saw the bands follow up “Let's Open Up The Chest”. How did you guys want to approach this record that differs from the previous album? What had changed within the band since first forming, having two LPs under its belt and touring/gigging up until this point.
Rick and I gained a lot of experience playing with close friends in a studio setting. We were out and about playing mostly local gigs with the band that made that record, but it was the studio where we gained experience. We recorded that LP at Seaside Lounge in Brooklyn onto 2’ tape. We insisted on recording directly to analog tape because it sounded much warmer and real. After our first three records, our bandmates moved on to other projects. Rick and I started working with our drummer John Miller as a trio. We quickly realized how knowledgeable John was with audio gear and recording techniques. Rick, John, and I began to get together weekly in my garage. We were making a record for a song cycle I wrote based on a made-up story called Apple Mountain and that turned into a double LP we released by ourselves in 2010. We are still very proud of it because it took us back to our roots of home recording, and allowed us to experiment without time constraints, or the rigid structure of a band. It made us realize we could make good sounding records with a cassette 8 track. Though our other records had psych moments, this was our first psychedelic record. The complexity and improvisational nature of the record made it hard for us to pull off live as a trio so we didn’t play any gigs to support it. Rick and I were beginning to think about having a real band again—- the way we both had in the past. Around 2009 and 2010, we were hanging out at a downtown DIY spot called Popeye’s Garage that had non-stop great underground artists—- noise, punk, freak folk, experimental acts— coming to town.
It connected us to many musicians we know and love today. That venue was run by Stefan Christensen and Kryssi B. Soon, we became friends. Stefan was playing in our favorite New Haven band at the time– Estrogen Highs. Kryssi was a noise artist in a project called Colorguard. At the time, I had no idea that Kryssi was a guitarist, but Stefan suggested she play with us. Turns out she was not just a brilliant guitarist, her control, tone, and style was unique and powerful. Rick, Kryssi and I started learning songs together and played a few shows as a trio. We needed a drummer. Ross Menze was the drummer for Estrogen Highs and Iron Hand. We just loved watching him play drums–— a natural player, a born jammer with a unique style. Rick, Kryssi, Ross, and I started playing together regularly. The four of us recorded and put out three lo-fi vinyl singles as a singles series. We were immediately developing a sound and chemistry as a band. For the first time since my early days, I knew that I found my music family. We all got along so well and we began challenging ourselves to become looser and more free with song structures. I surrendered control of the songs I was writing, and the band just took the songs to a place I never could have conceived of by myself. In 2015, we released our first LP Death Magic and I knew we were finally headed in one unified direction. That record was recorded by John Miller to 1/4“ tape on a Tascam 388 and he would continue to be our recording engineer for future projects. That has had a massively positive impact on our sound. Around this time Stefan started his record label C/Site Recordings and helped connect us to Bill and Lisa Roe who ran Trouble in Mind Records. Stefan and Kryssi also introduced us to a national and later international circuit of underground bands.
The band has released a huge body of work since its sophomore album and has signed with Trouble In Mind Records for the last three LPs: “Mountain Movers”, “Pink Skies” and “World What World”. Tell me about some of your memories of recording the band’s recent trilogy of albums with those guys and how this impacted the group in all ways it can and maybe has.
After we released “Death Magic”, we spent all of 2016 just going to our practice space without a plan. We would just fire up our amps and jam. There were no songs, no practicing really–— just four-piece improvisation from start to finish. This time helped build our chemistry as a band and expand our sound dramatically. When we did practice songs, they naturally would spill into long passages of free-form jamming. All of us have such different music tastes. We bring those different influences into the mix. Meanwhile, Kryssi had started the band Headroom to flesh out more of these jamming ideas. Headroom also included Rick, Ross, and Stefan. David Shapiro (solo artist, Center, Kath Bloom) was jamming with all of us on different projects. We played together at our practice space in a blown-out factory with a view of an enormous, construction dirt pile that somehow became our source of power and inspiration. We all played a gig together as the Dirt Pile Family Band and released a local LP comp called “Nobody Knows This is Somewhere” on C/Site Recordings. The Movers recorded our next three records (“S/T”, “Pink Skies” and “World What World”) with John Miller for Trouble in Mind. For each record, we would spend two days tracking in John’s basement studio. On the first day, we would record a batch of songs I wrote live to tape all in the same room. Then the next day we would go in the studio with no plan and just start jamming and see what hits the tape. We filled up reels and reels with long-form instrumentals. Then when it came time to get the record together, we would pick some of the songs and some of the jams and sequence them side by side. Each record was recorded and mixed quickly.
Between 2015 and the pandemic we toured every summer around the East Coast, the Midwest and the South. We connected and played gigs with all sorts of dynamite underground bands across the US and made lots of new friends in the process. On the flip side, we managed to bring and host these same acts when they did tours that took them through New Haven or Western Mass. In 2019, we had a memorable run in California when Movers and Headroom played gigs together for a psych festival put on by the Black Editions label in LA. In 2021, we played our biggest gig when we got to open for heroes Yo La Tengo in Central Park. It was just a perfect night and we were supported by so many friends who came down from New Haven and surrounding areas. When the pandemic came, we stopped touring, but kept meeting up masked-up at the practice space every week. Without the pressure of shows to practice for, we just began free experimenting and jamming again like we did in 2016. Only this time, we were playing other instruments. Ross got off the drum kit and played guitars, hand percussion, samplers and drum machines. Kryssi began playing the synth a lot more, Rick and I would play all sorts of instruments besides our guitars.
Tell me about writing and recording the bands new LP “Walking After Dark” and how this record compares to previous works. Is there anything else you would like to share with the readers?
Without a studio to go to during the pandemic, we recorded everything ourselves onto cassettes using my Tascam 488. It was like our “Apple Mountain” sessions—- anything goes. Everyone played different instruments and we would jam for hours. We also recorded a bunch of new songs. We ended up compiling hours of free-form music. The jams were different because we were freed from our traditional rock lineup. There are many tracks that I still don’t know what I am playing because we recorded so much. We also recorded ten songs. Rick did an amazing job recording and mixing all the material. We managed to pick specific songs and jams and sequence them into a sprawling double LP called “Walking After Dark” that is coming out May 17, 2024, on Trouble in Mind Records. Despite the similarity of being a mix of jams and songs, this record is a departure from the last three releases. There is no drum kit and many jams are synth rather than guitar-driven. While we continue to get together to practice or hang out every weekend, we look forward to playing lots of gigs to support the record. We have lots of weekend gigs coming our way and a tour of the Midwest in the summer.
