Interview with Jean-Peal Gaster from Clutch at Shaky Knees Music Festival in Atlanta, GA

Introduce yourself.

My name is Jean-Paul Gaster and I play drums.

I play drums too!

Yeah?

Yeah!

Alright! Drums are the best.

I’m not good at it, but I still play drums. So how has the tour been so far?

The tour’s been great. We’re very much fans of Mastodon so having this co-headlining tour come together was really great. Awesome band, great guys, and it’s been really fun touring with them.

Any updates on a new album that you can tell me?

The records gonna be called Psychic Warfare and we’ve been putting a few songs into the set and I think it is a departure from our previous album Earth Rocker in several ways. For me, the most obvious thing is that there’s a lot of different sort of feels on the album. Earth Rocker had more of a linear approach to it. We were just trying to play fast and heavy on that one and I think we were successful, but we always sort of react to whatever we just did whether we do it consciously or not and that’s what we ended up with. It’s a little bluesier, a little funkier.

How have fans responded to the new songs?

They love the new songs, it’s been great.

How was your set today?

It was hot. [laughs]

[Laughs] I heard Neil say something about the elements of the sun or something like that and I thought it was hilarious.

I think he might have said something about how mother nature is a global lighting director.

Yeah, that’s what is was! That was perfect. Anyway, I’ve noticed that  y'all and Mastodon are like the only two metal bands here which I think is really interesting. I’ve noticed on XM radio that  y'all are played on Alt Nation which is like this kinda music and  y'all are played on Octane which is hard rock and then Liquid Metal which is at a heavier than Mastodon level. Would you consider Clutch to be like a crossover band?

I think Clutch is a rock and roll band and so for me, rock and roll is all those great musics that we grew up listening to whether we’re talking about the Bad Brains or Jimi Hendrix or Fats Domino. It’s all rock and roll so to try to pigeonhole into one kind of thing or another I think is probably inaccurate. But it’s funny that you mention that we’re being played on such a wide variety of stations and I think that just goes to show that over the years we’ve played with a lot of different kinds of bands so there was a time when people didn’t know where to put us and so now maybe they’re trying to put us everywhere and I’m okay with that.

What do you think about on a broad range the current state of music, but more specifically the current state of metal?

Well I don’t really consider myself a metalhead, so for me to comment on the state of metal, I wouldn’t exactly know what to say. I will say that the music industry and the music scene has changed 180 degrees from when we started. We first got signed to Eastwest in 1992.

That’s before I was born!

My goodness [laughs] no shit!

Does that make you feel old?

I feel experienced.

I interviewed another band today and they were like “Yeah, we started in 1997” and I was like “I was 2 years old in 1997!”

[laughs] My goodness. So it was completely different than it was when we started this business. When we started the band, we did not have the intention of making a career out of this. We just wanted to play good shows and make good recordings and the idea of doing this for 25 years was not on our radar. Oddly enough, here we are and it’s the best job in the world, I love it. But you asked about the state of the music industry. It’s really important for bands to get out there and work harder than ever. More and more weight is gonna be put on the live show and that’s just because people aren’t buying records. So the bands who I think are gonna succeed are the ones who can put on a good show, who can play their own songs, and have those kinds of songs that can translate to an audience. So that’s more important than it’s ever been.

So what is next for the band?

Well, we’re gonna finish out this tour. We still have 3 week left on this thing and then we’ll go overseas to Europe. We like going over there, it’s a lot of fun. We’ll do some festivals, kind of this sorta environment. Maybe a little more rock and roll, a little more metal kinda of stuff. We’ll do just a few gigs over there, not very long at all and then the record comes out in September.