360ºSound recently spoke with Don Breithaupt, lead singer and founder of the jazzy pop group Monkey House. This year, the band is celebrating their 30th anniversary. The sixth and latest studio album, Remember the Audio, dropped July 15 on Alma Records. The core group consists of Breithaupt on piano, Mark Kelso on drums, Pat Kilbride on bass, and Justin Abedin on guitar. They were joined in the studio by trumpeters Randy Brecker, Guido Basso and Michael Leonhart, guitarist Drew Zingg, and singers Lucy Woodward and David Blamires.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
360ºSound: Our contributor Mark Seaman introduced me to Monkey House. He described it as Steely Dan-inspired, so I was immediately interested. How do you describe Monkey House’s music?
Don Breithaupt: I get why people call it Steely Dan-inspired because it’s a very Hi-Fi project, and it’s groovy pop tunes with a lot of chords and improvised elements. I think I’m pulling from much the same palette as Steely Dan harmonically. The chord progressions kind of unfold with that jazzy, bluesy inevitability.
Not so much because I’m trying to sound like Steely Dan, it’s just because I think it’s fun to write pop music where you’re pulling elements of jazz in without being ironic or forcing it, but just saying, ‘Look, I’d like to write a pop song that has more than three or four chords, and I’d like to have access to jazz language instead of just rock ‘n roll language.’
I read where you said 2019’s Friday was Monkey House’s best record. Do you think it was bested by Remember the Audio?
Well, I hope so. I may not be the most objective person to talk to. The artist always likes the new record the best. Certainly, our goal every time out is to beat the last one. [Remember the Audio] has been extremely well received. It went to No. 1 on the iTunes chart in the U.S. and Canada as soon as it came out. It went to No. 5 in Japan and charted in a lot of other places all over the world.
It’s not so much about chart positions as it is that feeling that you get that you got an actual core fanbase and people are waiting for the record and they’re buying it or streaming it the minute it comes out. That’s a great feeling.
A lot of the tunes on the album are very catchy and hooky. They stick in your head. Talk about your process for coming up with a strong hook.
I think at heart I’m a pop guy. My early influences are Chicago, Elton John, The Beatles, and music that’s very oriented around having a big chorus and a memorable hook. And yet, I have this other whole list of influences that have nothing to do with that. My process as a songwriter has been to marry those two worlds and put my jazz knowledge and training together with my love of a really great groove and strong hook.
I usually write from a title first. I don’t go into it the way some people do with plowing away with a chord progression looking for something. If I have a title that I like, I already know what I’m aiming for. So, the first 60 to 90 seconds of the tune usually have to do with aiming for that moment where the title lands, which is usually the top of the chorus. In that sense, I’m a bit of a pop structuralist.
The advantage of writing that way is you know, before the rubber even hits the road, what the song is about and what the money line is in the lyric, and you can orient things toward that. I have an inner circle of people, including the guys in the band, that hear the stuff when it’s in process. I quickly get a vibe from everyone early on as to what seems to have the most traction in terms of sticking in your head and being one of those annoying earworms.
What songs on Remember The Audio do you think are the highlights?
I still like all of it because it’s still pretty recent [laughs]. I haven’t started to second guess much of it. The opening tune, “The Future is Almost Gone,” I’m really proud of. That’s one of those ones where I finished it and thought, ‘Everything I know musically is in this tune.’ That tends to be the opening tune on the Monkey House album. If you listen to this tune and you don’t like it, you probably won’t like the rest of this record. On the other hand, if this grabs you, there’s a lot more to come. And I’m always a sucker for a good shuffle, which that one is.
Another song that’s getting a lot of attention is the third track, “New York Owes You Nothing.” It’s a midtempo ballad. It’s more of a traditional piano singer-songwriter type song. I’m just really proud of every syllable of that lyric and the way the band played the tune so dynamically. I even like my own piano playing and singing on it. We got Mike Leonhart from Steely Dan to play trumpet on it. At the last minute I thought, ‘this song needs strings,’ so I hired a string section.
You have either co-produced or produced all the Monkey House records. What are a few things you’ve learned about music production over the years?
I have to say my secret weapon in that respect is our engineer John Bailey, who just recently won his first Grammy and has won a bunch of Juno Awards as an audio engineer. He’s got such high standards and never misses anything when it comes to timing and intonation – nothing technical ever gets by him. He’s a lot of the reason the records sound like they do.
When I first got into the music business, most people were still tracking to 24-track machines, analog, two-inch tape, and routing things with a patch bay and editing tape with a razor blade and all that stuff. I may be the last generation of musicians who fully experienced both that world and then the world that followed on its heels, which was MIDI, automated mixing, digital effects, and marrying layers of keyboards and starting tracks with drum machines and all that stuff.
How do you prefer to work with Monkey House?
In the early going, a lot of Monkey House tracks were things that I cooked up inside a music workstation. We’d have live horns, live guitar, but sometimes the bass was something I played, and the drums were something I programmed. The advantage of doing it the way we do it now, which is a mix of new and old, is we have proper album budgets. And the people I work with just keep getting better and better and faster and faster. We track the rhythm section live off the floor, we choose our favorite take, there may be a few edits here and there and some keyboard and percussion overdubs, and then we move on to vocals and then we track the full horn section live off the floor.
One of the reasons I sat on these tunes for an extra year and a half was I was just waiting for the worst of the lockdown to be over so that we could all get in a room together and make a record the way it’s supposed to be done. I feel like now I’ve basically found the synthesis of the whole way of making records. Yet, I’m taking full advantage of modern studio technology where you really have control on a very nuanced level of every aspect of what people are hearing.
Visit the band online at monkeyhouseofficial.com
