ProgScape: Chris - thanks for taking the time out to sit with us. For those who have been living under a rock for the past few years, why don't 't you tell people a little about yourself?

Chris Buzby: Ok! Well, to introduce myself I'll start with the history of me and my music. I have been pursuing music my entire life, or at least since the age of 5. My parents started me at keyboard lessons in a school in Lansdale, Pennsylvania - which is where I grew up. The school was called Yamaha Music School - similar to the the Suzuki String Method, it was a school for keyboard and young students or young children. Needless to say, it stuck and I absolutely loved it. It was a Saturday morning two-hour class where I would go and learn how to do basic keyboarding - it was your basic kind of "mimic what the teacher was doing" kind of thing. You had a little keyboard that you practiced on in class...and from there I started singing in my church choir. So not only was I doing instrumental music but I was doing choral music. As I started getting into the middle school age - around 10 or 11 years old - my church choir director came to my mom and suggested that my brothers and I try out for the Philadelphia Boys Choir. The PBC, for those of don't know, is a world-reknown group - probably not as famous as the Vienna Boys Choir but its' not far behind in terms of its' stature and professionalism and people knowing it throughout the world. My brothers and I, the three of us [Brian, Chris and Jonn], auditioned for a spot in the choir and we got in! So at age 11 I was actively singing and performing with the likes of Luciano Pavorotti, Jeseye Norman, The Pennsylvania Ballet, The Philadelphia Orchestra, The Philadelphia Opera Company, touring and traveling all around the East Coast as well as to Europe. I even got a chance to sail on the Queen Elizabeth II, the ocean liner - before and after the fall Faulkland Island Crisis. The ship was actually used as a troop transport. So at the young tender age of 11/12/13 years old I had the amazing experience of perfoming and touring the world professionally. I never expected at that age to see so much of the world and I got to do it all through music. All this while I was playing piano, taking private lessons. I also played saxophone, starting in 4th grade and I started French Horn in 6th grade. I quit the French Horn after 2 years but I still play saxophone and obviously still play keyboards. I ended up going to Germantown Academy (a private school) for 7th and 8th grade and high school, and that's where I met up with a music teacher who I consider to be the biggest mentor in my life, because he came along at a critical juncture where I wasn't sure if I wanted to do music as a hobby or as a career. His name was Imants Mezaraups, and he really got me focused around the whole idea of understanding theory, and more importantly composing and composition. I'll never forget in my sophomore year my end of year final was to write a piece of music. I kinda looked at him sideways and said "are you kidding me? I don't know how to write any music" and he's like "What's all this stuff you're always sitting and noodling around with on the piano?" So, I said "It's stuff that I came up with" and he said "See? You're already writing it! Now I'm going to teach you how to write it down on a piece of paper and how to record it" and needless to say he kind of lit the spark that became what was me saying "This is something I think I want to do as my career." So I graduated GA having taken pretty much every single Theory, Musicianship, Music History, Jazz Band, Choral, Chamber Singer, Video and Theater Class class they offered and started out in college down at the University of Miami. I got down there and realized that the Jazz school and the Classical school were totally at odds with each other - so as being a Jazz pianist who wrote or tended to write music in more of a Classical sense or a Classical vain, I instantly realized that OofM wasn't the spot for me! Even many of the faculty didn't talk to each other. So I transferred home after one semester to the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and started taking classes there and living at home. This was when I was 19, and the reason why this is so important is that weaves into how I became a member of Echolyn. I was working a part-time job at the local mall - the Montgomeryville Mall in American Eagle Outfitters. One day, while I was working, Brett's [Kull] brother Tim - who I had known from kindergarten until 6th grade walked into the store. Now, we hadn't seen each other for 7 years but we recognized each other instantly. We got to talking and right away he said "Are you still playing piano? I remember you were always the guy who was always playing keyboards." and, you know, of course I said "Yes." Instantly his did stepped in and said, "I need to get your phone number because my son Brett has a band and they need a keyboard player and you should call him because maybe you guys would strike up some sort of a musical relationship." Now, I had heard of Brett's band Narcissus - they were a cover band in the area, and my first inkling was "Well, I'm really not into playing cover tunes which are other people's music and, at the same time, he's 5 years older than I." I was 19, he was 24, so it was just a "well, let's see what happens" thing. The long and short of it was we did finally get a hold of each other. I think it ended up being him calling me more times than I called him. He caught me at home one night and I lugged my keyboard over, we sat down, spent about 3 or 4 hours that night just talking. Paul [Ramsey, drummer] showed up. I think the first song we played together was Subdivisions by Rush - just to try and jam it out - it was the only song we all knew....and Echolyn was born. We sat down and I made it very clear that I was interested in doing original music, not cover music. He [Brett] agreed, and said he was actually trying to get out of the cover scene because it was kinda a one-way street - you can get really big and popular but you're never playing your own stuff. He mentioned that he had a friend Ray [Weston] who he used to work with and called up and Ray and he was aboard in early October 1989. Jesse Reyes was the bass player he [Brett] was working with at the time. So that takes us up to the beginning of how Echolyn started and how I met Paul, Ray, Jesse and Brett.

PS: Leading up a little bit further, you guys released two albums, although Jesse left after the first album.

CB: Right.

PS: How did you guys find Tom Hyatt?

CB: Well, basically what it came down to was we were in the middle of recording our debut album, which was just called Echolyn - and as we were putting the tracks down Jesse kind of came to us and said, "This is a lot of work and this is taking more time than I thought it would" and of course we kinda looked at him sideways and said, "No kidding! We said we wanted this to be a lot of work and we knew it was going to take a lot of time" but he kinda gracefully bowed out and said, "Well, I really don't have the energy or drive to put in the time and effort all of you guys want to put in it" so Brett and Ray actually ended up playing bass on a couple tracks [Brett played bass on "On Any Given Nite", and Ray played bass on "The Velveteen Rabbit"] on that album because Jesse was leaving and it was kind of a funky situation - rather than bring over the guy who had just quit, Brett just figured, "Why don't Ray and I just lay the bass tracks down, get the album done with, we'll put the album out, kinda regroup and go from there." We put out some feelers locally and I can't remember exactly how it happened, but we ended up having a couple of people that were interested in trying out for bass. I know for a fact that a few of them didn't even show up for their audition and although they had called and set it up. Tom ended up as one of the guys who obviously did show up for his audition. It was kinda wild - it reminded me when I had gone over and met Brett for the first time. We ended up sitting there for 2 or three hours and we talked about everything, from music to life and to death to religion and just got all of our personal stuff out on the table. Next thing you know, Tom was aboard. We went from there in terms of writing and that led us right into Suffocating The Bloom. We released that album in November of 1992 - which even to this day is considered by many to be one of Echolyn's major releases, if not our best release. It was a very focused time for songwriting - the 5 of us were extremely dedicated to what we did, we were getting together 2 to 3 evenings per week, we were putting all of our free time and energy into the music and the band. We were playing at least 3-4 times every month, if not more. Once Suffocating The Bloom came out in 1992, we had this groundswell behind us - not only locally but across the world - in Europe, Japan, even people in South America...all calling and ordering CD's and we realized that we had all of the sudden stumbled upon this independent underground of people, musicians, fanzines, distributors...who were able to take our music and get it to the people throughout the world who would enjoy it. We then followed that up in the spring, since the writing was going so smoothly. Brett and I tend to write more on our acoustic instruments - he tended to write at home on his acoustic guitar. I tend to write at home either on a Fender Rhodes or an acoustic piano. The 2 of us sat down and cranked out the four tunes that became ...And Every Blossom which was more of a little acoustic sampler - almost like a second-half to complement the heavy side of Suffocating The Bloom - and we released that album in the spring of 1993. That takes us up right to where we got a promoter and a manager came aboard and helped us get in the door to big old Sony and Epic.

PS: Which is what I was going to lead to!

CB: <laughter>

PS: Obviously, and this is a little hindsight 7 years later, but Echolyn and Suffocating and even And Every Blossom - they're very out of print and very hard to find if at all - and when they do they go for very high amounts of money.

CB: Yeah, it's pretty wild.

PS: How did the Sony thing go down from, I guess in Cliff Notes fashion, from them first contacting you until you guys finally getting dropped.

CB: Hmmm...basically the Cliff Notes version I can make pretty quick! They contacted us. Michael Caplan had had UK in his office - Eddie Jobson and John Wetton - the day prior to our album showing up, and he was trying to reunite UK for some sort of a tour. The next morning our album shows up, he pops it in, and he's like "What the hell is THIS? Why don't I just sign a band of 20-year olds who are actively writing, willing to play, they've got great chops, they write great songs, why am I trying to make Eddie and John get back together - why don't I just sign this new band?" So literally within the day he received the CD he called us at the studio. He had the album cranked in his office and was just like, "Hey my name is Michael Caplan - I'm a rep from Epic Records. This album is incredible! Where the hell are you guys? Where the hell did you guys come from? I've gotta meet you! I've gotta see you! Can you play this stuff live? This isn't just studio trickery, is it?" kinda thing. Within a month, he and the Senior Vice President from Columbia Records in Los Angeles had both flown in to Philadelphia and came to our studio. We had prepared a whole 30-40 minutes worth of music to play for them. We got finished the 2nd song and they looked at us and said, "Ok. We believe you. We know you can play it. Let's go inside and talk business." We went inside and they tossed a whole bunch of ideas at us for producers and for how, when and where we would do the album. Eventually we were offered an 80-page contract and they wanted us for nine albums. We thought it was a little bit much, as did our laywer...so we knocked them down to a seven-album contract - which really doesn't mean much in the long run because in all recording contracts there's always an "opt-out" clause that the record company, nine months after they put out an album they have the opportunity to drop you because if the album isn't making the residuals they need to make they have the option to say "Thanks, but no thanks." The long and the short of it was we went to Nashville with our producer. We made the album we always promised ourselves we would make, we promised our fans, we promised the producer, we promised the record company. In the end, when the album got to the people who had to market it, they were standing there scratching their heads going, "What the hell is this?" I think rather than being served up as this something that as unique, new and different, they were trying to make it fit into the Celine Dion, Oasis, Pearl Jam, Alice In Chains, Rage Against The Machine, Ozzy Osbourne, you name the Epic band - they tried pretty much to make it work that way, and we weren't a band that fit in to any of those molds. So instead of coming up with plan H or I or J or K on how to market us, they just used us as a tax write-off. The album came out, it made a teeny-tiny little blip, and that was the end of it.

PS: I do remember that you guys tried to tour and were taken off the road...

CB: Yep. Basically the touring thing was something that they had promised us all along was going to be the "A-Number One Thing" we would do, because the only way we were gonna take this music to people was to prove to them that we could actually play it live and was to "wow" them with our live show, which is always something that we've prided ourselves in. We're usually a pretty powerful and intense band live. A lot of people have said that our live shows are actually better than our albums, which we've always taken as a compliment because 9 out of every 10 bands can't do that. The album is usually the epitome of the band, and you go and see them live and its' pitiful because they can't pull it off. We were the opposite. So we were ready to tour. We were ready to go out on the road. Unfortunately, touring costs a lot of money. To put a band like Echolyn out on the road - even with staying at Red Roof Inn's, which, you know, is el cheapo, $15 per diem a day to buy food - which really at 2 or 3 meals a day for $15 you're talking Burger King and Taco Bell. When it came right down to it, it costs several thousand dollars a week to put a band like us out on the road. Unfortunately, we weren't quite seeing the returns in sales that we had hoped. While Sony did help us get hooked up with Dream Theater for about 5 shows, they were probably the best 5 shows we played in terms of people going right out and bought our albums after those shows. The downside was that Dream Theater was coming off a tour and those 5 shows were the last 5 shows of their tour. So once they stopped playing Sony pretty much said, "Why don't you guys take some time off...we're gonna regroup. You had 5 great shows with Dream Theater, and your album sold - your sales went up in all 5 of the cities after each of those shows so that was definitely the kind of band you should be playing with. Let's regroup, come up with another plan to get you back on the road again and we'll go from there." And that was the last we ever heard of them. We literally sat around for about 3 or 4 months staring at each other, scratching our heads, and finally it just started to set in that, "You know what? That phone's not gonna ring, and they're not gonna call us." Then it turned into us calling them and not taking our calls, and "Oh, he's out of the office and he'll call you back tomorrow" and it just became pretty apparent that what they were doing was biding their time, waiting for the nine-month period to come up - which by the time that did they did take our phone call to tell us that we had been dropped. That was the end of it. The only downside of it is that when we had gotten signed to Sony, we were heavily in debt. Like any band trying to make it, we were playing 15 shows a month, fronting all the money ourselves, putting it on the credit card, covering gas and travel and lodging and food expenses. Sony offered to buy our first three albums - the back catalogue. We kind of hemmed and hawwed over it but the amount of money they were offering to buy them was easily going to pull us out of debt and put us back on our feet again. The promise was that they [Sony] would buy those back albums and about 5 or 6 months after "As The World" came out they were gonna re-release them and just drop them in the bins with As The World so when people were going to buy As The World they would stop and go, "cool, they have other albums." Needless to say, that never happened.

PS: So, you have no albums, you've been dropped, the 5 of you are sitting in a room...and then 5 seemed to big a number....and then 4 seemed to big a number...

CB: <laughs>

PS: There's been a lot of confusion as to what happened with you and Tom leaving and the...not necessarily hostility but "miscommunication," shall we say, between you, Brett, Ray...

CB: Yep. Everyone has their own styles of leaving, and Tom and I were perfect examples of that. Tom did it under cover of darkness. He went to the studio at 3 in the morning, got all his gear, drove home, picked up the phone and called and left a message on the studio phone and said, "I'm done. I'm sorry. I can't do this anymore. I'm totally fried. I'm totally burned out. I'm totally disillusioned. The industry sucks, and this is not the reason I got into music to be jerked around." It kind of caught us all off-guard but it was one of those things where the four of us were like, "Well, we can't say we didn't expect it." We were all disheartened. We were all totally defeated. All of the wind was blown out of our sails because all of the promises we were made and all of the work we put in started to feel like it meant nothing. That's just a really defeated kind of feeling, you know, when you've given everything and in return got next to nothing - just empty promises. The four of us continued on for about another month and a half to two months and I finally woke up one day myself and was just like, "You know, I'm treading water here. We're talking about going out and doing this again. I went to college for 4 years to get a degree to teach. Instead of being in a classroom making a difference in children's' lives, I'm sitting in a studio drinking beer, feeling miserable for myself and living my life off my credit cards - which is getting me nowhere fast." The way I left was very different in the sense that I basically sat down with Ray, Paul and Brett and had a long five-hour "this is how I feel, this is why I feel how I feel. I want to remain friends. I know it's going to be really hard to do that but you have to understand that I just spent 4 years going to college, I have school loans to pay, I had just gotten married...I just can't sit here staring at the walls, waiting for a record company to tell me when to jump and when to sleep and when to eat and do whatever they need me to do, and the bottom line was - that company isn't calling us anyway!" It was very amicable split. It was a long, five hour thing, and like I said, it was more or less kind of "saying good-bye" - you know, like "hey, it's been a great six years but I gotta move on. I have to get a teaching job. I have to go do what I'm supposed to be doing with my life because the thing I'm not supposed to be doing is sitting on a sofa, staring at a wall." That's basically the whole reason I left. The reason why things got a little funky after that was because I'm a musician, so even if I'm gonna get a teaching job, I'm still going to continue to play. In looking around and trying to find some other musicians to jam with, instantly I thought of Brett, Ray and Paul - but that just wasn't going to be the right place to go, because that was almost going back on the whole Echolyn thing. The other thing was that we needed space from each other anyway. Sure enough I started striking up a relationship with Chris Eike and of course my brother Jonn, who I've known all my life and also Laura [Martin] and Scott [McGill]. Next thing you know, this band Finneus Gauge was coming together. At first it was going to be my solo album. My idea was, "Well, I've got all these songs I've been sitting on for all those years - I'll just put it together and it'll be like the Chris Buzby Project or something, " but the more I thought of that, I don't know - I wasn't comfortable with it. I wasn't ready to do a solo album, and I was having so much fun working with other musicians that I didn't want them to feel they were coming aboard just to be like by backup band. So in starting to write songs, it became very apparent that the music wasn't being written all by me and thus Finneus Gauge was born.

PS: So, a year later...we're talking mid-1996...you guys meet up and more once more is released in 1997 to very high acclaim. You guys toured throughout Philly and Baltimore and got some very good reviews...didn't Keyboard Magazine...

CB: Yeah, Keyboard Magazine had a year-end review, and one of their editors...each of the editors who wrote for the magazine were allowed to pick their top five albums of the year. Astonishingly enough it was a great tribute to the work put into that album, one of those editors actually picked Finneus Gauge's more once more as "One of the Top Five Albums of 1997!" For an album that was made using ADATs in a home studio in my basement following my departure from Echolyn - it was kind of a nice 'pat on the back.' It was a nice way of actually saying, "Wow. You know what? I can still pursuing my music for the sake of being a musician," and it was just nice to get that kind of accolade after all that had happened with the Sony experience and all that had happened with my life being on hold for six months while I was waiting for the record company to tell me what to do next.

PS: Ok, so that comes out, you guys tour...at least around Philadelphia, and then we have one inch of the fall...and then nothing.

CB: <laughs> one inch of the fall, and then we fell.

PS: And then you fell into apparent nothingness.

CB: You know, when it really comes right down to it, and I've had a lot of time to reflect on it, in any band there are always going to be conflicts of interest. There's going to be conflicting ideas (musical and otherwise), there's going to be conflicting egos, there's going to be conflicting thoughts and probably one of the biggest problems that I always was running into with Finneus Gauge was that anywhere we went, people always mentioned the fact that I used to be in Echolyn. For the fact that I had put six and a half years of my life into Echolyn, and we got signed to a major label in the process, that's not something I've ever been ashamed of. If anything, it's something I'm very proud of because I know the kind of work, time, effort and energy I put into helping Echolyn get to the stage that it had gotten to. So when Finneus Gauge started receiving album reviews, it was only natural that reviewers would immediately mention the fact that part of my personal resume had been the fact that I was in Echolyn. Chris [Eike] and Scott [McGill] from FG from the get-go seemed to have a crisis with that. The mention of Echolyn in any FG press was always a problem to them. At first, I just kind of chalked it up to, "Well, they're just not used to the press the name Echolyn gets...I guess they don't like the fact that people are mentioning that I used to be in this other band," but people weren't always mentioning it to say FG sounded like Echolyn - they were just saying that I used to be in Echolyn. But as time went on, and months turned into years, and we started putting out our second album and we were preparing to release it some people were still talking about finneus gauge as "Chris Buzby's band Finneus Gauge" or "Chris Buzby from Echolyn and his band Finneus Gauge" - and there was definitely a rift created because of it. It was not something I personally ever did, or set out to do, as I surely wasn't calling journal, fanzine and review press and telling them how to bill their album reviews or band features. I specifically worked very hard when we sent out press bios and promo materials to mention The Hand Farm as much as Echolyn was mentioned, in terms of our collective credentials and our resumes of where we'd all been musically. In the end, I think that two of them [Chris Eike and Scott McGill] were almost having an identity crisis as to where they belonged and where they fit into Finneus Gauge. Rather than just being the guitar player and the bass player and taking the positive and negative press critiques as the rest of us were, they always seemed to be so wrapped around the "Oh, they mentioned Echolyn again. Figures." kind of attitude. In the end, that attitude was a really defeatous kind of thing because right after we put out one inch of the fall it was pretty apparent that the two of them just weren't into the band and into the music anymore. When it came right down to it, it was pretty evident that they weren't going to be sticking around. The biggest disappointment of all was the fact that when they chose not to be in the band anymore, rather than being gentlemen about it and picking up the phone or meeting face to face, they proceeded to cancel two weeks' worth of band meetings, making up excuses as to why they each couldn't be there, and then decided to go on the Internet to post their letter of withdraw or retraction or whatever you want to call it from Finneus Gauge on an Internet newsgroup so that myself, Jonn and Laura could find out that way. It was incredibly spineless in the sense that you put time and effort into something, you bring people aboard, you share a common dream, you share a common goal, and that's the thanks you get, but like I said, looking back I think there were other issues that they were probably groveling with and they very well might still be groveling with those same issues today. But they're the ones who are going to have to figure that all out, that's not for me to do. However, their baseless and groundless actions of suing me (unsuccessfully) for $12,000 for being "involuntarily dismissed from the group," 2 days before Christmas this past year and 9 months after they *quit* FG online, really made Jonn, Laura and I realize that in the end we were much better off without them anyway. And so life moves on...

PS: ...and, obviously it did! You dropped out of the limelight, you go back to teaching...and then some time later we hear of an announcement that you're working with Brett, Ray and Paul seemingly out of nowhere. How did that come about?

CB: As any musician might say, when you're in a situation where you're writing and you're "at the top of your game, " so to speak, all the engines are firing in the right spots and you're looking forward to putting out new music, you obviously want to surround yourself with other musicians that can do that. Right around Christmas time of 1998 as one inch of the fall was being pressed, I was sitting down to write all my Christmas cards to my friends and relatives and I just had a lightning bolt hit me that said, "You know what? This is totally stupid. Just because you've gone on and started some other band there's now been this rift created between the fact that Brett, Paul and Ray are doing Still and Always Almost and you're doing Finneus Gauge - and that has nothing to do with anything other than the fact that you're just in different bands now! You're still people, you're still human beings, you're still musicians - why can't you still be friends?" So I wrote a Christmas card to Brett, to Paul and to Ray and sent it to them, just kinda like "Hey. What's up? This is what's going on. It's been way too long and we have to get together for a beer. There's been all kinds of stupidity and BS tossed around, and most of it probably isn't even true. I don't know what you've heard, but I know what I've heard. Let's grow past it and let's maybe we cam be gentlemen about it all and just be good musicians who are also good friends again?" When it came down to it, the irony of it is was the same day I was mailing those Christmas cards, Brett mailed me a Christmas card. Two days later I received his card in the mail the same day I know he was receiving my card. It was just plain weird! It's one of those fate things, like "Wow, that's pretty amazing. He's mailing me a Christmas card the same day I'm mailing him a Christmas card" and we haven't really spoken in years, but as silly as that sounds I said to myself, "You know what? This can be cool again. This doesn't have to be this kind of 'Oh, you left Echolyn to go off and start another group'" because that wasn't what I had originally planned to do . FG just kinda happened. Bottom line is - I was still teaching (and still am teaching), and that was the main reason I had left Echolyn...it was to go do with what my life what I thought I had to do - to make a difference in other places. So Brett and I had a couple of phone calls and finally, about March or April we were getting ready to say, "OK, we've talked about this, we've put the past behind us, we've patched up the past...let's try doing this music thing again." The reason we were so covert or quiet about it was the fact that we didn't know if it was going to work. We had no idea whether or not I would bring a keyboard over, Brett would bring a guitar, Paul would bring a drums and Ray would bring his bass and we'd stare at the room and go, "What are we trying to do?" So we were very careful at first not to even let people know we were doing this because we just wanted to do it for the sake of being musicians again. We weren't doing it as a reunion. We weren't even gonna call it Echolyn because Tom wasn't aboard. It was just one of those things where it was like, "Well, let's just write some tunes, we'll come up with a name, we'll be totally different, we'll put an album out and we'll suprise everyone." But, again, kind of as fate would have it, when you bring four people together who have put out music that have a certain trademark, a stamp, a style of sound and you put that magic back in a room again and that magic still exists - only it's a little more mature, it's a little more honest, it's more refined, the musicianship's better, everyone's a little older, a little wiser, and they have experiences that they can bring to the table that they never had to share before - next thing you know, we realized that this *was* Echolyn, and nothing *but* Echolyn.

PS: There is someone else that hasn't been mentioned yet along with the four of you, and that is Jordan Perlson. How did he get in the group?

CB: Jordan, for the past three years, has been a student of mine at Abington Friends School. He's a phenomenal drummer, and a totally focused, mature individual. He's someone I know we're going to be reading about in years down the road because he's got what it takes to go on and probably become one of the best session players and musicians around. He's got the drive, dedication and will to do anything. In working with him at school...most musicians kinda progress little by little so that by the time that they get to their senior year you're looking at them and saying, "You really could make a career in music, but you might want to minor in music and do it as a backup." In meeting Jordan in 10th grade, he already pretty much had what it took to be a professional musician and by 11th grade he was leaping above and beyond that and by 12th grade (his senior year, this past year) he was a monster! He's been studying privately with Joe Morello (Dave Brubeck's drummer), he takes conga lessons, he takes other world music lessons and classes in style to keep himself fresh - he's a perennial learner. He just wants to spend time perfecting his craft. When we first got together and Paul and Ray and Brett and I were working together, Paul kinda threw out right from the get-go that, "You know what? I'm into jamming tonight and all, but I'm not sure if I could commit to something as serious and what Echolyn used to be. I'm married, I have a child now, I have a full-time job, I'm working part time with GEG [Grey Eye Glances] and traveling with them. I don't know if I can throw my hat into this ring yet and commit." It was disappointing to hear, but again it kind of showed where we all were maturity-wise. We were at the point where we could be very honest and say what was on our minds." The instant thing that ran through my mind was, "Ok, well if Paul's not aboard, we need a drummer." So I went into school the very next day and just kinda pulled Jordan aside and said, "What are you doing next week? Do you want to bring your sticks, your snare, you can probably use Paul's kit, come on over and see what happens" and the rest is history! It clicked. Paul picked up the phone a few weeks later and said he still wanted "in" because he really wanted to be a part of this. He knew it was going to be something special. So rather than tell Jordan that he was out or Paul was in or tell Paul that he was out and Jordan was in, we figured, "What the heck? Truly progressive groups do things that are totally radical and different, and not many bands are working with two drummers - especially two drummers of the caliber, level, maturity and musicianship that Paul and Jordan are." So we threw them both into the mix and it all came together to help create Cowboy Poems Free.

PS: Now, I notice on Cowboy Poems that both of them don't drum at the same time.

CB: Yeah.

PS: Either Jordan drums and Paul does percussion or Paul drums and Jordan does percussion. Was that planned?

CB: Yes, it was planned for several reasons. The biggest goal when recording an album is that you have to be very careful of the use and understanding of space. When you're making an album you want to leave space, sometimes you want to have a little space, sometimes you want to have a lot of space. Drums and percussion instruments tend to take up the most amount of space - especially cymbals because they ring so much and they have a carry-over of sound. When we were going in and recording the album, we really wanted to make sure that we were going to have one person play the actual drum kit - the actual rhythm track - and then we supplemented it with all kinds of auxiliary percussion, but on some of the songs you'll notice there might be ten or fifteen other auxiliary percussion things from a afouches, triangles, claves, things like that - that are adding to that. In the live setting they both have the opportunity to play a little more aggressively, and as we mentioned earlier, is something that then takes the songs from the album to yet another new level of intensity. But on the album itself you want to set yourself up for success and have the most control in the studio over the tracks that are going down on the tape. When we went into the recording process, the drummer who had been there writing the drum parts for each specific song, as the song was originally being written, was the drummer who played the song on the album.

PS: Makes sense.

CB: So Paul played drums on seven tunes and Jordan played drums on three.

PS: The album has a very "Americana" feel to it, and unlike Echolyn songs in the past this album..it's not necessarily a concept album but it's very focused.

CB: We tended to sometimes be very introspective in the past and dealt with more of an individual "how does one person stack up against the world" or "how do a group of people stack up against another group of people" point of view. This time we really set out to take a very different approach lyrically. We chose 20th Century Americana - I guess a lot of it came to the forefront with it now being the year 2000 and technically the 1900's are behind us. We thought it would be neat to look back and take some of those moments - up moments and down moments - the pieces that made America what it has become today and turn those stories, history lessons and texts into lyrical material an album. The whole Cowboy Poems Free title deals with the way Europeans, for many years, looked at Americans - as cowboys - especially in the early-to-mid 1900's with settlers, blue jeans, cowboy hats, horseback riding - those images were what Americans were to the rest of the world. The whole "Poems Free" part links into the fact that all of these stories, these words, these lyrics, these anecdotes that we shared on the album - they were all there for the taking. They were all totally free. We didn't have to pay anyone for them...all we had to do was ask. Whether it was asking a relative to share a story about an event that happened when they were in World War II or digging through a box of old letters from a great uncle who had been killed in World War II and reading his personal possessions and actually re-creating his life leading up to the moment he was shot and killed defending his country in a war and being buried at Brittany Beach in France. Or writing about the dust storms that rolled through Texas and how people had so much pride in their land and their country that rather than running and being scared, they stayed put and died for what they believed in. All of those things are a major part of American history. It's something that some people are very in tune with. For others it's history that they choose not to think about because sometimes those events bring up negative connotations. To us these stories are all moments in American History, but that's all they are, moments, glimpses into the past. They're events that really happened and they're events we thought should be remembered.

PS: Sounds good. Along with the songs are four instrumental tracks, affectionately called "Poems." Was that done to offset the 10 lyrical tracks?

PS: There were several reasons for them. I tend to call them "Aural Pallete Cleansers" - it's kind of like when you're at a fancy restaurant and you eat sorbet between the meals to cleanse your pallete. They're segueways, or bridges, they're supposed to take you from one feeling of one track into another track. They're also there to create more space. We have also something we had never really done before, so to say, "We're gonna write a minute and twenty seconds' worth of music in this key and this tempo and it's going to be the segueway from, you know, Texas Dust into Human Lottery. was kind of fun. We liked calling them poems, even though they have no words, because a poem doesn't have to have text to capture emotion. Linking again to the Cowboy Poems, there are just as many stories and anecdotes that have been forgotten about in the past hundred years that people don't tell anymore anyway, so in more of a literal sense they're poems without words... emotions captured through music.

PS: Something that stands out is that except for one song, you and Brett wrote the whole album musically. I know that in Finneus Gauge you had a big hand with the lyrics, although with Echolyn it's more Brett and Ray. It's also noticeable that you refuse to do any lead vocals!

CB: I will probably never do lead vocals. Unfortunately, while I have an extensive vocal background it's all been very classically based and when I sing I have a hard time turning off the vibrato in my voice and singing "straight" like most pop or rock singers would. I tend to be suited better as a backing vocalist...and while I do use the phrase "never say never," as it might happen someday that I sing lead vocals, I feel much more comfortable in the backing roll. Also, when working with vocalists like Brett and Ray, who I think are two phenomenal vocalists, I don't think we need to have a confusing third "lead" vocal all of the sudden step in every now and then - it confuses things for the listeners. At the same time, in terms of the songwriting process Echolyn has always been pretty much been driven by Brett and myself - one of us comes up with the idea that starts the song and that's kinda where the song goes. Sometimes the person that comes up with the idea and starts the song doesn't even write another part for the rest of the song. One of us writes the first two or three chords and the other person takes it and finishes the tune. Other times Brett will have an idea and he'll bat it to me. I'll come up with another idea and bat it back to him. He'll come up with a third idea and bat it back to me. It's just the way we work. It's a system that has worked for over eight years now, over six albums, so we don't really question it, we don't really ask why, we just use it because it works well for us. It's one of those things that's very special because it's enabled us to continue writing songs - something Echolyn has always been focused around. We like to write tunes where you craft the verse, the chorus, the bridge, the solo section, and rather than being a band that plays lots of "noodles of nothing to nowhere," we're always very conscious of the song so that every part "fits." Every part must have a reason. There shouldn't be some spoogy guitar or keyboard line somewhere just to say, "Oh, look what I can do." It should be there for a reason, and that's something that our maturity as musicians and our collective experiences over the years has come together to create this new album. We now know when to be a little flashy or be a little inventive or left of center or ecclectic, and then we also know when to tuck in and play in the pocket. A lot of bands don't realize this, but playing in the pocket and keeping a solid groove can be one of the hardest things for a band to do. It's something that having two great drummers allows you to do. We consider ourselves very lucky because we can groove all we want.

PS: Ok! So, the new album's out...there are two questions that I keep hearing over and over again - when are you touring and when are you buying the masters back?

CB: <laughter>

PS: Normally in that order, too. You wanna set the record straight?

CB: I'll be very honest - the touring thing is kind of a nightmare at this point. We are five very in-demand, working full-time employed musicians who not only have full-time day jobs and not only have other musical things we're wrapped in (Whether it's me and my full-time teaching job, weekly private students, and the Master's Music program I'm currently enrolled in; Brett and his engineering job and studio-musician expectations; Paul and his studio-musician duties and his day job; Brett and Paul with Grey Eye Glances commitments; Ray with his musical projects, his day job, session work; Jordan with his many jazz sessions and gigs and the fact that he's going to Berklee College of Music in Boston in September, as well as all of our family commitments). You put all that together and you now want the five of us to try to be at the same spot at the same time at the same place on stage together playing a show? All of the sudden, things are totally up in the air. So we're going to have to be somewhat creative in the fact that we've looked ahead between now and January 1st - we're looking at it as almost the next five months - and we've picked a few select weekends in the fall and winter when, believe it or not, the five of us might actually be able to meet somewhere on stage together and perform! What we're gonna try and do is try and book some shows between now and December where we can hopefully play Philly, Baltimore, New York, Pittsburgh, Chicago and Canada. Pulling a few shows together will indeed be hard, but we're going to try. I know that this is going to disappoint a lot of people, especially our West Coast fans. I know our European fans are chomping at the bit to get us over there. Unfortunately, our lives are in a very different place right now than they were 5 years ago. We can't just quit everything like we did when we got signed with Sony and jump in a truck and go. I mentioned families, I mentioned jobs, we're locked into things now that we weren't locked into before. They're all commitments that we made long before Echolyn came back together again, and we have to live with that. The fact is we're still going to try and get out and play live. It's one of those things that if we drive to play a show in Chicago, Jordan might fly to Chicago from Boston to meet us there and that'll be how he gets to the show and actually plays. We just have to be very strategic about it. I guess that's probably the best word to use - it is almost a strategy. If we're gonna be in Pittsburgh on a Friday night, it makes total sense to go to Chicago or Michigan on a Saturday and then use Sunday as the day to drive home. You'd have to take off work on that Friday, but as long as we can be guaranteed that we're gonna make up the money we'd lose for not working the day, we can do it. It all can be justified. I know to some of our fans this will be disappointing news, but we're not the mid-20 something unattached men we were when Suffocating the Bloom came out. We're all in our 30's now, well except for Jordan (he helps pull down our median average!!), but he too has college commitments. The bottom line is that we each have to pursue everything in our lives seriously because nothing's a guarantee in life, and we all need to keep following up on all those other goals. In terms of the masters, we hope to get them back real soon. I don't know if and when and how it's gonna happen, but I think it's gonna happen. I have a good feeling about it. The big thing I keep telling people is to just be patient. A year and a half ago there was no real hope of Echolyn ever getting back together. All of a sudden Echolyn's back together with an album out, and now everyone wants to have all the albums. It takes time. We're trying to make it work. We're trying to book shows. We're working on getting a webpage built. We're talking about writing and working on new tunes someday soon - it's like baby steps. One at a time. We will definitely keep people in the loop as to what's happening when we have news to share. The big thing is, like I said, is allowing us to work it the way we think will be best for everyone - for us in terms of hopefully getting the rights back and for the fans that we can hopefully re-release them legally and make them available to the world again, which I think would be very cool.

PS: That would be very cool. I wanted to go back to the album for a bit. Who is William Barnes?

CB: William Barnes? Well, my name is Christopher Barnes Buzby and Brett's name is Brett William Kull.

PS: <laughs> That's beautiful!

CB: <laughs> He's actually a very famous producer from Vancouver and we had to fly him in for all of our recording sessions and pay him lots and lots of money.

PS: Why do I not believe you?

CB: <laughter>

PS: I know Echolyn has the farmhouse at Brett's parents' house. Is that where you recorded the album?

CB: That's exactly where we recorded it. It was a phenomenal experience. Brett recently expanded the studio - he has a control room, an isolated vocal booth there, he has sixteen tracks analog and twenty-four tracks digital, tons of outboard gear, a drum tracking room - the whole album was recorded there. It was a great experience. It was also a great way to break in a brand new recording studio. Talk about being on the learning curve! Every day there was something new we were figuring out. It was a lot of fun.

PS: Ok, just a few more things here. The album is on Velveteen Records. The old Echolyn stuff was on Bridge Records. Any correlation between the two? Any difference between the two?

CB: Well, in the sense that they're both our own record labels, that's pretty much the similarity. Bridge Records was always run by Greg, Brett's brother and Bridge was Echolyn in "the early days" - since this is kind of Echolyn 2000 and this is a brand new thing, we thought it would make sense to update all the business stuff and make a new record name. When it comes right down to it, it's basically us being independent musicians and independent businessmen running a business through the government - legally - with tax ID numbers and following through all the business aspects all the other small businesses have to go through, but doing it for ourselves in the sense that at the end of the day, it's ours. We're not paying any royalties to other people, we don't owe anyone anything, no one else has any licenses or obligations that they've purchased or taken from us. It's ours. It's kind of a cool thing in this day and age to be able to create something and make it and sell it and at the end of the day, no matter where it stands, it's yours.

PS: I did notice that your keyboards with FG...live, at least, you had three keyboards...and very high tech. Well, high tech for you.

CB: <laughs> Right!

PS: But with Echolyn, you went back to the Wurlitzer, back to the Fender, back to the old-style stuff. Was that intentional?

CB: Yes, it really was. To be honest, when you say "back to" - it wasn't back to Chris Buzby but it was back to the 70's because I never owned a Wurlitzer or a Fender or a Hammond. I always used digital keyboards for Echolyn. But when I went into the Echolyn thing this time around, I'm the kind of musician who thrives on new experiences and new environments. I knew that when we were going to do this new Echolyn album that I didn't want to use the same keyboards I had used in Echolyn. I also didn't want to use the same keyboards that I used in Finneus. So I really said to myself, "Ok, let's totally reinvent your keyboard rig...again!" and in keeping with the way that Echolyn had a keyboard style and sound and Finneus had a certain keyboard style and sound, I wanted this new album to have its own certain keyboard style and sound. I found the Wurlitzer on sale at a peach festival on vacation last summer - and people will shoot me for knowing this - but I only paid sixty dollars for it. It's in mint condition. The Fender Rhodes I've had for many years. The Hammond Leslie speaker I've had since the early days of Echolyn but never used it. It sat in my parent's garage for eight years. I put some money into getting it totally fixed up - I got all the motors rebuilt and all the speakers replaced, and it really gave me an opportunity to almost become a new keyboard player again. Not new as in "brand new" but new as in "developing" - I would think that most musicians would feel the same way - that if you all of a sudden were standing behind an instrument that you were familiar with but you weren't overly comfortable with, it's would make you write and approach music in a new way. I tend to thrive on that newness, and that's why I did it. It was totally my decision - no regrets. And I'm having the time of my life. This is definitely my favorite keyboard rig right now manily because I'm the most comfortable behind it and can get so much out of it.

PS: What do you see a couple of years down the line - not necessarily for Echolyn, but for Chris Buzby?

CB: Hopefully the ever-allusive solo album will finally come to fruition! There's definitely going to be something in the style of Finneus Gauge coming together again - I don't know whether it'll be called Finneus Gauge because I'm a firm believer that Finneus Gauge was what it was and that band had a time and a place and I'd rather go out and do something new and different and adventurous and obviously if I'm working with new people it would be new, it would be adventerous. Of course, there is going to be more music from Echolyn. The thing we've all learned is that to be in a band you do not need to be wed to only that band. Being in a band *can* be different than being in a marriage. Unfortunately, in the early days, I think we were all pretty high-strung and were a bunch of angst-written twenty-somethings fighting for our musical cause and sticking up for what we believed in and thinking that echolyn was all there was to life. Now that we've lived a little and learned a lot we've figured out that, "You know what? We can each be in five totally different musical situations and still come together to be echolyn. Anything can happen - even session work is kind of fun. Brett, myself, Paul and Ray have all started doing some session work in the area and we get pretty well to walk into a session where they put music in front of us and in 15-45 minutes you can walk away with a couple hundred dollars and know that you played a part that will go on and make the person's project you wee hired to play on be that much better than it would have been if we hadn't been playing on it. So it's one of those things where we've learned a lot and we've come a long way in terms of knowing that to be a musician isn't just to be a member of Echolyn. Knowing your instrument, knowing your craft, and being proud of what you do and being willing to share it with others.

PS: One last question for you. Are you happy with the record?

CB: I love it. I think it's the best thing Echolyn's put out. I think it's our most mature and focused effort to date - and I think that says a lot for a music industry right now that's totally struggling for an identity. I think most bands are struggling to find what it is to write that one hit song, and I think most musicians who are actively putting out original music are forgetting that music is about songs. It's not all about chops. It's not about, "look what I can do!" because I can sit in my room all night long and show off what I can do, but to sit down and craft a song? That's tough. It's an art, and I think Cowboy Poems Free is one of the best things we've done in that regard. Thanks to everyone who has already bought a copy. Everyone in Echolyn greatly appreciates your open ears and your continued support!

To learn more about Chris Buzby, Echolyn and Finneus Gauge, check out the following link:

The Official Echolyn Website