I had the opportunity to talk with Tommy Siegel, guitarist of one of my favorite bands, Jukebox the Ghost. We talked about their new album, Off To The Races, as well as some questions I’ve always wondered about!

Listen to the full audio interview here!

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Danya Trommer: I’m going to start out with a question about your Google Talk. You were talking about how you guys all got together, and I know you all come from different musical backgrounds and you said how your first practice it was kind of like, “This is strange.” How did you guys come to be comfortable with time and how did you come to mesh your styles together?

Tommy Siegel: It’s funny, I met them in college through putting a flyer up in the music department, and we had this one jam session–I was kind of in the process of forming my own band, but they already had their own thing going, and I was like, “Ok, sure! I’ll check out what’s going on.” Then we had one jam session and I remember thinking, “This is strange, they don’t even have a bass player,” and [lead singer] Ben at that time was like way more classical in his approach than he is now. I remember thinking, “Huh, this is interesting.” But, after just a couple of hours of playing with them, I was like, “this could totally work.”

DT: Oh, it was that quick?

TS: Yeah, it was just so easy. We all got along immediately, even though we were pretty different as musicians. Before the band was ever doing anything seriously, we were just friends just messing around in the practice space. It was very open, there wasn’t like an agenda which was nice. I think post-college it’s hard to just start a band for fun, it gets a little more complicated. People have ambitions and things they want to accomplish. It was nice that we had this three year kind of grace period where we got to make mistakes and figure out what kind of band we wanted to be but without any financial pressure or anything. We were just making a lot of mistakes and learning from them, like having a song and being like [dumb voice], “Ok, we want this song to have a Latin breakdown,” and playing a few shows and being like, “That’s really corny.” [Laughs] Thankfully, it was in a sort of pre-video internet where don’t have to live with those decisions for all eternity.

DT: So it was nice having that kind of cushion?

TS: Yeah. In hindsight, it feels very pure that we got to mess around. I can’t imagine being a band now where every step of the way would be documented.

DT: Speaking of documentation, your live album was super great. I was at your Philly show and I could hear myself on one of the tracks so like a gift was given to me [Laughs]. I feel like live albums and videos documenting tours are almost like gifts to fans. I love your Long Way Home mini-documentary back in 2015, were you guys thinking of doing anything similar for Off To The Races?

TS: In term of a little documentary or something?

DT: Mmmhmm.

TS: Well that was a funny thing. That was when we got signed to [record label] Cherry Tree, they wanted to put together almost like a promo reel to introduce people to the band, so that was kind of outside funded. I don’t think we would have thought of doing something like that. We were really stoked with how it came out. But yeah, as an independent band now, I think it would be tough…stuff like that is really cool but when there’s no way to make any return on it, it’s hard to be like, “Yeah! We’re gonna make a documentary for YouTube!” But, I do love that Long Way Home thing, I hope we get to do something like that again.

DT: Yeah, it was super cool. So…I noticed back in 2008 with Let Live and Let Ghosts there’s like four songs referencing the apocalypse. There are songs with darker tones on this album like “Time and I” and “People Go Home”, there’s some darker lyrics in there, but overall it feels like over the past ten years your song-writing–or the band’s songwriting has become a little bit less–I don’t want to say nihilistic, but there’s no songs about the apocalypse anymore. I was wondering what caused this shift in tone, and what would you say is the biggest difference in the songwriting process from ten years ago to now?

TS: A little background on the first record: we’d been playing as the Sunday Mail before we were Jukebox the Ghost, we had a different name. We all went and did semesters studying abroad and were apart for six months or nine months or whatever. When we came back, Ben and I had a lot of new material and when he was away, he developed [songs] “Good Day”, “Hold It In”, “Victoria”. When I was away, I got this idea in my head that I wanted to write a concept album about the apocalypse, kind of like playfully reinterpreting the Book of Revelation. I was studying abroad in Italy and there’s these amazing apocalyptic Medieval paintings everywhere in old churches, so I was taking a lot of inspiration from that. I was just backpacking around Europe with a guitar and a Book of Revelation and writing my little concept album. I envisioned it as it’s own thing, but when we got back and I heard Ben’s songs I thought they could work together and we could thread them in a way–it was sort of half concept record and half not. So that’s how Let Live came to be, and to be honest I still write that kind of stuff, it just tends to get funneled into other things nowadays. I write about more stuff than the apocalypse now–

DT: You have another band, right?

TS: Yeah. I feel like that thread of songwriting still exists, but it’s generally more with [band] Narc Twain. One of my goals for [Jukebox the Ghost’s] next record is to…reinterpret that voice in a way that compliments Ben’s songwriting and could work for Jukebox. I’ve got the seed of some interesting ideas that I’m playing with right now in a very early stage. But yeah, I wouldn’t say that thread of writing has gone away, it just comes in and out of being dominant.

DT: Are you ready to reveal any of those seeds or are you keeping those under wraps?

TS: I’m just sort of in the playful stage right now where I haven’t really decided what it’s for or what it is, but I’ve been taking some inspiration from the Book of Genesis and playing with that.

DT: So you’re doing a biblical thing again?

TS: Yeah, just all those archetypal images–that imagery sits well with me. I enjoy writing from that sort of surreal place.

DT: Gotcha. So in an interview you said that your demos are sounding more and more like finished products because you guys have become like studio engineers on your own time…Do you each individually make demos and then come to each other with the product or do you make demos together?

TS: We do all of the above. Sometimes we do it completely separate and sometimes we come together. For example, specifically on the last record, “Diane”–the finished recording of that sounds almost exactly the same as the demo, just a better version of it. Or “Jumpstarted,” Ben did by himself like I did with “Diane” and…the demo is pretty close to how it turned out.

DT: So I was wondering when you make those demos individually and they’re almost sounding like the finished product, does that make collaboration a little bit harder because it’s not as much of a collective building from the ground up process?

TS: Yeah. It’s good in the sense that it’s made us better writers and coming to the band with stronger material. It sort of knows what it is from the get-go, but sometimes you can get trapped. People call it “demo-itus,” where you get hung up on how the demo sounds and you’re not open to new ideas. The trick is, for us, is making a demo that gets your point across but not being psychologically married to whatever decisions you made and being open for other people to improve it.

DT: So I’m going to move on to some questions about your live shows. I know you guys started [three date tour in which the band performs half as Jukebox The Ghost and half as Queen] Halloqueen as doing something for a friend’s wedding and it spiraled into a much bigger thing. I actually went to one of your Halloqueen dates dressed up as Ben, I love those shows. I’m fortunate enough to live by Philly where you guys do the show, but have you ever considered a mini October Halloqueen tour?

TS: From my perspective, I really want to do it. It’s really a taxing show on Ben vocally[singing as Freddie Mercury], so we can’t do a lot of them in a row because he starts to lose his voice, so we’re limited by that a little bit. I would love to play a national Halloqueen tour, even if it meant taking a lot of days off in between.

DT: Yeah because not everyone gets to experience it and it’s such a great time.

TS: I know, I wish we could tour around but maybe someday we’ll get to.

DT: Yeah! So, “Hold It In Supreme” [where members of the band play each other’s instruments] is one of my favorite live moments that I’ve seen from you guys on a tour. I was wondering how you came up with that and why [play] that specific song?

TS: We chose “Hold It In” for that one because it’s the only song in our catalogue that we could do that. Any other song I think would be too difficult. But “Hold It In” just requires the T-Rex finger chord position on piano. It’s probably the only easy song Ben’s ever written on piano [Laughs]. Most of the time he’s adding in his classical training and those sorts of flourishes but that one is real easy so that made it so that I can get behind the keys and it would just be the second worst thing in the world, not the total worst.

DT: Have you guys ever [gotten through the whole] song?

TS: I think towards the end of that tour we did finish it a couple of times.

DT: Oh, wow. Impressive [Laughs]. So, you describe your live shows as a Vaudeville [act], and you guys have played over 1,000 shows. From just the collection of sound bites [of show banter released on Spotify], it sounds like you guys say unique things at each show and don’t really work off of a script. Is that how you avoid things getting stale on tour?

TS: I come from the mindset where I really like to just have a totally new setlist every show, and [drummer] Jesse tends to like making a good setlist and sticking with it for a whole tour, so we’re constantly kind of in a tug of war about whether to change the set list up or not. That’s kind of our big tour debate. But yeah, you gotta change up the stage banter. We’ve definitely been in situations where it’s easy to find yourself regurgitating the same stage banter every night and then you start to feel a little bit like a robot [Laughs], so it’s nice to avoid that.

DT: Is [recorded live song] “Keys in the Car” ever going to end up on a studio album?

TS: Probably not, because we have that live version, we have a kind of studio version–

DT: The Buzzsession.

TS: Yeah, we have a lot of people asking about that song but we’re coming from a different vantage point of [knowing] how much other material we have that didn’t make it onto the record. Coming into Off To The Races, we probably had like 75 demos, and “Keys in the Car”–I don’t think it was in anybody’s top ten [to get on to the record]. It’d be great to have the budget some day to record all these songs so people can hear everything we’re working on. We sort of felt like a third version of “Keys in the Car” would be too much [Laughs], especially with all those other songs.

DT: Yeah, if you got all those demos. So, since I’m technically interviewing you for Boston University right now, I’m kind of obligated to ask: can we look forward to a Boston date on your next tour?

TS: That’s a good question. I am not sure, I think so! We have a tour coming up this fall, I can’t remember off the top of my head if Boston is on it, but you’ll be hearing news about it shortly.

Check out Off To The Races on Spotify here and on Apple Music here!