Here’s the second entry in a series of interviews with artists and musicians we enjoy and respect. In these “double interviews,” bands ask each other a series of three questions. No agendas, no awkward plugs, no corporate bullshit.

Today, we sat down with our buddies in Snowplows. We caught these guys at their first ever show, some loft affair in the post-industrial wasteland of New Bedford, MA. We immediately noticed their penchant for compact, muscular songs and excellent shirts. Needless to say, we’ve been big fans ever since. This week, Snowplows release their debut full-length, Hold This for Me.

Jesse Marsh, the original Snowplow (photo: Freddie Ross).

A Troop of Echoes: So Snowplows originated as Jesse’s solo project, with Pat helping out on drums. How was the decision made to make this a full-fledged band, and how did you guys handle the transition?

Jesse Marsh (Snowplows): Even though I initially described the project as starting as a “solo project,” I think that’s a misnomer, looking back. At the time, I had written two songs, and I wanted to get them recorded; Patrick was kind enough to play drums on the songs, and we cranked them out at Jon Downs’ house. However, I was working and in graduate school at the time, and I didn’t really make the time to do anything beyond that, songwriting-wise. I had left my previous band because I simply didn’t have enough time to make practices or play shows anymore.

Later on, Matt and Brian and I kicked around the idea of playing music together, and when it came time to actually try it out, we asked Patrick if he wanted to play with us and see if he was into it. We kept one of the songs I wrote (Good Times) and shelved the other one, but once we all got into a room, it was obvious that this was going to be way more of a collaborative thing, and everyone was free to bring their own stuff to the table. I think the first song we actually completed as a group was something that Brian spearheaded, and he had been working on the riffs and structure with Matt beforehand.

We probably could have avoided confusion by going with a different name, but we eventually settled on just using the Snowplows name (which made some sense as we had adapted one of the songs I wrote initially).

Brian Williams (Snowplows): I’ll just add that Matt and I spent at least one night a week getting together bashing our heads up against depression and songwriting without actually having a band for a solid year or so following the end of our previous band together, Mast. We definitely had a ton of discussion about how we want to steal our good friend and musical crush Jesse from retirement and we orchestrated joining up with him by training him to respond to the sound of a bell by agreeing to move into a practice space with us.

I can’t stress how fortuitous it was that Patrick just so happened to have his full kit set up in the space we wound up in. He’s truly one of the most talented musicians we’ve ever played with and it was a lot of good fortune involved.

Patrick Boutwell (Snowplows): Yeah, this was all kind of a happy accident for me. It had been a long time since I had not only had a place to even play drums at all, but also been the drummer of a band. Brian and Matt came by to check out the space the day I was moving gear in, and I had known them from when my band The Brother Kite played a few shows with Mast, and it was floated that, if I was free, then I should come by and jam.

And jam we did.

We jammed the shit out of it.

Peter Gilli, the original Echo (photo: Stuart Window).

Snowplows: Your band is instrumental, but it seems that the saxophone “sings” in such a way that it fills a role that is traditionally occupied by a vocalist in many of your songs. When Troop was formed, was this a deliberate approach, or did it happen organically? In addition, how much did you draw upon instrumental music as inspiration? And finally, was there ever a time when you experimented with vocals? (Apologies if you have older material with vocals that I’m not familiar with.)

Nick Cooper (A Troop of Echoes): We do have some vocal material (!), specifically one song on a way long time ago demo before we really knew what the hell this thing was going to be. I think at first the general idea was just to try to use the saxophone to hit hard, almost like a guitar. Our early stuff has a lot more in the way of saxophone riffs. They were melodic and catchy, but more in your face. After Days in Automation, I definitely remember some long, tour-van conversations about trying to “work the saxophone” (Dan 1977, 3) more like a vocalist, and after some trial and error I think we got to a good place for our newest album, The Longest Year on Record.

Peter Gilli (A Troop of Echoes): I think “Constellation” is the first song where that approach really fell into place. Once we got into the groove of writing, getting that stripped-down singing quality on the saxophone became kind of a point of pride, and we started looking at some of the other instruments kind of similarly. We’d start with a jam, listen to our recordings of it, and then cut out half the stuff happening in the drum part. Most of the time it actually made the songs more interesting and somehow hit harder than they did before. So as an instrumental band that became part of our signature - basically that we’re not going to put you through a bunch of unnecessary bullshit in our songs. The sax players I’ve been into for the past few years (Lee Konitz, Matt Otto) are pretty lyrical that way too.



Dan Moriarty (A Troop of Echoes): When we started the band, I don’t think any of us were that deep into instrumental music. As time went on, I think we all developed a growing appreciation for the style. Like any other genre, there’s a lot of bullshit to wade through. But there are also some really special bands out there doing pretty incredible things without words (e.g. Alarmist, Blue Cranes, Giraffes? Giraffes!). Its always fun seeing what other people are up to, and sometimes you can learn a lot from bands you wouldn’t normally enjoy listening to.

Snowplows in action.

A Troop of Echoes: You guys have a knack for writing really tight, well-crafted rock songs. What is your philosophy and process for writing songs? What do you feel is the essence of a Snowplows song? And how do you guys evaluate what things are working (and what things are not)?

Jesse Marsh (Snowplows): I can’t answer for everyone here, but all of us bring our own song ideas to the table (sometimes just a riff, sometimes a more completed and structured song template), so it varies based on that. For my own song ideas, a couple on the record were basically complete from the get-go, while others maybe had a couple of parts, but Matt or Brian would add their own ideas for bridges or refrains. Depending on the song idea, I may or may not make suggestions for bass or drums, but Matt and Patrick pretty much have a great sense of what will sound good and what we are going for, so it’s usually pretty organic. And Brian will add different layers, textures and melody lines that I never would have thought of, so even when the idea is “mine,” it really becomes “ours” by the time we’ve run it a few times. Everything would sound wildly different with other musicians, to the point that the songs would be unrecognizable as Snowplows songs.

Although there is definitely some overlap, we all have fairly diverse musical backgrounds and interests, and this is probably reflected in all of our songs whether we are conscious of it or not. I realize that sounds somewhat cliched, but I think it’s applicable.

When ideas don’t work, I think we tend to hammer things into place until they DO work. Certain songs of ours have been quasi-retired after being completed and played live a few times, but for the most part, the seeds of most songs are either worked on to completion, or saved for a later date. I think there’s only one time that I can think of that we came up with a song idea, worked on it for a bit, but ultimately decided to abandon it. We kind of all had the same “meh” reaction to it, and for whatever reason, we didn’t look back.

Brian Williams (Snowplows): First of all, thank you so much for saying those kind things. Jesse only talked about the first part of your question, so I’m making fun of him in this sentence [ Editor’s note: 👌] .

For what I personally write, I keep lists of ideas with just terribly unhelpful descriptions on a very helpful app called Trello. I have just the worst memory. It’s pathetic. To not lose song ideas, I always need tools to help me. I also have a hand-held recorder I’ll hum into at random times. I sometimes write out chord charts and some basic melody lines I have in mind in notation. Haven’t completely wasted that minor in Music I picked up in college. Usually an idea I throw out to the group has gone through this sort of process, first. We’ve also influenced each other. Jesse, in particular, has really motivated me to tighten up the way that I write to get to the point a little more directly. Matt and I have been writing songs for 6 or 7 years now, so it’s hard to even quantify the ways that he’s influenced me. He’s just a part of my brain now.

Our overall philosophy is to trust each other. Every one of these guys is a great player with good instincts. Very rarely do we actually teach each other what to play. And when we do teach someone something, eventually we end up breaking it down into how we would play it. I wouldn’t say that we’re necessarily tied to pop song structure entirely, but it’s an important reference point for us. It’s a good limitation to play around with because it keeps us productive. If someone feels like something feels a part of a song is more self-indulgent then actually resulting in something worth listening to, we tend to lose it.

Look. The singularity, if it ever happens, isn’t even a good idea until we figure out how to populate somewhere beyond our beautiful planet. We’re all going to die and I don’t want anyone to feel like they wasted some of their precious time on Earth listening to an idea we only half-liked. So, we trim fat sometimes. Maybe that’s the most anti-climactic answer possible. But the essence of a Snowplows song is, I hope, a lack of waste.

We’re all fairly self-policing when it comes to what works and what doesn’t work. Everyone has free reign to try out ideas while we’re writing and usually we have pretty good ears for when something isn’t quite right. That’s not to say that we don’t have opinions of what we each play and sometimes express that. This seems like a good enough excuse to talk about the part in Honesty where Matt does a trick with a bass wah/whammy combo. The first time he tried it out the look on Jesse’s was like…okay…stop being silly. I wish I had a video. Obviously, if you listen to the recorded version on Hold This For Me, you’ll hear that it stayed. And it stayed because it ended up being a great, signature move that we all ended up getting behind. Matt has a way of doing things that shouldn’t work on bass that end up being great.

Patrick Boutwell (Snowplows): Before I answer, I will say that I lobbied HARD for that bass/whammy thing. It may have been me who led the conversation about compromising so it only showed up once per verse as opposed to once per progression (which is what it had been–hence Jesse’s death stare), but that little bit still makes me happy when I hear it.

Anyway, I think the essence of Snowplows songs comes down to the personalities of all 4 of us coming together. I feel as though each one of us has a pretty distinctive and individual feel and perspective, and simply can’t help but be ourselves, all the time. And while it is not a free-for-all by any means, we pretty much all have carte blanche as to what we do parts-wise on each other’s tunes. So you could say that self-expression is really the essence of Snowplows.

From a songwriting perspective, in the beginning, I had told the guys that I wanted to focus primarily on drums; having spent a decade at that point writing songs in my own band, I wanted a pretty clear separation between the two projects. However, when it comes to song craft, I truly cannot help myself (I just get really excited about writing songs, what can I say?), so I usually get involved if I think there is structural oddness that needs attention, and when I think there can be a little more “business” in a song, like little transitional tags at the end of parts, or making a song structure a little more traditional as to have a solid base to work off of. But luckily, I don’t feel the need to do that often because they all know what they are doing, and I can just sit back and dream up weird fills that are both hook-y and hard to understand.

Dramatization of a typical Troop of Echoes band practice.

Snowplows: Troop is a band that doesn’t seem penned into a particular genre or style. It’s not like this is a hardcore band where the idea of a 5/4 jazz break would get laughed out of the room. With such wide parameters and especially considering the fact that Troop isn’t the sole musical project for anyone in your band, how does everyone stay organized when writing? As in, “this is a Troop idea” and “this is for something else.” What kind of tools do you use for organizing these ideas? (I.E. demoing, organizational applications, actual notation, etc.) Feel free to get real nerdy and technical about process.

Nick Cooper (A Troop of Echoes): I think to answer this, it might make more sense to tackle the second part first. Our writing process has evolved significantly since the beginning of the band. Early on, one of us (usually Pete) would come to practice and demo melodies, riffs, or even rough structures for songs, and we would all play to what he was doing. I know at that point, I was often focused on providing a literal counter to the sax, so the songs ended up sounding pretty busy/mathy. As our sound evolved, we started working more off of jams, often improvising a pseudo-structure that we would record, reiterate, destroy, and rebuild over time. That said, Longest Year has more elements that were brought in, especially later in the process, by individual band members. “Small Fires” started as a bassline that Dan wrote. “Kerosene”, “Broadway Ghost”, and “Pure Alexia” were all workshopped outside of the normal practice setting. I can’t speak for Pete, but I used actual notation software to score out string and horn parts for “Kerosene” and “Broadway Ghost”.

So in general, most Troop songs start off and develop in the Troop space with all of us contributing. The pieces that people brought in for the album tended to be smaller or simpler in structure, and from the get go an opportunity to work with different instrumentation.

Peter Gilli (A Troop of Echoes): Yeah, a lot of the inspiration crawls out of the primordial soup of our group jams, for sure. I think we tend to put together collections of songs that have a certain general emotional tone, too. That definitely helped weed out a bunch of stuff from our most recent album. We had a few songs that didn’t work out because they were closer to your prototypical goofy math-rock fare and it just didn’t seem right to put them together with the more somber stuff we were writing at the same time. So, into the fire they go!

Dan Moriarty (A Troop of Echoes): As far as the division of songs between musical projects goes, its not always clean-cut. Nick and I both play in a post-punk band (Public Policy), and songs like those are never going to be confused for Troop songs. But as Nick referenced above, I had initially written pieces of “Small Fires” and “Kerosene” for a barely-existent solo project. As we were putting TLYOR together, it seemed to us that they’d fit really well. After some major reinvention, the dinky parts I’d originally written took on new life as fleshed-out Troop songs.

Brian Williams: melter of brains, plower of snow.

A Troop of Echoes: How did you settle in on the signature Snowplows™ guitar sound? Does holding so much awesome power ever frighten you?

Jesse Marsh (Snowplows): I care about my own sound to an extent, but my approach over the years has been pretty much set-it-and-forget-it. As I’ve gotten used to tweaking things with effects pedals and whatnot, that approach has changed a little bit, but as long as I’m in tune, I’m not super concerned with nuance.

The most obvious element that probably shapes our sound is our decibel level, and while I don’t think it phases us too much most of the time, it probably bums out sound people at venues who can only push the vocals so far. That’s on us. Sorry, everyone.

Brian Williams (Snowplows): Quickly, and possibly most importantly, our guitar sound really wouldn’t be anything if Matt didn’t have such a good bass tone. It’s big and burly and kind of gives us a little bit of a heavy edge. That really allows for us to not lean on distortion/fuzz with our guitar tone without coming off as dinky sounding. Plus, Pat is skilled as a drummer and also at tuning his drums situationally so that he can always cut through the wall of sound. On Hold This For Me, we mixed to be more balanced than we probably put off live. Bass, drums, and vocals all sit a little higher than the guitar. That was definitely intentional. I think in some cases it’s nice to have a live experience be different than a recording.

In general, our guitar sound shoots for loud and big, but still clear. We’ve definitely heard the compliment that people expected not to actually hear what we were playing so much as feel it based on our setup, but then were pleasantly surprised by the clarity. We definitely have fuzz and distortion going on from time to time, but our standard guitar sound relies on the natural break from power tubes being pushed on clean channels as our main source of grit. We recently did a Smashing Pumpkins set for a benefit show and it was immediately kind of bizarre to be using distortion and fuzz more than a clean sound.

Jesse has a largely unaffected, just classically great guitar sound. I saw my role as “the color guy” and use more effects and tend to do the wall of sound thing. I know my setup is ridiculous, but I also don’t really tweak my sound too frequently. Each amp I use is set up to kind of fill a different function. I use a Bad Cat Lynx 50 through a custom Earcandy 2x12. That’s my most focused, glassy sound. It has the best mid-range to my ear, so I push that. ENGL Powerball (clean channel only) through an Orange 4x12. That is sort of the bass presence in my tone…it’s the ooomph. And both channels of an Ampeg Gemini 1x15 combo amp from the 60s. Very chimey with a real classic reverb tank thing going on there. The second channel cranked has a really classic fuzz thing going on.

The number of amps thing has been my existential crisis lately. In Mast, I was the only guitarist, Matt was the bassist. We both played through two amps and a ton of cabs because we really, really wanted a huge sound. When we started Snowplows, we still had all that stuff and needed to keep it at our space. So, maybe we inherited the whole big amp sound thing just by having all that gear around when we started playing together. Jesse has this Music Man that can be both a bass and guitar amp. It’s about 150 watts and he plays through the bass input. It really keeps up with all of my stuff so long as I’m keeping myself honest with volume. When I’m not, it makes everyone feel bad. The existential crisis comes into play because I know that I could just play through one amp and play these songs and no one would feel robbed of the assault on their senses. Lately, I’ve been copying Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine and pointing my amps away from my fellow band members and the audience. It’s a good compromise, but I’m also toying with the idea of paring down. Gotta grow up sometime.

The Longest Year on Record release show.

Snowplows: As I’m sitting here listening to The Longest Year On Record, it occurs to me how emotional and even cinematic it is throughout. I could close my eyes and imagine a scene at any moment. Obviously, music is a constant inspiration to other musicians. But, I wonder if inspiration often comes outside of music for you. Have you been inspired by film, life experience, sounds in the world, etc.? Also, have you ever been interested in, been approached about, or actively sought out licensing your music for use in other media? Is that something you’d be interested in?

Nick Cooper (A Troop of Echoes): I think as a musician, artist even (gasp), I’m constantly inspired by other works of art. Sometimes, I hear our parts like a narrative, all the instruments building this scene, almost like a four-part dialogue with each of us spurring the others along. Other times, I tend to think more architecturally, where each instrument has this specific structural role to play. So for certain songs it’s like, “What do we need here to keep this section upright? Does the guitar need to lay down a support with the drums, or should it play off the accents of the saxophone line?”. Sometimes we all have to circle around for a while to find the right balance.

I’m not averse to having our music licensed. I know we looked into something with NPR a while back, but I don’t think anything ever came of it. We just finished up a homebrew music video for “Small Fires”, which sort of follows the making of the last album. It’s just a bunch of time-lapse photos and short videos spliced together, but at least for me it has a cool narrative, and adds a nice resonance to the song. So I think if we found a unique opportunity, that sort of collaboration could work well.



Snowplows release their debut full-length Hold This For Me at AS220 this Friday with Public Policy, Left and Right, and Ask The Dead. For more band-on-band action, click here.