Jukebox The Ghost just put a wrap on the first half of its winter tour its self-titled fourth album Saturday night at Mr. Small’s in Pittsburgh.







The band has two weeks off before the tour resumes in South Burlington, VT.







With the band’s fourth LP, it experimented with its sound. From changing arrangements to co-writing for the first time on a Jukebox The Ghost album, Ben Thornewill (piano/vocals), Tommy Siegel (guitar/vocals) and Jesse Kristin (drums/vocals) proved that stepping outside ones comfort zone is not only sometimes an option, but a necessity.







The Swerve Magazine recently had the chance to talk with Thornewill about touring, change and “The Great Unknown.”







The Swerve Magazine: So, how have the shows been going on this part of the tour.







Ben Thornewill: The shows have been beyond our expectations. They have been huge and enthusiastic. The other bands that we have been touring with are, in addition to being fantastic bands, are great individuals. Great people to be with. All around we just keep saying this is such a good tour. Such good vibes and good crowds.







SM: This is the second time you technically played Pittsburgh for this album.



The band played WYEP’s Live & Direct back in Sept ahead of the album’s release, was that a kind-of-get-the-word-out small tour?







BT: You end up doing a smattering of things before the record comes out, after the record comes out and in the process (of it coming out). It is all about the slowly getting of the word out.







WYEP has been really good to us for a long time. We’ve done their on-air performance before, so we were happy to do it again. That show was actually part of an all-week, all-radio promo tour. It was trying to say thanks to the stations that were playing the record before it came out and then trying to put it in people’s ears that we did have a record out. Our philosophy as a band has alway been you do what you can whenever you can. We are not really in the business of saying no. I don’t think that you find there is that room to be that picky. You want to make sure your message is good. We try and do everything we possibly can.







SM: The new album is really poppy, but there is this experimental vibe going on, like there will be instances where the keyboard will just drop out of the song or the guitar will. Those are new things for a Jukebox album.







In making the new album, did you have the idea before heading into the studio that you wanted to experiment with some different things?







BT: Going into the record, no we didn’t know that was going to be the process. We knew that we wanted to make a huge record. We wanted to make a pop record and we wanted to take some risks. Originally those risks were thought to be song selection. When we got into the studio, we, first worked with a guy named Andrew Dawson (producer)







He worked on the track ‘“Postcard.” He took the song apart and changed it with new sounds. We finished the record with Dan Romer who worked on our last record (2012’s “Safe Travels”), we sort of adopted that process (Dawson) started. At the end of the day what it meant was is that we sure and decidedly let go of the ego. What I mean by that is if there wasn’t meant to be piano a certain part, let’s find another thing to do. What matters most is not whether its your primary instrument playing, but what is going to make this part (of the song) the best and most successful.







Arrangement-wise, we definitely took risks. I remember the song “Girl,” and, actually, with “Sound of a Broken Heart” too, I was having these issues of, “Oh man, what are we doing? Have we gone to far? It feels a little out of character.” Then it began to feel like if you weren’t taking risks you weren’t doing anything. We didn’t want to make a safe record. We wanted to make something that was new, different and challenging for us. In the end, I really paid off as we are so proud of the record.







SM: Do you think that the album succeeds in being more poppy because you did take those risks and while they may have had you feel a bit out of your element, you could go back into the song and, almost, be comforted by playing with the poppier elements?







BT: I think it is both ways. I think one of the really interesting things about pop song tracks is that you can be musically subversive. You can put in strange sounds or parts. If they are done right, it sounds like the poppiest thing. From an arrangement standpoint, we did do some weirder things by putting some stranger sounds more out there like synth tones and percussion elements in there than we have on the past records. In some ways, it sounds more cleaner and more straight forward than it would have been just piano, guitar and drums. I think mixing and infusing element of it is successful.







SM: You just hit the heart of what I was thinking listening to the album. It does sound clean, yet there is so much going on when you really tune in and listen. It can be heard more clearly on repeated listens.







BT: I always think about “Girl as a really good example because originally it was almost this Bill Joel-esque, very thrills piano part, especially in the verses. We slowly stripped it away and away. Or “Sound of a Broken Heart,” the original verse was very Stevie Wonder, jazzy chords, super soulful and then we were, like, “How do we make this in a synth style that is just going to rip your teeth out? With sparse rhythms and electronic drums?” All this stuff that we wouldn’t necessarily do and it was changing every eight seconds. The textures. The synth tones. And yet it feels cohesive, I think that is why it is successful.







SM: Keeping with how this album is different, something that you did this time around that you didin’t do before is you co-wrote with other people and together. How did that change the process?







BT: I started writing with other people and then Tommy started. Not thinking that we need help with Jukebox songs, a great example is “The Great Unknown.” I wrote it with one of my friends Greg Holden. It was comprised of us sitting in a room and hanging out in the studio for a day and drinking a bunch of wine and writing a song. Months later, I thought it could be a Jukebox song why don’t we do it?







What co-writing does is that it makes things less precious and it is easier to say if it is not on the record, it will find a home somewhere else. It takes the ego out of it a bit. You learn tricks from other people and you write songs that you would otherwise not write. For us, it was freeing.







There is actually one song that didn’t make the record that we spent so many days working on it. The producer and I could never quite agree on how it was supposed to sound. It didn’t make it on the record and I feel okay with that because I feel confident that it will be on a future album.