Getting Funky 20 Years & Counting: A Conversation with Ryan Jalbert of The Motet
CREDIT: Scott McCormick
Founded in 1998, The Motet are gearing up to release their 10th album on January 18th! I got to check in with their guitarist Ryan Jalbert to get the full skinny on what’s to come for the group. Check out our full conversation below!
How did The Motet first come together?
Dave, our drummer, started the band in 1999. Wow, a long time ago. The story of which also kind of explains the name is, he started doing these different lineups where it was just members changing. So he was doing like the Dave watts quartet or the Dave Watts quintet or whatever, and it's kind of changing. It kept changing so much, and he just kept booking gigs. He called it the Dave Watts Motet, so it's kind of open ended. And then it became just The Motet by like 2000 or something like that. Shortly after then, they were touring for a while. I was in Massachusetts, where I grew up, and I saw them a few times at different festivals. I had a live tape because I was trading tapes, like Pfish and Grateful Dead tapes and other like jam band tapes and stuff like that, so I kind of knew them. I knew the band always had like great musicians or whatever. And then the bass player, Garrett, I used to see his band from Boston called The Miracle Orchestra and I knew that they disbanded, and I was big fan of them. He moved to Boulder, and joined The Motet, and I was kind of like, okay, I'm starting to pay attention more to what's going on with The Motet and then I moved to Boulder in 2004. I was just there for a while, and was kind of like looking for a gig and I knew Garrett from the East Coast. I kind of like started hanging around at the time where they were between guitarists and I snuck in to the fold. At that point, I thought the band was like a legacy band they've been around forever. But they've been around for like, four or five. I joined in 2005. They had only been a band for like five years and now I've been in a band like 17 years, which is crazy. Joey, our keys player, had already played with The Motet a little bit ,he was based in Portland, Oregon. Drew, our saxophone player, is Garretts younger brother. So we've all known each other for a really long time, even though the band has gone through some lineup changes. Currently, the quintet, we've just kind of been this way for since the pandemic, really?
How would you explain your sound to someone who has never heard your music?
We're heavily steeped in funk music. We have this deep reverence for 70s funk, kind of like the golden era of funky dance music. Everything was still kind of experimental and then it was like pre disco. That golden era where like, people just went out and saw funk bands and danced and it was a party, that was like real party music. That's kind of like the foundation of our sound. But of course, we're all influenced by lots of different music, we're influenced by new music and old music and everything like that. We all know and love jazz and we study jazz all the time. We're always trying to stretch the harmony more, that's the kind of the jazz influence there. Just kind of like make it a little more cerebral and then kind of have the that energy, keep the energy of funk music. I would explain our sound as being funky and soulful and jazzy, but it's really hard to explain. Genres are such loose terms, but yeah, I guess I would go with that.
You recently dropped your latest single Draccus - whats the story behind that track?
This is one that Garrett wrote. And I don't really know. The lyrics ended up being about some dragon, some kind of monster, that like eats trees, I guess. Garrett's kind of into sci fi, so he wrote those lyrics. That might have been the first lyrics that he's written, but he kind of went for it. I think they're great. He sings them on TalkBox. So it's cool. It has that sort of sci fi thing. Like, you know, he's kind of a robot/monster eating all the trees and spitting. I guess that's the story.
Your 10th studio album All Day is set to be released on January 18th - what can you tell me about it?
it's all instrumental. That's the big thing that's different than the previous ones. To me, it kind of feels a little full circle, because when I joined the band in 2005, we were making instrumental records. So the first couple albums that I'm on are instrumental. Then we started making vocal albums, which was great, I love all the vocal music. We're still working with singers and writing with singers. We plan on bringing a singer in full time, hopefully, eventually, but it felt awesome just to make an instrumental record, which is because, like I said, it's just kind of like, how I knew the band. I think a lot of fans really identified with that music. I know a lot of people loved our singers, but I think some fans, you know, anytime you change, people are going to have preferences or opinions or whatever. It is cool, though, that said, the people that fell in love with instrumental Motet get a glimpse of that all these years later. We're all improvising musicians at our core, so the five of us just got to think outside the box and just go instrumental on this one and just kind of experiment and do something different.
Out of all of the performances you all have done, which ones stick out as your favorites?
Red Rocks is just always amazing and we're so lucky to be able to live here and have such a strong fan base here. We've had a chance to play Red Rocks a bunch. Those aren't always my favorite shows, honestly, my favorite shows are the most like unpredictable nights. It's like show in wherever, like Birmingham or something, where we miss two lights and we get in there and we're like, we're not going to make this gig on time and then we just get there just in time. We just throw the stuff on stage and then we're all just completely frazzled and just like being out of your head so much .Everyone plays different or there's this shared camaraderie like oh my god, we made the gig, we're all here. To me, the most fun gigs are the in between gigs. Red Rocks is so great, but there's this pressure. It's all kind of very orchestrated. We want to make this impactful show and we're worried about ticket sales and the whole thing, it's just like so much musically. There's been good Red Rocks shows, but to me, just those random nights on the road, where maybe you're tired or someone's sick or whatever, the music just, it just ends up being different. And like those are the ones I remember you for some reason.
The Motet used to have a tradition of doing yearly Halloween shows. What was the story behind those & do you think it’ll make a comeback this year?
We should think about bringing that back! We used to just cover an artist and we've run out. Now, it's very common. Every band is covering different artists on Halloween. It was happening in the late 90s when they kind of started doing it. It was happening a little bit, but now it's you know, it's very, very common. By the time that I joined the band in 2005, they had already done Prince, Stevie Wonder, I think they did the Beatles for the very first when the band first started. My first Halloween was Michael Jackson and I got to do Earth Wind and Fire, we did Sly Stone, we did Parliament Funkadelic. We rearranged all the music to sound completely different. The best part about it was just diving deep in an artist's catalogue and making this list of like 40 tunes, listening to it over and over again, and then kind of whittling it down to maybe a strong 20 to 30. Then just really digging into the music, like learning it inside and out. Then we played these great shows. Our fans kind of knew us as a Halloween band, which was great. Then we'd always like leave every Halloween being like, we got to write a tune like this tune or like that. We kind of just were really absorbing all this music, influencing our writing. I think that really kind of jump started the next phase of the band's growth and our writing inspiration. It's like, it's so simple, look at the structure, we can make something like that. We kind of stopped doing it because we ran out of bands where we could just kind of just play their music down. For instance, we did Funk is Dead one year when we did the Grateful Dead, and we kind of like funkified it. That was so much work because that music, you know, we would do this tune in the style of James Brown and this tune in the style of Parliament Funkadelic and this tune in the style of Sly Stone or whatever. And so there was just like all this work and then we played four shows. But also, we kind of did away with it because we were just writing. We're just focusing so much on writing our own music, and we just wanted more time and energy to focus on our own music. And then we didn't want to be pigeonholed as the Halloween band.
In addition to the new album that is coming out later this month, what other plans and goals do you guys have for the rest of the year?
We are already writing more. We're working with this singer Sarah Clarke, who is this great singer that we know from Portland, Oregon. She was in this band Dirty Revival and we've been a fan of hers for a while. She's going to be joining us for a bunch of gigs and we're already writing together. We feel like we need to get some more vocal music out just so people don't think we're just doing instrumental now. We just want to let people know we're doing everything. So that's kind of the main thing. This is our last weekend home this weekend. I don't have another weekend off until like, May. Gotta stay busy. Next week, we're going in the studio, into our rehearsal space, to start trying to write more music and work up more music. We're gonna be touring pretty heavily through the winter and the spring. The big plans are just to keep bringing new music, play a bunch of this new instrumental stuff, get new vocal music out, and then some new covers and stuff like that.
Do you know if you have plans to come to the New England area for any shows?
Yeah, that's a good question. We were just there. In April or May, we did Boston and Connecticut. We did Holyoke, where I'm from. I would love to get back up to Maine. I love Maine. I do have plans to resume my family's annual Old Orchard Beach family vacations that we've been doing since I was like five years old. Last year, we didn't it was like a huge bummer. And so this year, we've already got Motet vacation week planned in July and my family's going back there. I love it so much. It's like the best beaches.
Speaking of Maine, our state motto is “The way life should be.” According to you, what is the way life should be?
You can do political terms of like, the way life should be, you know. It's like, the older I get, and the more just politically speaking, the more I talk to the older generation, and they remind me that politics weren't always so divisive. People just kind of rooted for their own teams, but it wasn't their whole identity. That was one way to actually be. When I talked to my parents and when I was talking, you know, when my grandparents were alive, they would just remind me that people were on either side of the aisle, and that's why it wasn't really discussed. And it didn't really matter as much. I mean, I guess, like, maybe it matters more now. It always did, you know, and I'm a card carrying liberal through and through. I'm always rooting for my team, but it's also just like, you know, we're definitely divided right now more than we actually are. We feel that way. So that is part of my answer. I guess the other part is, also, the older I get, the more it's just like, you kind of just live in your own bubble and you just care about whatever is manageable, whatever you can mentally and emotionally take on. And just dive in, dive deep into that. I've been waking up earlier than I ever have just to play guitar first thing in the morning, like for three hours every single day. I used to remember being in sixth or seventh grade and leaving getting on the school bus and wishing I could just stay home and play guitar, you know? And now that's one thing that I can do and that makes me happy. So it's kind of just like, also just do whatever you can find personal fulfillment and and just go in 100%.
Thank you so much to Ryan for taking the time to chat! Keep an eye out for The Motet’s 10th album on January 18th. In the meantime, stream them here!