(Editor's note: This Q&A previews a MAHA Festival Music Showcase, Wednesday, June 22 featuring and curated by MAHA local stage band Noah's Ark Was a Spaceship. Hear Nebraska is a showcase partner for MAHA. The show starts at 8 p.m., is free and for all ages, and also plays host to New Lungs. RSVP here.)
by Michael Todd
Please pardon the interruption for a brief statement about everything: Life is a neurological response to external stimuli. We know only what we perceive to know, and over time, perception changes.
Take, for example, Mark McGowan of the band Ketchup and Mustard Gas. He has recorded Noah’s Ark Was a Spaceship a number of times (that's his studio below), and now when he sees them live, he hears the same songs differently. To compare the phenomenon with another sense, it’s like seeing a house for sale as you walk by, but after a couple recording projects, it’s like having dinner inside with your best friends, which the members of Noah’s Ark have become for Mark.
Now that the day of their MAHA showcase has arrived, they’re going to hear what it’s like playing for the third time together, and they’re inviting some New Lungs to help the cause.
Hear Nebraska: First off, since you recorded their latest album, tell me about working with Noah’s Ark.
Mark McGowan: You know, I’ve recorded them a couple times before that at a couple other studios. This one we recorded all last summer. It’s really nice because they're not only a great band, they’re also my best friends. So we were able to spend a lot of time to get it to sound right, threw around a lot of ideas. And sometimes the ideas in the studio changed their live set, which is always good.
HN: How does producing a band change the way you hear them live? Does it make you think about different ways you could have approached recording a song?
MM: It’s not necessarily things I’d want to change. It’s that I’m more aware of what’s going on. A lot of times when I see a live act, I hear everything at once. After recording, I know every idiosyncrasy with each person, each instrument. It broadens my ability to hear them live.
HN: Now moving on to your band, Ketchup and Mustard Gas was featured on a Japan tsunami relief CD. How did you end up contributing to that?
MM: Friends of friends. Our drummer Scott is friends with Make Believe, so they pretty much asked us to help out. Within a week we were in there recording. It is for a good cause, so it’s great to be a part of it.
HN: And did you choose that song you used for the benefit for a particular reason?
MM: No, not necessarily. We just really like that song, and we just have a lot of energy with that. It’s just one of our newer songs that represents where our band is going, I think.
HN: OK, tell me more about where the band is going.
MM: Well, the band was created three years ago, with me, Andy Matz from Capgun Coup and Dustin Treinen from Paria. It was basically a six-month project with songs I wrote and needed musicians to play them with. Then we lost Dustin, he went back to school, so we picked up Tom (Flaherty). Then we lost Andy, our drummer, to school, so we picked up Scott.
Scott Micheels is a more technical drummer, allowing us to write complicated songs and riffs, and we’ve written four new songs with Scott, and we have the five old songs from the Andy days. They’re still, rock ‘n’ roll, but they’re heavier songs, more thought-out, more enjoyable songs. So after three years it’s gone from a side project to the most important band I’m a part of.
HN: What other projects are you involved in right now?
MM: Dance Me Pregnant is still pretty dormant. We haven’t played a show for a year and half, but we’re still in the studio recording an album we’ve been working on for awhile. Some of us have been on tour, so it’s taken some time to put together, but once we get that done, we’ll start playing again.
HN: Do you have other material for Ketchup and Mustard Gas? I couldn’t find much more than the one on MySpace.
MM: We don’t at the moment, no. We are in the process of recording a couple songs, but that’s one of the main things we’ve been talking about as a band. With each new songs, we’re going to record it, put it out there, so people can hear exactly what we sound like. Tonight, we’ll play some new songs, and hopefully, we’ll have a song posted to Facebook by the end of the week.
* RSVP to Wednesday's MAHA Showcase here.
Michael Todd is a summer intern for Hear Nebraska. He has recently started to hear music differently, too, only with him it’s because his right ear has apparently closed up. This is just great. Reach him at michaeltodd@hearnebraska.org.