When the house lights are down and Jason Hammel is about to pound on his drumkit for the first time that night, he’s about to forget about all the things, the constructions, that make him Jason Hammel.

It could follow that when Mates of State, the rock duo Hammel has been in with his wife Kori Gardner for nearly 15 years, at its best, it has no conception of what Mates of State is. No idea which of their eight albums someone is hoping to hear from that night, no feeling of obligation or responsibility that their family has a been a public discussion point, as they’ve become notable for brining their young daughters on the road during national tours.

Hammel’s friend Dan Harris is the author of 10 Percent Happier, a book — that along with a series of breathing meditations and exercises— Hammel uses to keep the first euphoric escape of a concert the same as it was 15 years ago, even if nothing else in his life quite is.

“Your mind is constantly racing with thoughts, your ego essentially,” Hammel says. “It helps to arrange and organize all those crazy voices in your head.”

He adds that in rock ‘n’ roll there’s other clichéd ways to try and arrive at the same sense of singular focus, seemingly nodding at the drugs or a certain lifestyle the father either never enjoyed or has certainly not enjoyed in recent years.

With a sound hinged mostly Gardner and Hammel’s dual, excitable vocals and drums firing their way through Gardner’s electric piano work, Mates of State released their last album Mountaintops in 2011. They recently starred in the feature-length Rumperbutts as a married couple of musicians who take a lucrative, but ultimately troubling gig playing children’s music.

Mates of State plays tonight in Omaha at The Waiting Room with Bluebird on an all-acoustic tour, featuring just voices, piano, drums, strings and horns. Tickets are still available for the show here.

But first Hear Nebraska spoke to Hammel via phone about his acting debut, the Daniel Johnston cover that just won’t quit on the band and having positive reception strike every other Mates of State album.

Hear Nebraska: When it comes to adding strings and horns to a sound that’s just been you and Kori for so long, does it feel at different or is there a different way of enjoying your music when it’s not you who’s exclusively responsible for the way it’s coming off the stage?

Jason Hammel: The biggest thing for me … so this set-up is all piano, she’s not doing anything that’s synthetic at all. So with the horns and everything they can fill in the arrangements from our record. And also because the volume isn’t a rock ‘n’ roll version, you can actually hear our voices a lot better. I think the biggest thing this set-up does is showcase our singing because we can hear ourselves so much better and really let the vocals fly. They don’t get buried behind a lot of loud amps. That’ll surprise most people.

HN: Are you using brushes on the drums or just deliberately playing quieter?

JH: Both. I’ll be using brushes on half and sticks on the other half and not bashing on the cymbals as much as I normally do. Still some though.

HN: Well, sure you gotta give the people some volume. I’m really curious to find out a bit about the Rumperbutts film you guys worked on. In the Kickstarter you’re joking about whether you prefer the Adler or the Mesiner method. But all jokes aside, it must have been a very new experience being the star of a 90-minute feature film. So I’m curious shooting for that duration of screen time, did you have any personal techniques that you came to favor for the more sensitive parts of the film? Because it sounds like Jack and Bonnie go through some stuff in this story.

JH: Yeah, are you an actor?

HN: No, I’m not. I’ve probably watched too much Inside the Actors Studio, which is the only reason I know who Adler and Meisner are.

JH: Good acting, as we found out, because we took a bunch of lessons, it’s really hard. The hardest part was being natural. We know how to do that as musicians because we’ve been doing it for 20 years. When you’re letting go, playing music, acting is the same way, acting as though the situation is happening. It feels really good when you can hit it and when you aren’t hitting it, it feels very obvious. Like, “Whoa, dude, that was horrible.”

The biggest part, to answer your question, was finding a way to relax. When there’s cameras and makeup people around you, if you’re not relaxed and you’re self-conscious and thinking everyone is staring at you, you’ll never get it. Those first couple scenes were pretty rough, but I think we improved tremendously over the duration of the film.

Luckily we didn’t shoot the film in order, so I think we were able to bury those scenes [Laughs.] Cover them up.

HN: So is it fair to say then that maybe the moments where you were thinking about it too much were the moments that needed to be worked out the most?

JH: Exactly. When you know the lines and the marks, you can go from there. If you don’t know where those are, you look ridiculous. It’s a lot easier to relax when you know what the hell you’re going to do. It’s like playing songs when you’re like “Ah shit we’ve only rehearsed this song once. What happens after the second verse?” Then you can tell you’re like a deer in the headlights.

HN: So before the advent of your home studio and being able to write and record in your basement, in any studio experience you had, were there any interesting comparisons that came up between a studio and a film set? With lots of people and various deadlines that have to be hit?

JH: I think the biggest similarity, it’s like when the red light is on, it’s like “OK, time to go.” And you certainly encounter that feeling in a recording studio, as well. You practice a song ten times and say, “Ok I’m ready to record.” And as soon as you say that, you feel your heart beating and your eyes are wide.

HN: Now, I don’t know if it’s possible to tear your being there away from the conceptual hook of the movie, because I don’t know if you and Kori would have been playing the leads in the movie if it hadn’t been about a married duo of musicians. But do you think it was more difficult or less difficult playing someone that had some very tangible similarities to you?

JH: I think the character has a lot less similarities than the people might think. When we started working with the writer/director, we were going to capture the Mates of State story. But we quickly realized that it was moving away from there, because we were writing and collaborating from different coasts: we were in the east and he was on the west. And he said, “We still have this other story of this couple that’s married and a have a musical collaboration.” Although we probably bring a lot of our personality to these characters, they’re not at us.

HN: So it’s a very kind of nominal similarity.

JH: Yes. But I think acting is one of those things where you work the best when you’re able to be yourself. So I don’t know. Maybe you’d see this movie and say, “Jason, that’s exactly like you. I can’t believe you said those characters weren’t like you.”

Maybe that was just a coping mechanism for me to be like, “I can do and say whatever this guy would, because I’m not him.”

HN: I wanted move forward kind of from here and ask about the music from Rumperbutts. I know you guys have an LP slated for release this year. Is there any crossover in the music between that album and the film?

JH: No, there’s not. Completely separate. We have ten real songs that are in the movie and two children’s songs. Completely different thing. I think the soundtrack music, although it’s written by us, is not Mates of States of music. They’re very cinematic songs. The song structures, though, aren’t artistically what Mates of State would write.

HN: I wanted to duck back with you briefly, Jason, to a couple prior releases. The Crushes covers record is a really interesting one to me as sort of  a moment in the band, just because 1) you guys did that and 2) because you took all creative control over doing it yourselves in the home studio.

And one of the songs that seems to have stuck with you guys or maybe outlived the rest of them in terms of your live sets is “True Love Will Find You In The End,” the Daniel Johnston song. I’m curious, is it maybe because you guys did so much reinterpreting on that song and it varies so much from the original that it stays with you? As opposed to something like the Fleetwood Mac “Secondhand News” cover, where the vocal parts are reminiscent of the original?

JH: Good question. Does it seem like we took a lot of artistic liberty and changed that song? To me, it seems like we kind of stayed true to the melodies, but maybe we didn’t, maybe we kind of cleaned them up. I’m curious to know about your interpretation specifically. His is so raw.

HN: Right, and I feel like that’s a significant part of what I’m talking about. I just feel it in distance traveled between cover and original, even if we’re just talking stylistically. Maybe it’s the two voices instead of one, as opposed to the Fleetwood Mac example. I guess I just feel like if there were a Mates of State machine and you put a song in one side and then it goes through you guys and pops out the other, that the Daniel Johnston maybe had to travel the furthest in the machine.

JH: Oh yeah, I see what you’re saying. I guess there are electronic sounds on there too and that’s different. But, yeah, to answer your initial question, I think we just love that song. It’s really easy to perform in many different looks. We could do that song with just a piano and us or with an orchestrated band. The melodies are so strong and good, that I think we’ve probably done that song live in four or five different versions.

You know, the Fleetwood Mac, structure-wise is a little harder song to get everyone on the same page with.

HN: Sure. More generally on the Crushes record, did working on a whole album of covers illuminate anything new for you guys about songwriting or song structures? Spending that much time inside of other people’s work?

JH: Yeah, definitely. And I think that was one of the reasons to do the covers album initially. We wanted to do songs by artist we love, but we also wanted to learn something. I think it did that.

HN: I’ll wrap up with this one, Jason. With seven records and an eighth one on the way, your discography is interesting to me. Because I first saw you guys in Omaha in high school, I will always mark time by the Rearrange Us album. That’ll always be the first album I think of when I think of Mates of State. But I imagine that a lot of other people might mark time with a different release. As long as you guys have been doing this, have you heard of different ways in which people conceive of your discography?

JH: Yeah definitely. It’s interesting and actually flattering to me that it might mean something to you. Because we’ve been a band for a while now, and at first everyone was like “Oh, their first record.”  And then for a while people were like “Oh, their best record is Team Boo. They’ll never top it.” I guess it’s like every other record for us. And then everyone was like, “Oh, Rearrange Us” and people thought that beautiful.

So maybe our next record will be the one? Because no one was like “Oh, Mountaintops that’s your best record.” So far it’s been every other record and that’s a good sign. But I’m flattered that’s Rearrange Us was that for you because that means we’re making progress.

Chance Solem-Pfeifer is Hear Nebraska’s managing editor. Reach him at chancesp@hearnebraska.org.