Dogs in a Pile bring the jam to The Met
Coming out of the legendary music scene of Asbury Park, New Jersey, Dogs In A Pile bring a variety of sounds to the stage. Their music encompasses a captivating mix of psychedelia, jazz fusion, funk and rock while riding a distinct groove all the way through. Going along with that jazz notion, their songs never sound exactly the same with each performance and everything they do always has a substantial amount of growth behind it. People will be able to see all of this live and in person when Dogs In A Pile take the stage on January 22 at 9pm at The Met located within the Hope Artiste Village on 1005 Main Street in Pawtucket. South County funk-rock partystarters Guess Method will be opening up the evening.
I had a talk ahead of the show with keyboardist Jeremy Kaplan and guitarist Brian Murray about the origins of the band, doing community theater, playing in bar bands, incorporating new techniques and having an abundance of live albums.
Rob Duguay: How did Dogs In A Pile come together in the first place? Have you all known each other for a while in the New Jersey music scene?
Jeremy Kaplan: It’s kind of funny. Our other guitarist Jimmy Law and our drummer Joey Babick have been family friends for a long time so they’ve always been around each other. They then met Sam Lucid, who’s our bassist and also from the Jersey Shore, and the three of them started jamming together. They all went to the Berklee
College Of Music in Boston where they met Brian and I and we eventually all joined forces to create a single group.
RD: Very cool. Jeremy, you got your start in community theater in your early teens so what was that environment like for you? What did you do there with music? Did you do soundtracks and introductions for plays?
JK: That was a lot of music direction for musical theater kind of shows. I would teach the actors their vocal parts and work with them along with a band that I would put together of musicians that I knew to perform during the shows.
RD: So you were kind of a curator of a lot of things.
JK: Yeah, totally. Beyond that I was playing in bar bands and stuff.
RD: Brian, you dive into numerous styles on guitar including fingerstyle, acoustic, bluegrass, and jazz. How do you go about including this approach when it comes to writing songs with the rest of the guys in the band? Is it a healthy exchange of ideas whenever you guys get together to work on new material?
Brian Murray: I find that having the diversity of those techniques allows for us to play songs in different ways and stuff like that. We have a couple songs that are based around the typical Chet Atkins and Tommy Emmanuel fingerpicking style so it’s more like rockabilly and country. Sometimes I’ll just have a chord progression and some lyrics in that style of playing and we’ll all flesh it out together. We also have some bluegrass stuff too, there’s this one song of ours called “Samba For Sam” that goes through a few different genres. There’s a samba sort of groove but also a bossa nova thing at the beginning, it’s a mixture of a bunch of things and Jeremy and I wrote that one together. It’s a great band to be in because everybody has such different influences so when it’s all put together in a unique way it’s really cool.
RD: It’s cool that you have that approach where it’s multi-dimensional while also having a collective flow. You guys also have a bunch of live records on your Bandcamp page, which is unique in how it’s something not a lot of bands do. Who had the idea to upload these performances? Do you like having them because there’s more of an organic vibe with a live record rather than something done in a studio?
JK: I think for the kind of music that we play and the improvisatory nature of it really lends itself to capturing these live performances and releasing them as themselves. The studio albums are great for representations of songs and where they stand in that moment in time but things develop on the road and they get better. It’s cool to have a recording of a song in a band that grows and becomes more tight as the years go on.
BM: We’ve also recently started going through tracks of this past year of live material that we’ve played and we’re planning on putting out another live album on Spotify, ITunes and all those digital platforms of hand picked selections.
RD: When can we expect that record to come out?
JK: In short, I think spring is definitely our goal. We can hopefully get it done quicker but it does need to be mixed and mastered. Also, when you upload to those platforms it does take some time to become official but we’re definitely inspired to get working on it as soon as possible.