Animal Instinct

John Boegehold defied the gloom of the last two years by escaping into the new worlds he created on the new Pattern Seeking Animals album. The songwriter and band founder talks to Prog about cranking up the energy, escaping the side-project label, and steering away from the darkness on Only Passing Through.

M “y cocky assertion after the first album was, ‘We’re going to put out one album per year,’” says John Boegehold, the creative engine behind Pattern-Seeking Animals, the band he formed with Ted Leonard, Dave

Meros and Jimmy Keegan in 2018. While a combination of the pandemic and vinyl delays put a crimp in the one-album-a-year plan, Pattern-Seeking Animals still delivered their third record, Only Passing Through, less than two years after Prehensile Tales.

With album three, Boegehold was determined not to get stuck writing about the pandemic. “Everyone’s going to be so sick of this by the time it’s over,” he says. “‘Here’s what I wrote about the pandemic while quarantined in my house.’ No one wants to hear that right now. [In the 1920s], when the Spanish flu was done, we got the ‘Roaring 20s’. Everyone just wanted to party, go out and dance and hear happy music. I could have sat down and gotten very morbid about everything, but I just didn’t want to do it.”

This mindset demanded that Boegehold resist some of his natural inclinations. “I tend to gravitate towards slightly darker, midtempo things. I have to fight against that sometimes,” he says. “For this album,

I thought the one thing I want to do is make everything a little more up-tempo, more energy to it, more vibrant. It’s almost as though there’s a big red knob on the mixing board that says ‘Energy’ and I crank it up

20 per cent.”

‘Only passing through, ma’am.’ I just like the different ways you can take that title.”

Despite his love for creating characters and worlds, Boegehold isn’t tempted by the lure of a full-blown concept album. “Once in a while I think, ‘I’m going to do a concept album’, then I have to slap myself out of that because what happens with concept albums is I would get two songs in and think: ‘Well, I’ve said everything I need to say, what am I going to do? I’m just going to pad everything so it fills up an album?’ I can’t do it.”

While Leonard, Meros and Keegan are all current or former members of Spock’s Beard, perhaps Only Passing Through will be the album that takes Pattern-Seeking Animals out of the shadow of Spock’s. “I still get the thing, ‘Oh, you’re the Spock’s Beard spin-off or side project’. I was never in Spock’s Beard,” says Boegehold. “I wrote with them, I worked with them on the side because I was always doing my own thing. I understand why people associate it with Ted and Dave and Jimmy in the band, but at this point we’re coming out with our third album since the last time they put one out, so I feel we’re established.”

The quartet have more than earned their place in prog’s pantheon, even if Boegehold isn’t quite sure where that might be. “I don’t even know where you’d put us, I guess ‘American symphonic art-prog-pop’?” he says. “I’m just trying to make music people like.”

Only Passing Through is out now via InsideOut. See www.psanimals1.com for more information.