Everything, Now!

Jon Rogers plays music next to a revolving door, rotating band members in and out who remain just long enough to make an album or play a tour and then leave for the next big thing. And after several years, he says he’s growing tired of it.

Can’t blame him. Everything, Now!’s latest album garnered one of the highest grades our site has ever handed out, and for good reason. The little known Indianapolis act creates “space gospel,” as discussed below, and pulls from seemingly every genre yet makes it all a balanced, beautiful affair. And yet, without a cohesive line-up, Rogers finds it hard to move forward to the national scene.

We recently sat down with Rogers to discuss their new album, the space gospel genre and why even his current band members have all quit on him before.

SSv: There’s been a bit of time since Spatially Severed came out and I’m wondering what expectations you had for it when it first came out until now. What’s the tension between being hopeful and realistic?

Jon: Since we switched back to putting out our own albums a couple years ago, the sales have dropped off a lot. We’ve sold only a few hundred copies of each one, so this time instead of 1,000 copies, we printed 1,500 copies to make this one bigger. 1,500 is a pathetic number for most bands, but that’s what we could afford so that’s what we did. This time was less about selling them and more about getting this one out there. We just wanted to get rid of 1,500 copies regardless of the money side of it. That approach is working pretty well.

We’re touring a lot this year and we’ll probably go back into the studio later this year, but there’s no plans to release an album. We’re all pretty sold on this one. We put a lot of work into it – about eight or nine months in the studio. And it was culled from a bunch of songs – maybe 25 or 30 – and we worked it down to where it’s at now. I think we really believe in it and we’re more excited about this one that we have been about any of the other ones.

I think we’re just gonna keep getting the right people to hear it. We’ve been working hand-in-hand with more promotional companies, friends, local places than we have before. We’ve got the drummer from Everthus who is our booking guy now and that should work out really well. A lot more people are with us on this one than in the past and a lot of that has come from living in Indianapolis.

SSv: You’re able to pull off so many sounds and influences on the new album and I wondered if you were worried about going too overboard – throwing too many ingredients into the stew?

Jon: I was kind of anxious about that idea, but in the last year or so, I changed my approach to making music. I don’t know if it’s just a rhetorical device that helps me to write songs better or to not have any worry about what it sounds like. But I try to take the songs outside of my own reality. We imagine that songs already exist and that they’re in deep space and that they can move radio waves or different lingering technologies or somehow that those things can be directed toward earth. It’s all imaginary, but it’s a good exercise to think about how a song will work or what you want to say. Then you imagine it being something else and that we’re just trying to represent it or that we’re the instrument for the being or song that already exists. Does that make sense? [Laughs]

SSv: I suppose, but I guess I was just wondering about how that happens tangibly?

Jon: I think that’s just how we’ve done it. When I started the band, it was my idea being 18- or 19-years-old that I should try to make all the types of music that I was into. That’s how I felt about it and that’s what I wanted to do. I’ve taken that into some pretty bizarre experiences. Now, I’ll hear something and think that it was a total mistake, but that’s a part of it. That’s what anyone who creates art will find. And I think what’s important is to capture influences in a way, but also what I appreciate at the time that I’m writing. I want to include the things that are musically or artistically or spiritually important to me and pull them from all different places.

I don’t think I’ve ever worried too much about the results. If I had more pressure on me, then maybe I would. The guys I play with are usually supportive, so that doesn’t happen. And labels only come to us after we’ve recorded, so they don’t have the chance to tell us what we can or cannot do.

SSv: As people come across the band, one of the first things they will read is “space gospel.”

Jon: I think that’s very representative of what we’re doing right now and Spatially Severed is the first album in a trilogy of albums. I think that’s an important concept to what we’re trying to make. It started as just a joke. I watched this video seminar about how to market your band and there were some things that were total bullshit. There were also things I thought were interesting. One of the things the guy said was if you have to describe your band’s genre name, it needs to be a genre that basically says ‘Our band is the only one.’

I don’t think that our band is the only one who can use ‘space gospel,’ but you don’t hear it very much. I think it gives at least a hint toward the music. It doesn’t sound like church music or anything and it’s not actually Christian gospel, but for us, the point is to uplift at this point and do it in this science fiction style. So we thought that was a good idea for this trilogy of albums and different elements will show through on each one. The second album is going to be heavier and the third will be mostly gospel. [Laughs]

SSv: I read this was much more of a collaborative band effort than past efforts.

Jon: I basically wrote the songs on the guitar and then I would take them to our bass player, Eric, at the time and our drummer and we would flesh them out that way. They came up with their own parts after that. Everybody had a lot more input than our last two albums, which were mostly me on my own. Some people would help me here and there, but this was one of the first times we could write together and work on songs in the studio as a group. I really hoped to change that, but I never know who’s going to be in the band by the time we get to our next album.

SSv: How frustrating is that?

Jon: It’s starting to be. I don’t think I used to mind, but now that I’ve wanted to change my philosophy to us working together as a band, it is frustrating. In the last year, I’ve learned a lot about running the band and I’ve had to handle the manager side of things and financial sides. I really feel like, as we’ve taken it more seriously, that I need to have dependable people. I need to know who will be a part of the band. I’m always losing people. Someone is always wanting to go somewhere or getting a job. But it’s always ‘okay, we just need to find somebody else and keep going.’ We’ve had a lot of good friends around and that’s fun, but I’m hoping someday to just have a really solid group that will stay together.

SSv: There are five guys now, but how many former members do you have?

Jon: Our current keyboard player, Justin, who has always at various points played guitar and miscellaneous percussion for a while, this is his third or fourth time in the band and he recently made an entire history of all the line-ups that we’ve had. I would say that close to 10 or 12 people have been in the band at any given point.

Right now, our keyboard player, bass player and drummer have all quit at some point and come back. Some will probably leave again. It’s unpredictable, but it does keep me on my toes for live shows. When it gets frustrating, I just think that I’ll grab whoever I can and record that way, but it really affects the live show to know who won’t be there.

SSv: Best live show for you guys ever? Is there one that comes to mind?

Jon: Definitely. It was just a couple months ago maybe in the beginning of December. There was a house show and it was our keyboard player, Drew, at the time and one of his last shows he played with us. It was this big party. I know that everybody there had a great time and, at the end, we all felt like it was our best show. But those things happen over and over again and the most recent one always feels like the best.

As the others get further in the past, it’s hard to remember what was so much fun and we always want to outdo ourselves and make the next one more fun than the last. At that point in those shows, everybody in the band is on this spiritual kick about it and we feel we’ve reached this nirvana or zen-like state where you don’t exist anymore. That’s always fun when you hit that. That’s what makes those shows memorable is how you feel during the music.