All Them Witches have released a prolific amount of music over their five-year existence. Fusing influences ranging from Delta blues and psychedelic rock to stoner rock and jazz, the quartet grows and reinvents itself with every record. Their latest collection of songs, Sleeping Through The War, is an essential listen that possesses heartfelt songwriting, groove, magical guitars and every element that is to be expected (and not-so-expected!) from the Nashville-based group. We caught up with the band before one of their shows in Alabama to talk about Southern musicians, the best and worst of touring and defying a genre label.
Who are some Southern specific artists who shaped you guys?
Michael Parks Jr.: John Lee Hooker, Skip James and Lead Belly. Allman Brothers bands.
Allan Van Cleave: Allman Brothers.
Ben McLeod: Elmore James
Allan: I was going to say Ray Charles for sure.
Parks: Ray Charles. CCR—although those dudes were from California, but that doesn’t matter.
They like to think they’re from here, so…
Parks: Yeah, Fogerty brothers, you know. Man, there’s a ton of Southern artists. It’s funny you say that. Abner Jay. I missed that one—he’s my favorite.
Robby Staebler: Tennessee Ernie Ford.
Being labeled as a psych blues/alt-rock band, what elements from those genres do you incorporate regularly into your records?
Parks: All of it. Yeah, I mean really you just take what you know and what you hear and what makes sense to you. Instead of sticking to the Hey, I’m getting drunk at the bar and I’m gonna find a girl kind of songs that you hear a lot… I don’t know. You pull from jazz and you pull from blues and you pull from the heavy stuff that you like. There’s no real cap on what you can do as long as you like it. If you like what you’re doing and like who you are then it doesn’t matter.
You’ve released a pretty good amount of material over the past two years. How do you keep that creativity going?
Ben: It just hasn’t stopped, to be honest.
Allan: You just walked in on a creative process.
Parks: I think a big part of it is that we don’t live around each other. This comes up a lot in interviews. We don’t see each other except to go on tour, so the creativity never stops. You get excited to go and hang out with your friends and make new music and then when we get a short amount of time to record a record it’s go-time.
Allan: Hanging out and making music never gets old.
Parks: No, it really doesn’t.
Ben: This summer we’re going to hang out and play music in between tours.
Again?
Ben: Again, yeah. [Laughs]
Parks: Well, we don’t is the thing. What he’s saying is we don’t hang out in between tours. We don’t see each other between tours.
So do you guys live really spread out and far apart, then?
Parks: Yeah, different states. He (Allan) lives across the country.
Allan: I live in his backyard, though. In a tent.
Parks: You live in a couple of different places.
Ben: I’m the only one who still lives in Nashville. It’s the hub. It’s where the van and trailer are. Tours start there and end there.
When you do work on new material, is it pretty much all on the road—a never ending process of coming up with stuff and you get together and record? Or when you do new records do you write all of it then?
Ben: It definitely varies. This one that we just did was the most prepared one going into the studio. Ones past we would go in with maybe three or four songs and then write the rest in the studio. We’re loosely talking about doing one soon where we just sit around.
Parks: I’m looking forward to that. No producer—no nothing.
Ben: No producer. Barely an engineer. Barely a studio. Just sitting around playing music for three days straight with your bros. I’m excited for that.
Parks: Yeah, we don’t have a specific way that we write It just comes as it comes. For this group, it’s easy to see what’s good and what’s not good. Nobody is ever like, Agghh that’s terrible, get away from it! [Laughs] It doesn’t happen like that. We all start playing whenever we feel like it’s our turn to start playing. That makes it really easy I think.
“Like the music that makes me feel the most isn’t Kyuss or anything. It’s meaningful, heartfelt, genuine music. That’s the heaviest part about music—being 100% yourself and not falling into any sort of subcategory or whatever.”
Since you do tour quite a but, what do you love about being on the road and playing live shows?
Robby: The sense of adventure. That’s what I like about it.
Parks: I feel like I get my ass kicked.
Allan: Yeah dude, we could’ve died three times today. In the past two hours. Maybe four.
Parks: It’s like that every tour. A good chunk of that you spend almost dying all the time.
Ben: You’re constantly doing something crazy no matter what you’re doing.
You’re either driving a rocket ship on a road pulling a ton of shit in a trailer next to the semi-trucks or you’re flying in the air across mountains and stuff.
Allan: It’s a lot of diverse life experience. It’s really good to have.
Parks: You get to see the change region by region—culturally and geographically, which is nice. The last tour was really fucking hard. [Laughs] The last tour was the hardest tour that I’ve ever been on in the 10 or 11 years I’ve been touring. We’ve been touring for four or five years now and it’s the hardest tour that we went on.
Allan: Everyone always asks what’s fun about touring. Nobody ever asks what’s hard.
Well, what’s the worst part? What do you hate?
Parks: The worst part is knowing that you have something that’s going to fuck you up for three days and knowing that you have to get on stage for three days and it doesn’t matter because that’s your job.
Allan: And having to drive five hours a day.
Parks: It used to be more. We used to do like 18 and 20 hour drives.
Ben: We still have that coming.
Parks: Really? West Coast shit?
Allan: It’s coming in May.
Ben: We have to drive from Salt Lake City to Portland or something.
Parks: WHAT?!
Woah, in a day?!
Ben: No, two days, but…
Robby: That’s not that crazy.. Dude, that drive from Wyoming…
Allan: It was from Colorado to Nevada and it was through a snowstorm—fucking two of them because it was such a long drive. We went through two days of snowstorms.
There’s your adventure and almost dying all in one!
Allan: Yeah, that’s stressful!
Ben: The hours on the road are unbelievable, but I like starting over every day and hooking up my amp and pedals. It’s really exciting.
Robby: I think that’s my least favorite part: setting up and tearing down my drums every day. It takes me a while to get them exactly in the right spot. It’s all minute movements that really affect me mentally and doing that shit and trying to get it the same every night… I just don’t like that kind of experience. And making sure that things are right and that you have the space and the lighting to set up the merch right. That stuff is my least favorite part because you do have to make sure things happen or they won’t.
Parks: You know what, I would have to agree. Tearing down after everybody’s kind of filtering out and you get to get back up on stage and put all of your stuff away. That’s my favorite part of the day.
Robby: Loading out is cool—when you’re loading the trailer.
Parks: Not even that. When you guys are fucking around and doing other stuff I get on stage and I’m packing all my shit away. Making sure I have my four or five things and I put them in a pile. That’s the best part of my day because you know that you did your work for the day—you traveled whatever distance you needed to travel, you did your show, you put everything out there and then you get to put your stuff away and then you’re off. That’s like the weekend right there because the weekend doesn’t mean anything to us. A weekday, what time it is—it doesn’t mean shit except for being on stage at the right time and being out of the club at the right time. [Laughs]
Ben: Also, dealing with promoters who don’t understand what a guarantee is… That can be fun.
Allan: That’s a great question. Keep that one. What’s the hardest part about touring? What your least favorite part?
People always say driving.
Robby: When people barge into the green room or your personal space. Like, when you’re done sometimes people will just decide that they can go wherever they want and get in your face and start poking your chest when they’re talking to you. The other night some guy came up to me and was talking and he was just so excited he just punched me twice. Like, a good punch. I looked at him and hit him twice back and his whole face changed but he kept talking. Stuff like that is kind of irritating.
Basically the after-show drunks?
Parks: You get a lot of big guys who are excited to see your band. They’re fans, but they come up and manhandle the shit out of you. That’s not fun. Like, in Madison on the last tour I was the last one to get sick and Madison was my sick day and there was this one guy who every time I walked by he was wrapping himself around me and I was physically having to, like, Okay, don’t touch me.
Ben: It’s for like five minutes. Just not letting go.
Robby: Hey man! Hey! Hey!
You have to get sort of good at being fake-nice I guess…
Ben: I don’t know, it’s all part of the culture.
Allan: Just niceties. What else do you say besides, Thanks. Thanks man?
Parks: A guy’s just so excited to be at your show that he wants to grab you and feel you. That’s weird, but they could either be like, Hey, fuck you man! and be one of those guys or just work it out peacefully.
Robby: We’re kind of asking for it doing what we’re doing. It comes with the territory. When I’m in those situations I recognize how it makes me feel. I just see it as, Well, this is my compliment now. I have to accept whatever comes. You have to stop it at some point. Sometimes you don’t. I lost my train of thought.
The new record (Sleeping Through The War), to me, was a lot less heavy than the previous one (Lightning At The Door). Was that a natural progression or was it intentional that you went a different route?
Ben: I thought Dying Surfer (Dying Surfer Meets His Maker) was the least heavy.
Well, just this one and the previous one—Lightning.
Ben: Oh yeah, yeah.
Robby: I mean, it’s void of the “stoner riff” like this [points downstairs to where stoner rock band is playing]. That’s not there, but it’s just as loud. Faster.
“I think a lot of bands just know how to play one thing or feel comfortable playing one thing. We’re all really different minded but we’re all kind of the same. That’s how this works. The differences of what we listen to… “
So did you purposely do that when you recorded or did it just happen?
Ben: I guess those were just the songs that came together. It just felt right at the time.
Parks: I just think “heavy” is overdone at this point. Everybody’s doing heavy.
Allan: The definition is so blurred.
Parks: Like the music that makes me feel the most isn’t Kyuss or anything. It’s meaningful, heartfelt, genuine music. That’s the heaviest part about music—being 100% yourself and not falling into any sort of subcategory or whatever. Yeah, that’s heavy music to me. I thought that the last one (Sleeping Through The War) was the heaviest one we’ve done just because it makes the most sense because it’s the time that we’re in. That’s who we are now.
Going off what you just said… There are so many psych rock and 60s and stoner metal influences in younger bands it seems.
Allan: Psychedelic is a delay pedal. That’s all it is!
Basically. Everybody puts that label on themselves. I feel like it’s everywhere. Anyway, what sets you apart from those?
Robby: We’re not trying to bring the 60s back.
Parks: They weren’t doing it any different than we’re doing it. They were just normal ass dudes and women in bands driving around the country playing their asses off and doing what they felt was best.
Allan: I think a lot of bands just know how to play one thing or feel comfortable playing one thing. We’re all really different minded but we’re all kind of the same. That’s how this works. The differences of what we listen to… If you just listen to the music that we make individually by ourselves they’re in polar opposite extremes. I guess what separates us is that we all just let each other do our own thing. I don’t know. I don’t know those bands or those people.
Parks: I sit a lot in the van and I think about how we’re all connected. The things that we do that make us alike and work together. Just as personal things like personalities. What about Allan’s personality connects you and Robby and Robby and Ben? What situations we tend to like… Okay if this is what’s happening, where’s the split going to happen? Two of us are going to this way and two are going to go this way. Depending on the situation, the mashup is totally different and that’s exactly what our music is, too. It gets to a point in the song where it’s like, it turns into a hip-hop beat and then Ben’s going to do something completely different. What was the question again? [Laughs] This is why our interviews always come out so great—we just do stream of conscious.
Ben: All of our songs on every record sound different and, I guess, current psych bands—all their songs sound the same. I’m not trying to be a dick, but…
Well, you didn’t drop names!
Parks: Well we don’t want to be a psych band or a heavy metal band or a stoner band. A band is something in its own right. It doesn’t have to be an “X “band. It can just be a band. A band of brothers. [Laughs]
Who are some lesser known artists who deserve more recognition?
Robby: Good Buddy!
Ben: Good Buddy. Walking Man. Mount Carmel.
Allan: Good Buddy.
Ben: Ranch Ghost. Chrome Pony. Just all of our friends’ bands.
Parks: All of the unsung heroes who can play their asses off and live in the cutthroat Nashville community.
Robby: The Great Machine!
Parks: King Buffalo. The Great Machine.
Ah, I just saw them!
Parks: King Buffalo? Where?
At SXSW!
Parks: At SX? Good!
Yeah! I love them!
Parks: It’s funny. People keep coming up to me tonight saying, Oh, you’re in King Buffalo! because we played here at The Blind Mule when I was on tour with them. I filled in for Dan on bass.
What are your plans for the rest of the year?
Allan: Tour.
Robby: Tour!
Parks: Lots of tour.
Ben: Tour and jam and record and then tour and then jam and record more and then tour and go to Jimmy John’s a lot.
Allan: Aw yeah Jimmy John’s later tonight.
Parks: We make a lot of good decisions and we make a lot of bad decisions.
Robby: But you know what? The bad decisions always lead to more good decisions.