I had been wondering something about Jack Stratton, the founder and leader of the band Vulfpeck, for the past twenty-one years. I remember him occasionally rapping in his sleep back in 2003, when I was Jack’s camp counselor on the shores of Lower Baker Pond in Wentworth, New Hampshire. “Unh. / Just like Sprewell,” he’d say, a midnight non sequitur. Or had I really heard that? It can be hard to tell what’s persona and what’s genuine in the world of Vulfpeck. Even their origin story has a factual version and a fictional narrative: they either met as undergraduates at the University of Michigan, or they were the rhythm section for an imagined German recording engineer. When we spoke, Jack confirmed that the sleep-rapping was real.

You’ve heard Vulfpeck: they’re a popular choice for bumper music between NPR segments. They have a particular sound (a raspy callback that arises from the primordial ooze of Motown) and shtick (lo-fi videos of a band of straight-men that recall VHS tapes shot with a shoulder-braced camcorder). Vulfpeck has a carefully curated affect, but as casually as they present themselves, they’re also popular: Vulfpeck sold out Madison Square Garden in 2019, and they’re a marquee name on the festival circuit: Montreux. Bonnaroo. Levitate. Newport Jazz. 

Their influence is widespread and extends beyond their releases. Drummer Spencer Tweedy wrote that Vulfpeck “is so interesting and inspiring, almost from a communications/multidisciplinary perspective more than a musical one.” They became famous for releasing a silent album, Sleepify, and imploring their fans to stream it overnight on repeat on Spotify, in order to raise funds for a tour. NPR, Rolling Stone, The Guardian, Forbes, and Billboard all covered the ethics and irreverence of that act; Jack appeared on CNBC, telling the host, “Let’s rock.” They auctioned off a track on one of their albums: the highest bidder was a band that plunked down over seventy thousand dollars for the honor; Jack subsequently spent a portion of the proceeds on DonorsChoose, funding requests from music teachers.

Jack’s role in the band is omnipotent: it’s his brainchild, and he is the ideas-and-logistics man, the mixer, the arranger. His manner and speech are methodical; he is easygoing and thoughtful. There are some musicians who meet someone who knows less about music than they do and disqualify their opinions; in our two lengthy online conversations, while he was at the home he rents near Occidental College in Los Angeles, I never caught that vibe from him. As unassuming as he is, Jack doesn’t shy away from evangelism; he has used his platform to advocate for a superfood diet, and for a while, relatedly, he maintained the website Regular Bean Eater. In a 2017 interview with a Dutch magazine, he credited his mother with encouraging him to eat slowly, in small bites, for health reasons.

—Josh Fischel

I. The Matzo Ball Mix

THE BELIEVER: Where is the intro riff for your songs and videos from?

JACK STRATTON: From a gospel piano teacher on YouTube, and at least the first half of it is how you would guide a singer to come in. And then the second half of it is kind of a riff on Bach, a little trill. So it’s a hybrid, but it’s just very—I mean, the first time I heard that progression, I thought, This is so pleasing. It’s very few notes, but it’s doing a lot.

BLVR: I especially like how it leads into “Christmas in LA.” I wonder how it feels to be yet another Jew writing Christmas songs.

JS: Feels great.

BLVR: We’re the ones who compose them all, if you look back through the discography; we’ve promulgated this myth.

JS: I think it’s perhaps the deepest expression of Judaism to write a Christmas song.

BLVR: You sell an online plug-in called Vulf Compressor. Can you talk to me like I don’t understand what a compressor is? Because I don’t.

JS: In audio, back in the day, if someone was playing something very dynamic—loud and quiet—they’d put it through a compressor so that when it was getting too loud, it would turn the volume down so you didn’t overload what you were recording to. So a compressor reduces the dynamic range. It’s a bit of an art to learn how to use it musically, but it’s one of the first things you learn how to wield when you’re mixing: compression and equalization are the two big ones.

BLVR: So the Vulf Compressor just—it takes the dynamic range and filters it in a certain way that other compressors don’t?

JS: Yes. That’s the thing—each compressor has a different sauce. Over time, some of these compressors gained a reputation because they had a very musical way of doing it. Vulf Compressor is an attempt to bring a new flavor with a specific, recognizable sound.

BLVR: When I hear a song from you guys—from you, Vulfpeck, or even the Fearless Flyers, another band on the Vulf label for which you produce—I immediately know it’s you. I wonder if there’s a verbal description of the sound you’re aiming for.

JS: Yeah. I have a specific mixing style. I use computers and plug-ins to mimic a lot of older sounds that would have been made analog. I would love to do everything to tape, but it’s quite expensive. I think it’s benefited me over the years because I keep a real light footprint. I don’t need a lot of gear. There are sounds of certain mix engineers that I’ve been drawn to over the years. Willie Mitchell did all the Al Green records in Memphis—an instantly recognizable sound. Geoff Emerick did the Beatles records—great sound. So you find out who’s mixing these things and pick out elements that appeal to you. I’ve always thought, How can I enhance the funk through the mix?

BLVR: Are there particular trends in mixing now that you are either a fan of or dislike intensely? What are you noticing in the mix in songs now?

JS: I think it’s going in a generally good direction. For a while there—and I have to credit a friend with this phrase—we lived under the Rule of the Solo Button, where every instrument sounded lush and big. So you got these really hyped-up sounds—and it’s cool when everything’s hyped up. It’s kind of like the Chipotle burrito, where every element you could just eat with a fork and it’d be pretty good. But sometimes there should be things in a mix that are just doing their little thing, and I feel like we’re getting back to that, where the pendulum has swung back in a nice way.

BLVR: If we’re using a food analogy for the mix, would you say a matzo ball soup is more your preference? As in, there’s the main thing you want to hear in the song, and then there’s all the little bits in the broth that are complementary to that thing?

JS: Precisely. Yeah. Delicate ratios.

BLVR: Does your own relationship to food influence your approach to music, in terms of finding joy in things that people often take for granted?

JS: Oh yeah, big time. The way I cook is similar to the way I mix. Your typical great chef, they’re using a lot of ingredients and they make it taste good and you’re like, How the hell did they do that? But I like to find three retail ingredients that are just really good, whether that’s the Okinawan purple potato, or now I’m getting into Calrose sushi-grade rice and Trader Joe’s frozen petite peas. Just finding really good retail ingredients, no more than three or four, finding how they can interact, and people go, How did you…? I literally just cooked it all together. I didn’t do anything. I love how Vulf will sit in playlists with music that is made in much more complex ways, and stand up alongside it.

II. Don’t Go It Alone

BLVR: How do you like to listen to music? In your ears? In a room?

JS: Usually, probably on my studio monitors or in these headphones. But as far as chilling out and listening to music? One of the few trade-offs of being a mix engineer is that you give that up a little bit. Not fully, but mostly. It’s like being a graphic designer or a cinematographer.

BLVR: I ask because in a video that you posted as a message about Spotify to Apple Music, you talked about how streaming is the endgame of what we all wanted—we all just wanted access to everything, all right in one place. And I wonder how you feel that streaming has affected the parent-child music relationship. Do you want my theory about it?

JS: Please share.

BLVR: Well, assuming streaming goes straight into headphones or earbuds, it seems less likely that a parent has the opportunity to disapprove of something, right? But it’s also less likely that a parent’s jam will reach their kid. Do you think of that as a positive or a negative evolution—to have music in one’s ears instead of out in a room?

JS: I haven’t explored that. That’s really interesting. I’ve thought of processed food as an analogy, where soldiers, in their ration box, would have Hershey bars. There’s a story of an immigrant who was Vietnamese and he had a Hershey bar from a soldier. And he was like, I will move to America, where this exists. If you’ve never had processed food, it’s spiritual, you know? But if you just grow up with that abundance, it’s not the same effect. So streaming, in that sense—it’s so abundant.

BLVR: In the video, your plea to Apple was to change the payment model so artists get 90 percent of the profits from a fan’s subscription, and it’s divvied up based on what the subscriber is actually listening to. And then Apple keeps 10 percent. Have you had any response to that, either from other musicians or from the music industry?

JS: People were sending me screenshots of it being in these industry-news mailing lists. So I’m sure everyone who might be interested in that sort of thing heard about it or watched it. The more I learn about the subject, the more confusing it gets with conflicts of interest: The labels own part of Spotify; Spotify owns part of the distributors. It’s not as simple as it used to be. So I don’t know how free Apple really is to do anything. But it came from the idea of: Maybe I know someone in tech who’d wanna do this. And then you look at how difficult it would be, and you’re like, Man, I wish we could get some muscle behind this. Well, how about the most valuable company in history? Like, maybe they could… [Laughs]

BLVR: They seem like your best possibility.

JS: They have some resources that, you know, a start-up might not have.

BLVR: As the bandleader of Vulfpeck, how do you see your role? On the one hand, you have these expert musicians to play with, these virtuosos on their instruments. But you’re also juggling all these different styles. This is going to sound hyperbolic, but it feels like a kind of Duke Ellington role: you’re the ideas person, and you’re getting the most out of your personnel. Does that sound apt? How do you make all these disparate personalities still always sound like Vulfpeck?

JS: I think I’m getting better at that with time, whereas maybe earlier on it was more of a Kubrick energy, more visionary: Implement these things on my behalf. And now, especially as people do more solo work, I see the band as a bit more Let everyone just do their thing. I think that’s a natural process too. I don’t get as neurotic about little things in the mix. Everyone has such a voice in the band, and that’s ultimately what’s fun about a band, you know? If you wanted to hear just my vision, you could listen to my solo project—and even on that, I’m mostly collabing now, because I’m way more interested in what someone else is talking about. It’s like, I can do these things pretty well, but I know these people can do these other things way better than me, or way different. I mean, at this point, it’s a joke: the collective Vulf sphere of what I have access to as a producer—it’s the best part, because people can just do things. They don’t even work that hard at it. You’re just like, Oh, you’re really good at that and I’m not, so let’s… Why don’t you write the lyrics? Maybe that’s part of getting older: people are further into their specializations. Like, if you’re playing the bass professionally in your thirties, you’ve taken a lot of punches.

BLVR: Bill Graham, the promoter for the Grateful Dead, described them as being “not the best at what they do; they’re the only ones who do what they do.”

JS: Ooh, there we go. That’s like every band, except maybe Earth, Wind & Fire.

BLVR: What’s the difference between Vulfpeck—your group—and Vulfmon, your solo identity?

JS: The deep fans can kind of sense more of what my influence is now ’cause of Vulfmon. It’s always been contained in Vulfpeck, my various tastes, because I pretty much do the mixing and all the videos. But Vulfpeck is basically Vulfmon, but a bigger collaboration. It’s been a wild ride. I mean, I saw Cory [Wong] sell out the Wiltern, and then I saw Theo [Katzman] play there. I saw both shows, and I was like, Wait, I’m in a band with both these guys. Everyone’s various solo endeavors are really taking off, which is so cool.

BLVR: I think it’s interesting that everyone has their own sounds that are distinct from Vulfpeck—

JS: Yes.

BLVR: —but then they come together to make this band that has this origin story that feels like it’s from your head.

JS: People are starting to figure out that it’s smarter to go through the arts with a kind of scene, you know? It’s hard to go it alone. So it’s a nice balance to have something big and collaborative, and then also to be able to do your own thing. But to just go out there doing your own thing is hard. So I think it’s been a good approach: All ships rise, you know? This has probably been my favorite era, seeing all the tentacles.

BLVR: You guys are so locked in technically that what I wrote down after seeing the Schvitz Experience [an eight­performance residency at the Great Hall at Avant Gardner in Brooklyn, New York, in November 2023] was how uncomplicated the joy was in the performance, both from your side and from the audience. People just left happier.

JS: Yes.

BLVR: But it wasn’t necessarily because there was a song that touched people in particular; it was just that there was joy in the music you were creating, and it didn’t necessarily have to come from the lyrics.

JS: Well, that’s for the academy to examine—what’s going on there—but there’s definitely something transcending the language. I mean, someone writes sad lyrics to a happy song, and then a year later, you realize, Oh, wow, this song’s about a bad marriage. You know, you have no clue. But that’s ultimately why I collab: some people listen only to lyrics, so they’re hyper-tuned in to that. That’s why I like to collab with those people: ’cause we’re both gravitating toward different things initially, and if you’re able to get both in one song—where someone who’s very lyric-focused is happy, and someone who’s groove- and feel-focused is happy—that’s potent.

III. “Purdie is my messiah”

BLVR: In the band now, you play drums, bass, keys, and guitar.

JS: Yup.

BLVR: I feel like you’ve always been a drummer at your core.

JS: Totally.

BLVR: Do you play the other instruments as a drummer?

JS: Oh yeah. I think that’s my main advantage on keyboards, for sure, because I approach it pretty rhythmically. Joey [Dosik] and Woody [Goss] will run laps around me ear-wise, so I have to compensate with impeccable rhythm. If I have a part in my hands, I’m the one you want, but it takes me a while to get it into my hands, compared with some of the other players. Because they’re so quick—they’ve just transcended elements of the instruments that I haven’t. Like, transposing on keyboard? Still impossible for me. So I’m definitely bringing the drums to everything. And right now I’m getting more into drums—like, I’m practicing drums more than usual to kind of reinvigorate that original thing. It’s hard; it’s really hard. I’m older, but it’s harder. You have to stay in it for the whole track on drums. It’s a quasi-meditation. You feel yourself lose it and then you get it back. How can I hold this for the whole tune? It’s very hard.

BLVR: Yeah, because everyone’s listening to you, but you have to listen to everyone else. You’re within and without.

JS: The Royal Scam, which is a Steely Dan record—pretty sure it’s [Bernard] Purdie down the whole record—but the level of focus, man: it’s like he was in a trance or something. I’ve liked him my whole life, but now I’m hearing him.

BLVR: When you are collaborating with people—and I don’t know if this has changed over time—are you reaching out to them, or are they knocking on your door to say, Hey, I’d like to work with you or Vulfpeck? For instance, how did Monica Martin come into that sphere?

JS: She was a contemporary in this band Phox out of Madison, Wisconsin. Do you remember them?

BLVR: No; the first time I heard her was either on your cover of “Alone Again (Naturally)” or on an episode of Song Exploder, which were around the same time.

JS: [Phox] were very web savvy and had great videos, so she kept popping up on YouTube, and I think they did a Tiny Desk Concert or something. We were the same age and both hustling on the web, so it was bound to happen—and then she moved to LA and was actually hanging out with Theo [Katzman]. We initially did a Theo song as a duet, “Love Is a Beautiful Thing,” because it just sounded like a jazz standard, and then I had the idea for the duet, which I thought was b-r-i-l-l-i-a-n-t. Their blend was incredible, so she was totally in the fold by that point. It’s a pretty small world out here—if someone can sing or play, you know about ’em pretty quick.

BLVR: What about reaching back to past influences, like David T. Walker or Purdie? What is it like to not just meet but work with your idols? And specifically with Purdie, what makes him so much better at what he does than everyone else?

JS: Oh my gosh. You opened the floodgates now. Purdie is my messiah. As far as reaching out, there’s kind of this web of trust between studio musicians and their various antecedents. And once one of them says, Yeah, they’re cool, or They won’t screw you, they kind of look to each other and you get a nod.

BLVR: So who was that first nod to you from that generation? Bootsy [Collins]?

JS: It might have been David T. He took a risk to play with Vulfpeck and then everyone… I mean, he played with Mahalia Jackson. If David T. is cool with it, pretty much everyone else is. There are, understandably, skeptical musicians from that era. They’ve seen more than we’ll ever know. Initially, [Purdie] was skeptical, but then after the shows that he played with us, he was all in. You’ll go back to an old director you like and the movies don’t hold up, but then you’ll go back to another director and they’re even better. It keeps happening with Purdie for me, where more just keeps getting revealed—it just keeps getting better. And it’s hard to explain, other than that he had this salesman commercial energy that is not typical of a virtuoso musician. He was always trying to sell you on his beats and make a hit record, and he’s so funky—what a treat for all of us—as opposed to someone who’s more concerned with earning various accolades or something. He was just trying to make everyone happy.

BLVR: If I’m a subscriber to The Believer and I’m reading this interview, is there a Purdie track I should go to in order to fully appreciate what you’re talking about?

JS: The most joyous Purdie tracks would be “O-o-h Child,” and then I would say a lot of the Aretha Franklin stuff—“Rock Steady” by Aretha, “Kid Charlemagne” by Steely Dan. And those are all so different. Yeah, there’s a story from when I was growing up, when I would play along to “MMMBop,” “Kid Charlemagne,” and “O-o-h Child” with headphones on. And I’d be like, Man, I love drums. I love funky drums. And it was all Bernard Purdie, and I had no clue—

BLVR: Wait, Bernard Purdie played on “MMMBop”?

JS: Yeah, he’s sampled on “MMMBop.” And then Abe Laboriel Jr., who’s Paul McCartney’s touring drummer, comes in—but that initial funk beat is the Bernard Purdie sample. So I was like, Yeah, drums are great. And it’s like, No, you just like Bernard Purdie.

BLVR: Wait, were the kids actually playing in Hanson? That’s probably a different conversation.

JS: [Zac Hanson] would play the song live, and that’s no easy task. But as a kid, I thought that kid was playing on the album, and I’d be like, This kid is smoking. Like, he is so much better than me. This foot pattern is impossible. Turns out it was a Bernard Purdie sample, kind of sped up.

BLVR: Do you often have occasion to access that childhood level of music appreciation?

JS: I’m doing a kids’ song right now with Antwaun [Stanley] and Jacob Jeffries. It’s really fun.

BLVR: How do you approach writing a kids’ song as opposed to a grown-ups’ song?

JS: We’re kind of framing it as a “Baby Shark” rescue mission. To make something that’ll grab kids but that’s also funky and good and less grating. But “Baby Shark” is—you know, people dig it. All of Vulf’s catalog is kid-friendly.

BLVR: Yeah, I do appreciate that, as a parent of a six-year-old.

JS: But, yeah, to really home in on it is—I’m kind of new to it. I’m learning.

BLVR: You’re right that you can play any song of yours for anybody—and I wonder if that’s a conscious choice on your part. Like, did you say at the outset, No swearing on these tracks, or did it just sort of happen?

JS: Yeah, there’s just something in my DNA not to swear. I didn’t choose it. And I like certain discographies that have a few swears—like, two swears in them? Over the course of a decade? Like Steely Dan or something?

IV. Yiddish and Breath work

BLVR: Do you feel like the best music is made as something personal and revealing, or as something that’s perfectly virtuosic? The two acts I’ve been listening to a lot lately are you guys and Noah Kahan. So is a focus on technical craft something that separates the audience from the performer, or is the music good because it connects the audience to the performer because of everything they’re pouring into the song? Heart or brain, I think, is the way I’m asking it.

JS: Yeah, I get it. Musicians really love when there’s a crossover. Like, [bassist] James Jamerson at Motown: super virtuosic, super funky, very difficult, but the masses love it. It doesn’t happen that often, but when it does, musicians really like it, because then they’re having their cake and eating it too. We wanna do cool stuff that’s fun to play and that pushes our limits technically and that also transcends. I’ve been watching Scorsese’s Dylan doc from 2005 [No Direction Home]. And there’s an element of—when someone’s not technically blowing your socks off and there’s a huge crowd, people are like, Well, this must be really insightful lyrically. It can almost work in your favor. I mean, I personally connect with what would be considered more craft-based, but I’m also changing my preferences. This Dylan doc has been really enlightening, and I love great singers and great drummers who hit both circuits at the same time.

BLVR: When you were writing “Here We Go Jack,” for instance, from one of your solo Vulfmon albums, did the music come to you first for that one, or did the lyrics drive that? I don’t know if there’s a lyrical meaning to the whole song that I’m missing, but it feels more like: I like the sound of this line musically.

JS: Yeah, the lyrics are kind of—there’s this postmodern nostalgia going on right now, where you bring up things from not that long ago, like a Chevy Malibu, not a Ford Mustang. There’s something I notice happening, and the song’s kind of this impressionistic thing that sounds like it’s getting at something, you know? Before I wrote the lyrics, a friend of mine, Ryan Lerman [of Scary Pockets]—I’ve always liked his lyrics, and I said, “What are some tips for good lyrics writing?” Someone had told him—I don’t know who originated this—that they should have the illusion of depth. And so I kind of went in with that attitude. You know how a font can look expensive or cheap? Well, I wanted to write expensive, depth-filled, Radiohead lyrics.

BLVR: You wanted to write in the font of those lyrics? 

JS: Exactly. You know, what’s a classy, expensive font you’d put the numbers of your house in? I want that. All of that is contained within the font. There’s a similar thing in literature too—lofty, biblical writing. Legal writing’s got a certain tone and vocabulary. Just thinking like that in a lyrical sense is kind of a new idea.

BLVR: It doesn’t feel that far off from the exercises in Jeff Tweedy’s book How to Write One Song, where you’re communicating the sound of the words as opposed to telling a country-song story.

JS: He’s probably a big part of that lineage of what I was writing there. It’s kind of impressionistic.

BLVR: Vulfpeck began more as a studio group, so how has your approach to playing changed as you’ve become more of a group that is also playing live more regularly?

JS: There’s a push and pull between studio and live, where live shows are quite a bit louder, like, really loud, and you play a bit differently. The adrenaline kicks in. So you can kind of lose some of the nuance of the studio, which is also live, without people watching. But now we’re really trying to merge the two. We made a Fearless Flyers record onstage a couple months ago that went really well. It’s interesting—the crowd also changed their attitude. You could feel that the red light was on in a cool way. So Vulfpeck is gonna attempt that later this year, and it’ll really influence how we set up onstage and how loud we play. But it’s interesting, because there are elements of live music that you can never get in the studio. Certain performers just come to life—they hit a different gear—so trying to merge the best of both is gonna be a fun experiment. I think they used to do it more. Jimmy Smith’s records would be recorded in a club, but they would just be marketed as his record. They wouldn’t be called live albums. Sometimes the live album gets the shaft—people don’t respect it as much as the studio album.

BLVR: Yeah, I wonder when the live-album phenomenon got started. I feel like it was with Dave Matthews or Phish or something.

JS: Absolutely, yeah.

BLVR: Until I saw you guys in Brooklyn, I’d only seen your other bands. So I’d seen [your high school band], Calvin Coolidge, at Cleveland’s High School Rock Off competition, and I’d seen [your dad’s klezmer outfit], Yiddishe Cup, at the Ark in Ann Arbor, Michigan. So I’m curious how klezmer informs your work, but also, every once in a while, you throw in some Yiddish for Antwaun, and I’m curious if you feel like there’s a particular connection between Yiddish and funk, or do you include it in lyrics here and there for, like, contrast and for fun?

JS: It’s so much fun. Antwaun singing your lyrics is just such a thrill, and if you throw in Yiddish, it sounds like it was etched in stone when he’s singing. It’s kind of like The Big Lebowski: they made such a beautiful movie about such a ridiculous thing: How did you get this guy to sing these lyrics? And you almost don’t even hear it, because he commits so hard to the lyrics. I’ll never stop enjoying that.

BLVR: You know, I think of Vulfpeck as this creation of yours that’s been an avenue for all these stellar musicians to be a part of and showcase their craft. But I wonder if I have that wrong, and you think of Vulf as this collection of more personal experiences? I’m thinking of your mom at MSG leading everyone through breath work meditation exercises, or for a while wasn’t part of your onstage outfit borrowed from your grandfather?

JS: Yeah, I’ve noticed that you don’t, with enough time, get to choose these things. All that was gonna seep into the Vulf universe with time. And it’s also in my dad’s klezmer band: it kind of has this unpretentious feel to it. And I always thought: Concerts should be fun. I don’t like it when they feel like religion. I’ll go to temple for that, if I want someone to sermonize. People are paying money; it should be fun.

BLVR: How do you decide where you want to perform, and why do you choose festivals so often?

JS: There’s nothing like a good festival, where they take care of all the logistics and ticket sales. They take so much weight off the band. You have this whole team dedicated to the event. It’s just a more diffuse pressure. There’s more acts. But there’s also nothing like a good Vulf show. There’s an energy to it. We’re trying to balance it out more, because I know Vulf fans just want to see the band; they don’t want to go to a festival. So we’re trying to deliver that as well.

BLVR: Do you have a favorite or most memorable gig?

JS: Our first Dublin show was unreal. It literally felt like a dream. We had no idea what to expect. People had kinda told us that Dublin loves instrumental music. It was just—it was unbelievable. I don’t think that’ll ever happen again in that way.

BLVR: Like, did the crowd know your stuff in a way you didn’t expect, or were they just so into whatever you were putting down?

JS: It was the first time where a crowd sang “Dean Town,” the bass line. But they sang Joe’s bass lines for pretty much the entire show. It was unreal.

V. “Layers of industry”

BLVR: I was listening to one interview Cory Wong did. He said, “The internet is Jack’s mandolin.” It feels like the thing you’ve mastered about being online is the thing that’s hardest to do on the internet, which is withholding and patience. I don’t believe that you yourself have an Instagram account or personal social media presence. It’s all within the presence of the band. The band’s website is minimalist. How do you make decisions about being prolific but also slow and intentional?

JS: Yeah, oh yeah. Pre-scandal, Louis C.K. deleted his Twitter, and someone interviewed him about it, and he said, Yeah, my worst stuff was being seen by the most people. Like, he’d just write a dumb tweet and his biggest following was there. So it’s very easy to post something—and social media wants you to do that to increase engagement. But everyone finds their rhythm with it kind of naturally. Mine’s a little restrained, but I think, to a lot of people, ours would appear like too much engagement, not enough mystery, you know? Some bands are truly mysterious.

BLVR: You’re not Radiohead.

JS: Ha, yeah. I think it’s amazing that cool people have to be on Instagram. It’s like, Oh yeah, the nerds totally won. Even the cool people have to be on there. That’s just so sad.

BLVR: Do you have a litmus test for when something’s a gimmick versus when it feels more earnest and right and worthy, and how do you approach and back away from that line? I’m thinking about things like auctioning off a track on The Joy of Music, The Job of Real Estate, or creating a silent album for fans to stream overnight to raise money for a tour, or performing a wedding at Bonnaroo for the highest-bidding couple. Were they the same way you envisioned them, or do you look back on them and think, I’d reel this back in, or, I would replicate this?

JS: Part of the fun is how Wild West it is out there on the internet. No one knows what’s gonna happen when you do these stunts. It’s fairly unique to Vulf, but people kind of expect it—it’s in our wheelhouse, the creative things we get to do. I probably have a hundred ideas for each one I do, and I will pitch them to friends: Is this funny? And most of the time, they’re not. I have followed through with some that people didn’t really like, and I tend to regret those. But it’s usually just a matter of running it by people face-to-face. Like, a good Curb [Your Enthusiasm] premise is just funny. You can just tell anyone the premise of the show, and it’ll be funny. Trying to get to that type of comedy—where someone can just say what Vulfpeck did, and it works—is tough.

BLVR: I mean, you did it with the things I just listed: You performed a wedding for the highest bidder. You auctioned off a track on one of your albums. You made an album of silent tracks that people could stream overnight to help you fund a tour.

JS: The auctioned-off track was a wild ride. For a minute, I was thinking, Is this going to be the last Vulfpeck record? Is this the last song we release?

BLVR: I guess someone could have just tried to screw you guys. Instead, Earthquake Lights went with a whole string orchestra and everything.

JS: Yeah, it’s very funny when people say that’s their favorite Vulfpeck song.

BLVR: What have you found to be the biggest pitfalls of ticketing and venues? It seemed like your Brooklyn residency had a bitter aftertaste.

JS: Yeah, we’re learning as we go here, trying to get more involved in the process. It’s really not as complicated as it ought to be. Once you get access to these ticketing portals, it’s just like creating a Facebook event, you know? A fifteen-year-old could do it; there’s no expertise required. But getting to that portal—it’s a battle: a fifteen-year-old could not do that. 

BLVR: What are the barriers to accessing the— By a “portal,” do you mean…?

JS: Where you create the event and see the ticket sales come in. There are just these layers of industry people between you and the actual ticketing portal, where it’s kind of hard to get access to who bought the tickets and where the fees went. It’s simple stuff, but if you’re not—anyone looking from the outside would imagine: Yeah, you probably get all the customer data and know where the money’s going. But the artists are in the dark. The Schvitz shows were a first attempt at getting more involved, and it’s really funny, because a fan wouldn’t know the difference either way. It’s just kind of our current pet project to be more involved in promoting our own shows.

BLVR: Was the Schvitz Experience—I imagine it to be sort of like a wedding where you didn’t hire a wedding planner, so you’re coordinating the cake and dealing with the venue and getting the flowers and making sure everyone knows where they’re supposed to be, when you’re also getting married—

JS: Yeah, most artists have absolutely negative interest in any aspect of this, but having set up a Shopify or done vinyl projects—I just have some experience in the selling-stuff-online realm. I wonder why selling concert tickets is so different from selling a T-shirt. I don’t know why concerts are this special class of events. Have you heard of the wedding tax?

BLVR: No.

JS: If you go to a cool bar or venue and you throw a party, it’s a certain rate. If you say it’s a wedding, it’s like 20 percent more to rent that same room. So I think there’s an element of that with concert tickets. That’s why we were kind of trying to treat this like a corporate event or something. Corporate events don’t have the same culture of middlemen that concerts do. There’s no promoter or anything, or Ticketmaster fees. So we were like, This isn’t a concert. It’s a corporate event for our shareholders, who bought tickets.

BLVR: How does geography inform the group? It feels like it originates with you in your native Cleveland, but the group itself originates in Michigan, but you also have this Los Angeles vibe—and, I don’t know, a kind of Brooklyn feel?

JS: We’re in the cultural sauce, you know? That’s a cool element—we’re all taking in different parts of the country at any given moment. I guess it’s a testament to commercial air travel, our ability to pull off these records and these shows. It’s really—we’re kind of living in the future, in a certain way. We’ll tour Europe this summer; explain that to someone two hundred years ago.

BLVR: I feel like there are a lot of things you’d have to explain to that person. Hey, you won’t believe this… Like, every single thing about our interaction right now would be pretty mind-blowing to someone from 1824.

JS: I guess that’s the irony of Vulfpeck: we’re an internet band using all sorts of technology, but we’re the most get-in-a-room, humans­-playing-together Luddite art form.

BLVR: You’re “online Luddites.” Maybe that’s the way to describe it.

JS: Ooh. Fischel’s got it.