Mike and Jamie from sparkle*jets open up about the creative process and slow burning a record for 25 years...
Outsideleft: A Box of Letters has been a long time coming, and in the track by track you sent, you allude to the etymology of the songs. Pieces stashed here and there, around the house. In shoe boxes. Left on a shelf in the garage. How long is the longest break between leaving something down and picking it up again. I mean, you’re always writing, right. Songwriters never stop, right?
Mike: If a song idea comes, and I’m in relative proximity to an instrument, it pops out and it’s there and I use it. I don’t have a backlog of material. I do have lyric scraps in my phone but they rarely turn into anything beyond scraps. We all had a major career shift just as we were finishing this album, and had a few songs that still needed lead vocals, things like that. We just got busier and busier, and the songs sat there. Eventually 20 years went by before I took the time and forced the issue a bit. One of the songs it was just a matter of Susan not jiving with the meter and feel the song needed. Modern technology helped in that regard.. .I adjusted an old vocal to the correct syncopation and she was like “AH OK I GET IT”, and that kinda broke up the clog. Then it was just a matter of adding the finishing touches and remixing. To be fair there are a few brand new songs as well.
Jamie: I’m more of a dreamer and I’ll write songs and they will reside in my dreams rather than being recorded. Mike is more of a producer that forces songs to be born. If he thinks either Susan or I have a song, he will not let up until he’s recorded the tune.
Outsideleft: Because of the nature of how Box of Letters evolved, I want to ask, is a piece of art ever finished. In Sparklejets case music. Is there a song you have committed to disc, and maybe you’re thinking, I’d do that differently now?
Mike: George Lucas syndrome? Sure! I’ve learned a lot since the first two albums, and I have the tools to easily fix things that drive me crazy… usually sloppy meter and pitchy singing. But that said, I thought when I found these multi-tracks that remixing and ‘fixing’ some things would make this massive difference… or that adding this or that would massively effect the sonic cohesion and stuff… but the new mixes sounded EXACTLY the same as the old ones! In some cases we didn’t have high resolution mixes of the original roughs anyway, so this turned out to be wonderful, but the time shift didn’t really help or hinder. I think I sing better now than I did on the first two SJ*UK albums, but by the time we got to this third batch I was already kinda matured in the way I do things. That is all to say, yes, there are songs with very old and very new parts and there’s really no way to tell. We got lucky on that.
Jamie: The band has a unique sound that has the distinct sound of Susan & Mike’s vocal harmonies, mixed with Mike’s classic power pop voice and Susan’s vocal style that is incredibly dynamic, soulful and her own unique style of singing. This is followed by a very strong rhythm section and lots of ear candy. When sparkle*jets u.k. first started to play live our music was loud, fast, and not the stuff you’d listen to over a dinner. We were more like music that you have to crank up loud on your car stereo while driving. I think it would be fun to take our old catalog and play some of the songs in a more relaxed style. However, if we ever did that I know I’d be the first one to miss the crazy energy on our first two albums.
Outsideleft: While I think you carry most of the creative spark, (I think) how does writing and recording work, with the band and even for live shows. Do you sit around for an age waiting for the bassist to get time off from Jiffy Lube to fit your schedules? Do you draft in new personalities, some of you guys seem to have been working together for a long while? You definitely seem like an entire band rather than…
Mike: Complicated! Certainly I’m the one who pushes things along, there’s no arguments there. I do the recording, the engineering, the producing for the most part. I can play all the parts so yeah, sometimes it’s me waiting for bandmates to replace my temporary parts or add their special magic. Sometimes I forget that we actually HAVE a full band! For instance right now both our drummer and our lead guitarist have more professional engineering chops than I do! A good half of this album came from live writing sessions with everyone there contributing to the arrangements, which was fantastic, and of course we’d love to always do that it’s just impractical with busy schedules and some of us far afield. Having a band in Southern California isn’t like I imagine a band in England is. If you were in London, but the keyboardist is in Swindon working 10 hours a day and the Drummer is in Exeter working nights and weekends. It’s tough. The core of Susan, Jamie, and me live close together and even work at the same place but still rarely see each other. Working on band stuff doesn’t just happen like it used to, you really have to plan and commit and stick to it. And the mechanics of getting a record to market, well… that’s a whole other huge bag of pain.
Jamie: I think the word synergy best describes the dynamics and “creative spark” of the band. We are all extremely creative and our relationship with each other genuinely makes for the strength of the band. We all have a way of enhancing each other’s shortcomings as well as utilizing each other’s expertise.
Outsideleft: The Beach Boys, everyone knows you’re a fan. But even that is an understatement. Can you talk about hearing them for the first time ever, presumably when you were a child, and how that evolves from hearing a radio pop hit, to going down the rabbit hole of being aware of every nuance of the band…
Mike: Beatles are obviously #1 for me, but Brian Wilson is a huge deal. I had Endless Summer on 8-track as a kid. The surf and sun songs are fine but the ones that really appealed to me were tracks like ‘Girl Don’t Tell Me’, ‘Wendy’, and ‘You’re so Good to Me’. I really got into their music when I was about 20, where I went and found all the records and really soaked in the songs and the lore. Their output from ‘Beach Boys Today’ through ‘Holland’ is basically scriptural in its importance. Similarly to the Beatles, there is a ton of material, a very interesting history and cast of characters. There is seemingly no end to how deep you can dig and the new things that can be discovered. I was really fortunate to have friends in Brian’s organization and get to see a few things at close range, or at least hear about them. Even though Brian Wilson has no idea who I am, I love him and he really is family to me. That’s how I see him. I have a copy of a famous painting of him in my front room. I look at it every day. It’s unfathomable how much that one man has given the world, and the rest of the guys too.
Jamie: I grew up with The Beach Boys’ music in real-time and loved their nonstop hit machine. I used to argue with my grandfather about the Beach Boys because he would say “You know, the Beach Boys don’t play their instruments on their albums and use a bunch of jazz musicians to record their songs.” My teenage brain rationalized “since The Beatles played on all of their records the Beach Boys had to have recorded all of their songs.” Years later, I would find out about The Wrecking Crew and I’m grateful for Mike exposing me to all of the Beach Boys Catalog Post “Good Vibrations.”
Outsideleft: Where are the influences on your songwriting from? Music, movies, literature, art, community… Where? I think, you have to look at a song as a whole piece and not as component parts, from an artistic perspective and so the artist in you needs to be able to unlock themselves, reach deep within, not just for something to say lyrically, but to find the right chord, the right bass drum sound, the right… vibe! The skittles skittering around that makes the magic just different enough to make it meaningful… Where does it come from for you?
Mike: I know everybody in the band has a very different way they work. For me, stuff just sortof falls out. Usually I have what I think is a clever title or topic. If it works, the song structure usually just falls out… I grab an instrument, and everything’s already kinda there, floating… I just have to formalize it. The good ones are quick, like they already exist. If you have to wrestle with a song too much it’s probably not very good. Sometimes if they fight you it’s because you are trying to fit the song into your own mold, and often times you have to do them in a style you don’t normally even like in order for them to work. That’s pretty rewarding when it happens. And if you can’t pull it off, the song dies, and that’s okay. When susan would bring me a song she usually had some crazy lyrics and a melody… maybe a few chords. Her songs arrive like a crumpled piece of paper, and I smooth it out. I will edit lyrics into more regular meter to give them balance. Maybe add chords or a pre-chorus or a bridge. They always come out great. I can do the producing that I’m too impatient to do with my own stuff. Jamie comes in with songs that already have all their chords, which are always way more complex than chords I would do. I never really understand what he’s playing, he has to teach me. He would argue with me but his new songs are usually AOR-jazzy. He’ll have a melody but often it’s just ‘ba-da-da-da’ type stuff. I will usually add a few things to those as well, or add a little aggression to the arrangement to make it more in the power pop vein. Although we almost never try to do anything genre-specific. Honestly, the fact that we don’t do everything in the exact same style really helps us stand out.
Jamie: Whenever I write a song it is the result of being in the Creative Zone,” and then capturing what I wrote for future assembly. I don’t get into the “Creative Zone” by being sad, happy, or sitting on a mountain top. I write by simply playing music in my home studio and once my mind filters out everything, and I’m only thinking about music, something happens to me. When this happens, I can only process a section of the future song and then my mind comes back to the moment and other distractions creep in. Later, I collect all of the snippets from when I’m “in the Creative Zone” and then begin the process of listening to my snippets of songs and seeing what works best. At this stage the songwriting becomes like legos and I assemble the different sections of the song.
Outsideleft: When you were a kid, was your family musical at all? You’ve been playing for a long time… Where does it come from?
Mike: My grandmothers and my mom played a little piano, but it was never something I saw them do. There was always a keyboard in the house for me to mess with, but I was left to my own devices. I’m kindof the same way. I live surrounded by every kind of instrument, but I only touch them when I need to. General lethargy and a touch of arthritis will do that. My brother played a little, but that’s it really. I don’t think my parents have ever understood what making music is about. I constantly tell them but they clearly don’t understand. They were at our record release party the other day and heard us all talking about our history and my mom said ‘I never knew all those things about you!’... and I thought well shit I tell you all those things all the time! I wish the people around me understood more of the motivations musicians live with.
Jamie: My father was from Tennessee and he would love to sing Southern Spirituals or “call and response” chants from his days serving in The US Marine Corps. He would also sing pop tunes like Chantilly Lace by the Big Bopper. while working around the house. My Grandmother on my mother’s side had a Hammond B3 organ and I would love to mess around with it whenever I was at her home. I got into playing music after watching The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. After their first performance, I begged my father for an Electric Guitar and joined a Garage Band. During the 1970s I made my living as a pro musician but I was more into playing covers because that’s what the audience wanted to hear at the clubs. It wasn’t until the late 70s, and I was starting to dabble in Power Pop and New Wave, that I started writing songs.
Outsideleft: I know you teach young people and produce records too. As the way you love music evolves, as I think it does, what is the most satisfying aspect of your current musical endeavours?
Mike: My philosophy when working with young people has always been to expose them to quality music. If we are preparing them to become musicians in any capacity, the hope is that they will contribute their creativity into the musical universe, and when they do, they will make better stuff if they have good melodic songwriting down in their soul. We all create based on what we know and loved in our developmental years. That’s how I can come up with a melody without constructing it. I don’t have to, my body and brain know what a melody should do. I want the kids to write from a similar place, so I make them learn Beach Boys and Beatles, etc. If I didn’t the best they could do is regurgitate whatever crap they heard on Radio Disney or whatever. Nowadays these kids all grew up with streamers, listening to everything. So that part of the gig is gonig to be easier now. The problem lies more with technology, and so many people coming into the creative space with the wrong intentions. Kids come in with absolutely no ability to play an instrument… at all… and want to ‘be a producer’ and ‘make beats’. It’s like music Lego to these kids. And that’s fine, but really… are they going to make anything truly great? I would argue that you’ll be better at Lego if you’ve taken wood shop or done sculpture. You know what I mean? Skills are important, and that’s what we are losing. It happens to me as well, so I feek I know what I’m talking about.
Jamie: Since you brought up education I thought a little backstory would be appropriate. When I started teaching in 2001, Mike was working for his family business and Susan was working for a steel company. I was a high school librarian at the time and formed a club called The Loud Music Club and started teaching kids, “How to Rock.” I would rehearse the kids in the Library and decided to do a Battle of the Bands that was going to buy money for books. I enlisted Susan and Mike to help with my first school Battle of the Bands and sparkle*jets u.k. played our first concert with the kids. At that moment the creative energy of the band started to get funneled into our future school music program. The school music program has been a labor of love for all of the sparkle*jets and we’re truly amazed at how many of our former students have successful music careers.
Outsideleft: Would be remiss of me not to ask, the ‘UK’ in Sparklejets UK, is that because you can?
Mike: I don’t hide my Anglophilic tendencies, but what really happened is that we were sparkle*jets, and our first record was about to go to plant. We had been through a few band name iterations, landed on sparkle*jets and been doing shows, had a logo and all the record art done and we liked it. Then we read in BAM magazine about another band called Sparkle Jet out of central California. I really didn’t want to start from scratch yet again. I don’t know if UK audiences are aware but back in the 80’s when the world started running out of band names, you’d have cases where there were bands in either country with the same name, that had a record deal or some modicum of success. To avoid legal issues, the label would affix ‘U.K.’ to the name to differentiate. We all knew this and a friend and I were joking that we could just throw UK on our name, and the rest of the band liked the idea, so we did. It doesnt’ have any deeper meaning than that! Since then, other bands have used our name and even their graphic looks very similar. But what can you do? We are the only ones with the daft suffix, so yeah.
Jamie: I was the band member who mentioned that I saw another band named Sparkle Jet after I was reading a Bam magazine when I was supposed to be working at my day job. I had a chuckle when Mike suggested we add a u.k. to the name and after the name change, most of our press would always say “they’re from the OC, not the u.k.”
Outsideleft: Finally! I know, I apologise for the long and winding long windedness, house-style! Do you have a 25 year plan for your next record, should we clear our calendars for a 2049 media splurge?
Mike: We are always hopeful to have more songs to do, and with the wonderful folks at Big Stir records doing all the things they do for us, new records are always in the offing. We shall see. As of right now I have one new song. Might be another year or two until there’s another. But maybe the other bandmates will throw something in the ring. I love nothing more than making records, and I would put them out all the time if there were songs! But based on the math, yeah 2049 maybe. Haha
Jamie: Now that I’m retired from teaching I spend most of my time playing music and the songs “keep coming.” Hopefully, Mike will continue to turn my AOR/Jazzy numbers into classic Power Pop Sounds (-:
Essential Info
It's sparkle*jets u.k. Week in Outsideleft (intro)→
Box of Letters LP review by John Robinson→
Track by Track Box of Letters by Mike Simmons→
Interview with Mike and Jamie
Eargraters: 5 Record Mike Simmons would go to the End of the Earth to Never Hear Again...
sparkle*jets u.k. on facebook is here→
Big Stir Records, sparkle*jets u.k. page is here→
