January 6th, 2014 
Brian Leak 
New Mongrels have a history quite unlike that of any other band, but it’s really best told in leader Haynes Brooke’s own words as it involves his own family and the impressive span of nearly 150 years.
The band is set to release their excellent, new, 14-track album, Raised Incorruptible, on January 14 and we had a chance to speak with Brooke himself about the new release, the aforementioned history of his band, and much more, so read through below to get acquainted with one of the most storied acts in recent memory in this extremely in-depth interview with New Mongrels.
First of all, New Mongrels have one of the coolest background stories I’ve ever heard of. Would you mind maybe providing our readers with a synopsis of the band’s history?
I was in the midst of the Athens-Atlanta music scene that produced REM, Drivin’ and Cryin’, The B-52s and a bunch of others when I discovered some interesting details about my great-great grandfather Henry.
He was deaf in one ear, shell-shocked, and just 17 when he came back from the Civil War and he promptly founded this crazy organization called the Smythe County Mongrels Society. His original by-laws stated the group’s purpose as ‘the joyful promotion, through song and rhythmic utterances, of a unified moral code for all creatures.’ Apparently the group met to drink hard cider and sing the book of Psalms to their own improvised melodies, among other things. The charter of the group was intact in the Smythe County Courthouse — it even included a provision that there be no restrictions to membership based on species affiliation. Dogs were welcome as members.
To begin with, this just struck me as cool. I mean, he clearly had a screw loose, but still it resonated with my life at the time. A bunch of us on the folkier side of the scene all hung out and wrote songs and supported each other — a great band called Big Fish Ensemble, Gerard McHugh, who influenced everyone who knew him, and Amy Ray and Emily Saliers of Indigo Girls, who got signed by Sony and started making a string of gold records that really impacted the folk world. I was writing songs at a crazy pace at that time but I didn’t have the desire – or the performance chops, truthfully – to be a solo artist. What I loved was the collective energy and creative spirit of the artists I was hanging around with – not just musicians, but actors and filmmakers – everybody feeding off of everyone else’s art.
I realized the Smythe Country Mongrels Society was actually a blueprint for what I was wanting to have musically and artistically myself, so I brought the group back to life as the New Mongrels, using the original by-laws from the charter of 1866 despite the fact that they are seriously outdated and make official group actions like recording an album kind of cumbersome.
But the link with history was important to me. Even after Henry died, the organization persisted as this invitation-only group that spread and changed over the years before they kind of faded away in the early 1940s. For example, in 1887 Mongrel member Laurens Tucker Holmes published an article on ‘Communal Singing and the Simultaneity of Inspiration,’ still available in the manuscript archives of the University of Virginia. By 1911 the Mongrels had over seventy members as far north as Pennsylvania and as far west as St. Louis. In its new incarnation, the New Mongrels have members all over the place, and of course modern technology has made keeping in touch a lot simpler.
We sometimes say we’re a 148-year-old band. Basically true — but it means we only average one record every 49.3 years, so I guess we could be more productive.
Is it daunting at all to be carrying on such a legacy with this band? Do you think the band will be able to continue on in further generations?
Daunting, not really. In part because the group had died out, and so anything that brought it back to life had to be a step forward. But mostly because the spirit of the original group was so non-judgmental. The whole idea of a Mongrels Society seems forgiving to me, and it was communal, celebratory and spontaneous rather than having strict performance standards. Plus, it had apparently morphed over the years, so I wasn’t worried about some particular standard. The current group of Mongrels is such a talented bunch, in so many different ways, I think we’re really in the best Mongrel tradition. We may be actually more law-abiding than our predecessors.
As for the next generation, I sure hope so. In fact, the inclusion of some young members into the Mongrels was one reason we decided to make another record – to share the wealth of new talent that’s come into the group. My daughter Lucy is just starting high school, but she contributed a lot to the record, not just singing but arrangement ideas. People will also hear a new voice handling lead vocals on a few songs – Katie Green, a super-talented young musician who is part of our Canadian chapter. She’s got the gifts to be a star if she wants to pursue it. I think at the moment she’s leaning towards becoming a doctor, though. I’ll keep the Mongrels going as long as I can and then I’ll pass down the by-laws and see what happens. Hard to predict the future.
Before we get to the album itself, I’m curious about the artwork. Raised Incorruptible has one of the most interesting album covers I’ve seen in awhile. Can you explain the artwork, where it came from, and how you feel it applies to the album?
I went through dozens of album cover prototypes myself, trying to get a handle on what direction would suit this project. I wanted some manifestation of the concept of a ‘new mongrel’; some creature part one thing, part another – but in a new way. We are all obviously mixtures — of two parents, different traditions, various races, physical and mental sides of ourselves, public and private personas, sacred and profane, old and new, it goes on and on. It’s true of music as well – all music is mongrel music as far as I can see.
Anyway, I had lofty ambitions for the album art but my attempts were falling short. I tried to capture an image of my dog leaping off a cliff – well, it looked like a cliff from a certain angle – so it would appear that he was being ‘raised’ into the sky. Plus he was wearing a bow-tie and dog shoes. Anyway, he refused to cooperate. Well within his rights as a mongrel, by the way.
One day my daughter Elizabeth, who is a talented photographer and designer, finally had enough. I showed her yet another of my failed mock-ups and she shook her head and said, “Fine, I’ll do it.” She emerged a little while later with our album cover pretty much as-is. The photo is hers. The figure immersed in the river carries a lot of symbolic weight in the tradition I grew up in, and it connects with the lyrics of the title track, “Raised Incorruptible.” The half-human, half-deer figure rising from the water is from an itinerant print-making outfit on Orcas Island in the San Juans. All the New Mongrels records have featured an image of some soulful creature that seems to inhabit more than one world. This is the latest incarnation.
The album is set to release on January 14, and the first thing I noticed about it is how full it is. Many bands these days are releasing much shorter albums, often with less than 10 tracks. What led to the decision to include 14 full songs? Is there a theme that ties them all together?
Maybe ‘survival of the fittest’? I probably had 50 songs vying to be on the record. You start to share them and sift them and see which come out alive. I guess there’s some right-brain thinking involved, maybe not wanting everything in 3/4 time or too many of similar tempos, etc., but mostly the process is organic. Some fade away by themselves and others really seem to want to make it on the album. Then of course different mongrels start advocating for various songs, which is great. I’ve got a thick skin. And we’ve got a “no bad songs” policy to uphold.
To the extent there are unifying themes, they’ve evolved out of the material rather than being decided before. Analytically, I can see the passage of time, loss, letting go, ruination, regeneration, and celebration all reflected in the songs. But, and I know this will sound weird, I feel like the unifying theme, if there is one, is friendship – and that the songs themselves are friends to each other – balancing and complementing each other in the way that friends do.
And that reflects what I feel is important about the band itself and its artistic endeavors. I hope people can really sense that feeling on the song “Freedom,” which I wrote for my late friend, the indomidable Thor Hesla, who was killed in a terrorist attack. That song is odd and bold and celebratory, but that’s in keeping with who he was. Maybe it can all be traced back to Henry and his example – everyone gets damaged as they pass through life, but you can choose to respond to that with negativity or with ‘the joyful promotion of song and rhythmic utterances.’ We go with that one. Plus dogs and beer.
Apart from already having an incredible story behind the band, you also have a dozen or so members involved. Is this a kind of rotating cast of characters or are all of you involved in everything that goes into the album?
Rotating cast of characters is a pretty good way to put it. Most are returning from previous records, but there’s new voices as well. As the songwriter on this project, I’m the coordinator and the buck stops with me. The by-laws require a certain amount of involvement, but not everybody is involved with every aspect – it just isn’t practical. We have to be realistic and have a sense of humor about it all. Some people care more what mic and pre-amp we use, some don’t care at all. I let people give what they want to give.
On other Mongrel endeavors others will take the lead. We’ve got one Mongrel right now conducting research in Russia, another involved in the study of an esoteric movement tradition. People are free to coordinate within our group structure if it’s helpful, but of course a lot of folks are committed to their own bands or art first, and mongrel membership is peripheral.
Vinyl has risen again in popularity over the past few years and I feel that Raised Incorruptible would sound amazing on wax. Do you have any plans for physical releases like that?
We did press a vinyl version of an earlier New Mongrels record and I loved how it sounded. With this one we weren’t sure what the demand would be so we held off. If I get any feedback that people might be interested in a limited edition pressing, I’d love to make it happen.
It looks like you guys were in control of producing and mixing the album for the most part. Were there any specific aspects of the process that you wanted to handle yourselves as opposed to putting it in someone else’s hands?
The process we have to go through to get a record together is so unwieldy, lots of people with unpredictable schedules in different locations, on tour or whatever, that there’s no good way to control it. Someone who wanted to put their sonic stamp on it – that was never going to work with the Mongrels.
I needed a way to put this together that would embrace the chaos. That’s how we ended up with the perfect guy co-producing – film composer Kubilay Uner. Chaos is the norm on film work – insane deadlines, sudden changes, conflicting directives, and of course explosions, dialogue, robot sounds, ambient beds – all that stuff is part of your everyday musical vocabulary. He was totally unphased that I’d be bringing a motley assortment of tracks from my garage studio to him over an uncertain time frame with an evolving vision of how it should all sound. Hell, he’s a punk band bass player with extensive classical training and his studio is full of weird-ass instruments he’s built himself; he was born for this job. It didn’t matter to him if I walked into his studio with an instrument, an itinerant mongrel, or a hard drive full of location recordings, he was up for whatever, as long as he could keep his coffee/beer equilibrium on target.
The production process began with a bunch of demos I made to inform the mongrels at large what songs were in the running and give a hint to their possible direction. For this task I teamed up with an amazing drummer and vocalist named Ken Palmer. He’s a guy that Tim Robbins brings in to sit at a drum set in the rehearsal room at his LA Theater company (The Actors’ Gang) for week after week as they improvise music and rhythm and movement for their stage shows. Ken is a super flexible, really inventive drummer and his improv training – he’s also a terrific actor – really shows in his music. He’s just way open to what the song is wanting to say. Sometimes I’d ask him for a beat and he’d turn his back on the kit, pick up his harmonica and give the song some texture I didn’t even know it was missing. We created this super free bunch of low-fi demos and disseminated those to any mongrels interested in being involved in the final record.
Then, once we got into the meat of the recording process, each new person who came by swung the project in a new direction. Jeff Mosier, who drums for one of the great event bands of all time up in Seattle, The Dudley Manlove Quartet, passed through LA and played drums on everything in sight before heading off into the California desert. Laura Hall left her TV show duties and brought her accordion and her glockenspiel in one day, then Mike Moynihan and I would share some Irish whiskey the next morning and see where his trumpet took the record.
And so it went – Michelle Malone left a lot of her heart in the studio – I waylaid her on a west coast tour. She’s an amazing artist and deserves the critical praise she gets for her solo work. I got the pleasure of hearing a Grammy winner like Amy Ray sing two songs one day, then another got to hear the beautiful lead vocals of an up-and-coming artist like Katie Green. No ego, no bullshit, no tension, just really talented friends and colleagues coming together to express their art and make something beautiful. As a production strategy, I love it.
To me, and many others I’m sure, I hear a lot of excellent influence from notable acts in the ’60s and ’70s throughout the album. Who are some of your most important inspirations that have led to your sound and style?
Top of my head, in no particular order, Warren Zevon, The Beatles, Gordon Lightfoot, Bob Dylan, The Grateful Dead, Cat Stevens, Jethro Tull, Bruce Springsteen, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Little Feat, Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass- but now that I get going I see I could keep going and going. Other Mongrels will have their own musical histories, and each one brings that with them – for Amy, it’s The Ramones, for Katie, it’s Shostakovich – so it’s hard to quantify. When I’m writing a song, it might be the poetry of Kenneth Patchen or the echoes of some childhood piano lesson or the countless church hymns I’ve heard influencing me as much anything. I remember more than once deciding to make a song shorter because I was running out of tape as I was trying to record the demo on my cassette 4-track.
You guys have had pretty large gaps of time in between releases, which is due to a lot of projects outside of New Mongrels, right? Can you tell us what other projects you’re all involved with? What do you consider to be a priority at this point?
That is an unwieldy question. We’re a lot of people with a lot of different things going on. Obviously, artists like Indigo Girls, Michelle Malone, Dudley Manlove are touring, playing and recording consistently. Amy Ray has made some brilliant solo records in addition to an enormous amount of work on behalf of social causes. Laura Hall was resident musician for the TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway?, among a bunch of other music projects. Mike Moynihan comes from a musical family – one brother is a guerilla ukelele performer who goes by the alias King Kukelele, another is a master of the musical saw who Rick Rubin grabbed to record with the Avett Brothers. Mike’s an actor and poker shark and official Kentucky Colonel, and between trumpet takes for The Mongrels he’ll spin tales of bullfights he’s been to.
My co-producer and mixer, Kubilay Uner, runs a Composer’s Salon here in LA that brings world-class folks in for intimate performances and discussions – Kubi and I listened to Randy Newman perform and talk about music at a recent Salon. The moment I knew I wanted Kubi to help me with this record, though, was when I saw a live performance of his wild operatic piece for Orchestra and Incoherent Diva – you’ve got musicians playing this complex piece and a massive Soprano in viking horns and stilleto heels lurching into the audience as she sings – and it’s all written right into his score. My kind of Mongrel.
As for me, I rotate my artistic pursuits. I’ve written a bunch of stage plays with music, starting with Texcalibur, a country-western take on the Arthurian legends I did with Mongrel Clark Taylor in Atlanta, and then several shows for Tim Robbins’ Actors’ Gang here in Los Angeles. I’m an actor as well as playwright, so these are great undertakings for me – I write myself a role in the play and also write the songs and do the sound design. Live theater is really in my blood – it’s my chance to get that audience connection I miss by not touring as a musician. I’ve also done TV and film work, a one-man show, won a screenwriting fellowship, been featured in ad campaigns, and I’ve spent a lot of time playing tournament-level ultimate frisbee. At the moment I write and produce an online series called THINK TANK with a great actor named Tim Hornor… it sounds kind of schizophrenic when I think about it, but actually it’s not that unusual. I know a lot of creative people who don’t fit in one category.
For me, poetry, acting, playwriting, sound design, songwriting, improvisation, performance – they all seem like very natural and very connected forms of self-expression. Having blurted all that out – it’s been great to come back to the particular process of making a record again. It’s one of my favorite things to do.
Do you have any plans to tour in support of the album in 2014 or any plans for festival appearances? I feel like you would fit in wonderfully at SXSW, Outside Lands, etc.
We won’t be touring as the Mongrels, even though it would be a blast. But the logistics are just too complicated. You might see various Mongrels at a festival, but not in our configuration – as part of their individual acts. I might put together a reduced, LA-Centric version of the New Mongrels for some shows, but nobody can commit to going on the road at this point.
Now that the album is complete and ready to be released, how long do you think it’ll be before you’re able to get another album together with New Mongrels?
I think it’s going to be a lot sooner than it was between the last two records. For one thing, when something’s that much fun and turns out that well, you want to do it more. And we established some nice new collaborative techniques with this record that should make the next one that much smoother.
All in all, what are some near-future plans for the band? Anything in particular you’re eyeing for 2014?
We want to really get the word out about this record, for one thing. There’s a lot of great music out there these days but this project occupies a unique spot that I think people will respond to. We’re sure not copying anybody else’s sound, that’s for sure.
I also hope to be back in the studio before 2014 is out — at least writing new material and making demos. Then I can get the collective process going and see how the Mongrels at large are feeling. And while Raised Incorruptible stayed mostly in the roots/folk world, I’d be interested in exploring different territory on our next record. A lot of us go in some pretty crazy directions in our individual music projects, me included, especially with some of my electronics-based sound design work, and it might be time to loosen up the reins and bring the Smythe County Mongrels Society of 1866 totally into the 21st century.
Written and conducted by: Brian Lion – Follow him on Twitter
- UTG PREMIERE: Hymn – ‘Mouth’ EP - June 10, 2016
- SakkieFTW snaps you out of it with new EP, ‘Experiment 1.3.2’ - June 6, 2016
- The Lost Poets’ ‘Insubordia pt II’ is dark and gritty - June 3, 2016
Posted in 
Tags: 