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Love Jones Return with The Greatest Show On Earth: "We remain mired in our iconoclastic obscurity. And proud of it"

The cult lounge-pop veterans discuss their long-awaited new album, surviving outside industry trends, recording live across multiple studios, why creative freedom still matters more than fitting in, and more.

By Eugenia RoditisMusicngear Editor

Left to right: Ben Daughtrey, Todd Johnson, Chris Hawpe, Barry Thomas, and Jonathan Palmer. Photo credit: Jonathan Palmer

After more than three decades of following their own creative path, Love Jones have returned with The Greatest Show On Earth, their first new album in years. Long known for occupying a space between lounge-pop, alternative music, film culture, and late-night television, the band has built a career that rarely followed conventional industry expectations.

In this in-depth interview, Love Jones discuss the making of the new record, the gear and recording techniques behind it, their unusual history – from appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon to opening for TOOL – the importance of staying true to your artistic vision, and more.

Eugenia Roditis, Musicngear: This new chapter with The Greatest Show On Earth arrives after a long stretch of silence. When you look at it now, does it feel like a continuation of where Love Jones left off, or does it reflect a different perspective that only came with time and distance?

Ben Daughtrey - founding member, singer, songwriter, percussionist, multi-instrumentalist: Both, at least for me. It would be impossible – implausible? – to imagine how this music could have happened any other way: the confluence of events, COVID lockdown, our collective experience.

Plus, Barry lent me a guitar. In other words, it is the reality of what happened. It's what happened.

Barry Thomas - founding member, songwriter, bassist: These songs were where we were heading, but then COVID hit, and we were able to spend time developing them more thoroughly. We hadn't written anything in a few years, but an insane thing happened: we heard from Jimmy Fallon's wife that they were fans and asked if we could record "Happy Birthday" for him.

She wanted to press a vinyl 45 for him. We ended up writing a completely new song, using personal info – friends' names, his dog's name – and it turned out really good. They loved it. And it got the creative juices flowing again.

Jonathan Palmer - singer, songwriter: That also led to Jimmy asking us to be on “The Tonight Show” in 2019, around the 25th anniversary of our first album, “Here’s to the Losers.”

And Jimmy challenged us directly on social media to start making new music. We took him up on it. It only took seven years. But hey, you can’t rush genius. 

Musicngear: Your history sits in a very unusual cultural overlap: film placements like Swingers, late-night TV, and even touring with bands that didn’t obviously belong in the same ecosystem. In hindsight, how did that “in-between” position shape your identity as a band, and did it influence how you write or arrange music today? 

Ben: I don't think any of it was intentional. Well...perhaps some of it. I know we were "punk rock" in attitude, and never thought we fit into any movement.

I'm not a joiner and I think it shows!  We did what we wanted to do and the universe did its thing.

Barry: We were credited with reviving the lounge music genre, along with bands like Combustible Edison and The Coctails. The swing music revival was already going and was its own animal. We never completely fit in. We weren't interested in trying to recreate a specific style, but to show our influences in original music from lots of genres. We had fun figuring it out as we wrote.

I compare what we did to what the Stray Cats did with rockabilly. They showed their punk and soul influences, but weren't trying to recreate Eddie Cochran or Gene Vincent. We were really influenced by the performances of Louis Prima and the Rat Pack, which added to the show. In 1994, that was unique. And we had a strong, if small, fan base around the country.

We seemed to tour better and had more in common with rock bands, like Afghan Whigs and The Presidents of the United States of America. We got our record deal immediately after opening for TOOL at an infamous night at the Church of Scientology’s Celebrity Center in Hollywood…and almost getting the show shut down. Maynard has mentioned it many times in interviews. Odd bedfellows, but it worked better than the other lounge bands.  Their fans were too serious about looks and their view of the music. 

We knew the guys making the movie "Swingers” at the time. And a lot of assistants and interns, people who are now running Hollywood. J.J. Abrams was an early fan, as was David Schwimmer...then Jon Favreau and Vince Vaughn, and  Jimmy Fallon, pre-SNL. Those people remembered us when they had the opportunity to make creative decisions...and we're very thankful. 

But to answer your question, we were ever-evolving in our writing…and now we're getting compared to Steely Dan and Boz Scaggs. We'll take that...and who knows what's next.

Jonathan: Being a unicorn of a band is very freeing. And we were doing it before it was cool. I say that semi-jokingly, but I often wonder if we’d have had a bit more success if we’d come along a few years later.

At this point, we have nothing to gain by being conformists, and we’re too old to change our stripes that much. So, we remain mired in our iconoclastic obscurity. And proud of it. 

Musicngear: From a gear and production standpoint, the new record was built across different spaces. From warehouse sessions to Village Studios, with production by John Alagía. What were the core instruments, recording tools, or studio pieces that ended up defining the sonic character of this album? 

Barry: Ben was really experimental with choices made during the recording. Our original idea was to record the whole 10-piece band "live," so we rehearsed these songs a lot, which meant they changed and grew during the process.

Our producer, John Alagía, came in when these tracks were a bit of a science project, and he straightened us out. He liked what we had done production-wise, but he's such a great musician; he really helped us find the voices we wanted. 

Chris Hawpe - singer, guitarist, songwriter: I recorded the warehouse sessions to Universal Audio UA LUNA software in combo with a Universal Audio Apollo x8p interface and an Audient ASP800 8-channel Microphone Preamp connected via optical. We also used my Midas M32 Live console to monitor through. The bass was recorded using an A Designs REDDI tube DI. Everything else was through the Universal Audio or the Audient.

We cut most of the tracks live, minus the vocals. It was a big space that sounded wonderfully diffused because of all of the antiques that were stored in the warehouse. LOL. Not kidding.

In the center of the room, I had a Blumlein pair of ribbon mics (Cascade Fat Head II ribbon mics). A lot of the sonic character came from those 2 mics. On the drums were the standard close mics, Shure SM57 LC on snare, Sennheiser E604 mics on the toms, and AKG D 112 on the kick. For overheads, I used a pair of AKG C 451 B mics and a Neumann U67 Set mono overhead. Shure SM57s on the 2 guitar amps. Bass was DI. On the sax, I used a Soyuz 023 Bomblet mic. I used an AKG C414 XLII on the trumpet and a Shure SM7 on the trombone.

For guitars and amps, we used a bunch of odds and ends. A Fernandes Telecaster bass. Ben played a fair amount of guitar on the record and it was all using a cheap but awesome Jay Turser ES-175 knockoff through an old and magically still working Univox solid-state amp from the seventies. I played a Fender Stratocaster, Nash Jazzmaster and Barry’s Fernandes Telecaster Deluxe all through a Fender Blues Junior. Todd Johnson played LD guitar using his Nacho Caster through a Film-o-Sound amp, which is converted from an old Bell & Howell film projector. The acoustic guitar was my trusty old Taylor GS8.

I used a Manley Reference Silver Tube mic on Ben’s vocals and a Shure SM7 on mine. Not sure what was used on Jonathan’s vocal. He recorded those in LA and sent the tracks to us in Louisville.

At La La Land, we used a Neumann U67 on Ben, a Neumann U87 Ai on Jonathan and a Beez Neez U87 on my vocal. I used a very old and cool Gibson Falcon Tube amp that shocked me every time I touched it. It sounded great, though. Barry used an old Ampeg B-15 bass amp. For drums, Ben used Anne from La La Land’s kit with the addition of his old Ludwig Acrolite snare.

Cool fact, the console at La La Land is a Trident TSM (from the Record Plant in Sausalito, CA). At The Village, I think John Alagía used a Sony C800 for vocal overdubs.  

This is probably WAAAAYYYY too much detail, but oh well.

Musicngear: You’ve always had a sound that feels carefully arranged but never over-polished. How do you decide when a track is “done” in the studio and has your approach to gear, layering, and restraint changed over the years? 

Ben: I look at it like a child's finger painting. There's a moment when it's perfect, but if you keep adding stuff, it all just turns into a dull brown smear…shit, so to speak. 

Also, I work in the film business. We have a maxim I live by:  "When is a project finished? When it is abandoned.” You know when you know, but clearly these wee sonic landscapes were labored on for a while.

Barry: We used to write really quickly and be anxious to play a song live, then it would change a little bit.  With all members involved in the writing process for every song, it would happen quite quickly.

Four tracks took years, while "PKD" and "Diamonds" happened the old way, pretty quickly. We were not ready to go into the studio, but it worked out. 

Musicngear: “PDK (You Better Believe It)” brings Philip K. Dick into a musical context that still feels rhythmic and playable. When you’re building something like that, do you start from lyrical concept, groove, or a specific sonic texture or instrument? 

Barry: We learned to adapt with members living all over the country, so I wrote this on piano and Ben came up with a great bass part...so we kept it that way in recording. Ben played drums and bass. 

He played bass on a few other songs too, which allowed me to play guitar on a record for the first time since "The Thing" on our 1995 album “Powerful Pain Relief.” That was fun. We had done some of that live as well, over the years, switching instruments. 

Ben: Jonathan and I are both big readers and I had been digging into PKD of late, “The Exegesis,” in particular, and had some broad stroke ideas about lyrics: time, space, etc.

Jonathan came in and masterfully wrote them. 

Jonathan: More like dumbed it down. I definitely made it sillier, what with the lines about “extra sexy ecstacy” and all that.

It’s the smartest, dumbest song, and I love it. 

Musicngear: Across your career, what have been the most difficult hurdles the band had to navigate creatively, personally, or within the industry and what advice would you give artists trying to build something that actually lasts? 

Ben: Get intimate with and be represented by someone who REALLY knows the business, because it is a business. We were naive and jumped in with NO knowledge of how ANY of it worked.

We had, and continue to have a blast, but being represented by a team that gets you and helps you find the right home and audience is crucial! Especially if you don't quite fit into what's happening in the zeitgeist. But it works. Take Devo, Talking Heads, David Lynch, just to name a few.

Barry: Being close enough to success to taste it, but not getting to where we could make a living and do full time. It put pressure on families and our relationship...but we are still best friends after all these years. 

Somehow that happened…even though I still blame Ben for walking out of the "Dumb and Dumber" screening when they were putting the soundtrack together. 

Jonathan: I think it’s important to block out what the industry is telling you, as much as possible. Be true to your vision and your art.

You’ll have plenty of temptation to sell out. But don’t ever fucking do it on someone else’s terms. 

Musicngear: The record has moments that feel cinematic in arrangement, especially in the way horns and layered instrumentation are used. How did The Bad Ass Brass come into the process, and what role did live players play versus studio construction in shaping those sections? 

Jonathan: We are all massive cinema enthusiasts, and that has always driven our creative process in the studio. We make music that should inspire little movies in your mind.

The whole Bad Ass Brass thing came about out of a desire to beef up our occasional live shows, give them the proper oomph that they deserved. And when we got the call to be on “The Tonight Show,” we knew we had to build the biggest, baddest ensemble we could.

From that point on, we knew that we had to work with those guys whenever and wherever possible. They’re our not-even-remotely-secret weapon, both in-studio and on stage. And the best guys in the world, to boot. 

Barry: Ben reminded us that a lot of the early harmonies were horn parts, and we finally got a horn section. They read music and everything. It's amazing.    

Ben: BAB were crucial to the process all the way through. We would workshop songs, then present them. I might hum an idea for a part, but they always topped it, made suggestions and even helped write lyrics, arrange, etc. They are friends first and foremost, and essentially members at this stage. 

The only "construction" was “P.K.D.” We recorded almost everything live, including that track. However, John Alagía wanted to use a click track so we could reassemble and decoupage with additional elements: synths, percussion, vocals. It was a super fun experiment, we really didn't know was going to pay off. 

Musicngear: Looking ahead, does this album mark a self-contained return, or is it the beginning of a more continuous creative phase for Love Jones and if so, what directions are you curious to explore next in sound or production?

Ben: Man, I certainly hope so. I'm open to anything. In fact, there is a big band here in Louisville, The Don Kreckle Orchestra, that I'd love to arrange some tunes and play with.

I've also discussed bringing in a full choir from another one of our longtime collaborators – keyboardist Todd Hildreth –  from the church where he is the music director. Onwards and sideways, says I!

Barry: With Whiskey Thief Music, our new label home, we have a partner that will allow us to keep writing and recording. 

Walter Zausch, owner of Whiskey Thief Distillery, pushed us to release "Here's to the Losers" on vinyl, which led to writing a birthday song for Jimmy Fallon, which led to “The Tonight Show” performance, which led to us writing and recording this album. This appears to be a snowball that's going to roll a little longer.

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About Eugenia Roditis

Eugenia's passion for music was ignited from an early age as she grew up in a family of musicians. She loves attending concerts and festivals, while constantly seeking fresh and exciting new artists across diverse genres. Eugenia joined the MusicnGear team in 2012.

Contact Eugenia Roditis at eugenia.roditis@kinkl.com

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