Catching Up With: Ethan Luck
NoiseTrade: While your multi-decade musical career has seen you traffic in a variety
of different genres, your new album Let It Burn is pure old school first wave reggae and ska. How did you originally get interested in those genres and when did you decide that your new batch of songs would revolve around this sonic vibe?
Ethan Luck: I first discovered ska and reggae around 1992, during high school in Orange County, CA. Bands like No Doubt, Fishbone, Sublime, Rancid, and many others became popular and I’d go to shows just about every weekend. I couldn’t get enough of it. It felt like it was just a California thing and that it was ours. Getting into these bands led me to going back in time to figure out who they were influenced by. That led me to discovering what would become some of my favorite ska and reggae artists, like The Specials, Madness, Bob Marley, Toots & The Maytals, King Tubby, Bunny Wailer and The Melodians, just to name a few.
For this record, I planned on doing another punk rock record, just like my last EP. One night on tour, I had a day off and was starting to write new songs in a hotel room. I had no intention of writing a reggae/ska record but that’s what came out. It was very natural and seemed like the right place to go. I hadn’t written that stuff in so long and didn’t realize how much I missed it. I don’t like being bound to one style of music and I only write what I love. To me, that’s the most honest way to write.
NT: Between the uniquely specific guitar tones, lockstep drum-and-bass grooves, organ rhythms, and triple brass horn section, reggae and ska are not really genres that a musician can just fake their way through. Since you wrote all the songs and played a majority of the instruments (guitar, bass, drums, percussion, and melodica) on Let It Burn, who are some reggae and ska artists and albums that you’ve been inspired by and have studied over the years?
Luck: For this record, I took influence from all sorts of artists, even stuff that’s far removed from reggae and ska. I touched on this in the first question, but a short-ish list of artists, past and present, would be: Toots & The Maytals, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, King Tubby, The Specials, The Interrupters, Rancid, The Aggrolites, Hepcat, The Steady 45’s, Operation Ivy, Jimmy Cliff, The Melodians… Actually, every morning in the studio, we would throw on a vinyl of a reggae or ska record to get inspired. I think I turned Paul Moak and his crew on to some new stuff.
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