Roots of Creation connects reggae and jam music with a new instrumental album underway
Photo courtesy of Roots of Creation. Photo Credit: Josh Coffman
Dailyreggae.com spoke with Brett Wilson from Roots of Creation to learn about the band’s evolution connecting reggae and jam music, working with industry greats like Errol Brown, and self-producing a new instrumental album.
Great to connect Brett! Tell us about Roots of Creation. Are you and the band all based in New Hampshire?
The band formed in New Hampshire. I got the name when I was a young one about to graduate high school. When I went to college, I met a lot of the guys I play with right now including our keyboardist, Tal. We jammed at Franklin Pierce University in Rindge, New Hampshire, which is in southwestern New Hampshire. Rindge and where I’m based right now, Brookline, New Hampshire, are the two hubs, combined with the seacoast of New Hampshire.
That is where we met our sax player, Andrew, and Billy on trombone, who tours with The Interrupters now and was in Reel Big Fish. Billy is only able to do a show here or there but works on the studio stuff with us. We’re made up of a lot of the New Hampshire areas combined.
Being spread out has made it tough getting together with COVID. Outside of New Hampshire, we have one member of the band in New Jersey, one member in Massachusetts, and one member in New York City. But we’ve still been able to work together virtually, so that’s cool.
What was the first show you played as Roots of Creation and what is your favorite show that you’ve played so far?
Man, the first show we played as Roots of Creation! I don’t know specifically. I know this guy; we call him “Gary Robedux.” I don’t know where he came up with this alias name, but he would tape all of our shows back in the day in the jam band spirit. The initial concept for the band was inspired by my love for the jam scene in the northeast and the west coast ska reggae-rock sound like Operation Ivy and Sublime. My idea was that we can combine the two.
New Hampshire loved it. The rest of the world wasn’t quite ready for it and is finally catching up with the concept. Initially, a lot of people were like what?! We toured the west coast and we played with Iration once when they were just starting. It was the hottest girls I’ve seen at a show in a bar (laughs). There were like two hundred people and the beach chicks were bobbing their head to our reggae song and then all of a sudden, we went into this psychedelic jam and I saw them kind of looking like a dog looks at you sideways. I was thinking, I don’t think they’re ready for this shit (laughs).
But bands have evolved like Slightly Stoopid with Bob Weir jamming with them. Twiddle is starting to tour with the reggae-rock bands as well. People are starting to catch on. We were a little before our time in some respect. We probably played some backyard party in Hollis, New Hampshire circa 2000. We were doing it just for fun and then we became a real band, not just a party band around 2002.
We did our first show at a legitimate venue and it sold out and I said to myself, maybe I don’t want to be an art major. I was originally going to do printmaking and painting, but this it was way cooler to see people reacting in real-time, not just staring at something on the wall.
People were dancing on tables and going crazy at these college parties. Those people went to a venue and we sold out the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Mass. It fits around 200 people and for us, that was a huge moment. We ended up playing another venue in Vermont and that sold out and we were like, “Oh shit, maybe this can work!”
We kept going to school and then around 2004 or 2005, I interned with a booking agency. A mentor told me, “The music needs a little work, but I believe in you guys,” so he started booking us and we had a mass appeal at colleges. We booked a lot of colleges and moved in together and that’s when we became a real band. We recorded an album, had a van, it was a shitty van, but it was a van. We hit the road for 150 days a year.
The first show was kind of relative based on us kind of being a party band and then we started playing real shows. Luckily, the whole time we were nurturing our organic fan base, and people were coming out to our live shows.
We’ve been blessed to play so many shows. At this point, my favorite show that I look forward to the most is when we play in New Hampshire at The Hampton Beach Casino Ballroom with our friends Badfish. It’s always sold out. It’s crazy. We have a lot of fans there. There are a lot of Sublime fans there.
It’s a nice venue and usually the show is around the Fourth of July. There is a lot of celebration and it’s on the beach! I love that show and that’s one of the shows this year that there are rumblings that it may still happen. It’s close to the Mass border, so you have people vacationing coming up and locals. Last time, we had people come up from as far away as Pittsburgh, PA to go to the beach and see us.
How has it been adapting as a musician during COVID-19? Do you think it’s affected your songwriting process or what you’re thinking about creatively?
Yes, it’s affected everything. I’ll start with the positives. We’ve had a number of wins. Thinking outside of the box is the major win in terms of life and business. You get caught on this hamster wheel when you’re on the road. With the grace of the universe and our fan’s support, I have had more time to take care of my two daughters, an eight-year-old and a now three-year-old. I was able to manage my living expenses solely by being a musician and an entrepreneur, which was a goal of mine, and to have that smashed out of nowhere and be thrust into oblivion was difficult.
On the flip side, the reason that was a positive thing is because traveling you’re away from your family a lot and I was transitioning into becoming a single dad. Figuring out co-parenting and all that stuff isn’t easy. Meanwhile, my kid is ripped out of school, and she’s having to do remote learning. I needed to be there for this situation. That was forced upon me, but I took it with stride. I’m here for her and love that we get to share more time. I took her to the studio, and she recorded her first song with her best friend! We’re doing all sorts of cool stuff. When I was home, we did cool stuff, but she needed the extra support through this time. It’s hard for kids right now.
Music-wise, we can’t all get together all the time. This last album was self-contained and self-produced, but now we are aiming to release a record in late April or early May. We’re reaching out to other producers that have their home studios, drum setup, and their own programming. It’s difficult to get everyone together, but to take a song I’ve written or have worked on with some of guys, throw it to the producer, and have them put their spin on it, is a great way to collaborate from home. That’s the current direction we’re going in.
On a business front, we’ve figured out a lot of new exciting things. Although I haven’t been able to draw a salary for almost a year at this point and have thrown everything back in, so our record label and our band doesn’t go under, I’ve learned a lot about live streams, online & limited-edition merchandising, and advertising. I’ve thrust myself into the learning process, so if this ever happens again, we won’t have all our eggs in the basket of touring, which I never thought would go away.
That’s the positive side. Adapting and knowing if you’re hit with a natural disaster so to speak that you can adapt and maybe you’ll be back to the old age of eating ramen noodles when you were younger (laughs), but at least you have your family and you’re still able to work on music.
We want to work on even more music, so we launched a Kickstarter. Our fans have been super supportive, the live streaming has been fun, and I think we’re going to come out of this stronger as a band.
Tell us about the creative process around one of your most recent releases, the single, Light it Up. Did it start with the bass line or a chorus? How did the song come to fruition?
Light it Up was an interesting one. It started with a bass line and then we built a rhythm around it. When we were off the tour for a couple of days, me and our friend the “Granite Lion,” who is a concert promoter were getting down with some herbs and freestyling. I was like, “I can’t come up with anything for this.” He started spitting stuff out. I started spitting stuff out and we came up with this cool chorus, but I didn’t have any verses written. And that happens.
I come up with a lot of choruses, a lot of guitar solos, riffs, and ideas, but the meat and potato verses sometimes don’t come to me as fast. It was sitting around for a while and I was about to go on a trip to Jamaica that was a present from a special lady in my life. We were about to head off to Jamaica and I was like you know what this could use some authentic dancehall reggae flare. The track sounds fire but I’m not coming up with anything right now. So, I called Mighty Mystic, who we’ve done a bunch of collaborating with and he came in and crushed it. I was like alright this is it. Let’s roll!
We made an animated music video and a regular music video that just dropped. It’s been a lot of fun. Andrew (Dub King), our sax player, did some great production on it. We had our FoH engineer, Pete “Boardz” Peloquin (Boardz House Production) who has been involved in all of our records, working on the song as well. He mixed it, mastered it, and took it to the finish line. Andrew is working on a cool dub version right now. I hope that we can do some fun stuff with it as a reggae riddim and maybe have some other artists on it. At the very least do a remix with some bigger dancehall artists that we’re reaching out to. We got some feedback from Jamaica, where they liked it, but it needed more of a dancehall edge if we wanted it to crossover. We’re having some fun with it. Maybe we’ll do an acoustic version with me and Mystic in the studio. I like to take a song and put it in different lights.
What was your experience covering the song Roots of Creation, which was featured on The House That Bradley Built compilation honoring Sublime’s music and impact on the reggae genre? I imagine that hit close to home.
Yeah, that was interesting, because my good friend and mentor, Jon Phillips from Silverback Music, who originally discovered Sublime and managed them and Long Beach Dub All Stars, hit me with a text. He was like, “You got to get on this House that Bradley Built tribute album.” The last tour I did was a solo acoustic tribute to Sublime around February 2020 and we raised money for Bradley’s House. So, I was like, “Hell yeah, I’m in!”
It was kind of late in the game because LAW Records had created it and their artists came first. Then the friends of their artists came and we’re friends with all of them but weren’t in the first or second wave in terms of what they were thinking. There weren’t a lot of songs leftover. There were a lot of deep cuts and I saw Roots of Creation on there and it was kind of between that and Scarlet Begonias. Scarlet Begonias made sense because of our Grateful Dub album, but then The Expanders picked Scarlet Begonias within 24 hours and we had around eight choices, so I was like let’s do Roots of Creation.
We used to cover it back in the day to pay homage to our name. What I realized quickly is that we had only really done two of the verses, because this was back in our party days. I realized it was a very difficult song the more I delved into it. The song was a demo and I think that Bradley pretty much freestyled the whole thing. For me, it felt like I was taking a freestyle and was trying to re-envision it. He was doing all sorts of crazy cadences and it’s the most I’ve heard Bradley speak patois or attempt to incorporate the Jamaican language and dialect into a song. That is always challenging, because you don’t want it to be cheesy. A little flare is cool though.
You’ll hear rappers flow in a couple of lines, but to do a lot of it starts to be a little bit, I don’t know. Bradley pulled it off because he was just firing shit off. I had just done the track with Mystic and feel like he deserves a lot more recognition in the Cali-Reggae scene. I don’t think the Cali-Reggae scene throws its arms around newer Jamaican artists as much as they need to or pay attention to. Since it is Cali-Reggae, it’s an American genre in itself. At the same time, I needed help. Because he’s Jamaican he could take what Bradley was trying to do and execute it authentically. I had him come in and do the parts I was looking at and didn’t know if I could deliver the flow at a fast enough pace. Mystic has that all day, so I brought him in. The song is influenced by Yellowman very heavily, so we threw a Yellowman quote in it, and we created a sample making it low-fi with Mystic’s voice. The song Mi Believe/Summer Holiday by Yellowman is basically where Bradley got the idea for the song in a sense. It was a lot of fun to create!
Tell us more about your music label, Bombshelter Records.
Yeah, kind of out of necessity, I created our label, Bombshelter Records, since the beginning. A lot of artists that I looked up to at the time, Dispatch, O.A.R., Sublime, Ani DiFranco, whatever style of music it was just seemed to be creating a label. Jay-Z. No one was signing us, so we’re going to create a label and they are going to come to us. That always seemed like what you do.
We were originally distributed with a subsidiary of Universal Music Group and moved over to Symphonic, which is an amazing company. It’s the same group that Ineffable is using and a bunch of other great labels in our scene. We’re a full-service entertainment company. I apply everything I’ve learned over the years. I’ve done internships with radio promotion companies, PR companies, booking companies, and management companies. That’s how I’ve figured out how to do stuff and I enjoy learning about how to apply it to what we’re doing in RoC.
The only music we’ve put out is our band, and my solo work opening for Slightly Stoopid in Columbus, Ohio. We also put out a song my Dad was inspired to write called The Tin Man. It’s been a family affair between the band, me, and my Dad, but we are open to working with other artists.
I’ve talked to our team about it and at this point, we have full radio, publicity, and management support. It does feel like the right time to help develop some other artists and producers. I don’t think producers get enough credit for what they do. They are essential to the song creation and finishing process and right now there are a lot of producers that are making 75 percent of the music, and people are laying vocals on top of it. And it’s dope! It’s kind of like the hip-hop style of doing things but in a Reggae form. We’re open to working with more artists. It’s really about what makes sense and how much bandwidth we have. Feel free to reach out to us.
We loved listening to your 2018 album release, Grateful Dub: A Reggae Infused Tribute to The Grateful Dead. What was the inspiration and process behind making that album?
Man, that was an intense project. That was our second crowdfunded project. We did it through PledgeMusic, who unfortunately went bankrupt, and we just made it by the skin of our teeth. There were a lot of artists that didn’t get their funding and a lot of fans that funded albums that went into the ether.
Luckily, through my radio promotions job, which had sent me to various music conferences, I had made friends with the Co-Founder of the company, who took it upon himself to make sure that our funds did not get lost. That was one of the last things he did even though he was let go from his consultant role at that point. It was one of those situations, where you start this amazing thing, you bring in investors and they don’t have the same vision. They started cutting costs and all of a sudden, they ran it upside down and sideways. He was there trying to fix things and he was able to fix it for us and a lot of artists were not so lucky.
We were able to make the record and recruited Errol Brown, who we met through Big Reggae Mix Radio. They are an amazing online radio station. We did an interview Mitch at BRM and he said, “I’m helping this guy Errol Brown. He’s produced the last couple of Bob Marley albums and recorded Redemption Song.” He was like, “I think he’d be the perfect person to do this Grateful Dub record that you have.” And I was like, “All right! Let’s do it!”
So, we met up with Errol and he was perfect. He knew how to get all the iconic sounds. He focused on the groove, which we needed. We have so much of a rock background, sometimes I feel like the groove might get lost because we’re ready to rock out with guitar solos and we’re having fun. He was like, “No man, the bass and drums have to be locked in.” I thought our drummer hit hard and he was like, “You can’t hit the snare like a baby!” He was funny. He was almost like a grandfather figure. He had more energy than us. He was helping us load up the van when it needed to be loaded up in the freezing cold. I fell asleep on the couch during the mixing process, which was 24 hours straight and I woke up and he was still at it. He’s a great human being and he worked his ass off on the record. We couldn’t have done it without him.
The album happened organically. I learned how to play lead guitar and improvisation from listening to the northeast jam scene. At the time, it was bands like The Slip, Uncle Sammy, and Percy Hill. These are some bands that people might not know about that had big followings at festivals and clubs in Boston at the time. In addition to that, I was discovering the Grateful Dead, listening to bootleg tapes, and trading bootleg tapes of bands like Phish and The Allman Brothers Band.
There was something about Jerry Garcia. I loved Trey’s in your face ripping and shredding stuff, but there was something about the nuance and the ability to do bluegrass, jazz, and acoustic music that is so unique to the Dead. There is something about the original style and the way Jerry played that I identified with and the fact that the Dead was one organic entity. It was almost like jazz, where everybody was soloing at once, and sometimes it crashed and burned and sometimes it was beautiful. I liked that, so I would just try to figure out what he was doing. Where is he going? And try to solo along with it. That was a really big influence in terms of songwriting.
If you look at some of our first shows, we played at the backyard parties, we played Eyes Of The World and other Dead stuff. And then we came into our own and didn’t do that for a long time.
Then we started playing this festival, Jerry Jam in New Hampshire. Jerry Jam started as people watching a movie of the Dead after Jerry passed, to having a couple of hundred people there, to us playing a festival with a thousand people there, to selling out five thousand tickets. And every year Melvin Seals, Jerry Garcia’s organ player would be there.
We struck up a friendship with him and played a couple of Dead tunes at Jerry Jam, because it made sense. We put Row Jimmy on the Livin’ Free record because we thought that was a cool not so famous Dead song that already had a reggae vibe to it. We had done a Halloween show where our musical costume was the Dead, so we learned a whole bunch of Dead songs for that and Jerry Jam.
People in our team kept going, guys, this could be a great record. I was like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” When I was growing up, there were two reggae Dead records, but they were not good. On paper it was with Steel Pulse and Burning Speer, and no disrespect to those artists. They did the best they could, but you could tell they weren’t deadheads, and it was produced in a very ‘80s and ‘90s style, which for me is not my favorite era of reggae music. There are some great songs to come out of it, but production-wise, it was very keyboard-heavy. Rock and roll was kind of cheesy at that point too. I didn’t gravitate towards it. I didn’t think it captured the improvisational spirit and thought it could be done better.
When I was a kid in the back of my mind, I was thinking I’d love to produce a record like this, but as a Deadhead, keeping the foundation of what the Dead represents musically in a reggae style. So that was always in the back of my head, and then it started to happen in a live setting. When we made friends with Melvin Seals he thought it was great. He played on the original song, Struggle with Ras M.G. from Sublime, so then there was that Sublime/Dead connection. Me and Jon Phillips from Silverback Music bonded over the Dead. We would jam late-night at Closer To The Sun, Slightly Stoopid’s festival in Mexico as well as Jungle Jam in Costa Rica.
We had all these things that were pointing to it and I think someone in our band said, “If we don’t do this, someone else is going to.” We were already doing it live, let’s just do this. We did the crowdfunding thing, we lined up Errol and went for it. I think I had to do a couple of bank loans to bridge us between the crowdfund to get it going, but it was worth it. I think I’m still paying off that shit, but it was worth it. I love how it sounds, people are really stoked with it and we got to have some amazing guests that mostly just did it for the love of the songs and wanted to be involved.
What can you tell us about the music Roots of Creation is working on now?
We have been working on a new album that is pretty much self-produced, mostly instrumental, with all new compositions. It’s for the fans. If you would see us late-night at a festival, it’s the sound we have going on. There is a little EDM, some Dub-Step mixed with Dub-Reggae, mixed with Hard Rock. There is a lot of Progressive Rock.
We have Mihali from Twiddle on it. We have some cool special guests. That’s something I think we’re going to do every couple of years. We used to put one or two instrumental songs on a record, which works ok, but I was like let’s just do a whole record of it. We’ll have Light it Up on there and maybe one other song with words, but it’s almost like a concept album. You’ve seen our songwriting focused Livin’ Free album, you’ve listened to our live albums. Here is us taking this live lightning in a bottle energy and putting it into a self-produced instrumental record. The fans are going to want some new songs with vocals, because people love vocals, so we plan on doing an EP of that.
People want us to make Grateful Dub Volume II, so we are also working on that. To accomplish all of those things, we’re going to launch a Kickstarter, because of the climate of what’s going on. It is an intense process like those trust falls you used to do in high school. “Here, catch me (laughs)”. But I think it’s the only way to get it done and I think the fans will be stoked that we have so much music.
We have never really put out any music videos because we weren’t a music video type of band. We were a get in the van, tour to the show, let’s jam, whatever. It turns out, those are helpful for people to find your music. There are certain building block things that bands do that we were like fuck we aren’t doing that shit. We are doing our own thing. We’ve put out more music videos in the last year than ever before. Look out for more music videos to come out. They are actually a lot of fun!
Where is a good place for fans to support Roots of Creation?
Right now, if you send us a message on Facebook it’s probably the best thing to do because we have some cool stuff cooking in there. We have some gifts you can get. If you’re a good fit, we’ll send you to our private Facebook community, “The RoC Family.” We skirted Zuckerberg’s algorithms a little bit, so fans see what we’re saying and are more intimate. Signing up for our email list or texting me at +1 617-752-8096 are other great ways to get intimately connected to us.
It’s cool if you like us on Facebook, follow us on Instagram, follow us on Spotify, subscribe on YouTube, and visit our merch store. Those are all great ways to support. Look out for some of my Friday live streams as well, which is a great way to support the band and our music!
We are thankful for such incredible fans and all the support over the years.
