Best of What's Next: The Shaky Hands

Photos by Miranda Lehman

At the intersection of The Shins’ faux-British Invasion jingle-jangle and The Allman Brothers’ raggedy Southern-fried boogie stands Portland, Ore.’s The Shaky Hands. The band has emerged as a local live favorite in their hometown, a city that embraces classic rock and indie rock with equal fervor, and now offer up a new album (Let It Die, out now) neatly divided into two old-school halves: “Side A” the decidedly upbeat and rocking set, “Side B” more reminiscent of the sort of smoky Americana that once wafted from Big Pink’s basement.

The quartet has experienced its fair share of change in 2009: After receiving raves for 2008 LP Lunglight, co-founding drummer Colin Anderson and multi-instrumentalist Nathan Delffs both departed and were replaced by former Joggers drummer Jake Morris. The Shaky Hands split the year between recording the new album and bouncing around the country on several tours, first in support of the legendary Meat Puppets and then with Portland pop/punk cohorts The Thermals. Paste caught up with new drummer Morris by phone during the band’s current tour, just prior to their arrival in New York City for CMJ, to talk about rough road accommodations, Curt Kirkwood’s sweatpants and the easiest album he’s ever made.

Paste: How’s the tour going so far?
Jake Morris: It’s getting better! We kind of had to tough it out the first week, just to get out there and start playing. We did a show with Blitzen Trapper that was pretty amazing, then joined up with the tour we’re on now as the middle band—The Headlights are the headliners, and Pomegranates, they’re opening. We didn’t know each other, but we’ve done four shows so far on the tour. We’re in Connecticut today—my parents live here, so we finally got a bed to sleep in between shows. We played in Pontiac, Mich. and stayed in one of the worst places we’ve ever stayed in—it was basically for squatters, sleeping on cigarette butts and broken glass, beer bottle caps—really gross. It was a bad judgment call on our part, but we’re all a lot better off today. (Laughs)

Paste: What was it like joining Shaky Hands? You came from the Joggers, and replacing a founding member of a band can be a tricky proposition.
Morris: It’s been good. This is my third tour with them, certainly the biggest one, by now everything’s pretty stable within the band. But at first, it was admittedly a little awkward. Colin and Nathan—I was essentially replacing both of them—they were the ones I knew the best and talked to the most in the band. With the exception of Nick, I hadn’t really talked to the other dudes even though we’d played shows together in Portland. Personally, that was definitely in the back of my mind—I’ve seen both Colin and Nathan since they left, and it’s cool, there was no “kicking out” of anyone, everyone left the band for their own reasons.

Paste: So how did you get asked in? Obviously they knew you from the around town—you were hardly an outsider, right?
Morris: I’d been touring with a lot of other bands just to keep busy because The Joggers had been struggling to stay active. Really, I guess I was trying to avoid having to work my regular job at American Dream Pizza as much as possible. (Laughs) Anyway, I had a couple of good opportunities—this band, the Grails, they’d been friends of mine for a long time and their auxiliary drummer was having wrist problems and about to have another child, so I did a quick week and a half tour of the East Coast with them, and was about to go to Europe. But the night I got back from that tour, I was out where I am most nights—at the bar by my house, Tiga on Prescott—doing crosswords and playing Boggle. (Laughs) And Nick just asked if I’d want to play or tour with Shaky Hands—I don’t actually remember which. Without hesitation I said, “Yeah!” with the idea that I could do both Shaky Hands and Grails, because I was really looking forward to doing Europe with them. But with The Grails, I was really only playing drums on three songs of the entire set, whereas Shaky Hands was like a full-on band member situation. So I ended up having to choose, and that’s what I chose.

Paste: How would you compare the writing and recording of Let It Die with the studio work you did with The Joggers?
Morris: There was a ton of stuff already written—the mellower songs, everything was pretty much done. There were a couple songs where I got to make my own contributions but otherwise it was already laid out. We did it coming in right off The Thermals tour, so we’d been playing all that stuff every night already. The energy of the songs was easy to harness. As far as the process goes, it was one of the easier records I’ve done. I’ve worked with Jay [Pellicci, who’s recorded Deerhoof and Erase Errata] before—that’s why I got him to do this with us. He’s pretty much a saint when it comes to knowing what he’s doing but also knowing to let the band be the band and not get in the way. We recorded it at Jackpot! in Portland, and it came together really quickly—ten days, basically.

Paste: To my ears, songs like “Love Curse” have that Motown-meets-Allmans vibe, then tracks like “All You Recall” are almost pure Dylan. And “Alison and the Ancient Eyes” could almost be Music from Big Pink. There’s a classic streak running through your guys’ stuff.
Morris: Huh, interesting. I’m not gonna deny that! I don’t want to speak for Nick too much, but for all of us, those are important artists. We listen to all kinds of stuff, but we don’t stray too far from our musical comfort food, you know?

Paste: What was it like touring and hanging out with Meat Puppets? I saw them at SXSW this spring—musically they’re still fearless but also a group of guys who’ve clearly seen some hard times and lived to tell the tale.
Morris: Well, their audience was by far the best audience we’ve played for, a mix of people all across the board, and they just like music. When we played they loved it, they got it, whereas The Thermals—it didn’t suck by any means, but their crowd came to those shows for a very specific thing. Anyway, Meat Puppets were amazing, and hilarious. (Laughs) I think Curt [Kirkwood] wore sweatpants the first four days, didn’t put on real pants until the fifth day of the tour. He didn’t really talk to us during the “sweatpants phase” but when he switched to jeans, we were all hanging out. It was cool. Cris [Kirkwood] knew all of our names immediately, was really gracious. And it was just us and them, no other bands around to bounce off of. It ended up being a really great experience. Definitely a really great way to start being in this band.