Excerpts from The Believer: An Interview with Musician Jack Stratton

“Concerts should be fun. I don’t like it when they feel like religion.”

I had been wondering something about Jack Stratton, the founder and leader of the band Vulfpeck, for the past twenty-one years. I remember him occasionally rapping in his sleep back in 2003, when I was Jack’s camp counselor on the shores of Lower Baker Pond in Wentworth, New Hampshire. “Unh. / Just like Sprewell,” he’d say, a midnight non sequitur. Or had I really heard that? It can be hard to tell what’s persona and what’s genuine in the world of Vulfpeck. Even their origin story has a factual version and a fictional narrative: they either met as undergraduates at the University of Michigan, or they were the rhythm section for an imagined German recording engineer. When we spoke, Jack confirmed that the sleep-rapping was real.

You’ve heard Vulfpeck: they’re a popular choice for bumper music between NPR segments. They have a particular sound (a raspy callback that arises from the primordial ooze of Motown) and shtick (lo-fi videos of a band of straight-men that recall VHS tapes shot with a shoulder-braced camcorder). Vulfpeck has a carefully curated affect, but as casually as they present themselves, they’re also popular: Vulfpeck sold out Madison Square Garden in 2019, and they’re a marquee name on the festival circuit: Montreux. Bonnaroo. Levitate. Newport Jazz.

Jack’s role in the band is omnipotent: it’s his brainchild, and he is the ideas-and-logistics man, the mixer, the arranger. His manner and speech are methodical; he is easygoing and thoughtful. There are some musicians who meet someone who knows less about music than they do and disqualify their opinions; in our two lengthy online conversations, I never caught that vibe from him. As unassuming as he is, Jack doesn’t shy away from evangelism; he has used his platform to advocate for a superfood diet, and for a while, relatedly, he maintained the website Regular Bean Eater. In a 2017 interview with a Dutch magazine, he credited his mother with encouraging him to eat slowly, in small bites, for health reasons.

—Josh Fischel

I. The Matzo Ball Mix

THE BELIEVER: Where is the intro riff for your songs and videos from?

JACK STRATTON: From a gospel piano teacher on YouTube, and at least the first half of it is how you would guide a singer to come in. And then the second half of it is kind of a riff on Bach, a little trill. So it’s a hybrid, but it’s just very—I mean, the first time I heard that progression, I thought, This is so pleasing. It’s very few notes, but it’s doing a lot.

BLVR: I especially like how it leads into “Christmas in LA.” I wonder how it feels to be yet another Jew writing Christmas songs.

JS: Feels great.

BLVR: We’re the ones who compose them all, if you look back through the discography; we’ve promulgated this myth.

JS: I think it’s perhaps the deepest expression of Judaism to write a Christmas song.

BLVR: You sell an online plug-in called Vulf Compressor. Can you talk to me like I don’t understand what a compressor is? Because I don’t.

JS: In audio, back in the day, if someone was playing something very dynamic—loud and quiet—they’d put it through a compressor so that when it was getting too loud, it would turn the volume down so you didn’t overload what you were recording to. So a compressor reduces the dynamic range. It’s a bit of an art to learn how to use it musically, but it’s one of the first things you learn how to wield when you’re mixing: compression and equalization are the two big ones.

BLVR: So the Vulf Compressor just—it takes the dynamic range and filters it in a certain way that other compressors don’t?

JS: Yes. That’s the thing—each compressor has a different sauce. Over time, some of these compressors gained a reputation because they had a very musical way of doing it. Vulf Compressor is an attempt to bring a new flavor with a specific, recognizable sound.

BLVR: When I hear a song from you guys—from you, Vulfpeck, or even the Fearless Flyers, another band on the Vulf label for which you produce—I immediately know it’s you. I wonder if there’s a verbal description of the sound you’re aiming for.

JS: Yeah. I have a specific mixing style. I use computers and plug-ins to mimic a lot of older sounds that would have been made analog. I would love to do everything to tape, but it’s quite expensive. I think it’s benefited me over the years because I keep a real light footprint. I don’t need a lot of gear. There are sounds of certain mix engineers that I’ve been drawn to over the years. Willie Mitchell did all the Al Green records in Memphis—an instantly recognizable sound. Geoff Emerick did the Beatles records—great sound. So you find out who’s mixing these things and pick out elements that appeal to you. I’ve always thought, How can I enhance the funk through the mix?

BLVR: Are there particular trends in mixing now that you are either a fan of or dislike intensely? What are you noticing in the mix in songs now?

JS: I think it’s going in a generally good direction. For a while there—and I have to credit a friend with this phrase—we lived under the Rule of the Solo Button, where every instrument sounded lush and big. So you got these really hyped-up sounds—and it’s cool when everything’s hyped up. It’s kind of like the Chipotle burrito, where every element you could just eat with a fork and it’d be pretty good. But sometimes there should be things in a mix that are just doing their little thing, and I feel like we’re getting back to that, where the pendulum has swung back in a nice way.

BLVR: If we’re using a food analogy for the mix, would you say a matzo ball soup is more your preference? As in, there’s the main thing you want to hear in the song, and then there’s all the little bits in the broth that are complementary to that thing?

JS: Precisely. Yeah. Delicate ratios.

BLVR: Does your own relationship to food influence your approach to music, in terms of finding joy in things that people often take for granted?

JS: Oh yeah, big time. The way I cook is similar to the way I mix. Your typical great chef, they’re using a lot of ingredients and they make it taste good and you’re like, How the hell did they do that? But I like to find three retail ingredients that are just really good, whether that’s the Okinawan purple potato, or now I’m getting into Calrose sushi-grade rice and Trader Joe’s frozen petite peas. Just finding really good retail ingredients, no more than three or four, finding how they can interact, and people go, How did you…? I literally just cooked it all together. I didn’t do anything. I love how Vulf will sit in playlists with music that is made in much more complex ways, and stand up alongside it.

Read the rest of the interview over at The Believer.