Moon Taxi’s Trevor Terndrup, Spencer Thomson and Tommy Putnam Discuss New Album, the Success of “Two High”

Moon Taxi – Photo by Harper Smith

Nashville’s alt-rock quintet Moon Taxi’s highly anticipated fifth studio album, Let The Record Play, marks the band’s first album for a major label. It’s an infectious, ten-track LP that includes their monster single, “Two High,” which to date has garnered more than 64 million streams on Spotify.

Produced and mixed by Spencer Thomson (who also happens to be the band’s guitarist), Let The Record Play lends itself as easily to home speakers as it does to the band’s dynamic live show.

We recently spoke with frontman Trevor Terndrup, Thomson and bassist Tommy Putnam about the band’s new album, and the incredible success of “Two High.”

To someone who may not be familiar with Moon Taxi, how would you describe Let The Record Play?

Terndrup: It’s a continuation of our story. For people discovering the band for the first time, it’s a great introduction, and hopefully, they’ll go through and check our back catalog. For fans who’ve been with us for more than a decade, they’ll appreciate that it’s a continuation of our songwriting and production skills. We’re always striving to become better songwriters, and we’re getting a more worldwide look with this record.

What was the songwriting process for this record like?

Thomson: One thing we tried to do a little more of on this album was to have a lyrical concept up front. So often, you end up having music that you like, but then you have the task of trying to put lyrics to it. It can slow down the process. What we’ve learned is that if you have an idea, lyrics or a title on the front end, it really helps the song move along and it makes it more of a cohesive concept to work with.

Terndrup: Spencer writes a lot of the lyrics, but everyone generally puts a stamp of approval on it. It’s all collaborative, so it has a pretty thick filter. Usually, it’s one person who comes in with the creative spark, and then the rest of us help push it to the finish line.

Let’s discuss a few tracks from Let The Record Play, starting with “Two High.”

Terndrup: The music and the lyrics both happened within a two-week time frame. The idea came from our keys player, Wes, who sent a text that was an auto-correct fail. He had meant to say, “too high” and it came across as “two high”. He told me about it and I immediately thought about the iconic peace symbol from the sixties. It was right around the same time the Women’s March happened and there was a lot of protesting going on. That’s really when the chorus started to shape up.

Read the rest of my
Interview with Moon Taxi by Clicking Here!

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