Manchester Orchestra bassist Andy Prince on Black Mile and skateparks ahead of Starlight gig with Incubus

Manchester Orchestra’s Andy Prince. // photo credit Brittany Bossert

After joining nearly 20-year-old indie rock group Manchester Orchestra in 2013 to help fill out the collective during the recording process of Cope, bassist Andy Prince has now embarked on a decade-long journey with the band, including their evolution into a more atmospheric edge that began with Andy Hull and Robert McDowell’s work on the film Swiss Army Man.

Shedding some light on the writing of the notable A Black Mile to the Surface from 2017, we chatted with Prince before their Tuesday tilt with alternative icons Incubus.

The Pitch: How did you end up joining the band? I know Jonathan Corley ended up leaving, but what paved the way for you?

Andy Prince: Tim Very, who plays drums in the band now, is from my hometown, Pensacola, Fla., and I knew him from a long time ago. We knew who each other were and played in the same church together. Then I moved to Nashville and lived there for 10 years with a band that I was in at the time called The Gills. As a bass player in Nashville, you have a lot of opportunities, but you have to basically play every single gig ever to get to know people.

I actually played with some really great artists, though, and one of them was a guy named Harrison Hudson. He knew Andy [Hull] and kind of grew up with him in Atlanta. These little worlds collided. When Jonathan was transitioning out of Manchester, the band was in the middle of writing Cope. So I kind of walked into their studio in Alpharetta, Ga., and they already had their recording process going. I didn’t know exactly what they were going for yet, but they just needed someone to play and be able to get through some of the sessions of writing.

I saw Andy Hull on Pete Holmes’ podcast and he said you sparked the group before a show once and are kind of the rallying force behind the band live. Is this how it’s always been?

I don’t want to take full credit for that, but it has become a thing where it can be really stressful and anxiety inducing, especially the 15 minutes before you go on-stage. We joke around all the time, but when it comes down to the show, we really want things to go as well as possible. The band is going to perform at 110% every time we play. And when you go through an arduous tour that spans weeks and weeks, you really can get burned out.

That whole thing just came from losing the idea of “this should be fun for us, too.” A lot of bands, you can stand there and be in your own little world and just try to get through the show, but it’s kind of made us face each other more and look at the big picture of what’s going on within the band.

I read that you change your strings for every single show. Is that normal?

I play other music with different people and I’ll let strings go for months and months, but when you go and do a show like this, I play a different style. I need a really edgy sound – I play with a pick and I use distortion. You need fresh strings to get that really high end and edgy overdrive tone that you need, so that requires you to change them at least every two shows. Other bass players may find that weird, but even after one show of an hour and a half of sweating on a guitar and eating it with a pick, your strings die. Your tone gets completely diminished, compared to that really bright, nice sound.

And you max out your Bassman?

What you can do is use a footswitch – you can have a clean channel on there, and then you have another side that’s your “dirty channel.” I completely overdrive that side and blend it all the way on 10, and it’s perfect real tube overdrive. I can dial in the tone, there’s bass, there’s mid, there’s treble, there’s all these in-between dials. And, yes, it burns the hell out of the tubes running it that hot, but it’s worth it to me.

I have a series of questions about A Black Mile to the Surface, if that’s okay? What do you remember the most about making it?

We took our entire studio and set it up in this cabin on top of a mountain in Asheville, N.C. Everyone needed to get away from their home to be able to focus solely on what was going on without distractions or their kids. The first session was probably like 16 days, which can make you kind of crazy, but the entire time it was snowing outside and absolutely beautiful. The room we were writing in had a big fireplace in it, so we kept a fire going the entire time. Even in the initial demos, there’s mics hanging everywhere in the room, and you can hear the crackle of that fire, and we actually got so attached to that because of the way the room started to have this really rich, warm sound.

When we got really loud in there, it just hurt our ears. We are a loud-ass rock band. We wanted to play stuff that wasn’t painful in the room, if that makes sense. That kind of influenced that record, too. What sounds beautiful? What sounds pretty? There are moments where it got loud, but you almost wanted it by then. It just had this wintery, beautiful vibe, the way it felt in there. There was something special going on. The songs in that environment, I think the elements of the way it felt – the nature, the cold – influenced the music, and it kind of felt like the music we were writing is the way we felt in that way. It was just beautiful. Some of the songs were so beautiful and they came in this really nice way. We knew we were finally getting together as a band and finding our sound.

What were the conversations like for that change in approach? You can draw a line between Cope and that record to distinguish the two parts of your career, in my opinion.

Going into Black Mile, Andy had a lot of thematic ideas for the lyrics and songs that were prepared, but we also contributed a lot of new material from scratch. We never really had to talk about it like “we’re gonna sound like this, or we’re gonna sound like that.” It just came out the way it came out. That’s what I kind of meant earlier about us getting in a room and sitting down, plucking around for a while, hearing a little chord there, starting a drum beat, and then we just start playing.

If Andy doesn’t have a song fully fleshed out, he’ll just do mumble lyrics and hum melodies along with what we’re doing. Jeff Tweedy talks about that – you have to have at least something in place so you can hear it. Once you have the vocal melody, then the other instruments can kind of play to that, accent it in the right way and not step on it. A kind of maturity came out of that that we’re still working on.

Is your sound, and the way you’re producing with Catherine Marks now, something that you’re gonna continue with? Or I saw a rumor that you guys might be turning it up into something heavier for the next one.

We’re working on music. We have been for the past three years. I can’t speak too much on it, but we are always working on music. If it’s not us together, Andy’s got songs that he’s writing all the time and then we decide which ones we want to work on and we’ll see which ones end up on the new record. But it’s a nice time right now. We’ve made some really great stuff so far that we’re really excited about, but we’re also taking our time with it and going to make sure we won’t put anything out until all of us are absolutely excited about it. We’re doing it for the fans, but we’re also always in a competition with ourselves, and that’s the biggest thing first. So far, we really love it, but we’re gonna keep working until it’s exactly perfect.

Talk about your skate park work that I saw on your Instagram. How did you become involved with that and what do you want people to know about it?

I grew up skateboarding in Pensacola, FL and one of the guys I grew up skating with is named John Shell. Years ago he started a nonprofit organization called Upward Intuition. When we were kids and in Pensacola, we didn’t have a lot of great skate parks. All the spots we were skating you would get kicked out by the cops and older people would yell at you, but we still loved it. As we got older, I moved to Nashville to do the music thing and John started working on building a skate park. It took him nine years to do it, but he got this beautiful park built in Pensacola called Blake Doyle Skatepark, which is named after one of my friends who passed away.

I moved back to Pensacola about three and a half years ago after COVID and I immediately linked back up with John and started working with him more closely. I’ve become president of the board and he’s the chairman of Upward. We have this great list of board members that have helped us out. One of our board members, his son, was actually killed while skateboarding. His name was Avery Stark, and his dad has helped us since then. Our next skate spot will be named the Avery Stark Skate Spot.

A great quote is: “If you want to keep kids off drugs, give them something to do.” We’re trying to provide the spaces where kids can feel like they belong and create a community within themselves. They can DM me if they’re interested in helping.

Manchester Orchestra plays Starlight Theater on Tuesday, July 8, with Incubus and Paris Jackson. Details on that show here.