The MGDs come together for a promising new album

Of the dozen songs on the MGDs’ newest album, Wake Up, only three are under the five-minute mark. You could say the groove band has a lot to share. With six members, each claiming a stake in the songwriting, brevity is not a priority.

It isn’t the length of Wake Up that will surprise listeners, but rather the album’s ambling from one style of music to another. Soul, funk, reggae, smooth jazz, Latin rhythms and more are traversed in the album’s 72 minutes. For any other band, weaving all those elements together might not have been an option, but singer and drummer Matt Davis insists that there was no other way for the MGDs.

“There are six of us, and we’re all influenced differently,” Davis says. “Our bass player, Greg Bush, was a big Rush guy back in the day, and he likes the progressive, complicated stuff. I like funk and soul, and our sax player, Rudy Vasquez, brings a Latin flavor in. And Damon [Parker, keys and vocals] is all about New Orleans jazz. When we write songs, it usually starts with one person — they write a song and bring it to the table, and then we finish it out pretty diplomatically.”

One of the most interesting songs on the album is the final “Where’s Chuck,” written by Vasquez and named for the famed jazz trumpeter Chuck Mangione. It’s a dynamic, rollicking instrumental filled with warm horns and charging brass — and it was the most complicated track to record, according to Davis.

“The melody is progressive, and if you flub a note, we’re starting over,” he says. “The timing is awkward, which will throw you off as a listener. We wanted to put it at the end because it’s so different. At the end of the day, I don’t think we really planned on being all over spectrum — that’s just what we felt at the time when we were writing. There are no limitations.”

It was doubly important for each member to feel like they had enough breathing room on the album, Parker says, because this is the first release that reflects the MGDs’ lineup as it currently stands. When the band formed in 2008, it consisted of Davis, Bush and Parker (the MGDs is an anagram of that trio’s first names); by 2013, just a few months after the band had released its self-titled debut, Vasquez had joined as a full-time member, along with guitarist Scott Middleton and trumpeter Eric Martens.

“This is the whole essence of Wake Up is that, even though it’s the second album as the MGDs, it’s really the first album with every member being a part of making the album,” Parker says. “There’s a little taste of everyone from the band.”

Wake Up works as a cohesive release, each song — no matter how different — fitting nicely after the one before it. But even that balance, Parker says, wasn’t necessarily the goal.

“Really, we just don’t want to do something that’s been done before,” he says. “For business reasons, I guess it’s important to have a one- or two-word genre tag on your music, but it’s not something that we worry about. The next record we do, we want to focus on having three- or four-minute songs, because that’s something we’ve never done. Honestly, this band is more for us than for anything, and if people like it, that’s icing on the cake. I think the big thing is all of us being satisfied with what we do.”

Davis, who has been friends with Parker and Bush for more than a decade, adds that though the MGDs is far from the only project for any of its members, it is one of the most rewarding.

“For me, it’s my baby,” he says. “The demanding part of it is probably more stressful on our families, because it does take time. But it fulfills me and, I imagine, the other guys, too. If I didn’t have it, I’d feel like I was missing something in my life. I guess we’re lucky in that, because we get to do something we love.”•