Q&A with Mellow Down Easy

As one of the numerous bands who have joined the No Depression Community, it would be easy to categorize Mellow Down Easy as another random rootsy band. However, considering their creative melding of jam-pop, indie rock, and country, I decided instead to steer our brief interview toward what exactly music genres mean, if anything, to them. On the heels of their recent release, Cosmisutra (Dualtone), I hopped on the phone with guitarist/vocalist Andrew Adkins and talked about the relevance of categorizing music, among other things:

KR: Do you feel like, with indie bands, that genre is becoming irrelevant because people are just making music to make music?

AA: Well when the music industry really took off back in the '50s and '60s, they started to come up with all these genres to name the bins in the record stores and sooner or later there were a million genres and it continued to grow, grow, grow. Now that the record companies are having less say about, everyone's using MySpace and YouTube to get their music out there, I think it'll be interesting to see how it goes. When you want to buy an album in a record store you have to decide what style you want first. I'm curious to see how it's going to work out. It's really changed things in the last ten years. People are more ready to just let music be music, you know.

KR: Yeah, and you see through iTunes, everything's falling in the rock or country category. There's not really much in between...

AA: It is funny...you were talking about Steve Earle the other day, for instance. you go anywhere into a record store and they'd always have a fancy name for his genre. But now, when you see Steve Earle on iTunes, he's country and sometimes he's rock. It's weird.

KR: Y'all are from Tennessee...do you feel like you're very much of the Tennessee music scene?

AA: I'd say we're of the Tennessee music scene the way it used to be. The thing about our music is that we're either a little too late or a little too early. As far as what's going on now...Kings of Leon [for example] are doing pop-rock alternative music. That's the flavor of what's coming out around us. We get embraced by the older country music fans around here, though. We get embraced by them as much as we do - if not more than we do - by alternative rock fans. I think we've got our own little niche here in Tennessee.

KR: What is up for you this year? Are you doing any festivals this summer?

AA: Not this year. We did some smaller festivals last year, but we're really just focused on getting this new record released. We don't plan on playing a lot of shows this summer. We're kind of trying to take care of [the record] and maybe we'll hit the road on a grander scale later in the year. We missed the openings for the festivals this year because the album only came out a couple of weeks ago. So we're just going to relax and chill out and head out later, I guess.

KR: Who are three artists right now that you guys are digging on?

AA: I guess, as far as what we've been listening to - T. Rex, Roger Miller, and Velvet Underground. I was just trying to think of what we've been listening to on the road. That's what's in our CD players right now. I'll stick with that.