What was playing with Earth, Wind & Fire like?
It was amazing! They were just totally crazy! Philip Bailey has his own private dressing room where he just jams along—for like two hours—he was just jamming along with the entire Herbie Hancock Head Hunters record. He was masterfully playing every solo on the album. And he doesn’t even play keyboards during the show—he just sings! It was mind blowing! Their production is huge, too: two busses, two semi trucks. They’re a machine—They play forever! Justin [Walter, trumpet], who’s like the most stoic member of the band, famously shed a tear during a version of one of their ballads. How do you make music with a brainwave monitor? It must be some like quack medical device. It just puts out this harsh frequency. I use it kind of as a source isolator, and then I put it through this Moog synth pedal. Was ‘Brainwave’ written around the monitor, or was it added in later? It was entirely written around the monitor. The brainwave is the boss. You can’t make it do anything it doesn’t want to do. E
