ALL CHANGE YET STILL THE SAME

Now a band in their own right, the Spock's Beard alumni are back with Pattern-Seeking Animals and their fourth album, Spooky Action At A Distance. This provides the perfect opportunity to catch up with multi-instrumentalist and founder John Boegehold, to discuss changing things up, bonus tracks, and what the future might hold for P-SA.

- Gary Mackenzie

It's 11am in a very sunny Los Angeles when Prog catches up with PatternSeeking Animals keyboard player/ multi-instrumentalist, main writer and producer John Boegehold, and he's already been up for more than five hours. It's an almost daily routine that allows time to boot up his studio to write and demo material before tackling his 'proper job' in property management, and he'll keep toying with ideas throughout the day. This cycle of writing partly explains the vast pool of music (more than 200 songs, he estimates) Boegehold has amassed for a number of collaborations, film soundtrack work, contributions to Spock's Beard over the last 20 years and the already enviable back catalogue assembled by Pattern-Seeking Animals since 2018.

"When it gets to the point where I think, 'Oh, that would be a cool song' then I go full-speed ahead, I'll put all the tracks together and send them to the guys to do their parts, although with drums we always do everything live in the studio," he explains.

However, new P-SA album, Spooky Action At A Distance, has seen a shift from business as usual.

"The past three albums we've recorded with Rich Mouser at the Mouse House and it's been great Rich is so good. You'll have heard his work a zillion times recording and mixing the who's who' of prog. Because our albums are so close together, the challenge with starting a new one right after the previous one is to make it sound different, not just a bunch of more tracks from the same sessions.

But you're kind of trapped though, because Rich is so good you don't want to risk making any changes." Ultimately, fate stepped in with simple scheduling when Boegehold wanted to start recording drums for the current album.