A professor and a neurologist walk into a studio

By Aitor Zabalegui

On his way to Phylum Feast, a dinner in celebration of Charles Darwin's birthday, professor Jim Cottrill took time to sit down with The Santa Clara in the basement of Swig Hall to talk about his experience as the keyboardist of the band Floodgate.

Political science professor Cottrill co-founded Floodgate in 1998 with a few friends he met while taking graduate courses at Texas A&M University.

A self-described Americana band, Floodgate stopped touring in 2004 as the band members parted ways to focus more on their careers and families. But after a long hiatus, Floodgate has reunited and is prepared to record a new studio album.

Amidst the hum and kick from the adjacent laundry room, Cottrill spoke about the recording process, music as an alternative aspiration and his influences as a keyboardist.

The Santa Clara: How did Floodgate decide to get back to the studio after the long break?

Jim Cottrill: I used to joke that we were the most over-educated band in America, because we were all Ph.D. students except our bassist, who was a computer programmer. We started getting our degrees and moving on to jobs all over the country, and now it's a challenge working on a new CD.

The lead singer -- he's a neuroscientist at UCSF -- moved here a couple of years ago and now that he's settled here in the area, we've actually started working together again.

We're actually supposed to start working on some new songs this weekend, so I'm really excited because it has been quite a few years since we worked together.

What we're going to do is Adam, the lead singer, and I will record a track, send the file to the other people and they'll put their track on top of it with this program called Cubase.

TSC: How do you go about the recording process? Do you write songs or is it more of a collaboration?

JC: It's more of a collaboration. Adam comes in with complete songs where he does the lyrics and the music and he has a pretty firm idea in his head about the song.

For me, I write a lot of music. I'm not as good with lyrics, so mostly I'll play some riffs for him and he'll spontaneously come up with lyrics off the top of his head. It's very fluid, and we usually come up with some pretty good results that way.

When we were making the last album, it seemed like we were getting better at recording and producing. It was all recorded at Adam's house, basically a home studio. We threw up some egg crates on the walls and just recorded there.

The first album was almost just an experiment in trying to learn how to record. We did a lot of overdubs and laid down a basic track, then layered our parts on top of it.

It was fun in that respect to build a song, but it created a lot of excess. We kept wanting to add more that was probably not all that necessary. Gradually, we started learning to be more minimalist and to keep things out, which really brings attention to chord changes and is a much better way to record.

TSC: As a keyboardist, how would you describe your playing style? Any influences?

JC: Gradually, I have evolved as a keyboardist. I used to play a lot of synthesizer. Now all I play is my vintage '77 Fender Rhodes electric piano.

I can get any sound I want out of it. If I want a piano sound it's got that, but I can also distort it, run it through a Rotovibe pedal and put effects on it. As a soloist you can basically hit any key on the keyboard and it's going to sound good at the end when everyone's jamming.

I got carried away one night and I started playing with my feet, and I broke two keys and I still haven't been able to find anyone to fix them. Fortunately, they're way up at the right end of the keyboard so I don't usually play them. If anybody knows anybody who can get it fixed for me that would be great.

As far as influences, the first record I ever bought was "Elton John's Greatest Hits." My dad was really mad at me because he already had it, but I wanted a copy of my own. Playing piano, I thought Elton John was great because you get rock music from a piano player, which was perfect for me.

The record that changed my life, however, was the Talking Heads "Fear of Music." That was the craziest thing I had ever heard at the time, I used to think Styx was a great band, and it profoundly affected the way I thought about music.

David Byrne would write a song about animals, cities, paper, drugs and heaven. Like, he would walk into a room and say, 'There's something. I'm gonna write a song about it.' It really opened me up to a broader spectrum of music. The Talking Heads are probably still my favorite band.

TSC: So it seems that you do this more for yourself than as a potential career.

JC: It's just for fun. Adam always described it that he'd go insane without music. All day he's doing academic research and studying spinal cord injuries, and for him, the music is an outlet.

I miss playing live. It was fun to do that. You make a little money, but it basically just covers expenses, and we would only use the money to finance another CD.

We played festivals where some labels expressed interest in us, asking for demos, but with us being in other parts of the country it wouldn't be a practical thing to do.

And today, even, it isn't necessary to be on a label because you can put out the music yourself on MySpace and people discover it there.

We all like our jobs, and it wasn't like we wanted to quit that and do music full-time. It was more of a hobby for us, and I think the music benefitted because of that. If I felt like I was doing music for a living, with the pressure, I probably wouldn't be able to write.

Contact Aitor Zabalegui at (408) 551-1918 or azabalegui@scu.edu.