KGNU’s Baskerville speaks with Adam Turla, the lead singer and songwriter of the Indiana-based band Murder by Death. They discuss the band’s unique tour venues, traditions, song-writing process, and the evolving dynamic of the band. Murder by Death is performing at the Ogden Theatre in Denver on Saturday, June 29 (Interview date: 6/22/2024)
Baskerville: This is Baskerville at KGNU, and I’m pleased today that we’ve got Murder by Death here on the phone. They’re an excellent six piece out of Indiana. They’re on tour right now, coming to Denver for a show at the Ogden, which is this coming Saturday, June 29th.
Murder by Death, who all do we have on the phone today?
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Just me, Adam, I’m the singer, and I guess songwriter guy.
Baskerville: Right on. So yeah, you guys are on tour right now, and we were just talking about a cool show you guys have at the moment. But I wanted to ask you, it looks like you just did a show in a cave in Tennessee?
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Yeah, we play some pretty wild places. We do a cave show every year for about the last seven or eight years. And it’s this natural cavern that they set up a stage in, and it’s always 59 degrees. You march down to the mouth of the cave, and there’s this big reveal, and you put 1,300 people in this giant open cavern and have a rock show. And it’s just a lot of fun, so it’s a tradition that we’ve had going for a while.
We’ve got another interesting one tonight, where we’re in Maquoketa, Iowa. This family has this barn that they call “Codfish Hollow”. The grandfather of the family built the barn. It’s a barrel shape, and they do these shows there through the summer. They put 600 people in a barn, and you play up on a big stage, and it’s got a really fun feel. You’re out in the country, surrounded by farmland, and it’s nice to get into a new space every once in a while.
Baskerville: Yeah, and speaking of cool places to play, you all are famous for your Stanley Hotel shows here in Colorado in the town of Estes Park. How long have you been doing that?
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): I think this coming year will be the 12th year. We were the first band to play there, and we basically lobbied the hotel to let us do it, and then it was a success, so we’ve kept doing it. It’s one of our other traditions that we have, and I think it breathes a lot of life into the band. I don’t think I understood how much having traditions matters and having people know they can go up there and see us play that gig and take a trip, or even just drive up the mountain.
It’s a lot of fun and it’s got a lot of spirit – pun intended. But it just gets people’s imagination going. I think that’s what our job is as musicians and artists: to let people step outside of their everyday life a little bit and use their imagination and have some fun.
Baskerville: Yeah, man, it’s really special for us in Colorado. So no end in sight for doing the Stanley Hotel shows?
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Here’s hoping, they are changing some things around up there. They’ve been working on a sale of the building and we are not privy to anything other than what we read in the papers. But we are hoping to continue that every year, but it’s ultimately up to them, and we hope we can keep it going.
Baskerville: Fantastic. We hope so too. Adam, I wanted to ask you, how does the writing in the band work?
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): I’m actually in this process, I’ve started writing for the next record. So I spent March and April just trying to figure out: what am I writing about? What kind of style am I writing in and what am I trying to say and accomplish? I wrote about eight songs in those months and then it came time to prepare and rehearse for tour and we’ve been on the road for almost a month. And then when we get home, I’ll be off to try to write more songs.
We have four week long sessions where I basically present the songs to the band in a thing I call “the Dreamhammer”. I basically just perform the song to the band and they give it a pass, fail, or back to the workshop review. They tell me like, yeah this song excites me, I want to work on this, or I feel like we’ve already done this song, or I just don’t like it, or I don’t get it. And then we try to have a bit of a democratic element before we start investing days of workshopping it as a complete band.
Sometimes, they’ll say I like this part, but this part’s boring, or whatever, and then I’ll take it back, and maybe a month later I reintroduce it. But then we’ll go into that process, where hopefully by the end of these sessions, we have almost recordable songs. Then you just keep running them and running them as you get closer to the recording date, hoping that you have called the weak songs out, and that you’re left with the best stuff.
My goal for this record – I tend to scrap stuff really early before I show it to the band if I’m not feeling it. And I’m hoping to have 20 songs done by the time we go into the studio. And then my goal would be to select the best between 10 and 12 songs. And only those will make the cut. But you never know what you’re going to end up with. You could get writer’s block near the end. You could be extremely prolific and then be in a position where – it’s one of the hard parts, choosing your favorites and what really goes together and. It could even come down to the wire where you get into the studio and even though the song’s completely finished, suddenly when you hear it playing back to you, you just say, boy, this one actually came out really good or this one didn’t come out so good.
So you never really know what you’re going to end up with on the recording until you hear that final playback. I think the coolest part of what we do is that you can’t be sure, and then something will bug you about the recording and then years later you listen back to it and you’re like, this sounds great, what was I so worried about?
It’s such a strange process. You’re really up in your head because every song, you literally make thousands of choices between each band member. And I think that’s one of the things that is surprising about the process: how many choices you make to get to a complete song.
Baskerville: Yeah, great answer. Absolutely. Spoken from someone who’s been doing this quite a long time.
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Yeah, most of my life. I’m turning 43 in about a week and I realized that I’ve been gigging in bars and whatever since I was 14. And it’s kinda nuts that that’s pretty much my life. Or one part of it, one big part.
Baskerville:So it was you and Sarah from the get go, right? Which was what, about 25 years ago?
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Yeah, 24. This April marks 24 years since our first live show.
Baskerville:And so Sarah was with you on cello from the get go. Fairly recently you introduced Emma on the violin, how did that come about?
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Our drummer Dagan has been with us since January 2007. Our keyboard player, David – we had a different keyboard player and he got essentially immunocompromised and had to stop touring.
So David jumped in to join us in 2013, and then he’s been with us since then. And Tyler came in 2016, and actually his first show with us was at Riot Fest in Denver. His first show was playing a big festival opening for the Misfits, so that was pretty wild as a trial gig.
Emma started as a merch seller. She had played violin in a band that had opened some shows for us. And at the time, we just needed someone selling merch, and she had thrown her name in the hat. As she came out with us more and more she was like, hey, can I play violin on a couple songs? And at the time we were really busy and swamped because we had opened a restaurant. It hadn’t even really occurred to us that we could add another member. So she would just come up and she’d play two or three songs just for fun. Eventually it got to the point where we found a way to integrate her.
So she kept her merch position so that there was enough of a budget and then now she’s totally integrated in the band. She wrote the last album with us. We did a holiday album as a pivot during the pandemic, and she’ll be writing the next album with us too. She just was clever enough to like, bide her time until we were able to integrate her and make sure that we could take care of her so that it was a fair exchange. And it’s been wonderful, we have a lot of fun playing together, and she’s a great writer. She’s been writing some really cool parts, and she’s adding on to some of our old songs, doing harmonies with Sarah’s cello on songs from 20 years ago. And it really I think has made the live show even more exciting than it has been in past years.
Baskerville:Very nice. Yeah, I can’t wait to see y’all next weekend. I’m excited. Speaking of which, the last time I saw you all was at the Ogden in 2020 in March.
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Yeah, right before it all fell apart.
Baskerville:Yeah, exactly. So you’ll always have a special place in my heart as one of the last shows I saw and it was a pretty special show.
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): I loved that gig. I mean, we had such a blast. I definitely feel the same way. A couple days later we went home from tour and we were on such a high and then all of a sudden it was just like all right, I guess I’m not leaving my house.
Baskerville:Yeah, thank goodness we’re back. During that 2020 show, you played what you called a secret song. Do you remember that?
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Yes, because we had started doing it around then. Now it gets requested every night. And we keep adding on to it. We’re like extending it. I assume you’re referring to “Pizza Party”.
Baskerville: That is the one.
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Yep. I don’t think we’ve missed a night on this tour. We keep adding on to the song. So we’re calling it the Extended Remix now. It is a very silly Latin rhythm and it makes for a really fun crowd interaction moment. I think with all the darkness and the sort of morose tone of some of the songs, it’s nice to have one silly moment in there.
Baskerville:Yeah, I feel like you all have always done that from the beginning, which is a nice nice aspect to what you do as a band.
To remind those who don’t know, your first studio album, what was the title?
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Oh, it was called Like the Exorcist, but More Breakdancing. because there’s a scene in the movie, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, where a guy break dances on the ceiling. We were describing that scene to somebody else and saying, “you got to watch Breakin’ 2! It’s like The Exorcist but with more breakdancing.” And we’re like, that’s our album title. I think the whole band name is a joke. There’s a lot of dark humor in the vibe of the band and I think that’s because we wanted to remind people that even though we’re singing about dark stuff, we see humor in the world, and we see joy, and I have a lot of lyrics that are tongue in cheek.
It’s just part of the style. It’s part of who I am and who I am as a writer. And we just want to invite people into exploring not just one dimension of who we are. I think sometimes when I hear bands that I like, the feeling I get from their music is really great.
But then after you’ve heard a couple albums, if it hasn’t changed or if it hasn’t shown you multiple facets of themselves, you start to feel like you already know that feeling. So I’m always trying to find a way to say, how do I push the boundaries of the world of Murder by Death and expand it into a broader experience? A bigger human experience? And it’s helped our longevity and allowed us to be a band for longer. You lose people along the way no matter what you do, and you gain people along the way no matter what you do. So my hope is to keep it interesting for as many people as possible and I hope they’re willing to join us along the way.
Baskerville:That’s beautiful. It’s working. I feel like you all have one of the deepest connections with your fans of any musical act I know. So it’s incredible. It is working. Thank you so much, Adam. I guess we better call it there. I’ve been talking with Adam from Murder by Death here on KGNU, and they’re coming into town here.
They’re gonna be in Denver at the Ogden this coming Saturday, June 29th. Their latest album is called As You Wish. Anything else you want to leave everyone with, Adam?
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): No, we’ve got Wildermuth opening, some former Denverites playing the show, and we’re excited to play the Ogden with them. We’re stoked for the show. It’s the tour finale, so we’re gonna leave it all out there up on the stage.
Baskerville: I can tell you from past experience it’s going to be phenomenal. I have no doubt. So I can’t wait. Thanks again, Adam. Happy birthday in a week and have a great rest of your tour.
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Thank you.
Baskerville: Cheers, man.
Murder by Death (Adam Turla): Bye bye.
