Pattern-Seeking Animals featuring the talents of current & former Spock's Beard members Ted Leonard, Jimmy Keegan & Dave Meros as well as long-time contributing songwriter-producer John Boegehold.

Of the musical direction, Boegehold comments: “My goal was to produce music that’s progressive and intricate while keeping things immediate and melodic. Whether a song is four minutes or ten minutes long, I didn’t want more than a few bars go by without some kind of instrumental or vocal hook.”

Originally a vehicle for a few tracks John had been working on in early 2018, he quickly came up with enough music to work towards producing an album. With that in mind, he enlisted the talents of Jimmy Keegan (drums & vocals), Ted Leonard (vocals & guitar) & Dave Meros (bass), with Boegehold handling all the synths. He adds: “Besides live strings on a few songs and a female backing vocalist on another, it was all done between the four of us with Dave and Ted ending up as co-writers on some of the material.”

With the band obviously being closely associated with Spock’s Beard, John was conscious of exploring different avenues with Pattern-Seeking Animals, whether it was song structures, vocal arrangements, synth sounds or emotional textures. “Pattern-Seeking Animals was a clean slate so I found myself drawing on a few different musical influences and using some contemporary production ideas and sounds that I probably wouldn’t use with SB for various reasons.”

As John notes, as the project came together it quickly became apparent that they would want to take this material out live: “Originally it was intended to be a recording project but as it was coming together we started talking seriously about doing it as a live band. Because of the complexity of a lot of the material, it’ll require an additional musician or two to pull it off live. The plan is to tour as much as possible and to come out with a new album at least once a year. In fact, work on the second album is already well under way.

Ted Leonard

lead vocal & guitars

synths, programming, guitar, mandolin

John Boegehold

Jimmy Keegan

drums & vocals

Dave Meros

bass

photos by Mark Berry