Interview with Daniel and Patrick McGowan (The Tea Club)

If you’re a reader of the blog, you know brothers Dan and Pat from The Tea Club. If you’re a reader of the news, you may have read not too long ago that Dan was recruited to cover for Billy Greer, longtime bassist/guitarist/backup vocalist for Kansas, for a set of live shows. After an impressive string of performances and Billy Greer’s retirement from performing, Dan was drafted as a full member, joining friends of the blog Joe Deninzon (member since 2023) and Tom Brislin (2018). I was able to see Dan in Louisville, Kentucky, and it was an absolutely breathtaking show. Dan was hardly just a bassist- he nearly sang in every song, and switched from bass to guitar several times, and it wasn’t just him. Everyone on stage was firing on all cylinders, switching instruments and singing complex harmonies. Please, go and see Kansas live if you get a chance! It was one of my favorite shows in recent memory.

But, I get to pull the hipster card here, and say, “I remember Dan before he joined Kansas and became Dansas”. Nearly 9 years ago, Tea Club keyboardist Joe Dorsey sent me a link to their incredible album Grappling (check it out here!) and I’ve been hooked since. They remain one of my favorite modern prog acts, with a perfectly balanced combination of modern progressive sensibilities with retro prog influences. Their last record, If/When, was a critical success (click here to listen), and fans have been dying to hear what’s next. We talked with Dan and Pat about Dan’s life-changing call from Kansas, what they’ve both been up to for the last several years, and what’s in store for fans of The Tea Club.

Pat, what is it like to have a brother in legendary prog rock band Kansas? Does he make you pick up his coffee, and what is his favorite coffee flavor? Also, Dan may or may not have asked me to include the second half of this question.

PAT: Yes, Folgers medium roast promptly at 10:30 am! All kidding aside, I think the Kansas thing is just awesome. I went to see them live recently and had tears streaming down my face for most of the show. It’s a beautiful fit. I’ve said this before, I am Dan’s biggest fan and I really mean that. Even back when we were young kids making our own comics and movies I was like his first fan. So, to see him flourish in such a big way with a famous band like Kansas is just the best thing. I’m proud as hell of him.

DAN: I most certainly DID ask you to include this question.

Dan, tell us a bit of your Kansas story. What was it like to get the call to fill in for Billy? Can you share some memorable moments so far with the band?

DAN: I got a call from Tom Brislin, who is the keyboard player for Kansas. We had worked together in various projects over the years and developed a good friendship. He played keyboards on The Tea Club’s second album Rabbit (click here to listen!), and I had played bass in his live band. Tom told me that Kansas needed someone to fill in for Billy Greer. He asked if I’d like to audition, but that I would only have two weeks to learn their 2 hour set. I didn’t even hesitate, I said heck yeah. It was the opportunity of a lifetime. So I set up camp in my basement and played the bass until my fingers were raw. I recorded videos of myself playing and singing the songs and sent them to the band. They were impressed with what I was able to do, and they offered me the gig. Thank God I was working two jobs that were extremely supportive of me and gave me the time off I needed.

There’s been a lot of memorable moments. Everyone in the band really is like a big family. But one of my favorite things about being in the band is getting to pick Richard Williams’s brain. He’s an original founding member and has 50+ years of experience. He’s also hilarious. One time while we sitting in the van driving to a gig, somehow the Ninja Turtles got brought up. Richard told me that he took his son to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II in theatres back in 1991, and then he started singing that Vanilla Ice song from the movie, “Go Ninja Go”. I almost lost my mind laughing.

Describe your emotions when you heard you’d be joining the band officially. What went through your head?

DAN: Everything right now is a bit of a whirlwind. I was definitely extremely excited to hear the news. I mean, what a true honor to get to be a member of one of the greatest rock bands to ever exist, guys who were there when rock music was at its absolute peak in the 70’s and 80’s. I also knew it was going to be a big life adjustment. It usually takes me a long long time to process things emotionally. Creating is the way I process big life events. I haven’t written a song or a poem or drawn a comic book about all this yet, but I’m sure I will. My friends and family and co-workers are just thrilled though, and that brings me a lot of satisfaction.

Dan, what are some of your favorite Kansas songs to play?

“A Glimpse of Home” is my absolute favorite. It is such an underrated Kansas song, and it’s so much a fun one to play. The lyrics are deeply moving and inspiring. But then there’s “Miracles Out of Nowhere”, which I love playing because I get to sing a bunch. It also goes all over the place musically. Just when you think you know where it’s going, it throws that rocking outro at you and it’s so joyous.

It’s been 5 years since The Tea Club released their last album, If/When. When you reflect on that album, have you learned anything about the music you made or the lyrics you wrote with a bit of time and distance? Do you feel like you can still relate to that headspace?

DAN: I can definitely relate to it. It feels like the beginning of a world view that I had just entered but am continuing to develop. There’s a lot of loss and grief, but there’s also celebrations of new life and determination and renewed faith. And we’re willing to look at how different everything is. There’s a lyric from “Came At a Loss” that goes “Now I’m awake for the Sun but I still dream of the Moon”. I think that sums up where I was, and I can still feel that today.

PAT: It’s a little strange for me because the last 5 years have been very complicated and difficult at a personal level. A lot of stuff happened and I think it changed me at some pretty deep levels. And this record was written before any of that.

It’s weird because the lyrics for If/When are at times really predictive, almost prophetic. So to think back to the headspace of when we were writing them is actually a little frightening, knowing now all that would happen. But it’s also really interesting because it makes me think that maybe we were tapping into something a lot larger than ourselves. I’ve also noticed comments on some of our stuff online that seem to suggest others may feel similarly. So it’s kind of a mixed bag for me.

After performing the album many times, do you have a favorite track to play live?

PAT: “Rivermen” is terrifying to perform. I’m not quite sure how else to explain it but for me there is a genuine sense of terror when we’re about to go into it. I pretty much have no idea what’s going to happen. Are we going to make it through the song? Are we going to destroy something? Is the room going to catch on fire? I don’t know that it’s my favorite to play but it is without a doubt the most visceral moment for me in our shows.

DAN: Playing “Creature” is always a quasi-religious experience. It’s a bit like performing a play. There was so much involved in it. I would be switching guitars, tuning to different guitar tunings while the band’s playing, switching spots on stage with Pat while he’d manipulate my vocals with an effects pedal. Like Pat mentioned “Rivermen”, is almost too much, but it’s very cathartic. It can get pretty violent. It makes me want to rip the strings off of my guitar. And of course, “If I Mean When”. We played a show a couple months ago as a four piece, and we ended with that one. It’s really cool, because so many people were singing along. It’s like playing a classic song that people know.

How do you contextualize If/When in the Tea Club discography?

PAT: I think with If/When we landed fully on what lies at the heart of our music. And I think I can describe it like this: we’re not modernists, we’re not postmodernists, we’re not deconstructionists or whatever that is. We’re Romantics. That’s our aesthetic heritage; Romanticism. And I think that comes across stridently on If/When. Now, don’t get me wrong, there’s a ton of it on all our records. But I think it moved from a latent sensibility to an overt part of our artistic language with If/When.

DAN: I like to think of If/When as The Tea Club’s Selling England By the Pound. The song writing is really strong, and there are moments that are similar stylistically to other albums, but there’s a sense of having grown up a bit. I see the previous album Grappling as the end of the young man’s journey to adulthood, and If/When is the band being in that adulthood.

Anything you can share about the upcoming Tea Club album? Any themes or ideas or sources of inspiration you could share?

PAT: Well, it’s interesting because something kind of miraculous has happened: the band that wrote and recorded the last record stayed together and wrote and recorded a new record. That actually has never happened before with The Tea Club.

I think that speaks to the idea of maturity as Dan said during the If/When years. At some point we turned a corner as a band and it stopped being so much a project mostly from the imaginations of the Brothers McGowan and more of a conversation between a band of similarly minded creatives. There was a cohesion that was established on If/When and this new record takes that and just runs away with it.

We are experimenting with a newfound boldness. The record is ferocious, unpredictable, apocalyptic, beautiful, and deeply personal. Going back to what I mentioned earlier about the pain of the last few years; this new record is like an exorcism. There will be a lot of surprises.

But I will say this, that Romanticism that we fully discovered on If/When is baked into every second of the new record. I believe that is something that will always be present in our music no matter how far we go with experimentation. It’s just in our DNA.

DAN: Like I said earlier, creating is how I process things, and I’ve been processing a lot of anger, a lot of paranoia and distrust with the world around me. Trying to come to terms with who I am and how I can authentically be myself in a world that feels like it’s constantly trying to force me to join their “team”. Ultimately trying to keep my faith amongst the absolute chaos of 2020’s America. Which is a very silly, frightening place. And it’s often silly and frightening at the same time, and I think moments of this new record are silly and frightening at the same time.

I had the wonderful privilege of seeing The Tea Club perform at ProgStock 2021. A number of songs were performed, many of which were in the demo phase. Was that concert in any way indicative of things to come?

DAN: Some of those new songs actually didn’t wind up getting recorded for this album. Some of the other ones have changed a lot since then. We wound up playing the “poppier” songs at that show, so I’d say it represented that side of the album but not the more challenging or aggressive side. There are like 10 songs that were left off this record that are really good songs. They will eventually be released in some form or another, whether it’s the next album or something else.

Pat: I would say yes and no. Yes in the sense that the full aesthetic range of the new album was represented. There are synthpop songs on the new record, there are wild rockers on the new record, and there are weirdo experimental outliers on the new record, all of which we touched on at that show. But at that point most of them had not yet made it over the finish line with regards to arrangements and such. So what you heard at that show was a good indication of the various directions we’re heading in but I think the songs are much better now.

Please check out The Tea Club! Here’s their website, and here’s their Bandcamp. And make sure to catch Dan with Kansas in the coming months!