A little rain won’t hold back reggae rock band Slightly Stoopid.
After its set was cancelled at Voodoo Music and Arts Experience, some members of the band stuck around New Orleans to play with a few locals and other musicians.
Slightly Stoopid’s drummer Ryan “RyMo” Moran, who played with the band since 2003, talked to The Daily Reveille about his constant touring with the band, its newest album and other projects.
The Daily Reveille: Slightly Stoopid came out with a new album earlier this year. Tell me what went into making that album.
RyMo: We have our own studio in San Diego that we write and record and rehearse and store all our gear. It’s like a big industrial warehouse. The nice thing about having that space and having a long term ownership of the space is we can kind of take our time making the records. With this record, we started working in the mid to later part of last year between tours and started getting a good momentum through the end of last year and got everything solidified by the early part of this year, probably early spring, and the album came out in June. We’ve been on the road and did a long tour for almost three months to support the album release, and we’re already back out and on tour doing a couple more weeks down here in the Southeast and making our way up north.
TDR: So is the [album] name reflective of that [“Meanwhile…Back at the Lab”]?
RM: Yeah, we didn’t have a name for the studio, and we were always just calling it like, ‘I’m going to be down at the lab tonight if you wanna stop in, have some beers … So people would always ask what we’re up to when we aren’t on the road. So we’re like well, we’re probably at the lab, making more music. It was kind of that deal and kind of have a comic book sort of feel with the cover art that was done by our friend Shaun Logan. So it has this comic-y feel to it, and we thought it was pretty fun and a good representation of the band.
TDR: How did it compare for you to your past albums?
RM: Every album is a little bit different because through the course of someone’s career — an album is sort of a snapshot of a time period — so all of our albums are slightly different because we’re going to be doing different things as humans. Obviously, the perspective on life and things change considerably since now most of us are married, have kids and mortgages and things like that. In the earlier years, it was about partying, having fun. Now, making albums is something we take seriously. We want to write songs that we like and we think that people will like. Also there’s no formula, we just record a bunch of material and whatever we like, we basically make the album. We have complete creative control. It’s pretty fun … If you listen to them back to back, this one I think the guys listened to a lot of styles of music, and a lot of that stuff was represented on this record.
TDR: So you have your own record label in addition to the studio, correct?
RM: That’s correct.
TDR: Okay, cool. How does that change the way you make music, having that control?
RM: We’ve always been an underground type of team. Our style is basically we do what we want. We want to maintain control, and it’s been grassroots and underground since the very beginning. We never really had a major label or a major marketing department for some major label pushing our albums and doing this and that … Being able to stay on the road keeps us in people’s minds I guess, and if we can get on the radio, that’s always good. But for us, that’s never been a go-to. We’ve just been able to sustain ourselves by staying on the road, touring like crazy and putting out albums that we put our heart and soul into.
TDR: You seem to tour quite a bit. What keeps you going after a decade or so of making music?
RM: Now, things have changed. I’ve been with the guys closer to 12 years, and they were going strong for a while before I joined — I think they started around ‘94 or something like that. In the beginning, you’re having fun, making music and don’t really know where it’s going to take you. You hope to sustain and create a career for yourself, but what we didn’t want was the big one-hit-wonder moment ­— the New York rise and the New York fall. So, fortunately, we were able to create a career that was more based more on touring. Nowadays, it’s what all of us know. We love touring. We love being on the road. The highlight for us is performing. We like to play shows. The rest of the hours of the day can be kind of hard when you’re traveling, you don’t know where you are, you’re stuck in an airport somewhere, you’re stuck on a tourbus. But what we really love is that couple of hours we can get on stage and perform and connect with fans and get the energy going. That’s really the most important thing to us. Nowadays, when a lot of us are married and have kids and mortgages, we take it seriously, but we still like to have a good time and have some fun.
TDR: So is that what prompted you to do that impromptu set despite Voodoo cancellation?
RM: Well the Voodoo thing, we were pretty bummed. We got here real early in the morning, got our gear set up. Our crew was out working in the rain all morning. When we found out that the show was going to cancel, our manager talked to a couple of other guys from some different bands and was able to get a jam session together on Frenchmen Street a couple nights ago. We had a bunch of artists and musicians showing up and [a] couple of guys from our band, couple of guys from Fishbone, the bass player from Living Colour was there, a local drummer named Terence Higgins … so a pretty awesome lineup of artists showed up. I actually just hung out and watched a couple of songs and then came back to my hotel and got some rest. But yeah the whole vibe was just to connect with some local greats …
TDR: Do you plan on adding another tour date for New Orleans?
RM: I haven’t heard yet. I’m sure we will. We always try to do any makeup days from when stuff gets cancelled. I haven’t heard anything yet. It’s so soon. It’s only a couple of days since cancellation. I’m sure we’ll be back really soon. I’d say no later than spring.

Gallery • 1 Photos

Courtesy of Slightly Stoopid's website.