Cosmic Echoes: In Conversation with SUSS’ Bob Holmes

Since their 2018 debut release, Ghost Box, SUSS have moved like a protracted echo over the horizon.

Beginning as a five-piece, the New York band, led by Bob Holmes and Rubber Rodeo bandmate Gary Leib alongside Jonathan Gregg, Pat Irwin and William Garrett, hailed from vastly different places from the creative landscape to arrive at this new central point. It’s this reason that has made SUSS’ story one of the most intriguing over the last 10 years.

As a five-piece, SUSS released three full-length albums. The above-mentioned Ghost Box, the underrated follow-up, High Line (2019) and the wonderful Promise (2020), before Garrett left the band and Leib’s untimely passing in 2021. (Leib would feature on the post-humous 2022 self-titled release and also throughout 2024’s Birds & Beasts.)

SUSS would continue their quest as a trio. Holmes (mandolin, guitars, harmonica, violin, keyboards), Irwin (guitars, eBow, harmonium, keyboards, melodica, loops) and Gregg (pedal steel, dobro), expanding on the band’s previous works by gracefully moving into new corners. The results, a vivid patchwork of new scents and colours out of this world. Firstly, with the above-mentioned Birds & Beasts, followed by last year’s Nanocluster Vol. 3 – the collaboration alongside Immersion. (The excellent project featuring Colin Newman and Malka Spigel.)

Nanocluster Vol. 3 proved to be an unlikely through-line to SUSS’ magnum opus and latest release, Counting Sunsets. Something that could be considered the SUSS mosaic, Counting Sunset has got it all. Swoon, verve and emotional intensity, it teleports you to safe havens. SUSS not only harness mood and open space, but also the spirit of country music at large.

While much of experimentalism feels, at times, like an intellectual exercise, country music has never patronised. The door, always open for others, which is an ethos baked into SUSS’ DNA. Counting Sunsets isn’t just the crystallisation of the SUSS experience. The band also captures what it means to be guided by the music and be totally liberated by it.

While a New York band, the trio aren’t exactly anchored to one place. Shortly after the release of Counting Sunsets, I had the privilege of speaking to Holmes via Zoom from his Florida locale. (One of three places where he divides his time; the others, Kentucky and, of course, New York.) Gregg also spends his time in Kentucky and New York as well as Connecticut and France, while out of the trio, Irwin spends the most time in New York (and also Shelter Island). “We kind of do a lot of roaming around,” smiles Holmes.

It makes senses, of course. These ceaseless wanderings, an extension of SUSS’ borderless nature. Having completed their U.S. tour days before this interview, our conversation moves a bit like a SUSS’ composition. Holmes is a wonderfully eloquent communicator, effortlessly guiding me from one topic to the next. From the history of SUSS and each band member, to the present where, in Holmes’ case, not only consists of the band, but also perhaps a by-product of it: the guitarist’s excellent Across the Horizon podcast.

Sun 13: You’ve just finished your tour. From the videos I’ve seen, the new songs sounded great. How much emphasis do you put on translating your songs in a live setting?

Bob Holmes: “Well, it’s kind of a process. The one thing that might have been a bit different about our process for this album was that we’d just come off a tour last year where we were playing with Immersion. We’d spent a lot of time playing new and old SUSS songs as a trio, which was new for us. We really liked the way how the trio interpreted the older songs, and it sort of informed the way we wrote and arranged the new songs.

“We ended up on this tour we just got through playing a lot of music from Counting Sunsets. The songs, from their very inception, were made with more of a trio in mind. That being said, with the way we write the songs, we build them up, we turn down, we rearrange them, we highly edit them using a lot of looping and move stuff around. So, what originally goes on to the tracks and how the tracks end up can be drastically different. Once we’ve arrived at a version that we all really feel is the best representation of that particular track, we more or less have to go back and relearn it. That’s actually where it gets fun.

“We’re not about performing karaoke versions of our own songs. But we know there are tones, instrumentation, and a certain arc built into these songs, as well as lyrical hooks that run through all of them. We try to capture those in certain ways, but we’re in no way bound to it. We’d be the first people to tell you that that we don’t jam, and we do have structure in mind. But the thing that makes it fun is that every night that we play these songs, we like to play with the structure a little bit.”

S13: I’ve always been fascinated by how SUSS’ writing approach begins. Is it in the studio together or do the three of you bring in ideas and work from there?

BH: “I can remember in the early days, us saying, ‘Hey, it’s Thursday night, let’s go to the studio and see what happens!’ At which juncture one of us might have had a thread of an idea that we wanted to explore, and the others would follow along. Or sometimes we’d go in with no idea whatsoever. But as the pandemic hit, and afterward, more often than not, one of us will start with a lyrical idea, a concept, and then pass it along.

“We nominally think of ourselves as a New York City band. But we all live all over the place, and we’re moving all the time. Pat’s in New York more often than any of us, and even he does a lot of moving around. I do most of my recording on the phone on GarageBand, and I capture everything on the fly. Jonathan does something similar, but a little different. Pat has a proper studio, so it all ends up in Pat’s lab to help make sense out of it. We’re pretty open about the process. If I submit something to the band and there’s only 10 or 20 percent that they like of it, it’s like, ‘Yeah, whatever, go for it!’

“At this juncture in our careers and in our lives, the best thing we have is trust and friendship. There’s not much ego involved. I think our egos come out in the music strongly. I don’t think anybody has any doubts about who does what, and then how well we each do our own thing. But no one’s battling for star power, which is great.”

S13: Counting Sunsets might be the embodiment of SUSS. What was the most important aspect you wanted to capture with it?

BH: “I think we feel the same way. It may be because this is truly our first trio album. Gary passed away during the making of the self-titled, and he’s on a good part of that. He’s even on one or two tracks on Birds & Beasts. But this is the first album where, as I said before, we went into it knowing that how we were going to make it was different, and that the end result was going to be more representative of who we are as artists if somebody put us on stage. You can’t plan for these things; you can only be sensitive to them.

“We knew that the vibe from the very beginning was something that spoke to who we are as three, how should I say, mature men. (laughs) All of us have been making music for well over 50 or 60 years, and everyone who knows what we’ve done in our past realises that we could make any kind of music that we wanted to. Because basically we’ve made so many different types of music over the course of our careers, both famous and unknown, I think one of the things when SUSS got started and people knew what our histories were, they were amazed that we had decided to make music like SUSS, because it didn’t really leverage any of our ‘past successes’.

“It was just something that all of us at the time felt like we wanted and needed to do. It didn’t need any reference to anything we’d ever done before. Each of us brought something to it, and the Venn diagram of our all of our experiences is what became SUSS. And now here we are! If you include the Immersion album, this is our seventh record that we put out. I think every step of the way, everyone’s like, ‘Can they distil this any further? Haven’t they said everything they need to say about this genre of music?’

“Obviously, for us, the answer is no. Because we feel that Counting Sunsets is, as you just mentioned, the culmination and distillation of everything that we’ve been working on over the last almost decade. We all feel it’s much more complicated musically than most of the stuff we’ve done in the past. It sounds simpler, but people seem to get it. Like, ‘Oh, that’s SUSS, now I get it!’ It’s expansive without being pompous; it’s ambient without being cold; it’s atmospheric without being new age-y, you know?”

S13: I agree.

BH: “It’s hard, but every time we go to make a record, that’s the needle we want to thread. Because we’re pretty tough critics, and we’re easily bored. We love soundscapes; we love atmospheric; we love new age; we love jazz; we love instrumental; we love all that stuff! But we knew that we were put here to force us to make something that was a little different than everybody else’s.

“As the years go on, our music seems to be a lot more different than what other people are doing. There are a lot of people that are mixing experimental and ambient and Americana. But I would have to say that if you listen to us, it doesn’t sound like anybody else. I’m not quite sure why that is, but you could listen to an hour’s worth of music, and if a song comes up, you’d go, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s SUSS!”

S13: Everything in your body of work is different. For instance, Birds & Beasts feels very political to me. I don’t know whether you think the same?

BH: “To be honest, we think that, though it’s not our intention. We are not only the makers of the music, but we are the people who enjoy the music and listen to the music ourselves. So, in hindsight, it’s pretty obvious to us that what we do is political in a lot of ways. In this day and age, there is no way that you can go out there and say that you’re making Americana or making some music that says something about Americana and is not political. People ask us this all the time… our music evokes images of the great west, and the great wide open spaces of America. You cannot think about that without thinking about cowboys, and you can’t think about all of that without thinking about the politics that is in America right now.

“It’s probably no surprise that we are of the blue rather than the red persuasion, and that our glorification of a certain type of Americana sound could be in direct opposition to what a lot of that Americana actually ended up standing for. We think about that all the time. Especially having got back from the touring the western part of the United States. All of the beauty that is America is all there.

“Everything that we grew up watching on TV and in the movies and all of that stuff. But the darker side of America is also there, and I think that we recognise that. Whether it’s more subliminal and coming out of our subconscious rather than our conscious, all of that darkness and beauty shows up in our music. I think that the last two albums, Birds & Beasts and Counting Sunsets, are really good examples of that.”

S13: With some of these compositions, there feels like some nice crossover with your Immersion collaboration last year. Do you think that influenced the new album?

BH: “Oh yeah, for sure. Working with them got us to recognise and appreciate two things that we probably had not explored as much until working with them. One of those would be melody, and the other would be rhythm. Two very simple things, but their solutions to that are different than ours. We appreciated that they were able to bring certain types of melody and rhythm to our tracks. The use of more sequencers and stuff in Counting Sunsets as well as not being afraid to use the occasional overt melody was definitely the side effect of our working with Colin and Malka.”

S13: I like the juxtapositions of SUSS. Going back to New York, and many wouldn’t think you were a band from there. Almost like your influences are outside of your immediate surroundings which is quite an unusual, fascinating thing…

BH: “It’s probably a little bit more complicated than that. We consider ourselves New Yorkers… all of us played at CBGBs. We all played at Max’s Kansas City. Pat was part of one of the most famous no-wave bands of all time with Lydia Lunch and 8-Eyed Spy, and then went on to be a member of the B-52s: one of the most famous new-wave bands of all time. Jonathan led The Lonesome Debonaires and was in so many great bands like The Lineman. I was in Rubber Rodeo, toured with about every new-wave band you can think of.

“That stuff informed a lot of the way we view making music. There’s an attitude there. It might not sound like no-wave or new-wave or jazz… Pat worked with worked with Philip Glass and studied under John Cage. Those things are just in there. I can point to exact places, and everything that is an echo of what we did as younger musicians 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago.

“I think the main takeaway is that it was our attitude for why we started it in the first place. Everyone that we just mentioned, it was not a commercial play from the beginning. It was just something that we felt had to be done. We weren’t even sure that we were going to release SUSS to the general world. It was just something that we wanted to do for each other. Then our wives heard it, and then they said, ‘Oh my god!’ When your wives say, ‘We like this, you should get it out in the world’, all of a sudden you start to listen’. You got to trust your wives.”

[Both laugh]

BH: “We definitely have a New York attitude about why and how we make music. Our music doesn’t sound like New York by a long shot. There’s definitely a film noir aspect to the sound that you could almost imagine in an old TV show. This is something that this is part of what you might call the political aspects of Counting Sunsets. You cannot divorce the fact of the music from the people making the music, and an age of the people making the music.

“Listening to Counting Sunsets, and everyone says the same thing. You can almost smell the experience that the collective group of the three of us have gone through. And that experience is not just musical, it’s media experience. Growing up watching TV in the ’50s and ’60s. It’s being there for the first wave of David Lynch films. Being there when Paris, Texas first came out, or when Brian Eno’s albums first came out. None of our peers can say that. They can say, ‘We love all of those things’. We know they liked them 20 or 30 years later than we did, because we’ve been living with this stuff for longer. We’re not bragging, it’s just a fact of life. So a lot of that stuff speaks for the fact that most of us have been in New York City for half a century.

“You soak it up over the course of [that time], and that’s why we still are very proud of calling ourselves a New York City band. Even though we’re all over the place all of the time, we really feel like our core DNA is out of that city. We never would have done this if it weren’t for New York City. It was the boiler that created what SUSS turned out to be.”

S13: Some artists say when they enter the creative process, certain aspects of it are out of their hands. With SUSS’ music, I feel that could be the case…

BH: “We don’t go into anything with a preconceived notion of where it’s supposed to end up. The best thing that I can say about SUSS from the very beginning – and definitely now as a trio – is that we listen to the music that’s being made by us and each other and let the music tell us where it wants to go. Now that could be a subconscious way of saying we’re listening to where it is that something’s telling us where we need to go. But we know that if we try to force any musical direction on something, it’s usually a fail. The music knows where it wants to go. We do best when we just follow it and let it take us to where it needs to be.”

S13: Did you ever envisage pedal steel having the renaissance that it has?

BH: “That’s a good question. Rubber Rodeo, the whole sound revolved around having a pedal steel as the lead instrument, so I always thought it was a cool instrument. But I have to say when SUSS got started, I figured the pedal steel was going to be just about as popular as it was back in the ’80s. Which is not too popular at all. (laughs) Because people have so many preconceived notions of what pedal steel means – bad country music and smarmy Americana – I think that one of our biggest surprises was as soon as SUSS came out, we found that there was a world of people exploring it as an experimental instrument. That’s sort of how the whole concept of my podcast came to be, because everyone thought that we’d invented a whole new genre of music. I was like, ‘Whoa, that is not true’.

“People have been crossing over experimental and ambient music and in country elements for a long time. Once again, going back to Ry Cooder or Bruce Langhorne or Brian Eno. And then BJ Cole was doing stuff, Chuck Johnson was doing stuff, and then Luke Schneider and Barry Walker. It just grew and grew and grew.

“With the podcast, I wanted to show people that this was not niche music or a sub-genre or a niche of a niche… that there’s a lot of people doing a lot of interesting stuff. Not only that, but these people do more than just listen to pedal steel music. These people are finding new ways. There’s some Miles Davis DNA in there, or how there’s some bluegrass DNA, or gamelan or John Cage DNA. And put this music into a larger perspective where people say, ‘Oh yeah, I get it, it’s just part of a bigger thing’. Once they hear not only the music, but the artists talking about the music, then a lot of doors start opening up for everybody.”

S13: Interesting…

BH: “I love the fact that that people are out there doing this, and it’s a very supportive community. I get dozens of submissions every week from acts all over the world doing a wide array of stuff. Some with vocals, mostly instrumental, but it’s really great. Going on the road and hearing what people will say, everybody has favourite new bands out there, and it’s fun. I love it.”

S13: You’ve released so much music over the years. Are you somebody who reflects on the past, or are you always looking towards working on the next thing?

BH: “To be honest, the fact that I mentioned the B-52s or Rubber Rodeo, that’s very rare for us. We usually don’t talk about where we came from. Though the DNA is there in the music, it’s probably not relevant. If we look back when we’re making music, whether it’s consciously or unconsciously, we want to make sure that whatever music we’re making as SUSS now is not just some reiteration of what we’ve done in the past. As the years goes on, it makes things more difficult, but it also makes it more fun for us. Because we want to make sure that with any great art or artist, you’re building on the past, but you’re not reproducing it.

“Your comment earlier about the differences between Birds & Beasts and Counting Sunsets. Now, you’d say, ‘Well, it’s still pedal steel, guitar, piano, electric mandolin and a little bit of synthesiser’. But it’s different. It’s not whatever successes we had with that album, or whatever successes we had with the Nanocluster album. We take some that and build on it, but we try not to reprise it.

“We’re easily bored and highly critical. We know when we’re covering ground that doesn’t need to be recovered, and that’s why I look forward. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but I got a feeling the next SUSS album is going to be a completely new step. As you said before, and a lot of people are saying the same thing, they feel like Counting Sunsets’ the capper on this first decade of our music. So what are you going to do after that capper? I don’t know, but we’re looking forward to it.”

Counting Sunsets is out now via Northern Spy Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.