Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Between them, musicians Jake Sherman and Abe Rounds have credits with Lizzo, Rick Rubin, Mark Ronson, Chance the Rapper, Rosalia and many, many more artists. They met in the band for Meshell Ndegeocello, and their duo Jake and Abe first took shape. Nearly a decade later, plus several singles and many other collaborations, they have final put their first release together, and it is titled Finally! Jake and Abe are here now and WNYC Studio 5 with me and they're going to play some songs. Welcome to WNYC.

Abe Rounds: Thank you so much for having us.

Jake Sherman: Yes, thanks.

Alison Stewart: What are we going to hear as our first song?

Jake Sherman: Good question.

Abe Rounds: We're going to play a tune called A Good Man Is Hard to Find.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear it.

[MUSIC - Jake and Abe: A Good Man Is Hard to Find]

A good man is hard to find

A good man is hard to find

A good man is hard to find

Woo

A good man is hard to find

No matter where you travel to

A good man is hard to find

From London to Australia

A good man will pass you by

No, no, no

Yeah, yeah, yeah

No, no, no

Yeah, yeah, yeah

A good man is hard to find

A good man is hard to find

A good man it's hard to find

Woo

Woo

A good man is hard to find

No matter when your fight gets in

He will pick you up on time

Oh, oh

Even if no deodorant

A good man will smell all right

Wow, smells good

No, no, no

Yeah, yeah, yeah

No, no, no

Yeah, yeah, yeah

A good man is hard to find

A good man is hard to find

A good man is hard to find

Woo

A good man is hard to find

If she makes a few mistakes

A good man will let it slide

But if she doesn't give consent

A good man will say goodnight

Good night

No, no, no

Yeah, yeah, yeah

No, no, no

Yeah, yeah, yeah

No, no, no

Yeah, yeah, yeah

A good president hard to find

A good president hard to find

A good president hard to find

Woo

A good president hard to find

Keep going, president

Alison Stewart: That was the latest from Jake and Abe, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. I have to say, you aren't wearing shoes when you're playing the piano, Jake.

Jake Sherman: Nope. Yes, I like to play with my toes, so I do it that way.

Alison Stewart: Always?

Jake Sherman: Yes, I always take my shoes off. It feels more like I'm at home instead of doing something that has pressure.

Alison Stewart: Okay. No pressure. No pressure at all.

Jake Sherman: Exactly. My shoes are off.

Alison Stewart: You guys first met in Meshell Ndegeocello's band in 2016. First of all, Abe, how did you all end up in that band?

Abe Rounds: Good question. I'm from Australia, and I moved to America, and I moved to Boston to go to Berklee College of Music when I was 20. Long story short, I met Meshell on a master class in Berkeley, and she asked me to join her band when I was still at school. It was an amazing, serendipitous opportunity. Yes, we became very fast, close friends, and collaborators. I've been in her band since 2014.

Alison Stewart: My niece lives near Berkeley, and so I'm picturing a Berkeley student just rolling up to class, and Meshell Ndegeocello just asked you to be in her band. What were you thinking?

Abe Rounds: Yes, I mean, it was-- Yes, I couldn't believe it at the time. I didn't believe her, and then she was very true to her word.

Alison Stewart: Jake, when did you two realize, "Oh, we share something. We can communicate"?

Jake Sherman: Yes. We met a couple of years later. I was asked to play in Meshell's James Baldwin band, which was a different band than the one Abe was in, but Abe was in that also. I met him there in 2016. Yes, basically, in the first rehearsal, we knew. We started being friends, and that was that.

Alison Stewart: It started as a friendship, really.

Jake Sherman: Yes, but it was intertwined with music at all times.

Abe Rounds: Yes. I was a fan of Jake's music, his solo music, and I told him that in the first rehearsal. He was like, "I love your song, let's be friends." He was like, "Oh, let me show you how to play it." I was like, "Well, that's very giving." That's beautiful. Yes, then we just started making music together, and we're like, "Well, let's make a band."

Jake Sherman: Yes, we wrote a song pretty, like, maybe two days later, and that was the beginning.

Alison Stewart: Do you remember what the song was?

Jake Sherman: It's called Don't Hold. It's that one, right?

Abe Rounds: Yes.

Jake Sherman: Which we've never put out, and we may never put it out.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles] It's okay. There's a first thing for everybody. I understand that Meshell actually came up with the name Finally.

Abe Rounds: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Is that true?

Jake Sherman: Yep.

Alison Stewart: Why do you think it was the right fit?

Jake Sherman: Because she said it. She always knows.

Alison Stewart: Why do you think it was the right fit, Abe?

Abe Rounds: I think it was just-- it's been kind of a running joke, like seven years, we've been making this music on and off, and we've been playing mixes and re-recording things and finding the time to get it together and doing it. When we asked Meshell what should we call it, she was like, "Well, finally." I guess that's it.

Jake Sherman: It was like a mic drop sort of.

Abe Rounds: Answer with an exclamation point.

Jake Sherman: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Exactly. It's like, finally, of course. You obviously have worked on a million different-- Well, many different records. How did you find time, Jake, to find time for just the two of you in your recording?

Jake Sherman: Well, it's something you have to prioritize. I just believe in it and believe in working with Abe, and I love what we have, so there's always going to be time if you want there to be.

Alison Stewart: Did you work together in the same room? Did you work remotely? How did it work?

Abe Rounds: I live in Los Angeles. Jake lives in New York. We've done a lot of voice memos and sending of files over the Internet, and then we'll get together for these periods of a week and try and record as much as we can. A lot of it has been over the Internet.

Jake Sherman: Yes. Lately, we've been doing a lot of prep work with voice memos and getting the songs as close to trying to understand how they should feel. Then when we get together, we have a week to do as much as we can together.

Alison Stewart: My guests are Jake and Abe. Jake Sherman and Abe Rounds. We're talking about their album Finally!. They're also performing live. Because you've been in backing bands for different groups and as session musicians yourself, Abe, how important it was you to have a good session band behind you on this record?

Abe Rounds: I guess in some way, we were our own session band for this record. I mean, we were very lucky to have some friends join us, like Pino Palladino played the bass on one track. Chris Bruce plays a guitar on another track. Most of it was done-- we're on a low budget, you know, so it's just the two of us in this economy, and we enjoy-- We play a lot of different instruments ourselves, so we like to explore that challenge and sort of the limitation that brings.

Jake Sherman: Yes.

Alison Stewart: What makes a good band for you?

Abe Rounds: People who are listening to the song and the lyrics and trying to support those without ego?

Alison Stewart: You're going to play another song for us, what are you going to play?

Abe Rounds: Yes, we'll play Curbs. This is called Curbs.

[MUSIC - Jake and Abe: Curbs]

At the edge of the sidewalk

Contemplating where to step

Dangers looming on the asphalt

Is this a decision you will regret

Curbs, curbs, curbs, curbs

Do you jaywalk or use the crossing?

All these answers can be found within

There comes a time when you'll discover

Where one street ends, another begins

Unwrap it [unintelligible 00:11:22]

Don't let the curbs get in your way

You'll find some type of hurdle every day

Up to your neck in the water

In the backseat of a sedan

That's when your spirit hardens

Try to escape there's still a chance

Unwrap it [unintelligible 00:12:19]

Don't let the curbs get in your way

Hey, a rabbit or a turtle?

Don't let the curbs get in your way

You find some type of hurdle every day

Jake Sherman: A little bass by Abe Rounds.

[singing]

Don't let the curbs get in your way

Don't let the curbs get in your way

Don't let the curbs get in your way

Don't let the curbs get in your way

Alison Stewart: That was Jake and Abe, and it's Curbs from their new album Finally! We'll have more after a quick break. This is All Of It. You are listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guests are Jake Sherman and Abe Rounds. They're here to treat us to their new album. It's called Finally! It's their debut. It's exciting. When you decided to be in front of the mic to actually be the vocalist, first of all, what went through your mind when you realized, "Oh, we might have to sing these songs for other people to hear them"?

Jake Sherman: Right. I have a solo project, so I've been doing this for some time, but it's still always scary and crazy to me that I'm in front of a mic singing. I consider myself a pianist or keyboardist, and it's been a long journey to learn how to sing. I'm just at the ground floor, I feel like.

Alison Stewart: How about for you, Abe?

Abe Rounds: Yes, I feel similarly. I'm a drummer, percussionist first. I have to thank Meshell for allowing me the platform to find my voice, and also Jake, too. I feel like I've always sung, but it's just been really interesting to find my voice. It's challenging because it's not my first instinct that I've done my whole life. Yes, I'm enjoying finding my voice and learning about it. It's the realest instrument.

Jake Sherman: Yes. People can really tell immediately versus if you're playing anything else. You can fake it.

Alison Stewart: What impresses you about Abe as a vocalist?

Jake Sherman: Well, let's see. His falsetto has always impressed me from the beginning and his effortlessness.

Abe Rounds: Thank you.

Alison Stewart: That's nice. Thank you very much on behalf. Atwood Magazine did a really nice preview of you guys and a review of you guys. It was really interesting because they told you said, "We treated each song as its own complete world, not worrying about how they would fit together on this record." How did that affect, Abe, the way you wrote?

Abe Rounds: Interesting. Yes. I don't think we ever wrote thinking like, "Oh, we're going to sequence and make an album, and it's going to have a whole cohesive thing." We were just trying to write the best song for whatever tune we were writing and produce it in a way that just felt right for the song. I don't think we were trying to-- I guess the cohesive thread is just us, and we were just trusting that it would work together as a sound. We weren't thinking too much about the overall. We're just trying to make the best sounding song that we could.

Jake Sherman: It's too hard to think of the whole picture. I get bogged down by that. I find that it can take away from the moment, what you're really trying to make the song.

Alison Stewart: When did you realize, though, that there might be an album in this? All of the songwriting that we're doing together?

Jake Sherman: I remember a time when Abe played me them all in a row. We were driving together and he put them all on in a row and we realized, like, "Whoa, that's long enough to be an album, and it's good. I like it."

Abe Rounds: Yes.

Alison Stewart: When did you realize for yourself when you thought, "Oh, this could be an album"?

Abe Rounds: Yes, I think when we had about 12 songs or so and we were like, "You know what? Yes, this is enough for a recording, for an album."

Alison Stewart: Once you realized, "Okay, we're going to put this together as a record," what kind of edits did you make or changes did you make to the songs when you realized, "Okay, this is going to be one cohesive unit"?

Jake Sherman: Well, I remember almost all of the songs have a fade-out. We were trying to figure out how to not just have this sort of stop-start feeling in the album, which usually the edits were making the fades shorter so that the songs would slam into each other almost. That was mainly Abe's domain figuring that out.

Abe Rounds: Then I remember us listening to a lot of old recordings, like Motown tunes, '60s, a lot of them have really fast fades.

Jake Sherman: Yes.

Alison Stewart: They just go--

Abe Rounds: They just like-- the chorus would just dance and we're loving and it just like fades.

Jake Sherman: Some other guy came in and turns this down.

Abe Rounds: After we did all that work, we were like, "Oh, maybe the fades aren't too bad," but--

Jake Sherman: Right, right.

Abe Rounds: It's more the long fade. Aa few of them, sort of another song starts as the other one's fading. Yes, those were the main edits.

Alison Stewart: I want you to explain this description that you settled on a double-tracked lead vocal combined with vocoder, for someone who's not in the business. What does that mean?

Abe Rounds: Double track means two at the same time. I sang the lead vocal and then sang it again. Put them on top of each other. It's like a sound that you would recognize with like John Lennon and Beatles recordings and stuff, that's my reference, anyway. Then vocoder is sort of a robotic machine that-- How would you describe that? It sounds like a robot singing.

Jake Sherman: Kind of like Zapp. Zapp and Roger.

Abe Rounds: Yes, that sounds good.

Alison Stewart: How did you come to that sound? That's a pretty--

Jake Sherman: Vocoder thing that I've messed with a lot that I enjoy.

Abe Rounds: Yes, we were searching for how the lead vocal should sound on this song, and we tried a bunch of things.

Jake Sherman: It's actually the song we just played that we're talking about.

Abe Rounds: Curbs. We tried putting the vocals through different speakers. We put it through a Leslie speaker, which is a thing that organ usually goes through that spins. That didn't end up being it, but when we found the double-tracked plus vocoder, it felt aligned.

Alison Stewart: Is that the last song on the album? Did I remember that correctly?

Abe Rounds: I don't think so.

Alison Stewart: No, I didn't-- Okay, never mind. The last one I listened to before it came in. My guests are Jake Sherman and Abe Rounds, and my friends. We're talking about their new album, Finally! There's a sort of a funny-- Well, I don't know if bluntness is the right word, sort of a cheekiness to your lyrics a little bit. One of them that was funny is-- it's an acquired taste. Just like an oyster saltiness. We hear a little something in that first song a little bit. Do you imagine people sort of getting chuckling as they're listening to your music?

Jake Sherman: Interesting. I think, yes. We toy the line with levity on these tunes. I think that we like to make each other laugh. We're just like, "Funny rascals." I think that that that finds its way into the music. I think a lot of people have come up to us on shows. We've been playing in Europe, opening for Meshell, and they've been like, "You kind of like Flight of the Conchords."

Alison Stewart: Oh, I love the Flight of the Concords.

Abe Rounds: Yes, which is an interesting reference. We were never going for that, but I think some of these tunes have a sort of a dry thing that's going on.

Alison Stewart: Aussies Kiss. Last song. I just quoted from that one, it's your last song. All right. The next song we're going to hear is actually, it's not on the album.

Abe Rounds: That's right.

Alison Stewart: It's called It's Easy. Where does this song come from?

Jake Sherman: This song we wrote a while ago. This was part of our EP that came out a few years before, and--

Abe Rounds: We wrote it in Brooklyn.

Jake Sherman: I wrote the verse to the song because of piano voicing that I found, and then I knew that the verse was good, and I called Abe, who was in Texas at a festival, and I said, "Here's how the verse goes. Then what happens?" He sang it from the bathroom. He sang into the phone how the B section went, and it was spot on. We wrote it from there.

Alison Stewart: Writing of the song, did it overlap with writing for the album? Or is it just something that's special?

Jake Sherman: It just came before, and it's one of our favorites.

Alison Stewart: The name of the album is Finally! It's from Jake Sherman and Abe Rounds, otherwise known as Jake and Abe. It is their debut. All right, let's hear it.

Abe Rounds: Thank you so much.

Jake Sherman: Yes. Thanks for having us.

Alison Stewart: Sure, of course.

[MUSIC - Jake and Abe: It's Easy]

Take a moment to greet the day

Everything is going a-ok

Its not often that I can say

It's easy

Take a deep breath inhale the air

Let it out again without a care

Run around and feel the wind in my hair

It's easy

Perfect flip of an egg, perfect dunk in the net

It's a song in my head that I couldn't forget

A sunset at the beach, an impeccable spliff

It's where I wanna be

It's always like this when I'm with you

Couldn't change it if I wanted to

Every moment feels brand new

It's easy

Get a running start, jump into the clouds

Fill my lungs and yell your name out loud

WNYC

Don't know the last time I was this proud

It's easy

It's an ace in the hole, it's a dip in the stream

It's like getting home drunk and your bedroom is clean

It's like taking a bath, it's like drifting to sleep

So effortless I can't believe

Perfect toss of the fris, not a cloud in the sky

It's like winning a game and not having to try

It's like making smores, it's like telling the truth

It's where I wanna be

Never been this easy

It's so easy

It's so easy

It's so easy

It's so easy

It's so easy

It's so easy

It's so easy

It's so easy