Worrying About The Next Generation

We are the last generations to be born into a world without modern communication technology.

Our children are the first to come out of the womb knowing how to swipe right on an iPhone and take a selfie. So how do we know how to teach our kids right from wrong when it comes to technology if we ourselves were never taught? "Oh boy, I've never really thought about it like that, we're just going to totally screw it all up! Then maybe our kids will be able to teach our grandkids how to do it better," laughs a concerned Gabe Witcher, who is facing this battle with his two-year-old son. "From birth it's the thing that they do, like, this is not amazing technology to you… My son knows how to swipe on a phone, he knows who Siri is — it's really cute 'cuz he'll go 'Siri, pictures of sea turtles please!… But gosh, it's so frightening. Like, what is he going to be subject to?"

For Witcher and his fellow Punch Brothers bandmates, technology's impact on communication and their families takes number one priority. It's a theme that ties together their fourth record The Phosphorescent Blues. "Especially us who travel so much… we have the ability to be constantly connected to each other in a lot of ways… Every day I'm gone, it breaks my heart to have to leave [my son] to go on the road, but at least now we can FaceTime. If he wants to talk to daddy he can call any time... But there's another side to it where it's really easy to — in a quest to stay connected to every one and everything around you — to become quite disconnected from your immediate reality. End up living in this virtual space that you create for yourself that can actually be devoid of real personal connection," Witcher explains.

His concerns about technology extend from interpersonal break down to the negative impact on the overall quality of musicians and their performances — "Oh yeah, don't get me started… You don't have to be at your peak while you're recording to get the absolute best performance that you have in you. Now you can do a pretty good job and fix it up later… What I'm hearing now is a diminishing of performance, we're so enamoured with this technology that that's all I hear now — I'm not hearing the performance, I'm not hearing the humanity coming out of the artist, I'm hearing the technology. It's a really dangerous place to be in… We've lost the other side [of perfection], which is a thing call 'feel'" he laughs. 

While conceptual focus unifies the Punch Brothers sound, you couldn't categorise them by genre if you tried. "We all kinda think genre is kinda a fabrication that is used to help people talk about music. We always say that there's more in common between, say, the greatest symphony ever written and the greatest tango ever written than there is between the greatest tango ever written and the worst tango ever written," Witcher illustrates. "When you break it down, all music is built upon the same basic elements… I think now when people talk about genre, they're mostly delineating different pieces of music by orchestration, you know?"