Statement About The Complex

The Complex is our first full-fledged entry into the world of rock music. We wanted to take everything we’ve learned and invented over the past ten years and apply it to this medium in a uniquely Blue Man way. So you’ll hear our signature sounds, such as the Tube instruments, the giant walls of percussion, and all of our other invented instruments, but you’ll also hear some more familiar trappings of today’s music: thrashing guitars, verse/chorus/ bridge song structure, scratching, and in addition, a variety of guest vocalists. We were hoping to end up with a fresh approach, a Blue Man Group twist to the medium of rock and roll.

We’ve always been interested in the mysterious gestalt that can emerge in a successful collaborative process. This interest has been central to the way we work together and the way we view the Blue Man. We tried to capture this idea on the album cover. This is why it was particularly satisfying to collaborate with so many interesting guest artists on this record. Our goal in working with them was to create music that pushed everyone involved into new artistic territory. The idea was that you could hear Dave Matthews singing in a style he’s never sung before, or hear turntablist Rob Swift scratch in a way he never has with the X-ecutioners. Dan the Automator was attracted to working with us because our music is so different from the style he’s used to working with, and his unique perspective definitely emboldened us to try things we never had before. In our view, the whole point of collaboration is to create a special alchemy that catapults the work into an unpredictable new place.

Another thing that was new for us on this album was writing songs with lyrics. Many people familiar with our non-verbal character have trouble imagining Blue Man Group songs with vocals. The trick was to have all of the words come from the point of view of people out in the urban complex, not from the Blue Man. We felt that working with lyrics would give us a chance to explore and express some of the themes that have been a part of our work from the beginning, but have lurked below the surface. Some of these themes have to do with the isolation and the lack of primal connection in the modern urban landscape, or the mind-numbing effects of information overload. But perhaps the most pervasive through-line on the album involves “the cultural mask.” We’ve always been interested in exploring the price we all pay for creating the “personas” that we live behind in order to get accepted into the giant cultural ant-hill. We believe that on a fundamental level, the purpose of art is to get beneath the mask and perhaps, help remove it. On this album, we decided to lift up our own masks and expose the essence of our work a bit more than we have in the past.

Throughout the entire process of making this record, we worked on a rock show to go along with it. We found that this not only gave us more time to develop the live show properly, it also influenced our songwriting process in ways we couldn’t have predicted. It was fun writing songs with the rock concert ritual in mind. So now we have a new album and a new show, and together, they make up this new body of work that we call “The Complex.” In some ways it’s a new direction for us, but at the same time, it’s where we’ve been all along.