Bio

Singer-guitarist Brendan Bayliss had just landed in Los Angeles after a flight from Chicago, expecting to start a West Coast tour with Umphrey's McGee, when he found a text on his phone. It basically said, "You're going home." Keyboard player Joel Cummins, who lives in L.A., was in San Diego, squeezing in some golf before the shows when his phone lit up. And guitarist Jake Cinninger was at his home studio in Niles, Michigan—across the state line from the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, Umphrey's McGee's birthplace—about to leave for the airport when he got the news. It was March 2020—the first shock and whiplash of pandemic lockdown. After 22 years on the road and a dozen ambitious and eclectic studio albums, including the 2004 breakthrough Anchor Drops, 2009's prog-rock trip Mantis, and 2015's The London Session, recorded in a single day at Abbey Road, Umphrey's McGee—Bayliss, Cummins, Cinninger, bassist Ryan Stasik, drummer Kris Myers, and percussionist Andy Farag—were grounded until further notice.

Two years later, ‘I Don't Know What I Want”—power-chord pop with a ska-type jump, like the Specials with jangle—is the opening track on the best and most emotionally direct album Umphrey's McGee have ever made. Asking for a Friend is 14 songs of crisis and doubt, theirs and ours, that point forward again, made by a band that is best known for its live ritual—nightly spectacles of dynamic, collective improvising—but always goes into the studio with the same commitment. And never more so, Cummins believes, than now. “Those first three months felt like an eternity,” he says. But “there was a huge excitement and motivation when we got back together again. More than ever, we realized how much we needed each other and this music.” As Bayliss sings over Stasik's walking bass and the urgent groove in “Small Strides,” “I'm so tired of the run around/Everybody's all wired to burst.”

By June 2020, Umphrey's McGee was at Boondock, Cinninger's studio in Michigan, face to face for the first time since they got sent home, firing up the stage-ready rock in "Ordinary Times" and cutting live basic tracks for "I Don't Know What I Want" and "Fenced In," an elliptical whirl of topically-charged funk. Umphrey's McGee convened again in September 2020, this time in the Chicago warehouse where they stored their gear, recording new songs during the day and playing live-streamed shows at night for tour-starved fans. “It was three days,” Cummins says of Chicago, “but we got five or six tracks”—including "Work Sauce," the album's closing dilemma; “Is anything ever gonna be even just a little like it was before?”

“I don't think we have anything to prove anymore,” Cinninger contends. “It's just about revealing yourself and being the best songwriter possible. We were writing this music out of need, out of grief”—personal and universal—and getting great results.” To Cummins, Asking for a Friend “doesn't sound like any other album we've put out. We still have our feet planted in our old material. Every night is a different career-spanning set. But this new music feels like a shot in the arm. People who thought they knew what we were about will be surprised by what they find.”