September 21, 2007:  Atmosphere’s “Everybody Loves A Clown” tour rolls into Providence, Rhode Island, with openers Grayskul, Mac Lethal and Lucky.I.Am—and stowaway Ben “Grieves” Laub.  Ostensibly, Laub has joined the tour as the touring DJ for fellow Seattleites Grayskul, as their regular DJ is unable to leave the state due to pending legal issues. More accurately, Laub had been working at the studio where Grayskul was recording their album and when they asked to borrow his van, Laub insisted that they take him along for the tour. Though he stayed silent during Grayskul’s set at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, Laub was allowed a single guest verse with Mac Lethal.

Later, with Atmosphere on stage and Mac Lethal and Lucky.I.Am busily selling and signing CDs at the merch booth, Laub waited casually at the bar for show-goers to finish ordering drinks before he approached and meekly offered a five song sample of his upcoming debut, Irreversible. He wasn’t particularly successful in parting with the stack of CDs in his hands.

December 6, 2011: A few hours before his headlining set at the Middle East Downstairs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Laub is slouched on a couch in the trailer parked on a nearby side street. Shoeless and pawing aimlessly at his phone, Laub is hovering somewhere between content and exhausted. His partner/ guitarist/ keyboardist/ trumpeter/DJ Josh “Budo” Karp sits beside him in much the same state. A lot has changed for Laub in the last four years. He’s signed to vaunted indie rap label Rhymesayers, moved from Seattle to New York and back again, and released three albums—partnering with Budo for the most recent two—all while spending most of his time on tour. His allowance of a single verse has grown to a full headlining set—complete with a line of fans waiting for him at the merch table. Still, as he causally obliges each shy request for an autograph or photograph with him, it’s not hard to recognize the scrawny, wide-eyed kid passing out CDs at Lupo’s in 2007.

How’s the tour going so far?

Budo: It’s great man. We’ve never headlined out here, so it’s definitely kind of a science experiment. We weren’t really sure what to expect and I think that it’s been amazing—especially hitting major markets like New York, Boston and Burlington. We’ve had some smaller shows too, but all of our shows have had a good core group of folks that are really there to see us.

How does playing those smaller shows compare to the last few months of playing Warped Tour and opening for Atmosphere in Europe?

Greives: It’s a more personal thing. There’s not a barrier between you and the crowd. Unfortunately, sometimes you can hear people’s fucking conversations, which can get a little distracting. But it’s dope because you get to really relate to your audience when there’s a smaller crowd. There’s really no way around it. If you’re going to put on a good show with a smaller crowd, you should be right there with your audience.

B: Grieves has kept saying that these shows are like we’re in someone’s living room. It’s a really dope feeling. It’s a really different energy from playing Warped Tour or playing for 2500 people opening for Atmosphere at the House of Blues.

G: With those bigger shows, you just go. You don’t sit. You don’t banter. Especially when you’re doing a half hour opening set. When that half hour is up, the audience comes out being like, “What the fuck just happened to me?” With this tour, it’s a different experience. You get to bring people in and twist them around. You get to hang out.

B: It’s weird because looking out at 2500 people, there’s a mass thing. There’s an energy that happens whenever that many people in one place are focused on one thing that you can’t describe.

G: It’s easier to rock 2500 people than it is to rock 25 people.

Did you find that was still true when you on Warped Tour with crowds that weren’t necessarily there to see you?

B: In a perfect world, you walk on stage with the Goo Goo Dolls and their fans will love you. You want to think that you’re making good music and that people will respect your music, etc etc. But people that go to a show, especially a certain kind of show, have a criteria by which they judge what they’re watching and they might not be open to accepting new music. You have to be very careful. We’ve taken some chances. Warped Tour was a big risk for us. It could have gone awry.

G: We figured out how to make the Warped Tour go our way. We’ve dealt with crowds like that within rap too. We opened up for Wiz Khalifa and that was not good for us. It sucked. We came back from doing that saying that we would never do that again.

B: It hits your ego. It’s a tough thing to walk on stage and play your heart out and have a bunch kids just look at you blankly.

You’ve sort of touched on the fact that it’s been a hectic six months of Warped Tour and then Europe and then this headlining tour. Have there been any highlights?

G: Europe for me was the highlight and not just because it’s Europe. We went there with a lot of the dudes that I grew up listening to. It was really cool getting to hang out with all of them on a bus and hear them talk about stuff that’s like folklore to me. And that group of us never together in the same place for that long, let alone together in a different country.

B: And we probably never will be again. The thing about being in a different country is that no one really knows that many people. If you play a show with Brother Ali in Brooklyn, everyone has their own agenda, everyone knows people in town. There’s press, there’s family—all that kind of shit. In Europe, we were all just hanging out with each other.

G: We had a day off in France and we were staying just outside of Paris. A bunch of all just hopped on a train and figured out how to get into Paris. We all just walked around and took pictures of super touristy shit. We wouldn’t have done that anywhere else. We wouldn’t have all mobbed out like that and wandered around Milwaukee. I got to know those guys a lot more than you usually do on tour. Getting to actually do stuff together—especially on the road, where you never have time for that shit—was cool.

You guys have been on tour a lot, dating back to even before the album came out, did you guys take a break from touring to write and record the album?

G: We did the best that we could.

B: It’s been a long three years. A lot of the record happened during those little pieces of time between touring. It’s not like we asked for two weeks off to make music. When we would have two weeks off between tours, it was like we had to make music.

G: We took the summer of 2010 to chunk it out.

B: But it was something that we had to cram into the little bits of pieces of time. I think that the record reflects that—in a positive way, actually. Some of that frustration and “where is my life” is part of that record. It is that record in a lot of ways. I don’t think that would have happened if we had decided to go to Hawaii for a month and a half to do yoga and make a rap album. I’m not sure we’d ever want to make a record in the same way again, but for what this was, it was what it had to be. It turned out well, I think, so I’m grateful for that.

Is there anything that now, six months past the release date, you would go back and change about the album?

B: There are definitely things I think that we’d do differently when we make the next record, but as far as Together/Apart is concerned, it’s exactly what Together/Apart should be.

G: I would like to go back to the studio that we worked at to record the next one. I’d do different things. That was the first record that we put out on that level. Now we know a little more leading into, so we can be a little bit more professional this time around to make things easier on Rhymesayers. We can build our tours a little differently so we’re not running on fumes a lot—like right now.

What are your imminent plans for when this tour wraps up?

B: Sleep!

G: A huge break. You’re not going to see our name on any marquees or bills for a few months.

B: We’ve both been just going 100% and never really thought about stopping or needing to stop. Not that we’re going to take a hiatus, but I think we’ve both reached a point were we need a little break.

G: No one can look at us and tell us that we didn’t do what we needed to do for this record. We did it. It’s done.

B: And we’re not done with that process. We’re going to go back out on the road at the end of winter or in the spring.

G: But we worked this record. We worked the shit out of this record. We worked the shit out of ourselves. We earned this break. I’d like to do some personal travelling. I’d like to see Central and South America. Be somewhere because I want to be there and I’m interested in spending some time there. I’ve gotten to go to a lot of those places, I just didn’t get to spend any time there.

B: The closest thing was Europe, really, and even then, we were on tour.

G: Trying to find some time for yourself on tour is really tough, too. When you’re at home, you wake up, make some breakfast, watch an hour of television by yourself or read and no one’s bothering you. Tell me where you can go on a tour bus to be alone. So, during the day, everyone kind of walks off to do their own thing. And there’s other shit that you need to do—like laundry.

It sounds like you guys are coming to terms with the fact that it’s a job. For most people going to the show tonight, it’s what they do when they get out of work. For you, you’re at work.

B: That’s the irony of it. Our office is where people go when the leave the office.  It’s a cool thing, but it’s also something you need to keep in perspective. For a variety of reasons, you can end up turning your office into a site of debauchery and losing sight of the fact that this is a job. I think that’s where a lot of people can get derailed. This lifestyle can get dangerous if you don’t treat this like a job. You have to be able to live in a way that you can still do this in a week, that you can still do this in a year.

G: And you have to still like it, too. You have to find some space and time to still be in love with it.

B: I think for us right now, we need time to go make some stuff and gain some perspective and look at the parts that we do like. It’s like anything: when the things you love become routine, you stop loving it so much. You have to think about why you love it, and it’s becomes a logic thing instead of an emotion. It becomes smothering.  And that the end of the day, despite the fact that we both really want a break right now, this is still awesome. We wake up every day and do what we love. It’s the shit.