Interview: Pigeons Playing Ping Pong talk Austin, Domefest and touring in 2025

Baltimore funk institution Pigeons Playing Ping Pong are a staying force in the world of jam bands. Rounded out by singer and guitarist Greg “Scrambled Greg” Ormont, bassist Ben Carrey, guitarist Jeremy Schon, and drummer Alex “Gator” Petropulos, the road warriors from Maryland aren’t accustomed to taking any time off since their inception 17 years ago. Ahead of their show at Mohawk on Friday, November 14 in the famed Red River Cultural District in downtown Austin, The Cosmic Clash caught up with Ormont and Carrey to discuss their storied career and thoughts about Austin’s vibe. 

The Cosmic Clash: This is the third time you guys have been in Austin since the pandemic. How do you feel about the city’s vibe now?

Greg: Austin is great. I really look forward to coming here. I just ate some really great food on our day off, and I’m all fueled up for tomorrow. There are certain cities whose reputations precede them. So when you go visit them, it’s typically on the money. For instance, we just had a great show in New Orleans at Tipitina’s, which is a famous spot with loads of energy packed into it. It delivered, and I have no doubt that Austin is going to be weird.

Ben: I love it. For our last show here, I got to check out Comedy Mothership and got to see Kill Tony and check out the mayhem on 6th Street. I’m glad I got to experience that at least once. It’s weird and wild, that’s the vibe I get from Austin.

TCC: Your live energy is legendary — how do you translate that into studio recordings without losing the jam-band magic?

Greg: I think it’s become more of a mental game than a physical game. We know how to play these songs, and we know the arrangements. It’s about keeping your mindset open in that energetic space. Especially when you’re in that sterile environment. You really have to rise above your setting and put yourself in that mental place where the songs originated and who they’re intended for. It’s about how you feel where you play them in those intended settings. I try to transport myself from the sterile to the live show. We’re the kind of band that appreciates feedback from a live audience, and we can reference it in the studio.

Ben: It’s also hard to write so many songs and then sit on them – when we write a song, and we just want to get it out there. The studio is a long process where you have to write it, review it, and then it takes a while with all the lead time and everything. We’ve been writing as much as ever and debuted three new songs this tour. We lay everything down live in the studio and overdub what we need to later.

Greg: Yeah, maybe more. We have our own festival (Domefest). We debuted a new song each night of the weekend.

TCC: Mohawk is one of Austin’s most legendary venues. What places back home hold that accolade?

Greg: Our old stomping ground is The 8 x 10. Amazing, smaller club that’s packed with energy. It literally has spring-loaded dancefloors. So everyone is bouncing together. You can feel that collective energy onstage, too. We’ve played there 49 times. So we’re due for one more. It’s a small spot, but we should go back and do one more because it would be very fitting. That’s actually where we started doing our themed shows. When we were younger and fresh out of college, we would do weekly residencies, where we would play every Wednesday for a month. To make it exciting and fresh, we started doing weekly themes. One year, one of the Wednesdays fell on July 4th. We decided that night that the theme would be red, white, and blue. As a result, we started digging up new cover ideas to play that week. It really pushed us musically and kept us from getting complacent. We have a lot of love for the 8 x 10; it’s like home for us.

Ben: Then of course there’s the 9:30 Club in DC. Legendary venue where Dave Grohl grew up playing, the smaller one before it became the bigger one, which is now the Atlantis.

TCC: I saw the Halloween show with Talking Heads and Radiohead. How do you guys decide on the theme and learn all those songs so you can play them in your own, special PPPP way?

Greg: I think what you said is important. We don’t just want to cover another band’s music; we want to make it our own. That’s the first hurdle that we need to clear before deciding to do a theme. Radiohead was a particular challenge because those songs are very specific. The songwriting is incredible, so once we start toying around with options, we feel like we could give it a swing. In doing so, it was like a masterclass in weird songwriting. It’s affected our songwriting moving forward. It’s one of our favorite by-products of doing these themes, like immersing yourself in someone else’s process. Then it becomes a part of your toolbox as well.

Ben: We start with more material than we end up using – To see what works with our sound. We get to whittle it down into what really works and have a good time doing it.

Greg: Especially on Halloween. We want to keep everyone on their toes from start to finish.

TCC: What’s the key to staying healthy through your long stints of touring? Lots of horror stories out there.

Greg: Rest. It is not a sprint. I prioritize my sleep over almost anything.

Ben: I did yoga on the bus the other day. At the very beginning of my session, we were still parking, so I had to hold onto the table for some of the poses. Then we got hotel gyms. I try to do it whenever we’re staying at a hotel. This part, I’m not as good at, is food intake. Especially after a show. You play a show, get all hyped up, put all that energy out, and then want to feed yourself. You can feed the fire, but you don’t want to feed the stomach too much.

Greg: Yeah, we’ve learned the hard way on how to stay healthy on the tour.

TCC: Which song from the new record evolved most from the original demo to what we hear live now? 

Greg: One that comes to mind is the song “Feed the Fire.” While it didn’t change tremendously, we had a demo that was most of the song, and for some reason, the four of us couldn’t sign off on it and be like, alright, let’s play it, and it’s done. We just didn’t have that in our gut. So it was a pretty well-formed idea sitting there, and we did something for the first time on this album: collaborating with someone outside the band in a bigger way. So, when we were off in Nashville, our guitarist, Jeremy Schoen, met up with Moon Taxi’s keyboardist, Wes Bailey, and showed him the demo. Wes immediately took to it and wrote the big peaking theme of the song, the main riff of the song that just started to get all of our wheels turning. From there, the song modulated to a key towards the end, which gave it a triumphant feel. At that point, we hadn’t had any lyrics, but once I heard the new melody, I immediately came up with all the vocals smoothly. Some songs are equipped to write, and they flow out of you, and other ones take some time, and you’re a little more precious with it, and you want to make sure it clicks, and then it’s interesting how even the ones that take a while, it just takes, like, one little tweak to it, and the floodgates open, and it races across the finish line. So that was really cool to experience. And then, of course, when it came time to record it, we invited Wes to play on it as well.

TCC: Do the songs get written for jams intentionally, or do you write songs to be played as jam vehicles and songs to be played as bangers that’ll never be jam vehicles?

Ben: It develops. We often write a song we know could fit into a jam, but we haven’t figured out where it might be yet, and we want to get the song out there. Examples, especially recently, one of our songs off our last album, “My Own Way.“ That was the last one. We played that song; it was a standalone for a while, and then Jeremy was like, “Oh, what if we just jam in the Lydian for a while, then bring it back to the 6’5, and then triumphantly return home?” That’s one example of where we played the song for a while and found a nice spot to let it explore itself. And now it’s a really fun jam vehicle that we have.

Greg: And then when we play that, we remember that history where this jam didn’t exist until we started talking about it and trying new things and experimenting. Then it feels like uncharted territory, and it’s so fun to explore. I remember our first jam in “My Own Way” was so fun. And it felt truly novel.

TCC: Who brings the most chaotic ideas into rehearsal — and who reins it in?

Greg: It’s funny, because it could be the same person. Our guitarist, Jeremy, has all sorts of crazy musical ideas that we all entertain. I’ll keep a bigger goal in mind, or all of us will. And then other times, if things are going a little off the rails, he’s the same person who will keep our eye on the prize of the musical integrity of the song. He’s not a slave to being in the right key or anything like that. We have numerous songs that modulate and push the boundaries of conventional music, but he also has a good grasp on the scope of the song, so it’s an interesting give and take with him. Where he wants to be exploratory, but he also has his strong opinions on how certain things should resolve or develop. So he plays both roles sometimes.

Ben: I will say that you recently brought in a crazy idea that became one of the songs that we debuted at Domefest, “Blue Light.” That started as a very interesting song and developed into something more debutable.

TCC: You guys put on your own festival, that’s hard nowadays in the current state of live music. How do you continue to stay positive in that process?

Greg: I think we never forgot that the first festival we attended, and that amazing sense of community, and how it contrasted with the rest of society in certain ways, or what you see on the news, or what you can get bogged down in, not in your regular reality. The escape that we got at festivals early on, and the friendships that were formed with the bands that we found, was an invaluable little ecosystem that we cherish, and to be able to give back to that community. No matter the current struggles that post-pandemic have presented, and those are very real. It’s a worthy hill to climb because when you can pull it off, we’ll see people get married at Domefest, we’ll have amazing collaborations with other artists on stage, and it really is a joyous event. So, I think there’s gonna be speed bumps in any industry, and the festival industry is at a tough point at the moment, but our last Domefest was, hands down, the best one yet, and we certainly intend to run it back and try to up the ante.

TCC: What is the most Pigeon-like thing about each of you?

Ben: Well, I’m im-peck-able. You throw yourself at the crowd.

Greg: The crowd are my breadcrumbs, and I’m hungry, baby.

TCC: What band member would win an actual ping pong tournament? 

Ben: We had a ping pong tournament at the Viva El Gonzo. Yeah, we’ve hosted numerous ping pong tournaments, and what’s funny is that when we started the band, we were doing it for fun. Our original drummer, after a few years in the van, was like, “Hey, guys, I don’t think I want to be in the van anymore,” so he very amicably left.

Greg: When we were on Jam Cruise, we hosted a ping pong tournament, and Jam Cruise was one of those goals back when he was in the band. So when we finally booked it, we invited Dan, our original drummer, to be our guest, and he played in the ping pong tournament with us, because he is a Pigeon who plays ping pong, and he won. So we brought a regular, and he beat everyone. I was talking to him an hour ago, and he used to live in Austin. We’ll see him next week.

Pigeons Playing Ping Pong’s eighth studio album Feed The Fire is out now. They continue touring through the end of the year, with Spring dates set for 2026. Tickets and other information can be found via the band’s website.

Featured photo by Jordan August courtesy of Pigeons Playing Ping Pong