Steve Christensen, Khruangbin’s longtime producer, explained it to me like this: Just about every day, he gets hit up on Instagram by folks asking how to achieve a particular Khruangbin sound. He responds, keeping no secrets, readily giving away everything, because Ochoa, Johnson and Speer have used pretty much the exact same setup for well over a decade now. Their gear and their instruments are simple and straightforward to the point of being borderline ascetic. (Ochoa, for example, has not changed the strings on her bass since 2010, when the group first formed.) When people write back to Christensen, which they often do, they will tell him that they now have all the same gear, and have learned all the songs perfectly, and still cannot get quite the same sound. “Well, I’m sorry,” he tells them, “but that’s just how they play.” Someone might copy Speer’s rig down to the last knob setting, and play his guitar melodies note for note, but without Ochoa and Johnson playing, too, the Khruangbin sound cannot be duplicated. “I know it sounds so simple,” Christensen says, “but if they’re not playing as a trio, it just doesn’t sound like KB.”
Questlove — the producer, documentary filmmaker, author and longtime bandleader of the Roots — is someone who has thought quite a bit about this quality in music, the ineffable alchemy that can occur when certain musicians join together. When he first saw Khruangbin, he was grabbed by not just the way they played, but also by their extreme level of togetherness. “They are so well gelled,” is how he described it. This quality, he went on, was a very rare thing, particularly in a trio. “Think of the Police,” he said. “Like, it’s so hard to do that. Musically speaking, you have to check your ego at the door and just trust that someone completely gets you.” And the Police were plagued enough by bickering to disband after about eight years — Khruangbin has, so far, been together for about 14.
After he first saw Khruangbin perform, Questlove reached out to the group. He was enamored with their sound, he told me, and wanted to find a way to help them preserve it. “They have magic — I don’t want them to ever lose that. You know what I mean?” I had to admit that, while I sort of understood, I had also never been a member of a wildly popular band: How did one lose the magic? That was easy, Questlove said: By not checking your ego. By having “one person stand like, ‘Oh, look at me, look at me.’” This was especially difficult to avoid, he said, because musicianship, like so much else these days, was increasingly focused on the individual. So how did Khruangbin gel so well, and stay well gelled?
Speer and Johnson first met in 2004, when the Houston keyboard hero Cleo Sample, who has toured with D’Angelo, pointed Speer out to Johnson, saying, “That white boy, he’s amazing.” Both musicians were gigging heavily in Houston: Johnson played in funk and jazz combos when he wasn’t playing organ in church, while Speer played with just about anyone, from ska, hip-hop and rockabilly to zydeco and R.&B. He was, Johnson says, “like a Swiss Army utility knife that can do it all.” Speer often felt as if he were the only guy in town moving among all these different scenes, and he took pride in trying to make musical connections among them. He played guitar with Solange Knowles, back when she was performing as Solo Star, and remembers asking: “Solo, have you listened to the Flaming Lips?”
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