Better a Neighbor Than a Far Away Relative: An Interview with Neighbor

Let’s kick off with the biggest thing that happened to the band this year — Lyle Brewer, a founding member of the band, is no longer part of Neighbor. 

Everybody has their own needs. Lyle’s needs were to focus on his own solo career and family. He was having his third child and it’s a lot to be on the road and he also has a quartet. For us, obviously it was tough to see Lyle go. It was him and I, from the start. We wrote a lot of music together, and it was great. To have him for those six years, it was a blessing. At the last show at The Cabot Theater that we played together he came up to me and said, “Thanks the call in 2019. I wasn’t sure if I was ever gonna play electric guitar again, and this has been a lot of fun.”

It was just wonderful to have him, to have all those recordings with him, and to be able to write all the music with him. It’s a really great part of our history as a group. I’m very thankful growing up next to Lyle, and watching him progress as a player, as a person, and later on in life as a great father, husband, and bandmate. It was a really exciting time. I think I can speak for everybody else [and say] we all had a great time playing with Lyle. It was a lot of fun, we all learned a lot as musicians, as players.

So Rob Compa from Dopapod, comes in. Walk me through the decision of why Rob was the guy. You just very, very passionately and very, very beautifully spoke about your friend who’s no longer the band. So you had to fill those shoes. What is it about Rob that made you say this is the guy?

It’s easy to answer, and it’s hard to answer. The beautiful thing about Rob as a player, and as a person is that he’s spent the last 20 years in a van, working his butt off, understanding what it takes to be a touring musician. He’s a friend of ours. We’ve played together, in different bands, and he’s joined our drummer Ducks in Club D’elf, and my band back in the day, Richard James Band. We used to play with Dopapod, and then Neighbor and Dopapod would share bills and festivals.

When Lyle was having his second child and we were on the road — Rob was our first call. I think he was our first call because of the nature of what Neighbor is. The music, the composed parts, the compositions, and the lyrics are what comes first. The jamming is tertiary to all that. I think that over the years our band has evolved into exploring more improvisation and taking those songs that have been played over and over again, and doing something different with them each and every time we played them on stage.

With Rob, he’s a very deep improviser. He likes to leave the reservation, and just see what happens. We all really enjoyed doing that and exploring with him as a player. He’s very creative. The way that he uses effects and what he does musically, melodically on his instrument is unique. His approach is unique, it’s fun, it’s fresh, it’s exciting for us on stage. It’s wonderful when the ball gets passed over to Rob; it’s his turn to kind of challenge us musically. Just getting to explore, as a new quartet in that way, was exciting. It was exciting for us, and it has been really exciting over this past year or so.

Playing with Rob is different than playing with Lyle. With Lyle, we would do more, classic country stuff, and put our own spin on it. Lyle is deeply rooted in that genre. With Rob, it’s more of the digging in, the rock stuff, which is … is a whole other animal. What’s also cool with Rob is he can cop a lot of that stuff that Lyle was doing. It’s fun to try to go back and cover some of those same tunes that we covered with Lyle. It’s a little bit different, but it’s just different because Rob’s not wild, but because Rob is Rob, and it’s exciting in a different way.

It’s been a minute since you’ve put out a new full-length record. Now, with Rob in the fold, it’s just been almost a year since he’s been there. Is there a lot of excitement to get back into the studio to do a new Neighbor record?

We just did a two-week tour. We went down south, then to Pennsylvania, and then Charlottesville, Raleigh, Asheville. Then we scooted over to Nashville for two days, and we recorded our second record.

That’s awesome.

That was really fun, you know, just in the middle of the tour we’re all oiled up … well-oiled, oiled up, well-oiled, greased? I don’t know what the word… anyways (laughs).

We had two days, and we had a lot of music. We didn’t want to try to kill ourselves doing our whole entire rock odyssey where you’re trying to do something wild in two days. We figured, “Okay, what are the songs that we’re enjoying playing at this moment in our career and time here, and what songs are sounding good, and what’s Rob comfortable on?” We chose eight songs, and we had this great audio engineer, Matty Algier, at the studio called The Cabin in Nashville. He was great. He blasted us through eight tunes, and was very efficient in the studio.

I really enjoyed the last album. How will this new album differ lyrically, and musically from the previous album?

I think that the lyrics are something with Neighbor, specifically, that resonate with our fans. As a singer and somebody who writes the lyrics, I pay attention to the crowd a lot. [I look] to see people singing along — either having heartfelt moments in a ballad, or just rocking out and losing it singing along. I think that that’s an important thing. I think in the jam band world that aspect can get lost. We’ve been coined by the music world as a jam band, and I understand that. We’ve played one-song sets three or four times, or five times, or something in our history as a band. Not a lot of non-jam bands do…

Outside of Dream Theater.

I do think that that’s an important aspect of our music, and I think that that is what sets us apart in the jam band scene. The music and lyrics come first. I think that with Rob, there is a little bit more of an exploratory aspect, but I also think that it’s necessarily by design. It’s more in the fact that, we are four guys who have been doing our thing in different bands. What we’re doing is just feeling each other out here. It’s exciting to do that, so we get excited to get on stage and to speak to each other with our instruments.

I’ve never heard anyone say that before and that is the perfect summation of a jam. Speaking of jamming, I’ve talked to so many artists within the nebulous genre of jam about the creation of new music. When speaking with The Wood Brothers they said they create new songs in the studio and then retool it for the live audience. Meanwhile, in my interview with Daniel Donato he said they road test new songs extensively, and then they go into the studio and try to capture the moment. How does Neighbor do it?

We let the song be what it is through who we are as individual musicians. So, 90% of the time I’ll come to the table with the guys, and I’ll say, ‘Okay, look, I got these bones for a tune. I have lyrics, I have changes, I have a hook, I have verses, I have a bridge. It needs skin, and it needs blood, and it needs… a hairy back.” I feel with our music, even though I write the majority of the music, it’s more important for the people that I’m playing music with to feel like it’s also theirs. Even if I write the music and the lyrics for a tune, the guys who give it the blood and the skin and the hairy back they get a percentage of songwriting as well. That eliminates a lot of potential aggravation down the road and I would feel the same way if I was there and helped craft a tune. So we came up with something that was fair, and that everybody felt comfortable with. I think with that mentality moving forward also makes people want to try to write songs and try to get a little bit of skin in the game in the songwriting department.

I just got an email from Fox Sports saying that they wanted one of our tunes. I don’t know whether it’s for football, or for something else but, that’s exciting. You don’t really necessarily think about it, when you’re writing a tune, like “Hey, this song could be played after the New Orleans Saints score a touchdown” or it goes into a commercial place. I never really thought about it that way when writing it’s cool. Everybody gives their own who they are as a musician to a tune and it becomes what it is, and I think it becomes the four of us, which is cool.

You mentioned the fans before, and, you know, you guys refer to them as “neighbors.” I found there’s this whole site dedicated to you called NeighborTunes.Net, where it’s just the the documentation of your set lists and information and news about the band. Talk about the community that has been built and fostered of fans of yours, and how much they’ve meant to the band in general, outside of just buying tickets to see the show.

That’s an important part of it [buying tickets], but it’s not nearly as important as just the connection. When you make a connection with a fan, I feel like it’s not just ticket sales, it’s not an album sale — it’s a personal connection. It’s cool because not only do we get to meet all these folks, and interact with these folks and share our favorite shows — we encourage our fans to write to us. We try to have a personal connection, sending out live shows, sending out songs, helping people explore Neighbor. If we see somebody on a thread saying, like, “Hey, what’s this band all about? I’m new to this.” I’ll send a personal note just saying, “Hey, this is Rick, you know, I saw your message. You know, there’s a lot of music, it can be hard to know where to start, but, what kind of stuff are you into?”

And they’ll say, “Oh, I like moe. and I like the Grateful Dead,” or somebody will say something else. I’ll take a peek, because I have a whole archive of everything, and I’ll pick five shows that I think that they’d like, because our music isn’t just one genre, it’ a little bit of everything. Or I’ll suggest some stuff on Bandcamp. I was in Peoria, Illinois, and there was this fellow who came out and he was like, “Hey, Rick, it’s me!” I was like, “Oh, hey!” I had no idea. He was like, “We talked about this date and this show online, and you sent me all these shows and soundboards so I dropped what I was doing, and I’m gonna do the whole entire second leg of the tour, it’s awesome!” He was like, “You know, Phish is my wife, but, Neighbor’s my dirty mistress. I love you guys. You’re always keeping me on my toes, the setlist.”

So, I got to meet that guy, and he’d show up in the same city early, and he’d come and talk about the music, and just about the show or the prior show that night. It’s that kind of connection that’s cool — getting to meet the people who are ingesting and dissecting and really digging into what you’re doing musically, and have questions for all the guys in the band and that’s  what it’s all about.

Music is important. The lyrics are a way for me to express myself and get out of my own head, and be able to cope with things And for someone else it [why they like it] may be for the same exact reasons why I wrote that song. But, it also could be for something completely different. To get to communicate and talk to these people and have them tell me why it’s important to them it gives me a whole new side of a song, and appreciation for what it is … not only what the connection between me and the guys in the van, and the fans. You can’t do that to everybody, but the people who decide to take a deep dive, we’re more than willing to reach out and say, hey, “Here’s a cool show. You know, check this out.”

The core fan base of Neighbor is what really drove us, you know, through the hard times. They really, they kept us going, kept showing up, kept streaming shows. Kept pushing us through COVID, and just exciting [doing] marketing stuff, like flying airplanes with banners, saying, “Go see Neighbor!” and having our backs and spreading the word. Those fans will forever be with us, and we hope that they always stick with us, because it’s a long and winding road. It’s not always going to be great, that’s just life. We hope that in the tough times, we can be there for you. In the good times, we can be there for you, as a band. We just want to be able to give our fans a two or three hour getaway from everyday life and just be able to enjoy themselves. like…

How do you feel about just looking back at 2025, outside of the band change, but as a touring band, and you toured a lot, talk about this year and how you felt it went.

It’s been a challenge. It’s been a challenge for me as far as writing. I think our main goal is always to write new stuff, but with a catalog of so much music we wanted to focus on Rob being able to own all the stuff that our core fans and everybody is used to hearing. And not trying to do it in a way that we did it with Lyle, but doing it in a new way, so Rob could be Rob. I think a lot of that has been me having to take a step back with writing and saying here’s more. I’m used to writing a lot. The first year, 2019, I think we wrote 60-some-odd songs or something like that. It grows every year if you look at our neighborTunes.net page with our songs, and all the tunes that we’ve covered there’s hundreds of songs. That’s a tall order for a guitar player who’s coming into a band like this, where not every song is just verse chorus, verse, bridge, chorus, verse, chorus, chorus. There’s a lot of complicated, composed sections. There’s stuff that he had to focus on and get under his fingers, but what’s amazing is that Rob was so quick with that stuff. He was able to blast through 40 or 50 tunes.

I’d be writing the set list for that night and I’ll be like, “Hey, did you check out this?” And he’ll be like, yeah, I know that one. I’ll be like, oh my god. I forgot that  there’s songs that I forget he even knows that so he’s doing his part, and now as the new year is coming I’d like to try to focus on writing new music collectively, because I think he has a really good grasp of the core group of original songs, that are in pretty constant rotation. There’s obviously deep cuts that we’ll throw out once in a while. We’ll say, hey, we want to do this tune, and we’ll let him know a week in advance or something to get ready for it.

He’s a workhorse. He loves the guitar. He has a very deep connection with his instrument and it’s the same way that Lyle did. I think that he really looks forward to challenges, which is exciting for us to know.To be able to continue writing songs that are challenging. I think that’s what gets Rob most excited. We did our whole rock opera, our rock odyssey, in Asheville this last tour. And man, he was pumped to do some really weird rock odyssey about space, and aliens, and planets, and lots of improvisation. That really got him going, which is good to know. That’s just another part of the learning process.

I think a big part of 2025 was getting to know the music and getting to know each other musically and now, it’s taking the next step forward, writing collectively as a group. So 2026 is going to be fun. It’s definitely going to be unique and a nice mix of all the stuff that we’ve done over the last six years, and it’s gonna be fun and fresh moving forward.

So that leads me, naturally, into my next question. Can you give me about 5 things that you’re excited for for 2026? Be here before you know it.

I love playing at The Met in Pawtucket. It’s a 500 or 600 person club in Pawtucket. There’s an energy in that room that’s really exciting. That’s happening in February. We’re most likely gonna be heading out to the West Coast.  I can’t give too much detail about that, but I look forward to the West Coast Neighbor Tour very much.  Going back to Colorado, and also exploring some new territory in the country. A goal of mine, and the goal of the band, is to try to link up with some other groups to do some co-headline shows. Also, trying to maybe even get to open up for some bigger national acts.

For my final question, you’ve kind of touched on this already, but I like to always end with a “one from the heart” question. You’ve dedicated so much of your life to this band — what is it that you love about this that makes you wake up everyday and say I’m gonna dedicate my life to this band?

It’s the marriage of the music and the people, and what it brings. It’s like going to a wedding every night. It’s awesome. You get to go and get married to your fans every night. You get to do exciting new things, musically, on stage. You get to meet all these people, you get to dance, you get to sing and party. It’s so exciting. The music is a part of it, but the whole scene that’s been created around it is a whole other animal. We’re making sure that we’re there to facilitate that fun and excitement for our fans, and doing it through our music is a very important task. I think people need that today, and they need to unplug from all the crap that’s going on, that’s shoved down their throats a world like today. That’s most important to us.

Neighbor hits Ardmore Hall in Ardmore, PA with Octave Cat (featuring members of Dopapod and Lotus) on Saturday December 6. Click here for tickets.