For the first six months after the debut of Late Night with Seth Meyers in 2014, keyboardist Eli Janney figured that he and the rest of the 8G Band, the show’s house band, could be fired at any moment.
It’s not that the 8G Band, which was named for the studio where the show is taped, was doing a bad job. Far from it. But the idea that NBC would let former Saturday Night Live cast member Fred Armisen assemble an untested indie-rock supergroup to replace The Roots, who had backed Jimmy Fallon on Late Night for five years before moving with him to The Tonight Show, simply seemed too good to be true.
There has never been an ensemble quite like the 8G Band in the history of late night. And now that they’re getting laid off due to the kinds of unfortunate budget cuts affecting most of network television, there might never be again.
“I have a very nontraditional music trajectory,” Janney tells LateNighter. “I was very DIY. I had a few lessons when I was a kid, but I never went to [music] school or anything. When you think about late night, you think about all of these incredible jazz musicians.”
Janney, who serves as Late Night‘s associate musical director, comes from the worlds of punk and indie rock. He spent much of the ’90s thrashing away on keys and bass in the ferociously cool New York City-based foursome Girls Against Boys. That’s how he first met Armisen, who played drums in the band Trenchmouth before transitioning to comedy and eventually landing on SNL.
When Armisen called Janney out of the blue in 2014 to see if he wanted to join what would become the 8G Band, Janney was a little confused. He was never going to read complex charts or play with the virtuosity of his late-night fave Paul Shaffer, leader of David Letterman’s famed World’s Most Dangerous Band.
“Girls Against Boys is like these awesome riffs,” Janney says. “Musically, it’s not challenging … It’s all about vibe and energy—especially energy.”
But that’s precisely what Armisen was looking for. NBC’s original idea for Late Night With Seth Meyers was to have a DJ, but then executive producer Lorne Michaels intervened and tapped Armisen to form a live band.
Wanting to focus on indie rock—the music of his generation—Armisen enlisted Janney to play keyboards with Syd Butler and Seth Jabour of Brooklyn art-punk heroes Les Savy Fav on bass and lead guitar, respectively. Armisen played guitar before switching to drums, replacing original 8G timekeeper Kimberly Thompson.
From the start, the 8G Band specialized in original music—not covers, like most late-night bands. That meant composing eight brand-new pieces per episode, for guest entrances and commercial breaks. It’s a daunting task, but early on they got some great advice from The Roots’ Questlove. He told the 8G crew to record their compositions before each taping and listen to them via in-ear monitors while Meyers interviewed his guests. That way, they’d have the tempo and vibe fresh in their minds when the show went to commercial.
“Otherwise, you have to write extensive charts for every single song and then just throw them away at the end of the night and do it again the next day,” Janney says.
While Janney was hired to play keys, he soon became the de facto bandleader, as Armisen would leave for long stretches to work on other projects, such as his popular comedy series Portlandia. Fortunately, Janney had experience producing and mixing other bands, and his skills as a project manager made him a natural leader.
This became even more important after Late Night producer Eric Leiderman introduced a “rotating drummer” program. With Armisen absent, the band began welcoming new drummers every week from every genre imaginable. One week it would be Danny Carey from prog-metal heavyweights Tool and the next it would be a jazz player like Allison Miller. Nicko McBrain from Iron Maiden dropped in for a time, as did Chad Smith from Red Hot Chili Peppers. There have been more than 300 guest drummers in all.
These musicians would participate in the daily afternoon writing sessions and perform the just-composed songs hours later, on camera, with little rehearsal. There were occasional train wrecks and things that needed fixing in post-production, but for the most part, it worked.
“What we realized after a couple of years was that really what our job is is keeping up the energy in the room in between the acts and kicking off the show with a lot of energy,” Janney says. “Absolute precision is not important. What’s important is that musical conversation that’s going on on the bandstand between us.”
With the band’s time on Late Night coming to an end, Janney isn’t bitter in the slightest. He insists that Meyers and Late Night showrunner Mike Shoemaker are “genuinely nice people” who created a warm and supportive work environment. They also fought against the budget cuts as best they could, but streaming platforms like YouTube have cut into the colossal market share once commanded by network TV, and shows like Late Night have no choice but to tighten their belts.
“I think, in a weird way, this was a way to save Late Night from actually being canceled itself,” Janney says of the band’s departure.
Janney describes his stint in the 8G Band as the best 10 years of his life, and is currently riding the high of his first-ever Emmy nomination (which he shares with Armisen) for Outstanding Music Direction for Late Night‘s 10th anniversary episode, featuring Amy Poehler and Joe Biden.
Going forward, the show plans to use pre-recorded music from the 8G band. That might keep the audience reasonably engaged, but it won’t allow for magical, spontaneous moments, like when Dolly Parton decided she wanted to sing “Jolene” with the band. Or when comedian Craig Robinson had the 8G crew back him on “Chocolate Muffins,” a song from his sitcom Mr. Robinson, and Janney realized just before showtime that Robinson was playing in a different key than the one the band had learned. (Janney fixed the arrangement in the nick of time.)
Then there was the time President Biden surprised the audience by walking out as the 8G Band played “Hail to the Chief.”
The question Janney keeps getting asked these days is what he’s going to do next. Coming off Late Night, he feels confident, creatively reinvigorated, and eager for new opportunities.
“Working on this [show] and having that insane time constraint—’You have from 12 to 1 to create seven pieces of music. Go!’—really taught you not to be precious about stuff, and also to trust in your creativity, because you’re going to make good stuff,” Janney says.
“Now what I want to do is continue to create music for television and for films and stuff like that,” he adds. “Seth Jabour and I did a soundtrack for a documentary last spring, and it was such a fun, awesome exercise. It’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, we can take these skills that we learned earlier, and we can start applying them to these other types of projects,’ of which there’s almost an endless amount, honestly.”
