String Cheese Incident [ tickets ] started out in the early '90s as a troupe of Colorado ski bums, with guitarist Bill Nershi and fiddler/mandolinist Michael Kang playing for skiers in lift lines for their own lift-ticket money.

Soon, longtime friend Michael Travis joined the fold as drummer and percussionist, as did bassist Keith Moseley and keyboardist Kyle Hollingsworth.

Together, the quintet fuses rock, jazz, Latin, country, soul, Afro-Cuban and bluegrass styles into inventive jams that have turned them into a truly independent outfit. How independent? The group has their own label (SCI Fidelity Records), street team (Pirates), merchandising (SCI Gear and Ticketing), philanthropic division (Gouda Causes), and even a travel agency (Madison House Travel) for fans who want to follow the band's tours and see multiple shows.

SCI is currently supporting their latest release, "Untying the Not," with a mix of festival and headlining shows.

liveDaily: How do you guys write material for your studio albums, considering you guys jam and improvise so much live?

Michael Travis: Everybody's writing all the time, but right now it's more just about being really impassioned about trying to be a good studio band as well as a good live band. Obviously, it's not the same thing. We're all now really intrigued at the concept of writing songs that hit that resonant pop sensibility. This is the first album where we've really felt like it's something we're proud to present as a studio album.

As far as the songwriting, we have a ton of songs that we haven't put on albums. And [the songs on "Untying the Not" were] selected to be appropriate by the producer, Youth, as much as anybody. He had a very heavy hand in this album, which is how it should be--I mean, for us, in this situation--because we, left to our own devices, would tend to be far too eclectic to put out a good, consolidated album.

How did you guys hook up with Youth? He's not exactly known for this genre of music.

We were looking at different producers, and looked at what he had done. He did The Verve album with "Bittersweet Symphony." He did most of the Crowded House albums. He just did a house/trance album with a little-known musician named Paul McCartney. Maybe you've heard of him. He's very into the trance movement.

We knew that when we hired him--that we had to allow him full reign to do whatever he wanted. So at first, everybody was pretty resistant, actually. If you'd asked anybody in the first week how it was, it would have been, "Ah, I don't know. This guy's a pain in the ass." It wasn't until later on that we realized that you just have to hang with the vision until it comes around.

Speaking of Paul, you wrote "Time Alive," which sounds decidedly Beatle-esque.

It came out more or less the way I wrote it. I tend to think like a British rocker, I think, as far as the simplicity of the parts. The particular chords are Beatle-esque on that. Pink Floyd and The Beatles are two huge songwriting influences. I had that song in my head for so long. That's the first song I ever wrote, and I wanted to make sure that the first one I did was really in accordance with all my heroes.

How did you write it? Do you play piano or guitar?

I wrote it on guitar. I've been playing guitar for as long as I've been drumming, but I never really focused on it as much. I really took to the drums and focused on them a lot. Guitar playing was kind of a background interest until the last three or four years, where I started focusing on it, deciding I really wanted to be a guitar player. Bass is probably my favorite instrument.

Where are you from originally, and how did you get involved in all the outdoorsy stuff?

I grew up in Los Angeles. To tell you the God's honest truth, Boy Scouts is what introduced me to the wilderness. My dad got me into the Boy Scouts, so I did a lot of backpacking and stuff, before I'd played my first drum. Then I went to this huge wilderness study program for two months of backpacking, for college credit. Just learned a lot about myself.

How did the band come together in Crested Butte, CO, of all places?

In the late fall of '93, everybody was gathering for another ski season. I was coming back from working in the woods for the forest service. I had known Michael [Kang] and Keith [Moseley] from years before in Crested Butte, and Billy [Nershi] had just moved there for a change of pace. Those guys were already playing together in a bluegrass band. And they had to do a gig out of town that they had booked, but one of the mandolin players backed out, and they were, like, "Well, Travis is coming back to town, he plays percussion, let's have him play instead."

Was the band's early focus to be a melting pot of styles, or more "Let's get a gig?"

It was just, "Let's get a gig wherever we can." The eclecticism was already firmly placed in our minds. Our biggest influence in the beginning was Leftover Salmon. They were huge in Colorado at that point, and we were really inspired by the idea of getting to do rock and Cajun-type stuff and bluegrass and calypso and Latin stuff, all in the same gig. Phish was coming into their own right then, and that's a huge influence on me and Mike, for sure. The eclecticism was becoming the thing to do, and we were so inspired to do that--there were so many varied styles that we would all choose to listen to on our own.