Change is a constant in life. Just ask Eagle Trace.

When we chatted with the young rockers last year, the band of brothers – quite literally, as four of the five members are all Borgardt siblings – were still coping with the aftermath of lead singer Mitch’s sudden and startling epilepsy diagnosis. One year later, Eagle Trace is dealing with some more adjustments, saying goodbye to one band member and saying hello to a new one.

Fittingly, change plays a big role on the rockers’ latest six-song EP, "The Restless Sea," getting an official release show alongside the Missing Letters tonight at 8 p.m. the Cactus Club ($10 cover). Before they take the stage tonight, OnMilwaukee caught up with Mitch and Jackson Borgardt to talk about change for the band, change in life and change in the industry. Also: Kanye West. 

OnMilwaukee: Coming off your last EP, what were your motivations and ideas going into this one?

Mitch Borgardt: So Phil Bregant joined the group, and Brody – our old guitar player – left, so that sort of brought a different influence I’d say sound-wise.

Jackson Borgardt: Brody wanted to really focus on his schooling. He’s going to school for music education, and he doesn’t want to go to grad school in Milwaukee. So it was either break right now or wait until the bitter end and break. It was kind of one of those things that we just decided: Let’s just, before we try to record and write the new album, might as well do it now. So it just made sense, and we still talk; it was a very mutual thing.

But the new EP, we wrote this one really fast actually – in a good way. Like, the inspiration came fast, and we were able to pump out six songs in a matter of a couple of weeks. The songwriting has improved again, and the melodies have gotten stronger. The biggest change has been that we’ve added a lot of harmony to our music. That’s where Phil has really helped us out a lot. It’s really filled out our vocals.

Mitch: Also, he adds some new instruments to the group. He’s my age, 22, but he’s been playing cello for 18 years. His first instrument is cello, so there’s cello on the EP. He plays a bunch of instruments, so this EP has everything from that to steel guitar. We experimented with a lot of stuff. 

It definitely sounds like your most diverse album. What was that like bringing in all those new instruments?

Jackson: We kind of opened the door a little bit. Before, we tried to write within our realm, but we really tried to sound the same as who we are. And we still sound the same as who we are, but we’ve kind of expanded on that.

Mitch: It’s important, anytime you add a new member but especially adding new instruments like that, that you don’t lose yourself and lose everything you’ve built before. We could’ve put out an EP that sounded like a pop album, but we really had to focus and pick the places really strategically where we put the instruments. Because, obviously, if we put that everywhere, it could’ve been like, "Who is this? It’s not even the same band."

And you have the threat of overproducing the tracks.

Jackson: Bringing Phil on board, it was a fear of ours that all of a sudden we were going to take on this whole new band, but he’s definitely added. He’s very blues-based and classic rock-based, which we all obviously have slight roots in, but he’s very much so in his influences. On certain songs, you definitely hear it – like "High on Nerves." That was one of the first songs we wrote with him. You can definitely tell our new music from our old, just by adding him.

Everything went even smoother this record. Recording, we thought we were going to get four songs in four days – about 30 hours of recording – and we ended up getting six songs done in three days.

You guys started as a literal band of brothers, so what was it like bringing somebody new into that tight-knit world?

Mitch: From day one, he blends with us so well. As a group, we get along the best we’ve probably ever gotten along.

Jackson: We’ve become very close to him. We have a lot of the same interests. I hate to make us sound like alcoholics, but we all love to drink bourbon and scotch and beer. Before shows, we’ll all take a drink of bourbon. We mix Eagle Rare and Buffalo Trace to kind of create Eagle Trace bourbon. We have a magic flask that we all take a little swig from before we play. It’s kind of a little ritual. So we all have the same interests, and he lives closer to New Berlin, where we practice. It’s become a very tight-knit group – not to say that we weren’t tight with Brody. It’s just taken on a whole different kind of thing.

What are you hoping the next step to be? A full-length album or …

Mitch: I think we’re going to do the EP thing. It seems the route to go.

Jackson: It’s been working really well for us. We’re able to get music our faster, and I feel like, with recording a full-length, it takes longer, and it takes longer to write.

Mitch: You get a little lackadaisical. I don’t think it’s as fresh. You go to write 12 songs, and maybe five of them sound really, really similar.

Jackson: And then by the end of the recording, you think, "I hate those first three songs on the LP we wrote six months ago. I want to write five new ones."

Mitch: It’s nice doing four to six, and just releasing once a year. It just keeps it fresh.

It’s interesting about keeping songs fresh because, right now, with Kanye West and "The Life of Pablo," he released it but then kept tinkering with it, and it never seems to be completed. Do you think that’s kind of the future of music, that songs kind of never die creatively?

Jackson: I hope not. (laughs) Because I think, as an artist, when you write a song, you look back on it six months, a year, five years down the road, and you want to change things. But I think it’s a good thing because it shows growth and depth. Songs are basically a mirror of ourselves. We’re always changing, but we can’t go back. You can’t change things in the past, and I think acceptance of that is a big thing of art. I guarantee Pablo Picasso wanted to go back and say, "I hate that friggin’ strike. That stroke p*ssed me off." (laughs) But I think those things are what give it a sense of humanity or imperfection.

Mitch: I agree. I think there’s something special in the moment when you’re recording a certain song that maybe you wouldn’t do if you were recording it six months down the road. There’s little things that you’ll do in that exact moment that you might not ever do again while recording it. Yeah, you might be able to do a bunch of different versions, but I just think, after a while, you get lost in a world of always wanting to fix things. And I think we live in a world where maybe the technology allows us to do stuff like that, but it’s just going to just run you mad.

Last time we talked, Mitch, you were still getting over and working through your epilepsy diagnosis. How is that coming along?

Mitch: I’m doing really well! I haven’t had any problems since last June.

Jackson: You’ll see a lot of the topics on this EP still reference it. Like "Without A Sound," that song’s written about Mitch’s inability to sleep, being able to deal with not sleeping and the thoughts and images that go around with that. Those meds can be pretty aggressive and brutal.

Mitch obviously writes about what he’s going through because he writes the lyrics on every song, but a lot of the tracks deal with his friends graduating college and everyone going off in their own direction and dealing with that, and as a band, we connect with that because we’re all really going through that, where we’re all adults now. Max just had his second kid two weeks ago. He’s married now. I’m engaged. Max and I are starting a business. Mitch is still in school and same with Cass.

Mitch: "The Restless Sea" is a reference to how the sh*t doesn’t stop. Nothing really ever ends. Everyone’s always changing. One of the weirdest things is when everybody graduates and everyone just moves away, it’s the weirdest thing. All your closest friends that you were with every single day for the last four years are now on the other side of the country working big kid jobs. Even the ones that live here can’t hang out because they have work early in the morning. It’s depressing for the first couple months because you’re just, like, everyone’s gone and you’re like, "Now what?" I’m supposed to get a job and do that the rest of my life? It just sounds really dull.

Jackson: It’s a weird thing for anybody that age. Max just bought a house, so now he’s got a house, two kids and a wife. He’s adulting full-time. He’s going through a lot, and it’s just normal everyday things that everyone else goes through, but he never went through it before so it’s this bittersweet thing.

Me and Max are starting a brewery; that’s another thing that gets layered on. And then Cass and Mitch going through school and with his friends, and Phil will just be graduating from college. So I think that’s why we got the overall feel of the record.