It's a true sign of the times that members of the old-school-leaning R&B band Mint Condition made much of its new album, "e-Life," the new-fashioned way: via e-mail.
"I'd send a track to Rick to put some bass on it, and then to O'Dell to add some guitar, and so on," singer/drummer/keyboardist Stokley Williams explained. "Usually, nothing gets lost doing it that way -- not for us, anyway. It's the way a lot of music gets done these days."
Indeed, but usually it's out of long-distance necessity -- i.e., Justin Timberlake in L.A. sends a recording of his b-boy beatboxing to Madonna in London. In the case of Mint, all five members still live close to each other around St. Paul, where they started playing together while attending Central High School in the mid-'80s.
They broke out a few years later with help from Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis and the 1992 top 10 hit "Breakin' My Heart (Pretty Brown Eyes)," but aside from ex-keyboardist Keri Lewis (who married Toni Braxton) none of them left town. Instead of geographic demands, then, the electronic collaboration has more to do with personal demands. All in their late-30s to early-40s, four of the five members are dads now, and many have other pursuits and music projects on the side, including the Afro-Cuban jazz play-thang Joto and the all-star R&B group the Truth.
"We've always been a group of many different personalities and backgrounds," bassist/singer Rick Kinchen said with a laugh, "so it's not a bad thing that we don't have to always all be in the same room together to work anymore."
Their work doesn't just involve making music these days, either. Since their last album, 2005's well-received "Livin' the Luxury Brown," they've been running their own record label, CagedBird. That album topped the Billboard independent album chart the week it came out and thus ensured that Mint could live out its career however its members saw fit.
"We're on another level now independently, so we don't have to submit to the kind of commercialism the way we did before," Williams said. "Of course, we're always going to strive for more."
Enter "e-Life," an album that sounds more modern and cutting-edge than "Luxury Brown" without sacrificing too much of their classic songwriting styles. The band will celebrate the disc's release tonight at Trocaderos, their first hometown show since last summer's Taste of Minnesota gig.