Aaron Comess has spent over three decades behind the kit, but most people know him for four minutes of music: “Two Princes,” the song that turned Spin Doctors into one of the defining bands of the early nineties.

There’s more to the story than that hit, though. Before Spin Doctors blew up, Comess was cutting his teeth in New York’s jazz scene, studying at the New School and building the kind of foundation you don’t hear in a three-minute radio single. That background shows up in everything — how he locks into Chris Barron’s phrasing, how he thinks about pocket, how he’s moved between rock, blues, and jazz without losing what makes his playing his.

In this episode, we talk about the making of “Two Princes,” the whiplash of a band going from small clubs to platinum records almost overnight, and what three decades of genre-hopping has taught him about groove.