Audioholic Media

Space Capone is creating the kind of smooth, baby-making music you were probably conceived to. His debut album, Volume One: Transformation, walks the seemingly nonexistent line between contemporary and antique. “I like to refer to old records as study material,” says the Nashville musician. In a time when the music industry seems to have hit puberty and is mutating and changing for both the best and the worst, musicians seem to be less and less concerned with looking backwards (which is a problem), thus redefining genres and leaving less room for the legends who came before them. “I’m kind of in a league of my own now– not as far as talent or material but as far as being placed in a genre with nobody else.”

Rather than basing his career around finding a way to re-categorize his sound, Space Capone has decided to perform R&B the way it’s been done since the beginning. By taking a modern approach to everything soul music was ever intended to be, Space Capone is reintroducing us all to a style of music that has never really left our radar. Or your dad’s vinyl collection.

Audioholic Media: So I guess the easiest place to start is at the beginning. Are you originally from Indiana?

Space Capone: Yeah. Rural, rural, rural Indiana. I grew up in a town with, like, 700 people. You drove a half hour just to get groceries and 45 minutes to see a movie. I grew up working on the farm and grew up building homes. If you’ve ever seen that movie Hoosiers, they filmed it around my hometown.

AM: Wow. That makes for a great foundation, though.

SC: Oh, it’s a great foundation. When you grow up in that isolated of a community, you can’t explore too many cultural things, but in time you’re instilled with a bunch of confidence being that there’s not, you know, a hundred other kids that play basketball or an instrument ten times better. You get a confident vibe coming out of a small community… only to be smacked in the face when you move to a large town.

AM: When you come from a town that small do a lot of people get the chance to leave or do a lot of people end up hanging around after high school?

SC: Most people– with the exception of hitting up Indianapolis maybe once every two weeks– pretty much just find entertainment there. A high school party might just be going to a barn and sitting on hay bales while drinking alcohol, or cow tipping, or just the stuff you could imagine. But I’ve never been overseas, still to this day. I’ve never seen many places or seen a lot of cultural things that a lot of kids get to when they grow up in a large city. There’s no black kids in school, there’s no Asians, there’s no Hispanics. It’s all white farm folk. As a matter of fact, I came out of one of the more affluent families in the community just because my dad was did taxes for everybody. He was an accountant, and I was the accountant’s son. Most other people were the farmer’s son, or the fireman’s son, or something like that. Very blue collar.

AM: And your real name is Aaron Winters?

SC: Yes.

AM: Just to clarify, are you Space Capone, or is that the name of you and your band?

SC: We like to keep it loose because there’s kind of a stigma wrapped around singer-songwriters now. Everybody would rather jump on a band’s bandwagon. Some people will look at a disc and if they see, you know, Joe Blow or some guy with two names like Aaron Winters, they’re gonna toss it over their shoulder, whereas if they see a name like Space Capone, they might give it a second chance. So we benefit from both sides, and we like to keep it loose. When we get referred to as “the band Space Capone,” I don’t shut it down, but it is my name. I go by Space here in town. It’s been accepted since two and a half years ago. My friends have been calling me Space instead of Aaron. Call it a band name if you’d like, or call it an artist name, but it’s definitely my moniker and people know me as Space here in Nashville.

AM: What I really like about your music is that it modernizes the old jazz/funk/R&B vibe and introduces it to a younger generation by keeping the sound relevant. This isn’t the R&B that kids born in the 1980s or later are really familiar with. Have you found that your music has opened a younger person’s mind up to an older sound?

SC: Totally. I’ve had this conversation with many people after shows while trying to explain what I do. A lot of people hear the music and say, “Hey, man, it sounds so good. I don’t know what to call it. It feels good. It’s got that feel-good vibe.” I think what they’re trying to say is that it is something they’ve heard but they haven’t really gone back and put together the pieces of that one song their mom and dad played on vinyl or, you know, when they heard Otis Redding for the first time, that’s what they’re really saying. It’s totally a revival. I hate [implying that it's] just throwback because that implies that you’re just ripping these things off and actually almost using the same lines and melodies. This is a revival of sorts. This is kind of bringing that music back because what R&B is today isn’t what R&B was 15 years ago or 25 years ago. I’m thankful that they’ve put the word “urban” before modern R&B now because it’s not classic R&B. I think the one thing that does hurt me and other people that help me write songs for Space Capone is that people don’t know how to place it in a genre because the genre that it should be in has disappeared. I mean, Michael Jackson was probably the last, but since then it’s pretty much become extinct.

AM: When I see your album listed places, people use so many hyphens to describe it. It’s like, groove jam-jazz-soul-funk-R&B with a rock vibe.

SC: I know there’s a need to put it between a bracket; there’s a need to title it. If I could place my music in a certain genre, it would be in a genre called real R&B, like, classic R&B. But you can’t do that because as soon as you say you’re the only person doing R&B, some Beyoncé fan or some Ne-Yo fan’s gonna come out and say, “Hey, that’s not right. Ne-Yo’s R&B.” But he’s urban R&B, he’s a spin-off of R&B, something that’s stemmed from that, but he’s not writing Stevie Wonder tunes or Earth Wind & Fire tunes.

AM: I’ve seen a lot of reviews about your music and it seems as if a lot of people make a point of the fact that you’re a white dude, but what I think is great about your music is that it transcends race, age, and, on a song-by-song basis, even genre. Is that something you think about and do deliberately?

SC: There’s no preconception at all before you start writing. You just sit down and whatever feels good is what you keep. I throw away a lot of songs because they don’t fit inside that realm of Space Capone’s sound and what I want it to be, and usually it’s a song that sounds a little too slow, or a little too pop, or a little too country, or whatever it may be. There’s a filtering process, but there’s no, “Hey, I’m gonna sit down and write a specific type of song,” or “I want to transcend this genre.” It just happens and if it sounds like it could be on the next record, it makes the cut.

AM: When I was doing research for this interview, it was really cool because all of the information I found was about your music. Your personal life isn’t really all over the Internet, which is rare. Is that a deliberate move on your part?

SC: I take it seriously. I want to be known as a student of music. I think that the reason why we– and I don’t wanna sound jaded here– I feel like the new musicians that are coming up and making new music aren’t doing their research, basically. I mean, if you wanna paint Michelangelo, you study him just like he studied Leonardo. If you want to be a good writer, you read a lot of Hemingway. I think one of our problems, in my generation in particular, is that people my age who are doing music are just sitting down and writing a song, only having heard pop radio through the ’80s and ’90s, which, lemme tell ya, is not going to make for a good song.

I take it really seriously. I think it’s a lot more interesting to hear about how I study music and write about music than for you to hear about what my favorite food is.

AM: That definitely shows through. When I listen to your music, it’s clear that you’re thinking about the music you’re creating because it’s not a sound that is currently mirrored by something else. You can’t turn the radio on and hear any song that sounds like what you’re doing, and that’s interesting. It doesn’t seem like a choice based on selling a ton of records.

SC: I was concerned with “making it” when I was 18, 19, 20. I wanted to be doing music, and not only that, I wanted to be making a lot of money doing music. Now it’s more of a selfish endeavor. It’s more like, “Hey, I’m going to write a song that I want to hear, not what radio wants to hear or what the public wants to hear.” I want to write songs that make me happy.

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And because it is imperative that you see him live, catch Space Capone on tour during the following dates:

05.08.09 Knoxville, TN @ Barley’s
05.18.09 Nashville, TN @ Road to Bonnaroo, 8 off 8th
05.19.09 Chicago, IL @ House of Blues
06.19.09 Opryland, TN @ Poolpalooza ’09
07.30.09 Carbondale, IL @ Jenn’s
10.16.09 Dallas, TX @ On Hold
12.11.09 Glenside, PA @ Glenny’s

Volume One: Transformation is currently available on iTunes.
For more information on Space Capone, visit myspace.com/spacecapone.