After nearly two decades as a working musician, Will Hoge has built a fan base that is as loyal to him as they are dedicated to the soul of the music he creates. When the Nashville-based musician was involved in a nearly fatal traffic accident last summer, there was no shortage of support from fans, fellow musicians, and even Perez Hilton — which was weird but, you know, thoughtful. In the same grand twist of fate that kept the singer-songwriter alive and eventually allowed him to pick up his guitar again, rock ‘n’ roll was granted one more opportunity to stop being awful when Hoge released his newest album, The Wreckage.

In a time when music is sinking as an industry, artists like Will Hoge are helping us to remember it as an art form. He is one of the primary artists who inspired me to start Audioholic Media, and he encompasses the spirit of what we’re attempting to create here. While major labels continue to struggle with the idea that the music business is more than just terrestrial radio and t-shirt sales, raw talent is becoming more relevant. Will Hoge is an honest, incontrovertible musician and a consummate example of the kick in the ass that rock ‘n’ roll so desperately needs right now.

Audioholic Media: I know that November 10th is a significant date for you and your career as a musician, so it’s especially exciting to talk to you today of all days.

Will Hoge: It was years ago. 1996, November 10th. There’s a weird phase when you wanna become a musician, it starts off as this hobby thing. I don’t think anybody just picks up a guitar or plays the drums and says, “OK, I’m giving up everything else for this.” Not just right off the bat. It’s kinda like dating and falling in love. You progress in your relationship with rock ‘n’ roll, and it gets to this point where you eventually quit school — or I did. I played in a band and eventually it took me away from school. I stopped school, but I still had a day job. Then you get to a point where you have less of a day job and it becomes more of this really temporary situation and you’re playing music more and more and more. It kinda gets to be this cutoff where you have to really commit everything to it or stop. The 10th of November, 1996 was kinda my day. I just went through a whole bunch of stuff at that point in my life: first real lost love relationship, first time that I was playing in a band… [I couldn't] just quit my job that very second, but I don’t think I worked for much longer. I just decided that this is what I was gonna do. I’ve really worked tirelessly almost every day since. It’s really been long term, and it continues to grow and get better each year.

AM: I want to jump 13 years later and talk a little about The Wreckage. When you were premiering the album on MySpace, it was immediately clear that all of the tracks were independently strong. I know that you re-worked a good amount of the album after the accident happened. What were the previous songs like?

WH: There’s three that made it from the original sessions. “Hard To Love” is the first song that we recorded for the record before the accident and that stayed. The duet “Goodnight Goodbye” was recorded before the accident, and “Just Like Me” was recorded before the accident. We had recorded a different version of “Too Late Too Soon”; it was much more of, like a big, kind of rock, The Who kind of sound, and it didn’t really fit the song. We had some other songs that were just a little more straight-ahead, rockin’ things — all the songs that we were real proud of at the time, but with everything that happened in the time off after the accident, I started writing a bunch more, so a lot of these songs kinda came along. We recorded these and as we started really looking at the overall picture of what we had recorded, it wasn’t that the other songs necessarily weren’t good enough.

I still really believe in albums, and I know that it’s a dying art. There’s a lot of people that say albums don’t really matter anymore, people just wanna buy singles or they’ll buy the songs they wanna hear, and I respect that — I think there’s definitely some truth in it — but as an artist, I still like to hear records. I like to buy records and put them on from the start and listen through the whole thing. I may be the minority in that but that’s something I’m still gonna do. As an artist, it’s important for me to make albums. Really, with these songs, it wasn’t that the first ones weren’t good enough, they just didn’t fit this concept. The songs started kinda finding their way onto the record, and there were certain songs that just got booted off.

AM: In terms of the accident, I was reading that you broke both of your shoulders and that you had lost your voice…

WH: I crushed one of my lungs and hurt the other one pretty bad, so I was on a breathing tube for a pretty good while. Obviously when they were rescuing me off the street, they didn’t take the time to say, “OK, this guy might die, but we need to see if he’s a singer first and be very careful putting the breathing tube in.” There’s a certain kind of breathing tube, and I’ve found out since that you can use different things that don’t mess with your throat or your vocal cords. I’m just thankful that they kept me alive, but having this big tube down my throat for a long time did mess with my throat a bit. Then having a lung capacity that is very different than before the accident, it just changed my whole way of singing. I had crushed ribs and a broken sternum also, so my chest just literally didn’t expand the way that it had before and it was months before I was really able to do that. A year or so later I’m still getting some of that back, you know, muscle-wise and bone-wise, and really being able to do all the things I did before. It just changed the way that I had to approach singing. Physically I’d done it the same way for so many years that it had become real comfortable — some of that in a good way, but there were some real changes in having to kinda learn to re-sing, and it opened up some things that I probably would have never done before. It’s certainly expanded my abilities as a singer — maybe not necessarily vocal range, but vocal understanding or willingness to try new things. It’s ultimately been a good thing.

AM: Was there ever a point when you thought, “Holy shit, what if I can’t hold a guitar again, or if I can’t sing like I did before?

WH: It’s strange to say this, but there was never a point when I thought that I wouldn’t do it again, but there was a point when I realized that I could do it again. When I got back home and was out of the hospital, I was still in a wheelchair, I still couldn’t walk, but I was to the point where I could hold a guitar. I couldn’t stand, but I could get my arms around a guitar, so I’d sit in this wheelchair and play. My voice was still real weak. It was the first time that I’d had some time by myself. My wife was able to at least leave me alone for 20 minutes to go to the grocery store, and my son was at school, and I was able to sit in the room and play and sing a song for the first time. It was real weak and all that, but it was a real cool moment for me, because that was the first moment when I kinda heard my voice again and it sounded at least somewhat like me again, I thought. I did realize then, “OK, I will be able to do this again at some point.” So I don’t know that I ever thought that I wouldn’t, but I do know that was a moment when I realized that I would.

AM: Because you’d been notably independent for so long, has it been difficult to share control since you’ve chosen to sign with Rykodisc?

WH: It’s been really good, actually. It’s odd for me to say that about a record label, because I’ve done my fair share of rants against the record labels, but Ryko’s been really cool. They’ve pushed me to just try to be the best version of myself. I’ve been getting a lot of suggestions, some of which have been really good, some of which I’m against and didn’t try at all and they were OK with that, some of them we tried and [they] didn’t work. It became much more of a partnership than a heavy-handed record label. It’s been really good, actually. I’m really excited about hopefully getting to work with them longer.

AM: What is it about them that made them the right fit for you and what you’re doing?

WH: They’ve been real. Record deals a lot of times are very over-the-top, and there’s somebody that’s selling you on what you want most and they’re telling you all of the things that they’re gonna do. There are a lot of fancy dinners and limousines, and it’s everything that you want. It’s a kid at Christmas scenario, but then that dries up. At Ryko, they didn’t really have that. Those aren’t the things that I’m interested in. I want an opportunity to try to write great songs and make great records and [create] true work and be a musician. I’m not interested in being a star, but I’d like to be a great musician. Ryko seemed to want very specific things, and they seemed to just want to give me opportunities to that would help me be a better musician. It struck me as a musical partnership, and that was the big bonus for me.

AM: Rykodisc seems to be supportive of the fact that you’ve really utilized new media to build your career, especially in terms of initially releasing The Wreckage via the Internet and allowing fans to tape and record your live shows. As an Internet-based music magazine, it’s interesting to hear you talk about your thoughts on the importance of giving people free access to so much of your music.

WH: I think the only people that fear taping and downloading are the people that aren’t very good at this. The reason Britney Spears doesn’t want you to tape her show — everybody knows what Britney Spears looks like, everybody’s seen her videos, they’re not concerned that she’s gonna fall during her performance, what they’re concerned about is that you’re gonna realize that she doesn’t sing at her concerts. There’s so much of that that goes on. We don’t discourage it, but we actually play. There’s some wrong notes in our set, don’t get me wrong, and you’re gonna hear ‘em, but they’re played with the most integrity that you can play a wrong note with. The bottom line is, on the business end, a lot of the label people will say it kills record sales to people who trade music or download music, and I just flat don’t think it’s true.

Even when I was growing up listening to records, long before the Internet — we didn’t have computers when I was a kid [laughs] — you’d have friends who would burn you a cassette of an album. There’s been the technology to not buy an album for years and years and years. I had friends that would burn a live bootleg of a show on a cassette and you’d trade it and spread it around and fall in love with a new band, then you’d go buy their record. It’s no different now, you can just reach more people than you could before. There’s gonna be some people that aren’t gonna buy your record, but there’s gonna be a lot more on the other side of that. They’re gonna download your record for free off of some file sharing site, and if they don’t like your record, they’re not gonna buy it, but they were never gonna buy it in the first place. If you didn’t have downloading, they were never even gonna hear your record. The bottom line is that all you’re doing is giving people an opportunity to hear something. If they love it, I firmly believe — and we’ve seen it with our fan base — they’re gonna go and support the artists that they believe in and want to see. I think that people may download your record but they’re gonna come and buy a ticket to a show, probably more than once; if you’re worried about it strictly financially, you’ve gotten more money from them in that than you would’ve gotten from them buying the record. They’re gonna then buy a t-shirt or two, they’re gonna buy your other albums and probably still buy the album [they downloaded] because when they realize that you’re an artist and you actually do your work, they wanna support that. They’re gonna give you the money to buy the record directly from you anyway. It’s not something that I’m afraid of. The music industry and artists as a whole are trying to fight that tide — it’s just silly. You’re just wasting your time. I think you’re better off going and making more records and trying to write better songs than trying to stop that. It’s like arguing gravity at this point.

I understand it to a point. You’re out here and this is the only thing that you have, so you wanna be a little precious with it, but at the end of the day — when you’re arguing about a dollar or two dollars versus [how] you could be celebrating the fact that you could make $50 — it just depends on which side of the argument you wanna be on, and I’m on the other.

AM: The more I speak to people involved in the music industry, the more I realize that most everybody really does know everyone else, but it stems less from the sleazy, networking side of the business and more from how willing they’ve been to take part in the community as a whole. That connection generally thrives most before an artist is signed. I’m sure that being part of the Nashville circuit has helped, but so many other musicians seem to know you or know of you. Is that sense of community important to you and to your career?

WH: Nashville’s a small town, geographically and population-wise, just in general. It’s not a huge town in the first place, but within that small community, there’s an even smaller collection of people that are musicians, so you know a lot of the same people. Music kinda comes and goes in waves in every community, and I’m sure Portland’s the same way. In Nashville you go through this thing where everybody’s getting signed in Nashville, then it kinda dries up for a minute, then it comes back. I was in between this wave of bands that had gotten signed and either gone onto bigger things or had gotten dropped. I was in between that and the success of, like, the guys in Kings Of Leon or something like that. When I was first starting, it seemed like it was a lot more cutthroat. It was guys that would want their band to succeed but they would kind of discourage people from liking your band. It was much more about, “What can I get?” And then somewhere in there, I really saw that change when it became this community where everyone kind of works with everybody again . “I want you to succeed because I wanna succeed.” It just became a really cool thing to see. It’s great for everybody if that’s the case. How important is it? It’s hard for me to say. I’ve had some opportunities to play with other people. It’s one of the things I still like to do, unfortunately we haven’t gotten to do much of it in the last couple years, but I like to go out with other bands on tour. It’s a nice thing to go out and be the opening band for a while. I hope that those relationships at some point pay off. It’s nice to go out and support some friends and not have the focus necessarily be on you 100% every show.

AM: The idea of sharing the spotlight and being part of the community seems like a lost idea to guys who want to be in a band just to tell chicks they’re in a band.

WH: Yeah, exactly. You either wanna be in a band or you wanna play in a band. I wanna be in a band because I wanna play music, I wanna make records, I wanna be a musician. There’s a lot of reality television, with American Idol… There’s still this false hope. There’s a lot of people that are out here, like you said, because they wanna nail a chick so they wanna be able to be famous or whatever. Of the people that I grew up admiring as artists, I don’t think any of them had that as their goal. I think that it’s always been more about the music. Obviously I wanna make a living, I wanna support my family and things like that, but I’m not willing to sell my soul to do that, to be on MTV or anything like that. There are a lot more music fans that don’t watch MTV than there are music fans that watch MTV. I mean, there’s a lot of people that watch MTV, but they’re just consumers at this point, they’re not music fans. They may like whatever MTV’s playing, and maybe at some point again MTV will actually play music and turn those people onto what is great music, but at this point, it’s just marketing. And whoever that star is, their music is more a souvenir of their stardom than [a result of someone] buying it because it’s a great record. I want to be on the other side of that. I want people buying it because they think it’s a great record and they connected to something that was said in the lyrics or something that they saw at a show, because those are the people that are gonna come back time and time and time again and buy record after record after record. That’s what I’m interested in trying to do.

AM: Having been part of the band Spoonful, are there any primary differences between being the lead singer of a band and a solo artist who travels with a band?

WH: Oh yeah. Spoonful was my last attempt at “a band.” A band is fake, don’t let anyone fool you. There’s always one guy who does the majority of the work, two guys who do the majority of the work, and there’s a bunch of dudes just kinda hanging around not doing shit.

AM: They just show up for the shows.

WH: Yeah, and take all the benefits. The only real difference to me was that I decided that this is what I was gonna do, and I was gonna do it. The thing about bands is that you get somebody that leaves and you’ve gotta change band names or you’ve gotta change something. I always knew that this is what I wanted to do, and I was gonna be the constant through it, so it was more important for me to just find guys to play with me, then it can always be Will Hoge ’cause I’m not gonna quit. I’m not gonna go and get a day job. So I kinda get both worlds, but I still love the consistency of having a group of guys that I can fall back on and rely on musically.

AM: When you have people leave your band, the change in the sound is a noticeable one. I know that some people have been sad to see guys like Dean [Tomasek] and Jefferson [Crow] leave because they were huge assets, but you do get this new sound with each transition and that’s a cool progression.

WH: That’s my favorite thing about it. People will say that it’s not the same, and it’s not the same. It’s never gonna be the same, and I don’t want it to be the same. When someone leaves or they’re fired or they quit, I’ve never tried to find a replacement band member, I’ve always tried to find another band member. No one’s ever gonna play the same exact same as someone else does and I don’t want them to. I want every person that comes in to bring something new to the party, and with each incarnation, there’s certain things that you go, “OK, this guy does this better than we did before. And there’s other things he doesn’t do as well, and we need to try to work around that.” It’s always a challenge. It’s never the same, and I don’t think it should be.

AM: Being on the road as much as you are, I know that you rotate your set list every night, but “Woman Be Strong” has kind of come to be expected at every Will Hoge show. Do you ever get sick of playing that song?

WH: I don’t think we’ve played in a few weeks. I’m real fortunate in that there’s no songs that I’ve written or recorded or that we would play that are cringe-worthy at this point. That’s one of my favorite things. To do a show and have someone come up at the end of the night and say, “My favorite song is ‘Woman Be Strong’ and you didn’t even play it, but this is my favorite show that I’ve been to.” That, to me, is something that’s real important. If you’re coming to just hear one song and we don’t play it and it ruins your night, we didn’t really do a very good job. I love for somebody to leave and say, “I just had the best time that I’ve had seeing music, and they didn’t even play my favorite song,” because then they’re gonna come back again, and go, “Maybe they’re gonna play it next time,” and they’ll be that much more excited. There’s nothing that I feel like we have to play.

AM: Considering that so much of your success has been based around the work you’ve done as an independent artist and a lot of touring and word-of-mouth promotion, you’ve done remarkably well for yourself. Are you taking everything as it comes or are you do you strive to accomplish specific achievements based on some sort of time line?

WH: I think you have to sort of take it as it comes. You have to, obviously, have some goals. I mean, I want things to be bigger. There are people that are doing this forever and there are people that are doing it temporarily. And I think that it starts to become a lot more temporary when you start to put time lines on things. Like, if I’m not playing to 1,000 people a night by October of next year, then I’m gonna quit. There are people that do that, and I would understand it to a certain point, but I’m not doing that. I suppose at this point, if I had to tour with just a Volkswagen and an acoustic guitar, it’s what I do, so I’d find a way to make that work. I think you have to be smart and work towards something, but to put to put a time frame on it is suicidal.

AM: What do you have planned for 2010?

WH: We’re working on some songs, trying to get some stuff together for another record. We’re doing the Rock Boat thing in January the seventh through the 11th, come home and do a show in Nashville on the 13th, then we go to Europe and do that for a few weeks. I’m hoping we’ll do some more touring next year, but there’s nothing scheduled as of yet.

AM: You’ve talked about your father once sneaking you in to see Bo Diddley play and how that really informed your idea of live music, and your live show has had the same experience on me and, consequently, on Audioholic Media.

WH: That’s cool. That’s real cool. Music can be such a spiritual experience and it’s funny because there’s a point where people see it and realize it. Unfortunately there’s so much bad music that a lot of people don’t experience it. It doesn’t have to be at my show, but I see it at my show because that’s when people will say that to me. We had some girls in Chicago that were big hip-hop fans and a friend of theirs had said, “Look, I’ll buy your tickets, you just have to come.” And they bought every album and said [they've] never listened to rock music, or country music, or whatever the hell it is that I do. It’s a wonderful experience. It’s changed my life forever, and if you can ever have that effect on somebody, it’s great.

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For more information on Will Hoge, visit willhoge.com.

photography by Justin Patterson

Nashville is considered one of the America’s music meccas. Although the city is known primarily for country music, it is actually a breeding ground for an array of different styles. Enter Paper Route — a band who see the artistic potential in everything and fuse that inspiration into music. With a number of EPs under their belt, this group of friends has fused pop, rock, and electronic sounds with thoughtful lyrics and created Absence, Paper Route’s debut album on Universal Motown. We had a chance to talk to JT Daly of Paper Route and found out more than what propels the band’s music.

Audioholic Media: From what I’ve read, it seems like Paper Route came about pretty organically. You were friends who loved to jam, and then you turned that into a career. Can you talk a bit about that?

JT Daly: We kind of all came from another band that kind of ended because of a drought of inspiration. And I went on to — and took — a whole other medium. I went on to do some film stuff. Andy [Smith] left and went to finish up his degree in the study of people. And Chad [Howat] went on to finesse the art of recording and finish his degree in that. We all just gravitated back towards each other. Very naturally, Chad was recording on his laptop, and I was writing at home. And I think it was much more healthy because the songs were writing themselves again. That’s something we always made a point to do in this band. We serve the song and are just along for the ride.

AM: So, before. you guys were forcing it and now it’s just coming out?

JD: Absolutely. If you feel like you’re forcing something, I feel like that’s just a sign with art that you need to call it quits.

AM: I got your Are We All Forgotten EP last year, and I’ve always thought your sound had this ethereal and haunting quality to it, which is something you don’t normally hear from Nashville. So was that initially what you guys were going for or was it something that just happened?

JD: Yeah, it just kind of made itself. We’ve always just loved a lot of those ethereal groups like My Bloody Valentine. We’re all huge daydreamers, and we all come from a history of all having sleep disorders. And all of those groups are things you can listen to you when you’re in that stage between consciousness of being asleep and being awake. I think we wanted to try to make music like that again or make music like that for the first time. It just sort of happens. We fell in love with the instrumental kind of ambiance music because it said something with our lyrics. Moving to Nashville, I’m not sure if we really got it, but we respected it. And now we get it, and we’ve fallen in love with the songwriter perspective where it’s just an intimate song with just vocal and guitar. And it puts more emphasis on the lyrics where the artist is forced to say something. I feel like it just all came together for Paper Route for the first time because it just became what we wanted to try and do.

AM: So do you think it took a while for the instrumentation and lyrics to fit together and become what it is now?

JD: Absolutely. It was again a very accidental process.

AM: I noticed when you play live, there are interesting instruments like the toy keyboards and samplers. Bringing that into the sound and adding a kind of nuance to rock music, was that something you guys wanted to play around with?

JD: I mean being in Nashville influenced in that regard as well. There are just a lot of different types of musicians and a lot of incredible musicians as well. We are people and artists that love electronic music. I mean we have four or five samplers onstage all playing at the same time at some points in our set. But in Nashville, when my neighbor is the guy who thinks that anything that has to be plugged in isn’t an instrument, it definitely forces you to take a different perspective on our live show performance because we are musicians that respect the craft of forming an acoustic instrument. And that’s incorporated in the way we create our songs and in the way we record these acoustic instruments and put them into these machines and manipulate the songs that way. I think it’s a challenge in the way we play our live shows. At the same time, it’s something we enjoy and something that we love is to recreate those songs on the instruments that they were originally recorded on.

AM: That’s actually one of my other questions. I mean I’ve heard other albums where you hear all these different layers in the sound, and then when you hear them live, it’s a completely different band. But with you guys, the transition is so seamless. It’s like I’m back home listening to Paper Route through my headphones but I’m really watching you guys live onstage.

JD: Thank you.

AM: How do you guys manage to do that?

JD: Hours and hours of rehearsal. We are perfectionists to a fault. That’s probably our greatest strength and also our greatest weakness. We’ve thought of every possible way of playing that song. And a lot of times we’ll switch it up in every tour. It’s something we like to take back to the people who have seen us multiple times.

AM: Going back to the songwriting process, how does the Paper Route songwriting process work? Do you guys have a specific way of going about it? Do you lay the track first then put the words later or is it the other way around?

JD: It really is all forms for us. All of us are writers individually, and all of us pitch in songs. But the end result is always the group sort of shuffling through it together — pulling apart the song and piecing it back together. We’re definitely a group where the song is greater than the individual parts. It would sound completely different if one of the members was removed.

AM: I was looking at your MySpace page, and your influences include Jurassic Park, magic tricks, Alice in Wonderland and the Titanic soundtrack — very varied choices there. So what else influences you guys?

JD: We read a lot. We’re always reading. I mean we always have the time to read. So we’re always passing around books. We watch a lot of movies as well, and we listen to a lot of soundtracks. We’re a visual band, and a lot of our songs are written around a visual that we all kind of have like a scene from a movie or something that we want to communicate with sound and what we’re seeing. And that’s why we love soundtracks and why we love film.

AM: What was the last book you read?

JD: I just finished The Devil in the White City [by Erik Larson], which is about “The White City,” which is a brilliant World’s Fair in Chicago. And it’s a true story and is this remarkable group of artists that got together and crafted the World’s Fair, which, at one point, Chicago was the center of the world’s attention. It’s where the Ferris wheel was invented, and at the same time, this was where one of the greatest or worst serial killers of all time lived. The book pretty much opens up with this quote like, “Some men are born with genius inside of them. I was born with the devil inside of me.” It’s just on another level.

AM: So there might be a song that’s inspired by that book really soon?

JD: Well, Chad’s from Chicago and the musician that travels with us and helps us create these songs live was architect and creating buildings.

AM: Well, hopefully the next album or even at your next live show, I’ll be waiting for that.

JD: All right. I’ll find you and let you know ahead of time.

AM: About your debut album, Absence, I read that you guys said that the songs are more hopeful compared to the songs on the EPs. How are they more hopeful now compared to the old stuff?

JD: Honestly, I think the only reason the album as a whole is saying that is because we have more songs to say something with. Also it was the time in our lives. Things were sort of being wrapped up; some loose ends were finally being taken care of. And we had more time, and we have more of the listeners attention to say exactly what we wanted to say. You know, an EP is more of what people have more patience for these days, and blogs are taking over the music scene. We only have the people’s attention for so long, and I think the EP really serves that purpose. But it’s really a shame. As a music writer, you really just need an album to communicate and instill exactly what you’re trying to say.

AM: As far as other people saying, “You sound like this. You’re synth-pop, electro-pop…” — all these different categories are thrown at you guys. How do you describe your music?

JD: I would say electronic alternative. I’m not really into combining these really long descriptions — saying what our music is.

AM: You mentioned the whole idea of blogs, and I’ve seen your music circulating around. Aside from the fact that you guys have been touring a lot, how have you seen the Internet helping bands? Has it even been helping you get your music out there to as many people as possible, the way it’s supposed to be doing?

JD: Well in the beginning, it was amazing. We weren’t even a touring band, and yet we had a lot of people’s attention. Our music had a life. Its heartbeat was the World Wide Web. We’re connecting with the music, and I think it forced us to play live because we realized that people were connecting with it. And that gave the songs more of a life. Now, I don’t really know. I think honestly we’re really trying to figure out exactly what the Internet is doing for us, and we’re trying to figure out what kind of band we want to be. As the era of the rock star is dying because of the World Wide Web, we’re trying to figure out how to embrace it and how to evolve but still how to keep our integrity.

AM: There are so many bands that come out every day, every second. How do you separate yourselves from the rest of the pack?

JD: That’s a really good question. [pause] You know, I think one thing that we’re particular on is that what we’re saying in the songs we’re presenting is always us because I think that the listener can tell. They can tell between what is a front and what truly comes from inside the artist. I feel like when you’re moved by a certain song and when you’re moved by a show, that is beyond us just performing. It’s on another level – spiritual even. And that starts with a seed of truth in that artist; they have a choice on whether they’re going to be honest or whether they’re just going to craft the song for the sake of melody or even craft the song just for the listener because they know it will get them anything from radio play to a specific tour. I think that’s something we want to stay true to.

AM: And what is Paper Route’s ultimate goal for music?

JD: To keep making albums.

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Absence is currently available in physical and digital formats.
For more information on Paper Route, visit paperrouteonline.com.

Aim & Ignite will include ten tracks, most of which have been unveiled during fun.’s recent tour with Manchester Orchestra. For the sake of knowing what to search for on YouTube, here’s the track listing:

Aim & Ignite track listing
01. Be Calm
02. Benson Hedges
03. All The Pretty Girls
04. I Wanna Be The One
05. At Least I’m Not As Sad (As I Used To Be)
06. Light A Roman Candle With Me
07. Walking The Dog
08. Barlights
09. The Gambler
10. Take Your Time (Coming Home)

The album’s cover was illustrated by Jacob Weinstein, and “At Least I’m Not As Sad (As I Used To Be)” is currently posted to the band’s MySpace page.

Additionally, the band’s name really is “fun.” As quoted in Andrew Dost‘s MySpace blog:

We definitely are named fun. Yes, it includes a period. Yes, the ‘f’ is supposed to be lower-case.

Because I’m really excited about this album, I caught up with Dost at one of fun.’s recent shows and grilled him about Aim & Ignite:

Audioholic Media: What can you tell me about your upcoming album, Aim & Ignite?

Andrew Dost: Well, the album’s coming out August 25th. It is ten songs long, because a lot of great records have ten songs. We’re just really excited about it. It’s got a lot of moments on it we’re really proud of– maybe the best of Jack, Nate, and I. It’s the best of all three of us, I think.

AM: This is your first tour as fun., so is it tough for you to tour on the strength of an unreleased album?

AD: Yeah, it is. It’s not so much “tough” in the sense that it’s hard for us to exist, but it’s definitely tough to be like, “Well, you can’t buy the record, it’s not out yet,” or, “We don’t have anything to give to you.” It’s strange to expect people to know songs and sing along to stuff they haven’t heard. Basically they’re just going on a YouTube video or something. It’s frustrating because I want people to hear these songs. I’m very proud of them, and it’s definitely weird to play songs and know they haven’t heard them yet.

AM: When you were playing the first few songs, people didn’t really know how to handle themselves, but the moment you played the covers by The Format, people began to dance and sing along. So it’s almost as if they’re fans, but they’re just not all the way there yet.

AD: That’s been kind of the trend of the tour. Once people realize, they’re like, “Oh, I know these songs. I know that voice. We can get behind that.”

AM: I know that fun. consists of just the three of you, so is the band that backs you now the band you tour with or did they record with you as well?

AD: They are just the touring band. For recording, we use other people. But these guys are awesome, too.

AM: The girl up there with you, what is her name?

AD: Her name is Jess. Jessica Martins.

AM: So she’s not the female voice you hear on “At Least I’m Not As Sad (As I Used To Be).”

AD: No, that was our producer Steve [McDonald]‘s wife, Anna, who used to sing in a band called That Dog who was really, really influential on all of us. Oh, and then also Rachel [Antonoff], who is Jack’s sister and Nate’s girlfriend.

AM: So you guys are basically just this supergroup who all came together…

AD: Kind of, yeah. I mean, that’s a nice thing to say. To say “supergroup,” you think, like, Traveling Wilburys, and I wouldn’t put ourselves in that league. We definitely have always wanted to work together, and it’s been really fun. Really a good time.

—–

For even more information on fun., visit myspace.com/fun.

As with most musicians, it’s easy to compare Diane Birch to the legendary female musicians who’ve come before her. With a sound influenced more by Motown and less by, say, the Pussycat Dolls, Birch is right on track to become one of music’s most prized possessions. Her debut album, Bible Belt, is romantic without being sex-driven. Maybe not the best news for pervy old men, but there is still hope for you yet, young America– you just have to know where to look for it…

AM: I’ve read a lot about certain aspects of your childhood, but can you tell us about your background in music?

Diane Birch: I grew up in South Africa, I lived in Australia… My dad was a preacher so we traveled around quite a bit. Then I moved to Oregon. I started playing piano when I was seven and started playing classical piano. I studied an ear-training method, so I played music by ear, and I just started picking up stuff by ear.

AM: You’ve been playing since you were seven, so you’ve been playing for–

DB: About 20 years.

AM: OK, because I was wondering how old you are. A lot of people make mention of how mature your sound is.

DB: I have an old soul. I used to be convinced I was from the 18th century, so I’m then 300-and-something [years old]. [laughs]

AM: So this is your first full tour?

DB: This is my first tour ever. I’ve never been on tour, so it’s like a whole new thing.

AM: Everything pretty much began with the SXSW shows, then.

DB: Yeah. We started in SXSW. We did everything from interactive media stuff to– we played Austin TV, which was cool. We probably, all-in-all, did about nine or ten shows, so it was busy.

AM: I saw your schedule for that run and it seemed like you were doing about two shows each day.

DB: I know, it was crazy. But it’s almost like, once you get in that flow, it’s nice. When we’re driving and we don’t have a show the next night, I’m always kind of bummed. I’m like, “Oh, we don’t have a show tomorrow?”

AM: So you wrote Bible Belt entirely on your own. How long did it take for you to write the whole album? Because it’s your first, did it take you years to compile songs?

DB: Well, I think what really took the most amount of time was just sort of finding myself and developing myself as a songwriter. I didn’t really know what I was doing, I just sort of stumbled into it. I did write all the songs on my own. I think that the songs are really taken from the last few years; the oldest song on there is probably about three-and-a-half years old now.

AM: I’ve always wondered if it’s weird to share your songs with people for the first time as a songwriter. I know that, as a writer, you have to really get into your head and reach deep, so is it difficult to turn yourself inside-out for an audience?

DB: It’s actually great. I just never am sure why people are into it. I’m like, “You mean you like that?” [laughs] It’s kind of a weird thing that people actually like it, because I’m just always like, “Oh, yeah, I’m sure it sucks.” Then people respond to it, and it’s really worth it.

AM: How did you come to be involved with S-Curve Records?

DB: Steve [Greenberg] found me through Betty Wright. I was doing some writing sessions with her when I signed a publishing deal with EMI Publishing. She called him or he called her, and I sang over the phone for him, then he flew me to New York.

AM: As a solo artist, is it difficult for you to create a band who can interpret your music as you hear it in your mind?

DB: No, I think maybe it could be difficult, but I’m really fortunate, and my band is amazing. I feel like they all have an old soul, too. They’re just incredible players, and they’re really great at interpreting what the music needs. I think that I really lucked-out finding them.

AM: Over the past few years, music went through a very provocative, “sexy” phase when it came to female musicians, where there were a lot of midriffs and suggestive lyrics. Do you think there’s been a recent shift in the industry which has allowed people to reacquaint themselves with women who take more of romantic approach to their music?

DB: I don’t really know if it’s the industry, I feel like it’s people in general. I feel like the time and the era that we live in is kind of like, “It’s OK to just be real and be honest.” I think that that my records conveys a lot of strength. It also conveys weakness, and I’m not afraid to say that I’m weak in a certain moment. I think it’s about honesty. I think honesty is really current and trendy. I think… [laughs] honesty is the new punk. [laughs] Just say it how it is sometimes.

AM: A lot of musicians have discussed wanting to make more upbeat music to reflect that the current time is a time of hope and that we seem to be on more of an upswing. Even the ballads on Bible Belt seem to reflect that in their lyrics or in their tone. Is that purposeful?

DB: I mean, I think there’s always this element of hope with everything, but at the same time I really gravitate towards rhythmical elements. I think the chord changes are often times quite uplifting, and I think lyrically, often times they’re pretty sad. I think there’s a juxtaposition in the musical aspects of it. It’s kind of uplifting. I never planned it, but it seems like it just speaks to a lot of people and maybe even current times. We’re in a recession and people gravitate toward things that sort of identify with their pain, you know? So maybe it happened at the right time, I don’t know. [laughs]

AM: You’ve referenced your goth days and how “Valentino” was a product of that chapter in your life.

DB: Basically it all stemmed from my classical background. I was really obsessed with classical music and that was the only music I was exposed to as a kid. I didn’t hear any pop music or anything. So I sort of gravitated to the whole goth phase because I, a) I loved the goth movement. I loved a lot of the goth bands and bands that are associated with goth, and I sort of was obsessed with the 18th century. In my boredom I created this imaginary friend, Valentino, who kind of resembled Mozart. I used to wear huge wedding dresses and dance around and think about the days when Valentino was… whatever. [laughs] But maybe he was a love in, like, a life past or something like that. And in a way the song actually represents sort of saying goodbye to that childlike innocence, where your imagination is so vivid and clear, and it’s not censored by media, or society, or whatever. It’s just really, really free. Essentially that song represents that kind of purity of imagination.

AM: It seems that people are desperate to try to classify your sound. I see such a wide array of genres attached to your music, from jazz, to soul, to pop, and I even saw something that said you’re a gospel musician. I think calling what you do “gospel music” speaks more to your background than to your sound.

DB: I do have to say, I’ve invited everything. I kind of think it’s everything and nothing all at the same time. I think there’s definitely a huge gospel influence, but not “gospel” in a Motown kind of a way; not really in a Christian type of way, necessarily. I think that there’s a huge sort of soul influence. I think it sounds– I don’t really know. I have no perspective. But a lot of people make references to early ’70s singer-songwriters, you know, like Carole King. I get that a lot, the whole Carole King thing, and she was very gospel-y. That’s what I tend to gravitate towards.

AM: It seems as if “soul” has taken on a completely new meaning now. When I saw it in reference to your music, it made sense, but not in terms of the modern definition of soul music.

DB: Yeah. I identify with a lot of the music that was happening in the late ’60s/early ’70s, so I think that kind of soul– I think now it’s defined by something like an Amy Winehouse or a Duffy. I think that’s a modern interpretation of soul, you know, and I probably stick to the older references.

AM: Have you had the time to put any thought into your next album yet?

DB: I love so many different kinds of music. I love disco, you know, the house music, the electronic stuff. I wouldn’t really want to do something like that necessarily for me, but I’d love to do, like, side projects. I’d love to play on peoples’ albums. I probably want to do another record, but I don’t think I’m done with this record yet. There’s a lot of songs that I feel like didn’t make this record that I still feel, like, need to probably have a home on another record. I just have so many songs at this point that we didn’t want to shove it all onto an album. I think there’s a lot of songs that speak to another side of myself that I’ll definitely be putting on another record.

AM: It’ll be fun to see because Bible Belt is brand new, so who knows what will happen next?

DB: [laughs] I know, I’m getting ahead of myself. [laughs] Well, on the fourth record, I’ll be doing, you know, disco beats. Or I’ll be going through my rap phase.

—–

Bible Belt is currently available on iTunes.
For more information on Diane Birch, visit myspace.com/dianebirch.

If you want the short version, Bobby Long’s initial success was catapulted by only a few verses. Having co-written a song that may or may not have been featured in some unknown indie film which involves vampires, his name has spread like wildfire in a very short amount of time.

We met with Bobby before his show at 3rd & Lindsley in Nashville, his last gig amongst a handful of American tour dates before making his way back to London to finish college. During our time with him, we learned that the kid is smart. He’s thought more about the future of the music industry than some of the most respected veterans in the business. He’s taking his career seriously. He has a genuine respect for his fans. His music and lyrics show no signs of youth but are instead sometimes cryptic and unnervingly wise. Of his writing style, Bobby told us, “I don’t think there are easily-accessible lyrics on a lot of the songs.” He’s not kidding. And, as with his lyrics, Bobby Long isn’t opposed to a bit of complexity in his career. “You shouldn’t go straight into it and be playing a 2,000-seat stadium. You should go in at the bottom and work your way up. That’s the way to be respected.”

Audioholic Media: I read that you recently signed a publishing deal with Bug Music. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Bobby Long: Bug are this really wicked company that have been around since, I think the ’60s, and they started off with this bloke called Del Shannon. It’s expanded and expanded into, like, Ryan Adams, and Gram Parsons, and… who else? Kings Of Leon, they publish all their music. They’re a really big company; a really cool company. A lot of country artists work with them, as well. Quite folk-y kind of stuff. They’re going to take care of all my publishing, and they’re going to help me out with America.

AM: Do they own the rights to your songs, as well?

BL: They own the rights for a period of time, and with handing over that quite small percentage, they go out and put you on the roster and they put you into the situations where you can do the things you want to do.

AM: It sounds as if you get all of the benefits of being on the record label without any of the obvious drawbacks that come with it.

BL: Actually, it is kind of like that. They don’t necessarily do anything with the album, but they help with everything else.

AM: It seems as if your lyrics are very honest and come from an introspective place. Is it difficult for you to hand your music over to someone else to produce and interpret?

BL: I think you can only write from an honest place, otherwise people see through it and don’t believe it. But in terms of handing [the songs] over to Bug, for them to do stuff with, it’s completely cool. You like who you’re working with, and it’s all really great stuff.

In terms of recording with a producer, as long as I’m always in control, I think that would be OK. I would never just go, “Here’s the song. Record it however you want.” I think you have to be really careful with your songs and be really protective.

AM: Does the experience of working with a producer allow you to see your songs in a different way?

BL: Yeah. In a nice way. I always take my music really, really seriously, but once somebody who has that kind of history behind them is taking you seriously, it’s like, “Maybe I have got a real opportunity for doing this kind of stuff.” It’s a real nice confidence booster, do you know what I mean?

In terms of the experience changing you, or anything else, I’m not resting on my laurels, and it hasn’t gone to my head that a few girls shout my name [laughs]. All that stuff is fickle.

AM: In today’s version of the music industry, there’s a lot of oversaturation with MySpace, and YouTube, and everything else. How have you been able to rise above that and stand out?

BL: I think all that comes to is just the live show. It’s so important for a musician to put on a good live show, and if they’re not good live, it’s just not gonna work. When people come to my shows, they see that I am honest. I’m an honest musician. I really like what I’m doing. I’m really passionate about what I’m doing, and that comes across. If not, I’m just some kid.

But I do work with the oversaturation thing. You’ve got MySpace, YouTube; it’s so accessible now. I think it’s really important, as a musician, to keep a little mystery about you. You should be attainable but unattainable.

AM: With your career, your fans have gotten to see the whole process. From the demos recorded in your bedroom to professionally-produced tracks. Has this had a noticeable effect on the relationship you have with your fans?

BL: I think one of the reasons people are interested in this and why people come to the shows and are really loyal is because you don’t often get an opportunity to watch an artist start from this, with very little recorded material and slowly working up. Not since the 1960s have they been able to see an artist slowly do an EP, then do an album… An artist now is determined to be in the limelight. They’re like, “Here we are. This is it.” Two albums, and they’re gone. This is an opportunity for me to have a long career. With all of my favorite bands, I love going from the first album to the last album, just seeing how they grow, seeing what happens, who dies, and all that kind of stuff. [laughs] Do you know what I mean? That’s what is really interesting. And Dylan was like that. You could see Dylan really start to explore with each album.

AM: You’ve listed artists like Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley as your primary influences, and their influence is present in the depth of your writing. The industry has changed a lot since their time, and the Internet has made music accessible in a different way. Do you feel as if your writing and artistry can be interpreted with the same depth as music was back then?

BL: Yeah… well, it’s just going to have to be, because that’s the way I am. [laughs] As an artist, you can’t just start changing anything because… people are fickle, and record labels are kind of watching what’s taking over and seeing who’s big at what time.

I think there’s just as much good music around now as there ever has been.

AM: I agree.

BL: I think music’s more unattainable– and more accessible at the same time. I think people are always trying to find good music, and they always want that slightly deeper stuff, I think– I hope. Otherwise, it’s back to college.

AM: What are you going to school for?

BL: I’m just finishing up my degree in sound in film. I just did it to move to London, really; to get a student loan. I’m just desperate to finish. I’ve got 7,000 words to write. I have to go from New York, to L.A., to Nashville, doing some really cool shows, then go back university. It’s going to be a real head fuck. [laughs] I got an extension on my work because I’m doing it on American folk music. I said I’m going to America to research. [laughs]

AM: The appeal of your music is that your sound isn’t packaged for a certain marketability or streamlined to be be mainstream, yet you have garnered a mainstream following rather quickly. Is that a difficult balance to wrap your head around?

BL: Yeah. I think some songs could be radio songs, but that’s just happened naturally. I just kind of do what I want to do and write the songs I want to write. But it is quite weird having an audience that perhaps wouldn’t have usually listened to my music, I don’t think. But I’m extremely lucky for that fact. You can’t buy people, you can’t beg them to come to your gigs, and especially in today’s climate where people aren’t buying records, you need to sell out shows, and you need to have that support there.

AM: Your lyrics are a little cryptic sometimes, so it is surprising that your music has been received really well by such a large group of people, but nothing about your songs is at all…

BL: Obvious?

AM: Yes.

BL: I think you should be able to interpret it any way you want to. I really hate when singers go, “This song is about Tracy, and she took me to go bowling, and I got my finger stuck in the hole. It’s called ‘Trapped.’” I find that boring.

I mean, sometimes you write songs and people might go, “Man, that’s deep.” And it’s just about a bad day or rain. It’s just your interpretation of it.

—–

Bobby’s live version of “Being A Mockingbird” is now available on iTunes.
For more information on Bobby Long, visit his MySpace page at myspace.com/musicbobbylong.

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.

—–

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.

I didn’t mean to fall in love with this band in a day and a half. After listening to their free EP that I downloaded from their website, I kind of got invested. And by “invested”, I mean that I then proceeded to buy their latest album, Everything is Working Out Fine in Some Town, and easily weaved it into my day-to-day routine by having it constantly playing in the background and tricking my iPod into thinking that it was the only album I owned among the other 3,000 songs that were beginning to collect digital dust.

I’m not that efficient of a person at times but felt compelled to put 32 different things in my life on auto-pilot (minus hitting a gaggle of geese) in order to manage time to get this interview while the band was playing in Tennessee. I’m glad I did because it is refreshing to meet a group of young people (I’m not claiming to be old) whose personalities are just as genuine as their music. Comparing this band to a particular genre of music or musician in general is hard for me. It’s hard because I respect what they’re doing, and at times, it’s not easy to categorize music that you respect because there is always that fear that you’re not doing them the right justice. So, with that being said, it doesn’t matter if you can compare them to anyone else out there right now—because they’re the band that people wish to be compared to. They’re that good. There’s my justice.

Audioholic Media: You guys have a very unique style and seem to work well off of each other. Tell us about your process of collaboration. Is there a primary lyricist? Someone who specifically arranges the music?

Josh Foster: A song usually starts off with me either on a piano or guitar and coming up with some kind of lyric or melody and then it usually turns out into some kind of core structure with these guys and they make it…what you hear. They add their creative influence to it and make it listener friendly—opposed to me, I would write the same thing all the time—so it’s nice. That’s where the collaboration really comes in, is in the practice room where I come up to them with basically and essentially a demo. Then they add their parts to it or change the song and enhance it.

Tom Gilbert: I think we all have really strong voices—or unique voices on our instrument—so it’s like we’re putting our layer or our voice on his song.

AM: Your latest album as a whole seems extremely well put together and is what I like to consider polished work. Bands in your position often have to cut corners here and there for financial reasons—which don’t show at all in this album. Tell us about the latest recording process.

JF: It took a long time and I think that’s one of the main corners we cut—was in time. We weren’t able to get the record done in four months. A lot of that had to do with monetary reasons but it also had to do with us making the record that we needed to make. We also had really good people in our camp that wanted to help out however they could. Whether it be financially, or someone like Derek Garten [our producer] who stuck with us for a really long time during the recording process of this album, which took a little over a year. You know, he put into that album as much as, if not more, than we did. It was people like that who allowed us to put out the record that we did. We didn’t have to cut a lot of corners.

TG: You listen to it and it sounds like we didn’t cut a lot of corners but I think we made that album relatively cheaply and it was because Derek [Garten], the guy who produced it, is really good and efficient. He had a lot to do with how it sounded put together and really polished.

JF: At the same time though, we did have to cut some corners with players. We didn’t have the finances to get $2,000 worth of horn players for a day’s session. We ended up meeting people along our way through traveling. We met up with this one girl in Auburn, Alabama named Marie. She was part of the Tiger Band and essentially, by keeping in contact with her, got a band full of horn players who all came up from Auburn. They were all really stellar. We had charts written out that were semi-legible and she had the people come up, and we fed them and paid for gas. That was a big expense that we made affordable.

AM: The band’s first self-titled album was released in ’04—

[Band discussion on when it was actually released. Some say ’04, some say ’05, but everyone came to an agreement that it was a while ago]

–regardless, it seemed like a huge gap in between this last album. What went on in that time frame? There were some additions and subtractions of members in the band, right?

Ben Jacoby: In brief, we were a band in D.C. and kind of, temporarily, disbanded for personal reasons. Josh carried the torch on and kept going ahead of the Parachute and found new players and I think that was a good time of growth for Parachute because his writing was really growing, and the arrangements were growing, while the styles were changing, but I think Tom and I were two of the original guys—and kind of left our fingerprint in the band—and were kind of the right guys for the band. After a couple years, Josh, moving forward, reconvened and now we are the band we are today.

AM: Geographically speaking, you all are in, what I think to be, one of the most competitive areas for independent musicians. Even though you all are doing something innovative, how do you go about making a name for yourselves and keeping that up?

TG: We promote really hard for our shows around here.

JF: I, personally, just don’t expect anything. I don’t expect to walk in to a show that we’ve not promoted for—it’s really important in this town because it’s really competitive.

TG: We don’t really leave a stone unturned when it comes to promoting for a show. We flier everywhere—a lot of people, for some reason, don’t flier for their shows. Maybe they think it doesn’t work, or whatever, but that is one thing we do for every big headlining show that we have. We just do everything we possibly can to get people to come out. Surprisingly, a lot of bands who are trying to make their band successful, don’t do a lot of these things. To us, it’s kind of a no-brainer—if you’re trying to make this your job, then make it your job. We promote hard because of that. Like you said, it’s a really competitive area so we have to do these things to keep up with all these other bands.

BJ: Actually, this is my only form of employment.

TG: There you go—Ben has made it his career.

BJ: [jokingly] Yeah—I’m already there. I’m looking into getting myself health insurance.

AM: Well, congratulations.

BJ: Thank you.

AM: It’s all about getting your name out there. I totally know what you mean. Fliers never hurt. My partner and I have been doing the same thing for our website, in terms of throwing fliers wherever we can. Last summer we hit random places on the West Coast.

BJ: You have to start somewhere.

JF: There is always someone else doing more; I like to look at those people and be like, “Let’s do more than what they’re doing.”

AM: How important do you think it is for musicians to be categorized in a particular genre of music? Because when I try and describe your music to people I know—I’m in a way speechless—I can’t really place you guys in one particular spot. I’m sort of just like, “Here, listen to this,” and I play your music for them.

JF: To an extent, I think. I mean, if you’re trying to get someone out to a show, and we’re rock-based, and they like rock and roll then…to an extent.

TG: Personally, it makes me happy that you can’t describe us to someone—in a good way, I guess. I think that’s sweet.

Kyle Cornett: It’s good not to be labeled because people don’t come in with preconceived notions. If you hand them a CD and are like, “These guys sound exactly like such-and-such,” then they’re just not going to think of that the entire time.

JF: We do get that kind of stuff.

TG: We actually get grouped in to a lot of different people, which is why I’m excited to hear you say that you can’t describe us, because it doesn’t happen that much.

AM: This is going to sound weird, but will you guys give me your definition on pop music?

BJ: No.

[Group laughter]

TG: I’m sure we all have some definition.

JF: Taylor Swift? Music that my mom likes…and my brother likes?

BJ: I think that pop music is the most common genre for white people to make babies to.

TG: Slash, think about their feelings too.

BJ: White people don’t have feelings.

AM: Very true—I’m only asking that because people seem to be categorizing your music as “pop” in all the reviews and press releases that I’ve seen. Although, when I think about “pop”, I think about two things:

So, what I’m trying to ask is, where do you think the intent of classifying your music as “pop” comes from?

TG: I think they just hear it, and they hear hooks, and like you were saying, the recording is polished and it sounds good. While sometimes, there are song structures that are kind of left-of-center, or whatever, there are still hooks and stuff.

JF: Thank God for pop music. If pop music didn’t exist, not to get all philosophical or anything, but if the true essence of pop music did not exist, I don’t think bands like us or other indie bands would thrive because there reaches a point where the listener just gets tired and I think that we bridge the gap between very left of center and radio mainstream, and we’re right on the route of people who are tired of that and are kind of just looking for something else. I think that’s why we have a generally wide accepting audience. I think that’s what makes our general demographic quite large. So, thank God for pop music.

BJ: Without Michael Jackson I wouldn’t know how to dance.

AM: You can’t really help what people say about your music—

JF: [In a threatening tone] Yes, I can.

AM: You can’t really help what people say about your music but what is being said can affect a first-time listener’s perception. For example, I have read and heard people compare you guys to sounding “just like” Rufus Wainwright or Ben Folds Five, which, to me, doesn’t seem exactly right. I think to myself, “Not really, I mean, there is a piano in the band.”

TG: We have brown curly hair—

AM: Exactly—that’s the degree I’m talking about. Do you guys worry at all about people comparing you to different bands or musicians solely on the fact that you have a piano in your band?

JF: As long as we’re not compared to The fucking Fray. I’m sorry.

[Group laughter]

BJ: It’s basically unavoidable.

TG: Maybe someone who really likes Ben Folds will come out to the show and be like, “Oh, they’re like Ben Folds?” Then they’ll listen to us—and be a new fan, regardless.

JF: You know, a lot of this, too is much to our own fault. In the earlier interviews we did, we were grasping at something that we could compare ourselves to so we can find an audience that has similar likes—and I would pick Rufus—I like Rufus. There was a time period where our writing was influenced by Ben Folds, and I think it was a short time period right when I first moved down here. Then we went in a little bit of a different direction but a lot of that is to our own fault, and our own press releases, and stuff like that. You kind of have to list some similarities—and honestly, it doesn’t kill me to be compared to or say I’m influenced by Ben Folds—I respect a lot of what they’ve done.

AM: Definitely.

BJ: I think at the end of the day, we’re just accessible enough that anybody who likes any of those bands—if they took the time to listen—there’s a decent chance that they might like us and that’s all that really matters is that new people are listening. I don’t really care where they come from.

[A group consensus that equates to an “Amen”. Shortly after, a squealing sound is heard outside the building we’re in. Eyebrows rise. Shoulders shrug.]

AM: What was that?

JF: It was a screeching car about to crash into us.

BJ: Zombies. It was zombies. Zombies don’t like our music. I think we need to start a human-flesh-flier.

[Somehow we start talking about Phyllo dough. Don’t ask, just keep reading]

AM: The musical breaks, especially the ones in the songs I just mentioned, are very textured and compliment the style of that particular song. Does having a piano in your arsenal of instruments make it easier or harder to personalize or give identity to songs such as those?

JF: When it comes to this band, to my own fault, I think I play very similar style of the instrument. I do the [imitates a particular style and rhythm popular in their songs] that I try to get away from, then I do something else, and I try to latch on. I think the only thing that gets inhibited is the bass, you know. There is a lot of bottom end to this instrument. Kyle is an upbeat portion of the bottom end of the band. So it adds a lot of low end—when you’re in that low end, it doesn’t leave a lot of room for various between the two low-end instruments because it gets muddy. Either I’m following him or he’s following me for most of the time. Does that answer your question?

AM: Yeah, I guess it does. Basically, what I’m getting at is that your music is different as it is. Like I said, I can’t really describe you guys to people when recommending the album, so with those already unique arrangements how do you go about making those “different” songs different?

BJ: Instruments are vehicles. You can drive them wherever you want them. I don’t think there’s a conscious decision to make a song different or similar. No decent musician that I know of is going to want to play the same song every day of their life. You just naturally write new things; it’s all about growing. Any instrument or art is about progressing and going forward—that’s what art is.

JF: I guess that’s kind of what I was getting into but more on the technical side of things. I get into a style of playing that I vibe with for a little while and then it becomes monotonous and I want to do something else. Like Ben is saying, it’s all about growth and doing new things.

TG: In “Dear Jacksonville” there is that whole Latin part at the end, and in “College Degree” there is like, that whole jazz thing in the middle of it—it’s not like we were like, “We’re going to write this song today and there needs to be Latin groove in it.” When he was writing the beginning parts of that song, that’s what he felt—or that’s what we were jamming on. You know what I mean? It’s like that’s an influence shining through.

AM: The record business is in a pretty weird spot—do think that because it’s so shifty right now that it has offered musicians such as yourselves more creative opportunity and freedom?

BJ: Absolutely.

TG: I think now more than any time, a band can make their own way and be creative, as far as promoting their name and getting their music out there.

JF: At the same time though, a band is a business and a business needs capital. I guess it’s a kind of blunt way to look at it, but if you’re making it your career, your band is essentially your business. Fortunately there are a lot of ways of growing and getting capital and touring is one of our main ones. It helps a lot to do the types of things that independent bands do without any support. It’s kind of magical to me, it’s what makes people starry-eyed; it’s a phenomenal thing. I think it’s awesome that [independent artists] have that opportunity and jumped on whatever they could to be able to do the types of things that they do.

AM: You guys just got finished touring in the Midwest. How do you go about finding venues or areas that your music would do well across the board?

TG: A lot of our touring is finding a band in a city that we’ve never even been to. Right now we’re touring with this band called Oh So Close, who are in Texas. Our music meshes well and hooking up with them is an opportunity to play in cities they’ve played in before and to play for their crowd. That’s really our main way of getting a lot of different audiences is just by show trading with other bands.

JF: We do have a lot of help from other people and our manager— what is that screeching?

[The mysterious screeching sound returns]

KC: We talk to other bands, too and figure out where the good venues are to play at.

JF: I think a lot of it is also trial and error. You’re going to go out and find a lot of places—

[More screeching]

—that you do not belong at.

[Everyone looks around for zombies]

AM: I guess that wraps it all up. Anything else you guys want to add?

JF: Are we signed now?

AM: Yes, that’s exactly what this whole interview was actually for.

BJ: Thank you, but we’d like to decline now.

[Group laughter…and more screeching]

—–

Visit Parachute Musical on MySpace at myspace.com/parachutemusical.
Their album, Everything is Working Out Fine in Some Town, is currently available on iTunes.

Glasvegas are from Scotland and they are an anthem band. The songs from their debut album, Glasvegas, double dog dare you to throw your fist into the air and take a shot of whisky (… or maybe just throw your fist into the air). Lead singer, James Allen, sings every lyric with a great deal of emotion– which is hugely appreciated because it’s downright difficult to understand what the hell he’s saying at times. But after a Google lyrics search, it becomes apparent that Allen (who is the band’s sole songwriter) has some really great stories to tell.

It’s no secret that Scottish music magnate, Alan McGee, has played a large part in Glasvegas’s success. After discovering them at a show in Scotland then praising them extensively on his blog, the band have become both well-known and respected over a short amount of time– they even got former Libertine/ex-Dirty Pretty Things lead singer, Carl Barat, to open for them on their first American tour.

Not bad, Glasvegas. Not bad at all.

Audioholic Media: So a lot of people know that you guys are involved with Alan McGee. Is he how you got Carl Barat to open for you on this tour?

Paul Donoghue, bass: Yeah, yeah. Alan and Carl came along to see us on the same night, and Alan managed Carl’s band, Dirty Pretty Things. They were finishing the album in Glasgow, and they managed to get Alan to come along. Carl just came for something to do. It was great.

AM: I read that there were twelve people in the audience when Alan first saw you live and that Columbia got you a $4 million house in New York City while you were recording the album. How are you able to process such a dramatic shift in such a relatively short amount of time?

Caroline McKay, drums: I don’t think we have time to process anything because there’s always the same kind of manic activity the following day. So maybe some time in five years’ time, we’ll process it all. [laughs]

PD: On our death beds. We’ll be like, “Ah, shit. That was really good!”

AM: James [Allen, lead vocals] co-produced the album, which is pretty rare for a new band on a big label. How were you able to convince Columbia to go for that?

PD: Before we signed a deal, we had already done sell-out UK tours on our own, and one of the singles went to number two in NME [for single of the year], and that was James that had copied that in his house, on like, a really crap little computer. So we had done so much of the groundwork, and what James had done in his house– I think they realized it was really special. Rich, who produced [the album] as well, had been in touch before any labels, so he already believed in James enough to let him do it.

CM: We were very fortunate when it came time to sign, that’s for sure. We had the opportunity to go with any kind of label, so… yippee! [laughs]

AM: With most well-known Scottish bands here in the U.S., it seems that one of peoples’ biggest complaints is that their sound is too Americanized– that they sacrifice their accents or strive to emulate American bands. Taking that into account, were you surprised at the American acclaim for your album?

PD: With the lyrics James sings, it’d be very hard for him to do anything other than completely honest, and if he sang in kind of a Mid-Atlantic accent, that’s not what we sound like. We wouldn’t sit down and talk with a Californian drawl or a New York accent, so it’s mostly just honesty.

AM: It seems as if this band is personal for you all– you were all friends before the band and the songs seem to be based in a lot of emotion. Does that make public criticism more difficult to hear? Are you more likely to become defensive?

CM: You can’t take it too seriously. If you believe everything that’s written about you, then you’re going to be in some kind of crazy headspace. You know, because as much as there’s good, there’s an equal amount of the bad things being said. If someone said something personal about someone in the band, I would be very upset.

PD: It also helps when you’re friends– you all have that bit more heart and you can face the kind of bad things because you are a group and there’s always four of you together.

AM: How long have you been on tour?

PD: Almost just over a year to the day.

AM: And you only get to go home for a few days sometimes, right?

CM: Yeah. We’ve spent more time in America than we have in Glasgow this year.

AM: Your families must be going crazy with you being gone so much. Did you get to travel a lot before you were in the band?

PD: No, no, not a great deal. Me and Caroline both had full-time jobs. Rab [Allen, lead guitar] and James were unemployed, so you don’t really get to see much of the world, Our families are good– as soon as you’re in the local paper. [laughs]

AM: What continents have you been to so far?

PD: Just America and Europe. We go to Japan in three or four days.

CM: Yeah, we finish this tour in Japan.

AM: People seem to be reacting really well to your live show– I heard that you just had a great show in Vancouver…

CM: Yeah, it was amazing!

AM: Is fan reaction at shows a definitive indicator for you of what your music is beginning to mean to people?

PD: It’s more important to us, the people out in the crowd than in the press. They’re the people who… they don’t have to spend their $15 to come and see you. They can spend that $15 on anything they want, so because they come to see us, it means so much. You have to give your all for them. It’s good being over here as well, because in Britain the shows are sold back now and you don’t get a chance to get out after the shows and talk to people, whereas here…

CM: It’s quite intimate. It’s great to get a chance to speak to everyone.

AM: Scotland has really rallied behind you, and everyone seems to want to see you do really well. Being that you have so much support from Scotland, is it strange or difficult for you to go back home? Does it feel like the same Glasgow to you?

CM: It’s just like going home. Because we’re constantly on the move and at the end of each day, we’ve got a gig or something major happening, I think after you’re home for, maybe four days– which I think is the longest we’ve had off this year– you get a bit restless. That time is usually kind of mad because you wanna see everyone but you don’t have time to, so it’s actually easier to be on the road…

PD: She sounds like a bit of a diva, ’cause it’s only the 15^th of January and she said we’ve only had four days off this year. [laughs]

CM: [laughing] No, no! I mean last year! I mean last year! But you know what I mean. It’s really hectic when you go home because you want to see everybody whereas when you’re on the road, that’s it.

—–

Visit Glasvegas on MySpace at myspace.com/glasvegas.
The band’s debut album, Glasvegas, is available on iTunes.

When you listen to The Matches there isn’t one particular band that you can compare them to. Sure, you can tell they’ve been influenced by an array of punk, pop, and alternative rock movements, but there isn’t one particular indicator where you make definite connections. In a day and age where music is being mass-produced like Adidas sneakers, it’s comforting to have something else more original than your average shell toe shoe. The good thing about this band is that they’re not afraid to take risks and they’re sure as hell not afraid to put on a good show. These guys are performers. These guys know how to perform.

Audioholic Media: On the Epitaph website, it states that you guys “honed your skills” through guerrilla concert-making, which is pretty admirable. Can you tell us anything about that?

Shawn Harris: Um… We became promoters… sort of… by necessity. We couldn’t really get a show through other promoters so we figured if we booked the show then we could put ourselves on it [slight laughter], you know? We started in the Bay area in California. It was like the generation after Green Day and Rancid had gotten really big from the Bay area, and so it was kind of like the do-it-yourself were more punk scene was opposed to the indie scene. They got really protective. They didn’t want— well, the scene was being exposed to MTV and everything at the time, and so they didn’t want bands that had pop elements. So when we did our shows we realized that we had some pop elements and also some alternative rock elements. So, yeah, we started booking our own shows— That’s really annoying isn’t it?

[Ed. Note: For the first half of the interview, someone outside of the room we were in was doing their warm up vocal exercises. By transcribing this interview I had to listen over someone saying “ah ya ya ya ya” for about ten minutes]

We promoted our shows by playing acoustic guitar outside of other shows in the area. Not with the intention of just drumming and singing but with the intention of doing it in places where we would get kicked out of. Not like libraries, but we would stand right in front of the exit of where a show would let out and when the bouncer would open the back door we’d throw fliers and we would get hauled off by our t-shirts—

[Ed. Note: More distracting noise. But this time louder]

—Yeah, I just lost my train of thought. But, yeah, we just got kicked out of places. We were like nineteen at the time and had just graduated high school, so we would go play at the all girls’ school that was in the area, and the principle there knew us by name. He hated us. He would chase us down the halls and all the girls would be like, “Ahh, there’s boys! There’s boys!” Then we would just throw fliers everywhere and that’s how our shows started selling out in local areas.

AM: Do you think shows like that had an impact with the direction your music was going at the time? For example, fan reaction?

SH: I don’t know. It basically just had an impact on— not artistically— just the fact that we had people coming out to our shows and we were able to start trading shows with other bands. That’s how we started getting outside of our local radius. We would trade shows with bands from, say, Chicago. Plain White T’s was one of the first bands we traded shows with. So, they would give us their Chicago headlining show for support if we would give them support on our Oakland show. We kind of scheduled tours around bands that we had hooked up with in Oakland.

AM: With videos being just as important of an art, where do you all get the visions for your videos? Is it a collaborative effort? Tell us about the creative process.

SH: It’s always a little different. Two of our latest videos, I directed. I have an art company.

AM: OXEN, right?

SH: Yeah, with an Australian artist named Emilee Seymour. She and I directed two of the videos. I actually find that the videos’ conceptions, at times, are completely separate from the songs, and then the right kind of song comes along and then the right kind of idea comes along— and there’s this certain connection that goes, “Oh, those work together”.

AM: Yeah, there seems to be a good balance between the videos I’ve seen of yours.

SH: Thank you. Actually, that’s kind of the same way we write music and lyrics. I kind of write a lot of lyrics separate, without melody, really. We write a lot of music and nonsense words and sometimes those things will align themselves and then it’s like, “Oh, this sort of fits here.” Then things kind of just mold together.

AM: The “Salty Eyes” video received a lot of praise from Alternative Press, Spin, and Rolling Stone. With the Internet being a leading factor into discovery for artists such as yourselves, how do you go about keeping up with what you’ve accomplished? Is there a certain “keeping up with the Jones’” mentality?

SH: We went international to film “Chip Shop”. We figured, “Alright. We’ll go to London, then.” I wouldn’t really view it as a one-upping. I think that could be sort of unhealthy when it comes to art because I think a lot of bands’ records have suffered because they’ve tried to rewrite or one-up their last single, or their last success, even. Once you start putting it into terms of success, and you keep trying to reach that same level of success again— it’s not a formula. It doesn’t work. You kind of just have to look for inspiration and go forward. Some of the stuff you do will be acclaimed and some of it won’t be, but that’s just the nature of the beast.

AM: Your genre of music has a relentless following in terms of its fan base. What I’m trying to say is that they’re so quick to judge change and your music changes from album to album. This is good. If not, I’d be interviewing New Kids On The Block in 2008. Because some people are skittish to change, does that have a factor in the musical progression you all take or is it kind of like a no holds barred kind of approach?

[Ed. note: Take a look at “McDonald’s is great because it all tastes the same”.]

SH: The largest piece of criticism that we get is usually like, “You guys changed a lot.” You know? Or like, “Your old stuff is cool. Why did you change?” You know? And I hear that semi-frequently. That’s pretty much the biggest piece of criticism that we get. I can only really make what work I’m inspired to make. You know what I mean?

AM: Totally.

SH: I like our first record. It reminds me of being seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen when you’re writing and recording. I’m not seventeen anymore, you know what I mean [starts to laugh]? I have to write stuff that I’m feeling right now. But that doesn’t mean that I dislike that record or that style. I think the misconception is that if a band doesn’t play as much of that stuff it must be that they’re writing off that history, or something like that. That’s not what we’re doing.

AM: It’s like evolution. The stuff has to grow.

SH: Exactly. Sometimes you have to put a song to rest for a while in order to appreciate it in terms of a live show. Sometimes a song, just through playing it for eight years in a row, becomes such a repetition on stage. The spontaneity of performing it is kind of gone. You end up doing the same moves, the same gestures, all at the exact same times. There’s the performance aspect of it that becomes almost like filling out paperwork. That’s not what we try to hope to convey on stage. But when we put a song to rest for a while and then come back to it, it kind of comes back to the way it sort of was when we first started playing it.

AM: Musicians seem to have a pretty big loyalty to their hometowns. For instance, the Nashville music scene is like a cult. All the Nashville musicians run together and help each other out, which is a good thing because it promotes progression. How would you compare Oakland, in terms of family-like qualities among other musicians?

SH: Yeah. Oakland, surprisingly, has a really good arts community. The scene over there— it was like everyone was helping— like a stepladder— they were all helping each other to the next level. Now that we’re on tour, we’re there much less frequently but we have a really good network when we come home. We’re looking for a bit of a change too. But it is nice to be home. I don’t know how difficult it would be to move. It’s kind of weird when you move, as a band, because people are always like: “Aww! They used to be from Oakland!” You know what I mean? [laughter]

AM: Yeah, that makes sense.

SH: I kind of want to go to Paris or something

AM: That would be sweet.

SH: Yeah… although, now that we have a smart president I kind of want to stay. We actually promised each other if McCain won that we would move out of the country. It would just be an exodus.

[Group laugher]

AM: Did you all do any kind of promotion, in terms of politics? We had an interview with Everybody Else and they were really gung-ho about using their concerts to promote political awareness and voting. Did you all have a part in things like that during this last election?

SH: Yeah, one of the songs on the new record. It’s called “We Are One”. It was kind of written about the forthcoming election. There are like six words in the song. It says, “When we are loud, we are one. When we are one, we are more.” Yeah, we were kind of embarrassed being an international touring band as well as being from America. It got embarrassing when Bush was reelected to actually go over seas. People would look at us and be like, “Wow. You guys are stupid.” It’s hard to say, “Actually, yes. I know 50% of us actually did vote for that guy… again. How is that possible?” It was just really embarrassing, you know what I mean? The image of America and the rest of the world were pretty bad. It was like taking the lowest common denominator of how we see life over here, and throw that on kind of like a big strain over there. Then they’re judging us on Legally Blonde, gangster rap, Kid Rock, Nickelback, Hinder, and our president.

AM: Those are all really bad examples of America, too.

[Group laughter]

SH: I know. It’s like, we’re horrible, you know?

AM: What would you say helped you guys get this far? I mean, it wasn’t a short ride since you guys have been together since ’97.

SH: You know, actually I think a lot of other bands would have broken up by now, but we actually coexist pretty well. We have kind of like a brotherly thing where we’re not going out and getting wasted with each other at sports games like bros but we’re also pretty close in a way where we know each other. I would say that kept us together through the good and bad. We just got a new bass player [Dylan Rowe] but we’re still good friends with Justin [San Souci], who was our bass player since the beginning. He kind of just lost the passion for the road. He kind of wanted to get a dog and live with his girlfriend and we totally respected that. So, it’s really fun being on tour with Dylan because he’s got that renewed excitement about touring and that sort of thing. I mean, I was born to be a gypsy. My mom had it in her and her dad was a rock collector who would just search for rocks.

AM: You guys seem to have a good grasp on your music regardless of being signed to a popular label. You can’t say that about too many bands, but with your guys’ music it sort of shows. Have there been any restrictions or discouragements along the way?

SH: Once in a while we have a little scrimmage with the label, producer, or a mixer. We generally like to do as much work ourselves as we can when it comes to videos or being there for every major step when it comes to recording. I think we annoy some people in that way because we always want to say exactly what’s going on. I know a lot of other bands are a lot less hands-on when it comes to that and just trust the producer more.

AM: That can cause some problems. For instance The Starting Line had a lot of problems with that sort of thing.

SH: Yeah. That’s definitely why we didn’t want to— we had a lot of major label offers when we first started and before we signed with Epitaph. One of our big reasons [to not sign with those major labels], as a band putting out their first CD, like, how much respect or say are you going to get from a label? We were kind of scared that they would take our sound and make us something that we weren’t. You know what I mean? If anything, Epitaph was a really good place to go for things like that. We still have problems and have butted heads because we didn’t want to be told this or that. We won most of our battles [laughs] but we had to concede a few times.

AM: Even though this might discredit my English major, what in the hell is a chip shop?

SH: [Laughs] It’s just a French fry place. They have them in London, the UK, and Australia.

AM: That’s what I figured. The only thing I kept finding online was fish and chips. You guys should add that entry to UrbanDictionary.com because it’s not in there.

SH: Yeah, people always get that title wrong. We kind of had a contest— we were leaking the titles to the songs one at a time with a cryptic illustration and people had to guess the title of the next song. We had the contest with the fans illustrating their own versions of the titles and there were so many pictures of the New York Yankees in automotive chop shops. The Yankees in a chop shop. That’s funny.

—–

Visit The Matches on MySpace at myspace.com/thematches.
Their newest album, A Band In Hope, is available on iTunes.

For those of you whose music library is filled with music your friends make fun of you for liking, Colour Revolt is your safest bet at acquiring some street cred. The Mississippi natives’ first full-length album, Plunder, Beg, and Curse, is a solid rock album that sometimes catches itself being catchy but never cute.

Last month we invaded the band’s personal space to interview Jesse Coppenbarger and Patrick Addison (lead singer/guitarist and bassist, respectively) inside their van outside of Dante’s in Portland, Oregon.

The weather was hot and the inside of their band was no better. The entire experience was sweaty, and fun, and enlightening– not unlike their live show. [insert rimshot here]

Audioholic Media: I went to colourrevolt.com and the page is blank, but the title says there are some places some of us can’t face yet…. What does that mean?

Patrick Addison: It’s a lyric to a song but our website is not up because we’re in transition.

AM: Your sound, to me, is pretty difficult to categorize. When people place you within the Southern Rock genre, do you feel as if they’re looking more to your home base than your music to classify your sound?

PA: I think sometimes it’s easy to categorize it as Southern Rock but the music isn’t necessarily Southern Rock.

Jesse Coppenbarger: It isn’t like, Lynyrd Skynyrd or anything. Same amount of instruments, though– minus the piano. But geographically it’s correct.

AM: Right. When I listen to your music, I don’t hear any Lynyrd Skynyrd…

JC: There’s definitely influences we take from the South, but I mean, Lynyrd Skynyrd so much? Not really.

AM: With all of the sub-genres and hyphenates that have been created to define a band’s sound, do you feel like it hurts an artist’s marketability if a critic can’t place you within a specific genre?

PA: I don’t like critics because a lot of them don’t really, fully understand. I guess it could be their job to label you as something but they’re wrong a lot. We end up seeing a lot of different comparisons that don’t make sense, and I guess that’s because they don’t fully understand it.

AM: Do you ever have people who come to the show and say, “I was expecting dirty, sweaty Southern Rock–”

JC: That’s what it is, kind of.

PA: It’s definitely gritty, and sweaty, and scary, and confusing…

JC: But fun.

PA: Yeah, but fun and energetic.

JC: We have fun.

PA: I’ve never heard anybody complain about a show.

JC: You always hear complaints about sounds or equipment or something, but usually if people are gonna come up to you and say something–

PA: Yeah. Expectations have always seemed to be higher than what they expected, I guess– not to sound cocky. But of course that’s just what people say. I’m sure we’ve let people down.

JC: But they wouldn’t come up to you and say, “Man, that sucked. Guys, what the fuck?”

PA: I wish they would.

JC: Also, our full-length is live. Basically when we play the songs live, it sounds like the record so if people have the music and they’ve heard it… It’s not like we’re not accomplishing what the record is. It kinda just is what it is right now, and maybe in the future we’ll make records that we can’t play live– but I don’t foresee that.

AM: You have three guitars in Colour Revolt and each guitar seems to have a specific role that generates a deliberate sound on each track. Is it challenging for you to accomplish that when you write songs?

JC: I think everybody definitely has their own style. Jimmy is kinda the noise guy, Sean’s kinda the clean guy, and I’m kinda the middle man. But it’s not like one person writes all the parts, and it definitely gets hard. It’s hard anytime but sometimes it’s fraying having to play harder parts than you [usually] would. But definitely there are times when you’re writing a lot of parts and the other person’s writing a lot of parts and you have to like, cut out stuff.

PA: And for the record, specifically, a lot of that came out of necessity since we didn’t have a piano anymore.

JC: We kinda just wrote the album with what we had. The EP has a lot of like, keyboards, and samplers, and all kinds of stuff. We were basically reduced to the equipment that we had– touring equipment– so the album’s very accurate to what it is live.

AM: I’ve heard a lot of bands try the three guitar thing and it sometimes just sounds like sloppy noise.

PA: We definitely try to make sure it works and it’s not overdone. Everyone has their role, and if it’s not time to play, don’t play.

AM: The thing I think I like most about your band is that you write albums, not singles. If I want to listen to your music, I listen to the entire CD, not just one or two tracks. Is that something you strive for when you write?

PA: I think of it as a song-to-song thing, but I guess we try to keep it consistent.

JC: I think it has consistent themes and stuff like that, but this album in particular is very song-to-song based. The EP is as well, I guess.

AM: You all just graduated from college…

BOTH: Yes.

AM: Is this your first September on the road together?

PA: Pretty much, yeah.

JC: Unless there’s holidays–

PA: Yeah, Labor Day weekend I’m sure we did tours. We did a lot of weekend tours, but this is the first time we can actually go out.

AM: What did everyone major in?

PA: Me and Sean were both Psychology, Len was Art, Jimmy was English…

JC:: I was Social Work.

AM: Does it surprise many people that there are no music majors in the band?

PA: I’ve heard people say that but… it’s different.

AM: It seems as if it might make music more of a mathematical thing than an art for some people.

JC: That’s definitely what I was scared of. There’s a blues program at Ole Miss. but there’s not really– I mean, if you could sit down and be taught by like, sweet blues players, then I would definitely major in that.

PA: Being technically right isn’t always the best thing.

AM: It seems that there’s kind of a pre-conceived image that comes with a certain amount of recognition as a band, particularly after touring with Brand New or playing SXSW and Lollapalooza. Was it ever difficult to find the balance between that and just being nomal college students?

PA: It was a complete balance all-around. I mean, you’re in a band, and you’re having to write papers in the van and read and do work on weekends, you know, leaving on a Friday for New York and having to be back in Mississippi on Monday for school. It’s a complete balance.

AM: Was there ever a point where you’d go back to school on Monday and your classmates would be excited about the fact that you’re Colour Revolt?

JC: No, definitely not. We just saw it as like, a vacation from school. I mean, for a long time it was work but you’re also being able to hang out with your friends in a band and play music for a weekend. In terms of image and stuff like that, it’s such a small town that we know so many people. My professors were really into that kind of stuff like, “Oh, you’re in a band?!” But there are so many bands around Oxford that we know everybody and all the band people know us, and it’s all kind of interwoven between school and living in a small town together. You know basically everybody and everybody kinda knows who you are.

PA: There, we’re just Patrick and Jess. Our hometown paper got our picture wrong for our CD release. They put a picture of Brand New and said it was Colour Revolt. [laughs] So they don’t care too much. [laughs]

AM: What is being said at the end of the song “What Will Come Of Us?”?

JC: That is in reverse and it’s me talking to Clay about Len’s drum track. I was saying, “Len’s droppin’ it. He’s droppin’ that shit.” It sounds awesome. You know… I don’t know.

—–

Colour Revolt’s Plunder, Beg, and Curse is currently available through Fat Possum Records as well as iTunes.
Visit Colour Revolt on MySpace at myspace.com/colourrevolt.