I put together a full band together for a few reasons. In the last year or two, I’ve been more drawn to full band music for one thing. It’s generally a bit catchier than singer songwriter stuff, and I just found myself wanting to listen to and make it. I think I also realized that there is only so much you can do all alone. I had it in my head that staying solo meant maintaining an emphasis on strong lyrics and prominent vocals that might otherwise be lost, but I’ve realized that you don’t necessarily have to sacrifice it in order to have a band. Plus, as a solo artist you miss out on the really cool experience of collaborating with and learning a lot from other people.

I’ve been playing music live for a really long time (over 10 years) and this is the first album I’ve released. I’ve tried to record material before and was never really satisfied with the songs enough to want to have them out in the world. I’m a bit of a perfectionist, and I think that was part of why it took so long to actually finish a CD. To me, this album means finally just doing that thing that I’ve been meaning to do for so long and not worrying so much about it being anything more than what it is. I’m calling it a coming of age album. Maybe that’s pretentious though.
As far as themes go, a lot of songs are about perfectionism! Striving for truth and beauty and stuff like that and coming up short and dealing with it. I think it’s also about trying to figure out what is real and what is imaginary. The album title means unfading and everlasting and refers to a flower that doesn’t exist. Another theme is disorientation in time. Most of the songs are told from perspectives I used to have when I was younger or experiences I’ve never had and only dreamed about or imagined.

When I was first a part of the music scene, I was just playing the exact same show at the exact same coffee shop every week because I was 14 and no one could drive yet and it was fun to feel like we had something to do on Friday nights. So the music scene is much better for me now that I can drive and eat ice cream whenever I like and stay up past 10!
I’m not really sure how I feel about the general music scene. I think it felt more close knit to me a few years ago, but maybe that’s just me. One thing I feel like I ought to do is go out to more shows. Being there when bands play and hearing and supporting good music is something that I enjoy and that makes me feel like a part of things. It’s a hard thing to do when you work a desk job and commute and barely have time to make your own music sometimes, but it’s worth doing.

Andrew Hawkins: For this record, specifically, I’d say Swans and Scott Walker were really big influences as far as my approach to writing guitar riffs and structuring the songs. The main thing we wanted to do differently on this record was to make it more expansive. Not necessarily in the length of the songs, or anything like that. More like, let the frequencies take over the songs and guide them to where they want to go. We let the riffs breathe a little more and we focused the songwriting around repetition more on this record than we did on the previous one. One song that sticks out in particular is “Mountain.” There’s a part in the middle that’s really hypnotic and simple, one-two chord progression – that was really influenced by Swans. I’d say as for the band as a whole, we always get Gorguts for a comparison – and they are an influence. But there’s a lot of different things that come into play when we talk about influences. We’re all really into jazz, like Ornette Coleman. We also like Cannibal Corpse, Cattle Decapitation, and Behemoth.

Well, no, because I definitely am a metalhead as far as what I predominantly listen to. But I have influences outside of that. I think a lot of what appeals to me about metal is the extremity of it. It’s hard to get that from a lot of different genres. Even with something like Scott Walker, it’s heavy – it has a lot of parallels with metal, but it doesn’t go as far as a metal band would. If I were to listen to the new Aborted record, I would get a different kind of enjoyment out of that.

Difficult. It’s not easy at all. That’s one of the things that can be frustrating when we talk about our band. People think we take a bunch of ideas and throw them against the wall. But in reality, it’s really difficult to come up with new material. We’re very discriminating in what we write. We became a little quicker with our songwriting process. There’s one song on the new album, I think it took a year to finish it. We concentrate really hard on what we’re doing, and when we do write, we have to be focused solely on songwriting. When we do reach that endpoint of a completed song, it’s a lot more rewarding.

Charlie Parr: I haven’t had a job in about 10 years! I’ve been mostly recording on my own, and touring around where I can. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve gotten to see every corner of the US, plus England, Ireland, a good bit of Europe and all of Australia a bunch of times. I’ve been happy with how things have grown. I’m comfortable and live as simply as possible. I do the stuff I like and work to avoid the rest. I really try to live in the moment and enjoy each day as I find it. Getting to play the guitar has saved my life in every way and I don’t want to take it for granted. I’m grateful for every chance I get to play, no matter where it is.
Brent Frishman: As a working professional musician, how have you learned to balance your home/family life with your rigorous touring schedules?
CP: I haven’t! Haha. It’s really hard, and the best I can do is to try and be present wherever I am. To try and take time to be at home and be there for my kids as much as possible, to be grateful and patient wherever I am. It’s gonna work out, at least as well as working in a packinghouse 9 hours a day and being tired every night; which is how my dad spent most of his life. He said not to go that way… and it’s been the best advice I’ve got.

CP: It’s been a very different process. Normally, I write songs and play them for a while at shows, and then record them; but with Hollandale I had a handful of tunings and a few phrases and just improvised the rest. Which was really fun for me! The song took the lead for a change and I just kind of followed along.
BF: On “Hollandale” you worked with Alan Sparhawk (of Low, Retribution Gospel Choir, Black Eyed Snakes, etc). How did that relationship and collaboration come about?
CP: I’ve been friends with Alan for a long time, and a fan of his for even longer. When I mentioned that I’d like to do an instrumental record, but didn’t have the guts, he was supportive and offered to help me; and it turned out to be one of the most relaxing and satisfying session I think I’ve had.

CP: I love North Texas, and getting to play around Denton has always been good for me. I’ve made some great friends and have been influenced and awed by some incredible music. There are a few places I visit like Denton (and Duluth for that matter) where music seems to be in overdrive, and it’s pretty energizing to come to those places and feel a part of that. Denton’s always made me feel welcome and at home. Plus Burntsienna Trio is always on heavy rotation in the car.
BF: Right on. So, what’s next?
CP: Same. Record another record, and hit the road.

Tony Clark: Saves the Day is one of my favorite bands of all time. Unfortunately I have not gotten into Lifetime or Bouncing Souls, but that’s because of me being lazy. I know Saves the Day always talks about how influential they were to them. I first got into Saves the Day with Stay What You Are back in high school and then I got into Through Being Cool. Both of those records, I listened to on a weekly, if not a daily basis.

Tony Clark: I would say we slept through it. The only way we were impacted by it was, when we were in high school, one of our best friends’ older brother was Buddy from Senses Fail. We got the dramatic, theatric side of emo when it was really popular. I didn’t not like, but it wasn’t for me. When I was in high school, I was getting into indie bands that were big at the time, like Built to Spill, Modest Mouse, Arcade Fire. I also really liked the Cure. The combination of that led to me to American Football. From there, I went down the rabbit hole of 90s Midwest emo. By that point, bands like Algernon [Cadwallader] and Snowing were around, so I was able to go to those shows.

Tony Clark: That’s a really good question. I haven’t really thought about it. I would say no. We’ve been a band for six or seven years, so we have gotten to know bands that we’re really happy to see have success. I think most of the people that have supported Into It. Over It and other bands like the World Is… throughout their careers understand that being a musician requires some kind of money. The long-term fans will support them. We’re not at the level of signing to Interscope or Geffen or Island. Seeing Tiny Moving Parts go from playing Macaroni Island to playing Riot Fest, these bands are rooted in such a DIY ethic, they’re so down-to-earth and super-appreciative of anyone that wants to listen to their music. No one really carries a big ego at all, especially people we’ve met.

Daniel Folmer: I wouldn’t say I ditched ‘Danny Rush’. My birth name is Daniel Rush. Danny Rush was more of a conceptual representation of the person I was during those albums. Danny Rush recordings began in mid 2008, when that phase of my life in Denton was wrapping up. In 2009, I moved to a little lake house in the hill country and took a job. Living in Canyon Lake provided some of the most enlightening and frightening years of my life. During that time, I wrote a lot of the songs included on Danny Diamonds. To be honest… a lot of the Diamonds songs were composed in a haze and cast aside. It wasn’t until I returned to Denton in January 2012 that the songs were brought to fruition. The frightening aspects of my personality followed me back. The person who I was in the hills and the person who I am when in organized society are not the same. Being surrounded by friends, family, and other artists is such a saving grace. But, enough of the sappy bullshit. Danny Diamonds was a character created during a 2011 tour with The Paper Chase and This Will Destroy You. When I played piano, I had a series of rings for each finger. It was a lot of green knuckles and arthritis but I felt like Liberace. Our first night of playing with TWDY, at some point, I became agitated and began throwing diamond rings at the band and yelling ‘diamonds, bish!’ …It became a running gag and the name stuck. The album, Danny Diamonds, was recorded during a time (summer 2013-summer 2014) while I was beginning to shed the mindset of self-destruction and began to focus on renewal and production in a positive way.
Brent Frishman: What’s the writing process like with you and the Designated Drivers? Do you demo the songs before bringing them to the band?
DF: My songwriting process has been pretty fluid over the years. When I was a younger man, I used to sit down at the piano or the guitar and attempt to squeeze songs out. Thirty minutes banging four to six chords around and hoping for the best. Though it produced some wonderful material, it is not always as natural or smooth as one would hope. As I’ve gotten older… eh, more mature, I have become a satellite instead of a radio tower. It’s as if the signals of song come through and I merely accept them. I will hear a melody or a lyric in my head, transcribe it or record it quickly. This is when the fun begins. I scramble to find an instrument or begin to sing and the words come through. It’s kind of an unconscious expression. Half of the time it’s gibberish or no words come through, but I snatch them when they do. However, the songs I write are autobiographical. It always ends up that way (at this point). For this album, specifically, we spent more time preparing for the studio. Most of the Designated Drivers albums were products of the absolutely awesome Justin Collins experience. We show up at JC’s home studio, play the songs together a few times, JC would hit record on the tape machine, and magic would flow. It was harrowing, breakneck, and wildly creative. However, with these songs, I wanted a more rehearsed and orchestral arrangement. These songs’ topics nearly cost me everything, and I wanted to give them the respect I felt like they deserved. Justin’s influence was instrumental in the formation of my sound as well as the creative process. He was a great help with this album as well: playing, arranging, and producing. He is a master.

DF: Rodrigue is an old friend of mine. We’re both Brookhaven college alumni’s, both named Daniel, and both in love with photography & the people who produce it. One day, he presented this idea of making a video with a kind of ‘crank camera’ as I called it. It was a little plastic box with a handle that looked like a jack in the box. He would crank the handle several times and it would take thirty frames. For more detailed information you should check out the Central Track write-up. The original concept of the video was for Danny Rush to leave the Dallas county jail and engage in total debauchery around town. As we progressed filming (we had to re-shoot three times because the film was faulty), the video became less focused on my asshole persona and more a juxtaposition of imagery and lyrics. The song centers itself around suicidal ideation, planning, and intent. While editing though, the video became an exquisite series of bright colors and an expression of enjoyment in life. Mr. Rodrigue is a wizard.

DF: Hmmm. That’s a tough question. Being a primarily Denton-based artist, I love Denton’s artistic community. I do hate the FRISCOization or whatever that is occurring under the very watchful and attentive eyes of ‘your friendly city council’. I hate the Rayzor Ranch development. I hate the consumerism that has taken the place of many local businesses. However, with all cities… things must progress. Austin is a great example. Everyone in my family besides me was educated there. You always hear ‘ah man AUSTIN JUST AIN’T THE SAME’ from the townies that grew up there in the 70’s. You even hear it from the mustached men who moved there in 2009. And while both of them are right, it’s fucking annoying and trite. I see Denton heading that way and already hear that kind of talk. I have frequent conversations with my friend, who has achieved worldwide success as an artist and songwriter, about the ‘glass ceiling’ in Denton. In his mind, you can only achieve a certain level of success in this town. However, I disagree. The bands I worshiped early in my Denton years (Lift To Experience, Little Grizzly, Centro-matic, the Baptist Generals) all achieved the success that I strive for – national/global touring. To me, succeeding as a musician is being able to bring your art to new and fresh ears. Josh Pearson (LTE) is a monster in Europe. George Neal (LG) is now fronting Hares On The Mountain, a blender full of talent and a local secular praise and worship machine. Centro-matic is still putting out great albums. Will Johnson is touring and collaborating with other great writers. The Baptist Generals just released a terrific album and have been touring. All of these bands were seeded and grown in Denton. All of them are achieving what I would define as success, either on local or national terms. Go to Austin, Chicago, or Portland. Try to get a half decent gig where people give a flying fuck about the art you are presenting. It’s tough, and sometimes defeating. That being said, I’ve been playing in Denton for ten years now. There have been plenty of tough/defeating opportunities, but what I love about Denton is those shows are sometimes the most intimate. Playing in the basement of J&J’s for six people with no PA and being provided total silence in a room to present your art is a blessing. Sound is the canvas for song. It is difficult to paint when the canvas is muddied. But as far as Dallas and Fort Worth go, I love both cities, but finding good gigs is hard. I love, love, love playing the Kessler. From production to the busboys, the staff is friendly and as kind as anywhere in the world. I love what Dallas has to offer as a city and a cultural hub. I love Fort Worth for the history, the musical arts, and the Texas tradition. Being given the opportunity to tour Europe and the US a few times has given me such love for my town. One day after returning from a tour, I star struckenly ear fucked Matt Pence. We talked about coming back from tour, being exhausting, and a bit of a nightmare in terms of psychological adjustment. He said, ‘man,… I’ve lived all over the country, but there is nowhere like Denton.’.

Jeff Ryan: Well, I think everyone we collaborate with in some form or fashion can have an influence on us in one way or another and I have been very lucky to write, record and play with some amazing artists that, whether they know it or not have helped me sculpt my writing in some form or fashion. It really started though with Pleasant Grove probably 7 or 8 years ago when I would jump in during a rehearsal or recording and come up with some very simple linear melodies that would complement a song in some way or another and that got me thinking of elaborating on that concept of just building around simple melodies with piano or rhodes and utilizing bells, drums and guitars to build out these ideas. This project has just been something that’s been a part of me for a long time and I’ve had these melodies and ideas in my head and now just taking the time to puzzle piece them together to make something hopefully interesting. I’m not really that worried about fitting into any specific genre or anything, I just really enjoy the process from beginning to end of building on, again some pretty simple patterns and then trying to do something unique w/ them with whatever equipment I have within my reach.
Brent Frishman: You’ve sighted influences like Aphex Twin, Kraftwerk, Orbital and even New Order as being influences on your more ambient approach to electronic music. What other groups or musicians would you site as influences, directly or indirectly?
JR: There’s too much out there really, because now we have access to everything, I get overwhelmed with the amount of music that absolutely floors me at least on a monthly / weekly basis, but a definite direct influence ? I don’t know, i’ve been into Boards of Canada and Sparklehorse for a long time, but I guess just anyone who uses patterns and builds on them with bells, drums, analog keyboards and samples and then shapes them in the mixing process to something that would either respect the instruments in their natural state or completely disassemble them and tear them apart to where they are indistinguishable because I’ve always been a huge fan of that approach, you know melding the organic and the electronic to where you can feel what’s going on but it’s slightly out of reach as well.

JR: Yeah, I mean it’s definitely changed from when I started playing in the 90’s and in my opinion that’s a good thing. I’ve always championed the Denton/Dallas/Fort Worth musical landscape to people I meet wherever I go b/c I think it’s something to be proud of you know? I’ve always been super excited to tell people about our great artists like Centro-Matic, BedHead, The New Year, Lift To Experience, St. Vincent, Midlake. But yeah, you know i think back in the 90’s or even early 2000’s there seemed to be this overall incessant drive to “make it” whatever that means and it seemed a lot of bands kinda came and went during that period, and that’s fine, it’s just nothing I’ve ever really been that concerned about. So now, because the industry has changed so much it seems like the bands that have consistently put out great records and new ones that have popped up are continuing to do so for the pure act of that’s what they were meant to do, not for any other reason but this need to make beautiful music, which i find refreshing and inspiring.I’m really excited about what’s happening in this area, b/c even just a few years ago we didn’t have anything like the Aurora Light Festival where you’ve got thousands of people walking around downtown and all this amazing experimental/electronic music and light installations and films being shown all over the place is an example of art and music really coming together and doing something interesting. So, playing in different cities around the US or Europe or wherever I used to really want what they had in my own city, and I think we’re really catching up and definitely making strides in that area where the DDFW area is really embracing and realizing how important it is to support artists, like the Aurora Light Fest, Patio Sessions and all the festivals that have been popping up in all three cities, Denton, Dallas and Fort Worth thanks to some really smart people is exciting.
BF: How did the band/project get involved with Todd and Simulacra Records?
JR: Well, it’s mainly down to my friend Peter Schmidt who was a friend of Todd’s and knew his band Crushed Stars was looking for a drummer. He put me in touch with Todd and a few months later he had sent me all the tracks for his third release under that moniker to write some drum parts and melodies and a few weeks after that we were tracking with my buddy Stuart Sikes. Eventually, that all evolved into recording now several records with Crushed Stars and also collaborating with him on Myopic tracks as well. We realized we had a lot in common not only with electronic music but that using his label Simulacra we had total control of everything. It’s a very DIY aesthetic which I love and has some great artists including his own electronic project called Sonogram.

JR: You know, up until recently I never really considered this project to be a fully functioning band to be honest, it was really just me as a bedroom project and I would call on friends like Mike Rudnicki(Baboon), Ean Parsons(BoomBoomBox), Tony Homillosa(Pleasant Grove), Sean French(Theater Fire, Eyes Wings and Many Other Things) and Shane Culp(Mission Giant) and also now Jay Allen(Crushed Stars) to help out play but now it’s really taken on a life of it’s own and I couldn’t be happier. I was completely blown away to have it played on BBC6 Radio this past year a number of times and have been communicating with some promoters over there, so we shall see what will happen for this next release. I’ve started to write for the next record and have been trying to approach everything differently than before, maybe it’s because I’ve been working with the guys pretty consistently for the past year or so but these ideas that I’m working on now are pretty different than the last two albums, so I’m really curious as to where it’ll go.

Dustin: I would say they’re pretty much the same, the only difference is that there’s a ton of venues here. We changed members, added new people in the band, kept doing what we always did, but with new people… things always change.
Eva: The sheer number of people here makes it a lot more fragmented than Denton. I don’t know if that’s changed our course.
Lee: There were bands we’d play with in Denton, and we’d play a few shows with them, and see the same people at every show. It was a large, nebulous group of people, but I hardly ever saw a person I didn’t recognize. Here it’s a lot harder to keep track of that.
Theron: It’s quite a bit more close knit in Denton, there’s a big population difference.
Lee: I don’t think in Denton we ever said no to a show because we weren’t interested in playing at that venue. You play everywhere in Denton, that’s what everybody does, and everybody’s really cool about it. Venues have their own little quirks, but there wasn’t anywhere that people just refused to play.
Dustin: We definitely like playing everywhere that we did in Denton.
Lee: For sure, but because there are so many venues here, you don’t need to play at every single venue. Some of them don’t have a crowd that’s going to be into what we’re doing.
Hoop: So you get a little more selective about what to do and where to play.

Eva: Hoop & Theron work really well together, things have gone really smoothly.
Theron: Coming into this thing, it hasn’t ever felt awkward. I like you people.
Dustin: We knew each other beforehand. Theron & Hoop came from some pretty heavy bands in town, and bring that to the new stuff we’ve been writing. I don’t think we ever set out to write songs a certain way. I really like the new stuff we’ve been doing, and we jammed on it and worked it out, and it just kinda happened. It’s always been getting heavier, but I feel like any band should be a little different after playing together 5 years. I hope so, at least. Grow to a different sound.
Hoop: We had all played shows with each other’s bands, and it seemed like the end of the first practice, we were already working on finishing up a song by the next time we all played together.
Lee: We got a song together and working in a way we were comfortable with playing live in just a few weeks, a couple of practices a week. It used to take us months to get a song written.
Brent: Do you have any plans of recording your new(er) material? Is the idea of an album still relevant and something the band is interested in releasing?
Eva: Yes, we’re recording the weekend of March first & second. We’re recording four songs to tape, and we’re still working out how we’d like to release it.

Theron: I try to keep things separate, as far as riffs that I write. There’s always going to be your own style.
Dustin: Yeah, Theron came to Sans Soleil after playing in Communion. I feel like no matter what, I’m always listening to something I haven’t heard before, new or old, and that’s always going to influence you. It’s inevitable to not listen to a certain style of music and end up making something similar, in your own way.
Eva: I feel like I’ve changed a lot as a musician by working with different people. When I first joined Dead To A Dying World, they write so differently than Sans Soleil does. We’re really democratic about how we write, where Dead To A Dying World writes each part separately and pieces them together with leadership from Sean and James. Doing other recording projects and playing with other bands has really changed my definition of playing. There’s a difference between harmonizing, which I do in this band a lot, and adding embellishment. I’ve tried to bring that more into Sans Soleil. The role of strings in a band is really confusing to me, but I’ve learned more about the places it belongs and the role it has by playing with more people. In this band I feel like it’s different than any other project I’m working on. It’s almost like a lead soprano role.
Dustin: It’s kind of like a lead vocal role.
Theron: I think so, too.
Hoop: That’s the vibe I’ve gotten from everybody that’s seen us play and talked to me about it. People really like that it’s instrumental, but the viola sort of fills in that vocal role so it feels like it’s not missing.
Dustin: Yeah, and I don’t think we’ve ever thought about getting a singer. It’s not something we would necessarily say “no” to, it’s just always kind of worked out that way.
{to Eva} You’re doing Sabbath Assembly now, too.
Eva: In that project, I harmonize with other vocals, and it’s more like a vocal line there. Harmonizing with myself is a lot of fun too, I plan to do some of that on Sans Soleil’s recording.
Brent: Awesome! Are there any upcoming gigs you’re excited about and/or would like to promote?
Lee: Yeah, actually. On April 11th we’re playing the Hole In the Wall.
Dustin: And on April 22nd we’re playing Thee Silver mt. Zion after party with Lord Buffalo at the Mohawk.
Eva: We’re also talking to Sub Oslo about some dates in may, and we will announce anything else on our Facebook page.

The writing process was the same as always. Jake and I (Bren) wrote the songs acoustic and then brought them to each other to make the songs full band. The record process was a little different this time around though. Like the last time- we recorded it ourselves, with some help from our friend Pat in The Hundred Acre Woods who engineered drums. Though, unlike with “Sports”, Sean and Ian played on the record which was something we were all very stoked about since the last record was just me and Jake. Then once we were done recording we sent it off to be mixed by Jon Low who worked on records like The National and Restorations (dude has a grammy nomination) and we couldn’t be happier with the result! When we got the first mixes we were amazed how great they sounded!

Bruce Springsteen, Miley Cyrus, Gwar, Los Campesinos and then us haha

We’ve never played any bad cities everywhere we go has been really really cool. That being said The Nile Theater in Mesa/Phoenix, Arizona was so so hot which might make it my worst city, but the show was great so complaining feels dumb haha. The best cities for me are Boise, LA and Chicago. Chicago being my top choice cause every time we go there, part of me wants to move there haha.

Bill Mayo: Well, the band forming is kind of boring. We just met through friends of friends and stuff like that, so there’s not really a story there. As far as songwriting, basically, the ideas for songs either come from me or Ezra, and we bring them to rehearsal, or to a session or whatever, and fill out the rest of the parts. Recently, we’ve been getting into demoing out the songs so that we can actually get an idea of what they will sound like recorded. We’ve always kind of had an issue in the past where we’re always just a live band, and we don’t actually get around to recording all that often. Being in New York, we just didn’t have the time or space to do a lot of recording, so, we’d play these songs like, a hundred times live, and then get into a studio and be like, ‘Oh, well, we actually don’t really like that part all that much,’ or, you know, we’d change some things here and there, so now we’re trying to do both processes at the same time. Recording and playing live…new tunes. That’s where we’re at these days.
DJ: Being a band in New York City, as you’ve mentioned, has its own unique challenges. Do you find it particularly competitive to be a band in one of the country’s culture capitals?
Bill: It is competitive, but not in the way that…I mean, the word competitive is sort of…doesn’t really work in the music industry. I guess it does work in the music industry. I’ve never felt that, anyway. It was always just, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of bands,’ and it felt…just saturated. It felt oversaturated.
Ezra Huleatt: I think ‘healthy competition’ would be more apt. It’s good to be surrounded by a lot of bands doing different things and pushing in so many different directions, and there are so many venues and there’s so much to do and learn. There’s a reason it’s been kind of bubbling for a while.
Krisana Soponpong: I also think, you know, we’ve been around New York for a couple years. I think a good response to that is that…after a couple years, the bands that have the cohesiveness stick around longer, and we find bands that we kind of call our peers, and we want to play shows with them because we like their music. So, that’s really helpful.
Jason Holmes: Yeah, I think there’s a lot more than a competition, where it’s like, teams, you know, like in college basketball. Instead of us all being in it against each other, it’s more like, you see your friend’s band do something really impressive, or like, come out with a song, or put on a show that’s like, amazing…you don’t want to bring them down, you just want to bring yourself up, and be like, ‘Oh, I want to have the same effect on the people who see our shows.’ And so, it’s not really a competition in the traditional sense, it’s more like, just, everybody keeps raising the bar, and that’s what’s so cool about the environments that we try to put ourselves in, such as Brooklyn, and now Austin, and so on. It’s just being around other bands who are trying really fucking hard, you know?
Bill: It’s also 2013 in the music industry, so, nobody actually ever wins.
Jason: We’re not even sure what the rule book— or where it is! There isn’t a trophy.
Krisana: I know who wins! The music listener. The music listener wins! You can either keep playing the game, or decide to go somewhere else.
DJ: The music listener definitely wins, as far as accessibility is concerned. Do you feel that the easy availability of music today devalues the listener’s experience of new music?
Bill: I feel that it does. You don’t get that anticipation for a new…Nirvana record, or something like that. No one gives a shit anymore. Every day there’s something coming out, and everybody has the access to promote themselves— which is great, and we do the same thing. We’re using those tools to promote…a smaller scale band than they might have gotten, but, you know, I kind of miss the glory of the smaller pool of great bands that were doing well.
Ezra: I think, at some point…it’s really hard to make money in general right now as a band. I think listeners will suffer, because it’s hard to be sustainable at all, especially when everything’s going to streaming now, and you’re just making…It sucks that money’s involved, but I think you’re going to lose artists.
Bill: Great bands will just quit, because there’s not enough—
Ezra: I was reading a fascinating article about books on amazon.com, and the ability to resell something you buy, when you get your e-book…or i-book…or whatever online. They’re trying to set up a program on their site where you can rebuy books that people bought online. So, the author won’t make any money, and the only people who will make money will be Amazon, because they’re hosting it, and then the individual who bought it originally makes some money, too. It’s scary. The article was kind of approaching it from an author’s perspective, how it’s like, getting to that point where it’s getting crazy.
DJ: In the physical world, that stuff has been going on for a long time, with used book stores and used record stores buying and selling media for profit without any of the money going to the original producer. But now, you don’t need a physical storefront. You can do it as an individual, online.
Jason: With that idea, just somebody buying a used record and being like, ‘All right, I dug it, I’m sort of over it now, let me go and pass it on and get a couple bucks for it,’ it’s like, now that has really moved into the digital realm. So, that, on top of being able to download so many things for free, it’s just taking that little bit of potential revenue that would go to supporting bands like us and just diluting it that much more. But, that’s just the way of technology.

Ezra: It’s the future. We’re still in a position where a lot of these offers come up, and because we want to get ourselves out there…I mean, that’s the crazy thing. There’s so many bands, and there’s not a lot of payment. So, when your friend’s like, ‘Hey, write a score for my movie. There’s not money involved, but it’ll be a good experience.’ You get to a point where you’re like, ‘Man…!’
Bill: You can have all the exposure in the world and still not have revenue streams. Also, there are so many bands that have access to these licensing opportunities that the actual payment that you get is going down and down all the time. People would sink, maybe 20 years ago, maybe $20,000 or $50,000, over the course of a few years, and now you get, like, $3,000, or a few hundred bucks, or something.
Jason: That’s basically supply and demand, you know? Anybody can have a home recording set-up, and record CD-quality and sell it, you know?
Ezra: But we’re definitely trying to push that. That is definitely a revenue stream we’re trying to maximize.
Jason: Yeah, the whole thing is, having all of the rules change while we’re in it and while we’re trying to do it has forced us to be creative in different ways. Not only are we trying to create the songs, and cool videos to go along with them, we have this whole other thing of being…creative like business people, really, and trying to figure out, like, ‘All right, how the hell do we perpetuate what we’re doing?’ It’s an interesting creative challenge that I’m not sure if we all anticipated when we got into it, but it’s sort of fun.
DJ: You mentioned how people will often ask musicians to provide their music or other services for free, in exchange for the privilege of ‘exposure’ and thus a chance at future returns. Have you personally seen any of this ‘exposure’ pay off for you?
Jason: Well, we sort of do the same thing. This idea of sort of working together for exposure, you know, working with other artists, we’ve benefited from it, too, because we have filmmakers who want to make music videos, artists who are willing to put in a lot of time and energy to create a video or something that maybe they didn’t necessarily get paid for, and it benefitted us and it benefitted them. So, though we say a lot of times what we’ve just been saying, where we do these things but we don’t get paid for it, we do also benefit from it. Artists and other folks we’ve collaborated with…
Ezra: I just think you never feel like it benefits you enough, and that you end up feeling like the music industry is actually really kind of depressing. There’s always good stuff going on, but you’re just like— you want the process to go faster. Say you’ve been doing this 5+ years now. You want to be rocking stuff out. You want all these things to make a splash faster, and it does take time. And then, things do come around, but just never at the speed you’d like them to. But, you learn, and you learn not to be too naïve and to be smart about things. When you hear you’re going to open up for the Rolling Stones, you just don’t believe it, you know? [Laughs] Yes, that happened.
Jason: Yeah, that did happen.
DJ: You were told you were opening for the Rolling Stones?
Ezra: It was just this guy…
Jason: Long story short, there were some promises made with this old record industry executive…
Ezra: He was on his way…he was on his deathbed, pretty much.
Jason: He didn’t have a lot to lose, but he had a few things to gain…
Ezra: …Which made it all the more believable, because he was like, ‘I’m gonna…’ you know, do such-and-such, ‘I believe in you. I’m going to be really pushy with my last little bit of money,’ and, just…we’ll leave it at that.
DJ: That kind of disappointment seems like it would be symptomatic of a place like New York City, where creative and powerful people with big ideas are moving in and out all of the time, and everyone is trying to use whatever they can to really pull something off…
Bill: Definitely. What happens to be hip at a certain moment comes and goes really quickly. You just kind of do your thing, and eventually the timing will just line up, you know? The things that were doing really well there five years ago or four years ago are just…dead, or were vastly different than what’s coming out of there or being successful now.
Jason: That’s a good point. You can’t chase the trends so much. You’ve kind of got to be into what you’re into, and just hope that enough other people are into it, because, as much as you want to be influenced— and are, it’s hard to avoid being influenced by your friends’ bands and stuff that’s on the radio right now, Bill makes a good point. By the time you figure out how to do it yourself and come out with it, it’s sort of a little bit passé. So, I think that’s influenced our songwriting in general. Our whole approach is like, yeah, you’ve got to pay attention to what’s going on in the greater context of music and new music in whatever city that we’re in, but you’ve also got to be true to your ears on what sounds good, and what elements of pop songs and good songs have really proven themselves to be timeless.

Bill: We’ve been headlining a lot of tours, and doing our own tours and playing small clubs as a headliner for basically the last year or so, and our booking agent has been doing a great job of getting us much better shows than we were ever doing before. Kind of the next step would be to get on tours with some bigger bands and…get some more fans that way. Play bigger shows opening for bigger acts…I think it would do us a lot of good to do that. Playing at bigger and better venues…I’m not going to bring money into it, because I know it’s a very complicated thing to actually make a ton of money, but you know, it would be nice to kind of be in the company of larger acts, and hopefully making a better living as we go. And, coming out with great recordings, you know. Coming out with a great single or a great EP, and if it catches on, that’d be great, too.
Ezra: Yeah, that’s the best way to do it. I mean, two years is really too far for me to know, but, it’s great, we’re on the trend for at least this year of putting out an EP every few months, it looks like, which I think is a great way to go. To constantly have content coming out, and fresh ideas. And new environments, too, which I think influence your sound, even if you pretend they don’t. You know, we’ve been in Austin for a couple months. There’s a chance we might be doing the same thing out in LA, or maybe even Australia, all within the coming year. So, we’re excited.

Matt: There is a ton of history between Sam and I. So much that you may not want to read it all. I can say that we’we’ve been playing music together longer than we haven’t.
Brandon and Ben have known each other since high school, and Brandon and I met as coworkers.
Brandon: We had similar music tastes, and Matt was in a band called Blitzer with Sam and a couple of the other guys currently in West Windows with me (Justin Ward, Michael Stoner) they needed a drummer. I was excited because Matt had shown me some previous recordings of their recently abandoned Monte Cassino project, and before that Elm Fooy. This was in 2007, a lot has happened between then and now. Over the years we tried several different projects together. (Wolf Rayet, Living With The Ghost). They’ve all been points of growth and we’ve come a long way. Musically and personally. Each project building or refining off the last.
Matt: Sam and I were approached by a college student asking to help him record some material. We’d both been out of the music scene for quite a while but we figured “why not”. We had nothing in mind when we agreed to help and with the exception of all the musical gear we had accumulated from previous bands, we didn’t even have a starting point. We didn’t even have a drum kit. We met a seller in a parking lot on the way to the studio the morning of recording. That day I played drums, and Sam played guitar and bass. That is where the idea for Things of Earth started. It was just going to be Sam and me. We were going to be a never-performing, sequenced drums, kind of band. We later realized this was going to take more than just the two of us to create what we had in mind for a final product. The song recorded that day became “This Old Haunt”, the first song on our first EP. We recruited Ben and Brandon and we all started practicing once a week. And here we are.

We liked how well the first EP turned out, so we wanted to go with Alex Gerst again. This time around he has a new studio (Empire Sound Studio) and it’s super nice but what really counts is that he’s a badass behind the board. He’s a master at Pro-Tools, and he always has a resolution to anything that might come up. It helps that he’s been recording bands since he was a kid. Having someone as experienced has Alex really maximizes the time we can spend making sure we are putting out something we are really proud of. This release, like the last one, we plan on giving away entirely for free. Ideally we’d like to release 5 songs per year, if our schedules and wallets permit. We fund everything ourselves out-of-pocket so we can’t afford to do much more.

If we shoot for 5 songs per year, it seems more manageable. This is easier to swallow when we see almost nothing back on album sales/plays. Our last EP grossed $37, Sam lost all of that when he “made it rain” on windy summer day. But doing it this way enables us to reach a far greater audience from all over the world. In short, our goal is to make our music available in the highest quality possible, to as many people as possible and have a good time doing it. So far this ‘once a year, 5 song EP’ formula is working for us.

Brandon: I’d say recently there has been a major uptick at the very least in the sheer number of new bands in the area. It is really encouraging to see bands that work, get national and even international attention. My personal favorite is True Widow. In Dallas it can sometimes feel like an uphill battle, but speaking from the Things of Earth perspective, (meaning us not being motivated by sales) everything else seems to fall into place. We have seen more success by just wanting to play shows and writing songs that are fun for us to play. I hope that Dallas can keep growing as a community. People helping people for the sake of having a positive thriving scene.
Matt: When Sam and I started playing the Dallas music scene, we started playing on Wednesday nights – and we were grateful for that. That is where bands had to start. You had to prove yourself and prove that your sound could bring a crowd old enough to drink. It was years before we were playing Friday / Saturday nights at the bigger clubs, and even longer to play those shows with well-known acts.
When the early 2000’s hit, everything just seemed to start falling apart. It was like a domino effect with clubs closing. It does seem like its coming back strong, but it has a different feel to it. Most people aren’t going to Deep Ellum to wander around and find something to do like they used to. It seems like they are there for a specific reason or act.

Luckily most of us have adopted some sort of social network, and this has made a huge difference in how we communicate. Things of Earth almost completely relies on social networking and digital album distribution. While trying to keep cost down, we’ve found that offering our music on sites like Spotify, iTunes, and BandCamp we can get it out faster at a lower cost for the listener. (usually zero) If someone wanted to pay for it, we wouldn’t mind that either. That might help with other costs we take on. Like making it rain on windy summer days.

We started because our old member Dan Lee (now member is Illinois post-rock outfit Enta) was bored and posted something on Facebook about wanting to start a band. Nelson, Teddy, and myself all replied and then we were a happy family for about 5 months till Dan wanted to leave due to artistic differences. After a couple months of panicking we picked up the pieces and carried on. Then we went on tour a couple times and turned our merch man Ryan (who was a horrible merch guy but a great guitarist) into the 4th member of out band to even everything out and to add pieces that we couldn’t do as a 3 piece.

The scene in Champaign, Il is solid, close knit and welcoming to other bands. The only downside is that it’s pretty small so a lot of bands share members which is good and bad. Great because everyone gets to work on different genres of music and bad because everyone is already in 100 different band that idea get spread thin amongst them.

Darwin – sausage and bacon with extra cheese
Ryan – margarita pizza no cheese
Teddy – deep dish vegan veggie
Nelson – pesto

Daniel Markham: Well, I started writing songs when I was 23. I was living in Rotan, Texas. Out in the middle of nowhere. My parents bought me a guitar for graduating. So, I started writing songs, and then I went to South Plains College in Levelland, and then I started a band. We were called Waiting to Derail. We were really alt-country, really really alt-country, and I just kind of went from there. That band broke up, reformed as One Wolf, I guess, and I was starting to write more ‘rock’ stuff, and, yeah. That’s basically how it was. And then we played a long time. Lots of shows with lots of bands. And then I moved from Lubbock to Denton, and here I am.
MB: What prompted that move?
Daniel: I just…I just needed to go somewhere else, where I could do something—
Tony Ferraro: You’ve been all over! Lubbock, Athens…
Daniel: I lived in Athens, Georgia for a little while.
Tony: You dated Michael Stipe.
MB: Did you play music while you were in Georgia?
Daniel: Uh…I wrote a lot. I played a couple of shows. I didn’t stay long enough to do it. I kind of freaked out and went back to Texas, so…but, yeah, that’s basically it. Now I’m here.
MB: How did you put this band together?
Daniel: We’ve been friends for a long time, playing shows together and hanging out and stuff.
Ryan Thomas Becker: Grady and I played a show with One Wolf with RTB2. When was that? Several years ago.
Daniel: 2008.
Tony: I remember Eaton Lake Tonics playing a show with One Wolf out in Austin somewhere. That’s how we met.
Daniel: That was like 2008. Yeah…and then I moved here, and it was just like, ‘Hey.’
MB: Kind of a natural fit?
Tony: ‘I have arrived, guys.’
MB: ‘Ok, I need the best backing band in Denton.’
Daniel: Not quite. I just got lucky, I guess.
Ryan: Thank you, by the way.

Grady Don Sandlin: It’s had a pretty huge impact on my playing. It has allowed me, through studying other people and trying to break it down for kids to learn, to realize the kind of player that I would like to be, because I keep telling them, ‘Oh, you’ll always be a second-rate so-and-so, but you have a chance to be a first-rate yourself.’ That’s something that’s informed my playing since I’ve been teaching. But I’m not thinking of the technical aspects when we’re playing. It does make it easy to explain things. If everybody knows music and knows all of the technical terms, it’s a very easy way to say ‘Play on this beat,’ you know? Whatever. ‘The change occurs here!’
Ryan: ‘Ryan, you act like a child! I’m going to explain this to you!’
Tony: Yeah, it makes it easier to talk to Ryan.
Grady: But, Ryan has his own language, too. I mean, even though he doesn’t teach music and has never had any formal education, we have a way that we communicate that I can understand.
MB: Has teaching music influenced you, Daniel?
Daniel: I feel like it makes me play better. I’m always playing, it seems like, so it just keeps me kind of…good, at what I can do. Keeps me sharp, I guess.
Grady: I feel that way, too. Even though teaching is…I would hardly even consider it part-time hours. I probably work closer to full-time hours as a musician. Teaching, and the hours I accumulate with that, it could almost be a hobby. But, when I am there, I still have drumsticks in my hands. I’m still thinking about music.

Daniel: I wrote it over the past two years. I wrote most of it in Denton. When I moved here, I wrote a bunch of songs. I was living by myself and just writing a lot, and I went to Grady’s house and put a CD on his table, and I was like, ‘I put a CD on your table.’ That was later…I called him.
MB: You broke into the house?
Daniel: No, he was having a get-together. But, then we just started recording, and just…got it done. We made lots of sounds and stuff. It was cool.
Grady: It was an eventual process, or at least, we knew that we were going to make a record, but there was no timetable. Or if it did, it got quickly abandoned. In fact, I think there was at one time. I think we were supposed to record over the summer and release in the fall, and I think it went through the summer, and we ended up releasing it in the spring. That’s how most things go, though.
Daniel: I think that made it better, because I wrote more songs in that time, and I was like, ‘OK, cool.’ I don’t think I quite had the songs yet to push through, so…I think it worked out good this way.
MB: So what’s next for the band?
Daniel: I’ve been working on lots of new songs, just, putting it all together. I’d like to make another record. Playing shows, doing some touring here and there, you know, just staying busy as much as possible.

Warren Franklin: Well, we recorded an entire full-band EP, so we’ve added four other people to the mix, you know? So, I’ve been writing with that in mind more, so, I think that’s taken me in a different direction and has helped to fill everything out.
DJ: And you’re still the main songwriter?
Warren: Yeah, yeah. I mean, I usually bring the songs in, but if like Stewart or anyone has an idea, then obviously we’ll go that route, too. Sometimes it does change a lot, sometimes not at all. It really depends.
DJ: Why did you decide to form a band?
Warren: Honestly, it’s a lot more fun to play with other people. Like, when I was playing acoustic, I would be having fun, and then I would look over and be like, ‘Oh, there’s no one to like, jam out with…this is kind of lame.’ Now I can look over and Stewart’s there, and I can be like, ‘Fuck yeah! We’re jamming!’
DJ: How did you guys meet?
Stewart Oakes: We actually went to high school together, but we hated each other.
DJ: What for?
Stewart: We were in bands— separate bands, that did not like each other. At all.
DJ: Just different scenes, or what?
Stewart: There was a rivalry.
Warren: The same scene, but…It was like a hard…metal…We were both into hard metal. His band did a bunch of Metallica covers.
Stewart: Metallica, AC/DC, you know, the classics.
Warren: We didn’t really know each other, though, so we hated each other without even knowing each other.
Stewart: We knew who each other were, though. I knew who you were and you knew who I was.
Warren: So, like, how many years later…?
Stewart: Until after high school. Three or four, after high school.
Warren: He started hanging out with Brandon and all those guys, and then I became friends with Brandon after…How did that happen? How did we even start?
Stewart: We were drunk one night at a bar, and you stumbled up to me and asked me if I wanted to play in a band with you, because Stop Motion Call had just broken up, and so I said ‘Sure.’ And then, I think like six months later, we actually started practicing.
Warren: And then we traveled the world…
DJ: Going back to your rivalry for a moment, is it common in Illinois for metal bands in your area to just hate each other?
Stewart: I don’t know. I mean, we were in high school. We were probably in a Battle of the Bands with each other, and one band beat the other one, or they got a gig somewhere that we wanted, something like that. I don’t know. It was pretty stupid.
DJ: Sorry. I don’t want to dig up old bones or anything…

Warren: I don’t know. Me and Stewart were in a band called Parker, and when I was trying to think of a band name for Parker, I thought of the Founding Fathers. I don’t know why. It’s just one of those things that just popped into my head, and I was like, ‘That’s…too good for this band. I’m going to hold on to it.’
Stewart: Before we had settled on the Founding Fathers, we would make up a different band name every single night. Sometimes it would be Warren Franklin…and what?
Warren: The Deathly Hallows…
Stewart: Part Two.
Warren: Pretty much just Harry Potter movies.
Stewart: Yep. We did a different Harry Potter movie every night.
Warren: We finally settled on this one. Not even, really. I just kind of like, ‘I guess it’s the band name,’ and then we’ve been that. There wasn’t much of a discussion about it…
Stewart: There’s a nice alliteration to it.
Warren: We actually have the longest band name on Count Your Lucky Stars now. That’s crazy, to be beating out Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate)!!!
DJ: That’s intense! Quite a prize.
Warren: I saw it on the flyer for the South By poster the other day, and I was like, ‘Wow, it’s way long! It barely fits on there!’ We take up two lines! I mean, The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die will always be the champions of long band names.
Stewart: What about …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead— oh, no, that’s definitely shorter.
Warren: Way shorter.
DJ: I mean, they could put more ellipses in there. Just string it out.
Warren: ‘The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am Longer Afraid to DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!’ Just add exclamation points.

Warren: Probably here, for South By.
Stewart: Probably have another full length under our belts. Our first full band full-length.
DJ: So, this is definitely a clean break from the solo artist thing?
Warren: Yeah, I won’t be doing that again in the foreseeable future. It doesn’t really interest me right now. Really, when I was writing acoustic, I never even thought about putting a full band behind it. I just didn’t…I don’t know. There just weren’t the right people around, really. That’s really what it was.
DJ: So, you weren’t writing the songs thinking, ‘Oh, this would sound so good with another guitar with it’ or something like this?
Warren: No. I didn’t think that until the first time that we did a full band, which was actually with a band called Island of Misfit Toys, and they just kind of jammed up with me for the tour. They were my backing band. Actually, a lot of those guys play on the record now. Ryan plays keys, Even plays bass, and then Mark plays trumpet. Trumpet— I really think the trumpet translates really well with the full band. It helped keep the acoustic record afloat, I think. I think it made it a lot more interesting. It translated very well.

Justin Talley: Cerulean Giallo was just the next logical step for me. Both Brandon and I were doing one-manned-solo projects and we found through an earlier ill fated project and our previous band, Depths, that we worked really well together and had a lot of common ideas as far as playing in a more malleable, progressive project. At the time I felt I had taken A Smile Full of Ale as far as I could without adding additional equipment and eventually I just stopped. As for which I find more interesting, I can’t really say. They exercise very different sides of creativity for me. I think Cerulean Giallo is far less stressful to play in, because I have two amazing creative forces doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I will say, I can’t drink and play with A smile full of ale. I don’t know if that says anything, but the project commands a lot of focus and for my faculties to be pretty sharp.

Justin: …strange. Its hard to articulate how the pieces come about. A lot of it is about solitude. I used to have a space out at Airlock Studios and I would often be out there all night just experimenting with what I could do. I find that spending a copious amount of time with an instrument and getting to know it by just playing works best for the way I discover and learn. Just seeing how you physically react to the instrument and vice-versa. Though I had and still have only a rudimentary knowledge at best of how to play bass and drums, combining the two was very much like learning a new instrument. I developed movements and “techniques” with A Smile Full of Ale to obtain certain sounds that I don’t have much use for elsewhere. The bass and drums played together are more like a single instrument for me in a sense. Its not entirely unlike writing with a piano. At its heart though, its more about discovery and pushing the boundaries of myself and the project.

Justin: The tape was a pretty botched job in my opinion. It was a very last minute idea. I had never released anything for the project before and I really didn’t know if I would continue on with it after the Macaroni Island show. It was put together for two reasons really. The first was to try and scare up cash to put into the Cerulean Giallo release we’re STILL not done with and the second was to have some document if the project never did anything again. It was all very rushed and poorly executed. The best sounding tracks I had for Asfoa were recorded by this sweetheart of a guy Jacob Shelton some years back and they sounded absolutely abysmal on the tape because I had no idea how to correctly transfer them and no time to check my work. They we’re literally spray painted an hour or so before I played the show. So yeah, very shoddy in my opinion. The flip side to that is now after doing everything; the show, the tape, a very last minute unannounced Rubber Gloves show, and the Vio session I feel a very renewed energy and interest in the project. Especially because of how dissatisfied I am with the tape I kind of want to “do it right.” So maybe there’s a future for this mutt of a project.

Billy Chevalier: Basically, Matt’s my brother and Dylan’s our cousin, so, in junior high or somewhere around then, we got instruments and sometime around then we started playing Blink 182 covers and slowly started learning more and more music. We were in a band called the D Cups when we were in high school. It was us three and another guy. Basically somewhere around 2008, you think?
Dylan Mattheisen: Yeah…
Billy: Around 2008 or so, we started Tiny Moving Parts with us three, and…that’s it, I think. Do you guys want to add anything?
Dylan: No. Basically…I got my first guitar when I was like 11. Billy had drums back then, and Matt had a guitar when he was like 11 or 12, and so we’ve been playing together for like 11 years or so. But, Tiny Moving Parts has been like, five years, I think. Even for touring purposes, like, you hear of so many bands that can’t do more than two weeks on the road because they just want to tear each other apart and argue all the time, and since we’ve been best friends since day one, it helps out a lot. And, I think just the fact that we know how each other work…I think, playing together, I think we learned a lot from each other, and what to do and what not to do, and just kind of connects really well for an overall band.
Billy: We learned our instruments together, two, and we’ve only written with each other for basically our whole lives, so it’s kind of like the only way we know how to play is with each other. That’s the only thing we’ve ever really done.
DJ: So have you guys developed telepathy to use when writing parts and stuff?
Billy: I guess you could say that. We don’t really ‘jam’ ever. We’ve never really even jammed. We have ideas and we kind of play them for each other and write parts around them. We don’t really…I don’t just start playing and then we just write something. That’s never happened.
DJ: So you write everything separately?
Billy: No— Well, no. Basically, Dylan writes a lot of little things and then we mold them together, and be like, ‘That part sounds dumb, just change it,’ or something.
Dylan: We literally— We make a song and we rewrite it a good 5+ times until we’re fully happy with it. Like, there’s songs we’ve written a few times and we’re just like, ‘Well, we still don’t like it,’ and we won’t put it out. But, yeah, we don’t jam. We don’t have jam sessions or anything.

Billy: The worst moment was definitely Philadelphia. We got broken into. We got to the city at like 3 am. Our friend drove us from the city before us, and we stayed at his place in north Philly in a sketchy neighborhood. We brought the guitars in, and then I went out in the morning to get my toothbrush and saw that the side window was shattered all over the sidewalk. I just went back into the house and was like, ‘Guys, we got broken in to.’ Luckily, they only took Matt and Dylan’s cameras and a cooler full of beer, so…
Matthew Chevalier: Nothing of yours, though.
Billy: The beer.
Matthew: That was my beer!
Billy: I was going to drink it, though. It was good that we didn’t have to replace any musical instruments, though. It sucks we lost cameras, but at least we could move on without having to go to a Guitar Center and buying a bunch of stuff.
DJ: So what was the best moment?
Matthew: I liked the last show with the Front Bottoms in Richmond. It was our first time playing Richmond, and kids were like falling on stage and singing along and crowd surfing to our songs and it was like…it was just crazy.
Billy: Very unexpected.
Dylan: Sold out show, and it was just 250-300 people and everyone— everybody was going nuts for the Front Bottoms every night, and it was always fun, but that show in particular the kids actually went nuts for us, too, and it was pretty cool.
Billy: We had someone in the audience ask us to play a song that I don’t even think is on the Internet, that’s from like 2007 or something. It was cool to know that there were people there that knew us from like five, six years ago.

Billy: Well, we get home on the 22nd or 23rd of August, this month, and we already have some studio time for September 4th booked. We’ve got one song and we have to write another for a split we’re doing.And then we’re going to do a tour down to Florida for The Fest, and then we want to go to Europe. We also want to go to Japan and Australia, but we’ve got to be realistic.
Matthew: We’ll have a new full-length out, and then I think it’s going to be a lot of overseas touring and stuff.
DJ: Is there a timeline on the full length?
Matthew: We’re shooting for May or June next year sometime.
Billy: Yeah. We quit our jobs, so we should have a lot of time to write and record…

John Zambrano: Jeff and I had known each other for a long time, and then we were at a party…
Jeff Smith: Yeah. I think it started on drugs.
John: No…we were at a Halloween party.
Jeff: Yeah, Adderall. You can blame Adderall for this madness.
John: My roommate had Attention Deficit Disorder—
Jeff: Poor guy!
John: He survived, though. You know, we got to talking, and that’s how it went.

John: People kind of just do what they want. It’s really not— I mean, it’s an art town, but it’s not really like a music town, so music’s just weird.
DJ: I guess it’s known more for hip-hop than punk.
Jeff: Yeah, there’s a lot of rap, but there’s a good music scene. A lot of it is just younger kids, and then the old guys are kind of coming back, too. It’s weird. It’s doing really well now. It seems like it’s kind of back a little bit, you know? Population’s grown a lot.
John: Houston!
DJ: What sets Houston apart?
John: Money and people who don’t have it. And people that have it and…
Jeff: Houston’s weird.
John: There’s oil. Space.
Jeff: One thing that’s different about Houston from other Texas towns— the only one that could be related is Austin, but it’s that it doesn’t stop, you know? It’s 24 hours a day. You can do whatever you want. There’s shows at 3 o’clock in the morning, fun stuff happening all the time. It could be a Monday and you could be having the time of your life, and you’re like, ‘Wow, it’s Monday! I have to go to work! This sucks! But I had a great night!’ You know? I don’t think you get that in other places in Texas where it just kind of shuts down.
Juan Uceda: Like, a Monday could be better than a Friday on a certain night.
Jeff: San Antonio being one of those towns where everything just shuts down after midnight and you’re just left to—
John: What about Dallas?
Jeff: I don’t know about Dallas.
John: Denton is raining whenever we’ve been here.
Jeff: Denton is always raining. The last time we played here we trashed some guy’s house, and there was just mud everywhere. I think it’s going to happen again tonight.
DJ: You’re playing at Dave’s tonight, right?
Jeff: Yeah, it’s supposed to rain and be muddy. [Laughs]

Jeff: Probably just the same thing we’ve been doing, just light touring and…hanging out, you know? We’ll try to maybe do some more records, which we have a hard time doing, but, you know, we get them out every once in a while.
DJ: What makes it hard for you to make records?
Jeff: It’s just, in Houston there’s a few people that record who are really good and that’s about it. You’re at their discretion, so it seems like a lot of times we have to wait for somebody to be ready, and by the time they’re ready, we’re not ready, or things are going on with us, you know? So, it’s just been hard to record, but…we’re about to record soon, I swear. I keep telling people that all the time. I’ve been telling people that for years, like, ‘We’re going to fucking record. It’s going to happen, there’s going to be a new record.’
Juan: We’re recording right now.
John: That’s true, this is being recorded.
Jeff: Right now.
John: Two years…Somebody asked me that at a job interview. They were like, ‘Where do you want to be in two years?’ and I was looking at them, and I was like, ‘Not where you are.’ ‘But that’s a negative answer!’ ‘No, I mean, somewhere else, not here.’ [Laughs]
Jeff: Did you get the job?
John: I got it for like…three jobs, I was travelling with this guy, and he had this business called Teach Like a Rock Star, and I traveled with him and basically was like his assistant, and it was really horrible.
Juan: I think that’s one of those questions, like when you go to a class and they’re going to ask where you’re going to be in two or five years, because they want to hear, ‘Well, we’re going to be big stars, mister! You’re going to be buying our magazine!’ [Laughs]
Jeff: We’re going to put out a magazine?
John: Yeah, we’ll basically be a part of corporate media in some kind of way, because that’s where the money is. And so, people are like, ‘Oh, fuck corporate media! DIY!’ That doesn’t really make any money. But, it does something else.
Jeff: You can eat rice.
John: You can eat rice and garlic and hang out with David Yow, and he’ll tell you about cats scratching his eyes out and having to get surgery.

Oliver Kalb: As If To Say I Hate Daylight was recorded on one microphone and was basically constructed in the most primitive way possible–dozens of instruments and voices were layered into every song and the arrangements were not really planned in advance. The whole album was made in a trial-and-error way, mostly because I didn’t really know anything about recording. I would listen to the bare-bones acoustic recordings of each of the songs and try to imagine huge string swells and weird percussive and orchestral sections—once I had an interesting idea I would basically record my own versions of the instruments I was hearing with the limited means I had available. The one rule I had when I was recording was that I purposely didn’t use any MIDI, electronic or digital sounds at all—there are no samples or synthesizers on the album, so most of weird sounds are just voices or acoustic instruments made to sound like something evil coming out of the ether. The percussion on the album is usually comprised of found objects rather than real drums kits—again, this was kind of an accident that came from my inability to carry a beat on a standard drum set. In a number of songs, I had a couple different percussion tracks each playing an extremely minimal beat—one track was usually a ‘thump’ and another was a ‘chh’ and so on, approximating a bass drum and snare. The drums on songs like “Uh Oh!”, for instance, became dance beats after 5 or 6 tracks of thumps were panned and mixed to dance around each other. Group vocals also played a really integral role in the recording of the album. Once a song was finished, it would be sort of inaugurated by all of my friends coming over to my house and singing along to a climactic moment. This was more-or-less just for fun, but it would also help develop songs that needed to go to a different dynamic place than they were going with just my own quiet singing—the middle of “I Opened My Eyes”, and the end of “Yanguang” and “You are Not” are some examples. I think the group vocals are the biggest carry-over from the recordings to the live band.

Oliver: The tour went really well. It’s interesting to be a touring band at our level of popularity (none), because you play tremendously different kinds of shows every night. This recent tour was our longest and broadest so we played for lots of different kinds of people in lots of different kinds of settings—one night we’d be playing to a huge number of really psyched people in somebody’s house and the next night we’d be playing in an art gallery or a café where about seven people were sitting on the ground and looking really bored. One really amazing show on this tour was in a geodesic dome in the woods near Columbia, Missouri. Our friend Joe built a house and a small farm on some land a few miles from the Missouri State College and kids from there come and see bands and usually everyone sleeps over in the dome. It was a really cool space and it was great to play a show and then go hang out with goats that are about 20 feet away from your amplifiers. Sadly, we didn’t find as many swimming holes as we would have liked to but we did swim in the James River in Richmond and the Broad River in South Carolina. We swam a lot in New England too.
MB:How did you find all of the players in your live band?
Oliver: They are my best friends! I’ve been in bands with Felix since I was in high school, and I play in another band with them called Told Slant. I met Gabby and Henry when I was in high school too—they each have solo projects that I really love too; Gabby’s band is called eskimeaux and Henry’s is called Small Wonder. All three members of Bellows are songwriters whose writing has inspired me to write music for a long time, so it feels really natural to work with them and let them embellish my music in a way that feels instinctual for them.

Oliver: I’ve been working on the follow-up album to As If To Say I Hate Daylight for over a year now so I’d hope that in two years this new Bellows album has been released and that we have a lot more music recorded. As a songwriter it’s sometimes a challenge to keep yourself interested in your own brain—especially when you devote your life to traveling around playing shows and are trying to write new songs in every spare minute, certain sounds and patterns of thinking become almost second-nature to you and it’s easy to become bored by yourself. I see a lot of songwriters struggle to make music that they would want to listen to, and oftentimes fail to do that—I think being bored is the most common reason people give up on being songwriters and touring musicians. It’s simply too hard to convince yourself that it’s worth it to get up and sing the same song every day for over a month and not feel like a total faker. Which is not to say that I’m disillusioned by touring and am thinking about not doing it anymore—I mean the exact opposite! I’d hope that with each successive Bellows album I’m adjusting the way we sound just a little bit, so that there’s something sitting just behind the music that’s still a little bit foreign to me. My goal is to make something ethereal, that’s good for a reason that I don’t understand. And in two years I’d like to have made an album that has nothing in common with As If To Say I Hate Daylight at all.

Tony Ferraro: Amanda writes kick-ass songs. That’s how the band started. From what I know, Ryan and Amanda did a lot of four-track stuff a couple years ago, and Amanda’s just always been writing, so Grady…In my head, it was Grady’s idea to start the band.
Grady Don Sandlin: Was it?
Tony: I just– I don’t know. That’s the origin story in my brain. You were the first person that I remember mentioning it.
Ryan Thomas Becker: Actually, I don’t remember who wanted to start the band.
Grady: Why don’t we just…I have this…for probably about five years, I’ve had this dream of being a backing band for people, where it’s not just…a bunch of different bands, and people end up in bands for whatever reason, like, ‘I just know a guy who has a guitar,’ or whatever. A lot of the things that I read about and like, there are scenes in the 60’s such as Stax, Motown, the Wrecking Crew— and I’m not trying to compare myself or any of us to those musicians, but where there’s a crew or a group of musicians who are the backing band for whoever comes along. And Amanda…I knew she was writing songs because I used to live with Ryan, and Amanda would sleep over at our house a lot, and I would listen to her songs and stuff, and she would only ever play the songs for me when she was drunk. They would work on stuff in secret, and then when she would get drunk she’d be like, ‘Showw Grady the s-oongs…’ And we’d listen to her songs, and they were really cool. And then they did a band called The Rymandas, and they didn’t ask me to join, or I wasn’t available.
Ryan: Because you weren’t a Ryan or an Amanda! It was made up of two Ryans and two Amandas. The Rymandas.
Grady: I could have changed it.
Amanda Newton: We asked to borrow your drumkit.
Grady: Well, I was the drum tech.
Tony: You had an emotional investment.
Ryan: So, it all started with Amanda’s songs and…I mean, you don’t play an instrument regularly. I know you played one in high school, but you…
Amanda: [Laughs]
Ryan: What?
Tony: What instrument?
Ryan: Bassoon.
Tony: Bassoon? Bad ass.
Ryan: But you had these ideas, and we would work on them, kind of…flesh them out and make up the progressions and the chord changes, and we recorded a little bit with Amanda and Ryan—
Grady: Ryan Williams, of Every Other Band fame.
Amanda: He’s actually really angry that he’s not in this band. Every time I see him he looks very hurt.
Grady: He’s in those other bands.
Tony: Those other bands keep him very happy, I’m sure.
DJ: Amanda, if you don’t play an instrument, how do you go about writing songs?
Tony: She writes the melody and the lyrics.
Ryan: Tony!
Tony: [poking Amanda] You answer the question!
Amanda: You say the words, I’ll move my mouth.
Grady: Take Two in 3…2…1, go!
Amanda: I write the lyrics and the melody!!
DJ: How do you do that? Do you record yourself singing and play it back, or do you just carry it around in your head, or…
Amanda: Um…yes. Both ways.
Tony: Both ways have worked. She usually has it— She’ll sing it to us, she sings it to Ryan, and he’ll come up with music, or she’ll sing it to me and I’ll come up with music.
Amanda: And I’ll say, ‘No, I don’t like that.’
Ryan: There is a lot of that.
Tony: Yeah, we try a lot of things.
Ryan: She has a very specific idea for sure, and we kind of put in our two cents until our two centses make sense.
Grady: So, you write a song with a guitar or something, and a melody and words, just take the guitar out. She has a melody and a lyric idea in mind, and then she brings it to one of them— not me. I wouldn’t know what to do. I’d be like, ‘Whoa, I’ve got a drum beat for this! It’ll be great! Just drums and vocals!’
Tony: A snare hit on every line of the melody.
Grady: So, same deal. You’re trying to translate that idea into a band, right? So, I think the same thing happens, except she doesn’t come with chords necessarily in mind. I think these guys are trying to put chords underneath it and it can be right or wrong, depending on what she’s thinking.
Tony: We usually try a lot of things before it gets there, and then…we get there. We usually still try to change it a bit here and there.
Amanda: Eventually I like it.
Tony: Eventually she’s satiated.

Grady: Well, shit, I really hadn’t considered it. I hadn’t thought of it.
Tony: I don’t know.
Amanda: Are we still going to play shows?
Grady: Yeah.
Amanda: Oh, okay.
Grady: We don’t have plans to. I think it would be…Obviously, we want to stay active, I guess, because we released an EP in March and then a single, completely unrelated, in April, so…
Amanda: I’ve actually never talked to anyone in this band about doing a full-length before.
Ryan: I’d love to. Yeah, we don’t have any plans— We like the idea of doing singles, like A-side B-side stuff. That’s a lot of fun. But, we have the songs and the technology.
Grady: Both of the things so far have been a bit different in approach. Like, the EP we did on 4-track cassette—
Ryan: Mono.
Grady: And then I mixed it on the computer, and then we did the single thing.
Ryan: And released it as a vinyl 7″.
Grady: So, I don’t know what we will decide on if we do decide…probably we need to do a record.
Ryan: It will be something different from an EP or a single, whatever the other thing is that we do.

Amanda: I really like 50’s girl groups and I also like Dolly Parton…
Grady: She’s a girl.
Tony: A sexy girl. I also like all of that.
Amanda: But she’s a single person. She’s not a group…but she did write songs. Anyway, whatever. Yeah, I like that kind of music, so…I tend to write kind of like that. Or, I sometimes do.
Tony: Yeah, I grew up on that kind of music, too. That’s the era my dad grew up in so that’s what I was shown as a child, and that’s what’s lodged in my brain. I’ve always wanted to be in a band like this. I’ve always liked songs like this.
Ryan: My dad grew up in the 90’s, so I like 90’s music, because he liked 90’s music. I like 90’s music.
Tony: How do you feel about the Goo Goo Dolls?
Ryan: They’re great.
Grady: My dad never grew up. To me, the late 50’s and early 60’s is my favorite moment of popular music that I know of. I’m glad you mentioned country, because I think of really good rock n’ roll as a kind of country music. I love pop music from that time. That’s it for me.
Tony: That’s the golden age of pop music, for sure.
Grady: If i could produce records or drum on records that sound like those…I could do that forever. I’m lame, right?
Ryan: And when we were recording the EP, that’s when we were going on the 4-track, and I think that we were trying to reach for that aesthetic. A bit. I don’t know, we thought it would kind of help with the sound we were going for.
Grady: Limiting ourselves a little bit.
Tony: Working with few variables and seeing what we could make out of that.
Amanda: I like simple things.
Grady: To paraphrase John Hartford, he said that style is based on limitations. So, the 4-track is a very simple thing. Trying to use one microphone per track, or maybe a couple.
Ryan: There were a couple of tunes where we didn’t use all four tracks.
Amanda: There were some where you guys just played together, and then I did vocals.
Tony: Most of them were just live band onto one track and then vocals.
Amanda: The good thing about recording with them is that because they usually lay it down the first time, and then they can go have beers or watch the game while I’m in there doing it 75 times until I’m like, ‘That one doesn’t sound like crap. Let’s keep that one.’
Grady: It didn’t sound like crap, either. She was right.

Brandon Price: Well, we recorded it in this room how many months ago? August? It was in August, almost six months ago, or something.
Iain Blair: Over six.
Brandon: Over six. Yeah, we’ve been waiting for it to come out for a while. We really, really want it to be in our hands…
Iain: At least we’re not Two Knights. At least it didn’t take two years.
MB: How did it come to be released on Count Your Lucky Stars?
Iain: Well, we had talked to Keith [Latinen] about releasing it on Count Your Lucky Stars when we were a four-piece, and it just took us forever to get the songs written and recorded, and then once we recorded it, we kind of held on to it and shopped it around a little bit, and I knew that he had previously been interested in putting it out, so…when we finally got it done, we kind of just put up a Facebook status that was like, ‘Hey, does anyone want to help us put out this new full-length?’ and Keith responded to it and said, ‘Yes, I’ve been wanting to do it since Day One!’…wouldn’t respond to my email when we recorded it, but…
Brandon: Yeah, it was like, right after we had posted it on the Internet for anyone to listen to, we immediately got emails that day, or the next day, or something, from both of the record labels…
Iain: Yeah, from Texas Is Funny, we got an email the day or two after we put it up on the Internet, and then Count Your Lucky Stars, it took a couple months for them to get on board—
Tucker Porter: Nah, what, it was a couple days when he told us to take it off the Internet, though.
Iain: Yeah, but I mean, it took us like a second…I mean, I feel like we didn’t have Count Your Lucky Stars until September or October—
Brandon: Yeah, but we only had it on the Internet for a day.
Iain: It was longer than a day. It was like a week. Yeah, I guess it…fuck, I can’t remember.
Brandon: It was a day.
Iain: He wanted us…I don’t know, he had been interested in putting it out for a while. We played with Keith when we were a two-piece, like, a long time ago, and we had booked him a few shows, and we had known Keith for a few years before recording this album.
Brandon: Yeah, Empire! Empire! played at a house that we had all lived at probably a handful of times.
Tucker: They’re good.
Brandon: Yeah, they’re awesome.

Iain: It’s the entire basis of why this band exists, basically. Tucker was in a band called Heavy Metal Dreamhouse and I was in a band called Honest Abe, with Tucker. Both bands really wanted to tour, but our drummers wouldn’t ever go on tour with us. Honest Abe even booked two summer tours that we never got to go on because our drummer would never go on tour with us. So when we started playing as a two-piece, we never intended on taking this band seriously, but when Honest Abe would drop shows…like, we would book a show, and then our drummer would flake out on us—
Tucker: Yeah, the first show we played was with Honest Abe and we played the spot that Heavy Metal Dreamhouse had booked, but the drummer of that band couldn’t make it, so we just did this instead.
Iain: Whenever our respective bands wouldn’t show up, our drummers wouldn’t show up, we would just fill in instead rather than not play the show, and then we just started doing that enough, and then Captain Space asked us to do a short 9-day tour with them and we said yes, and that’s like the entire reason why we’re a band. It’s because we wrote a bunch of songs specifically to go on tour with them. And then, once we went on tour once, and we finally got to go on tour with a band, we just decided that we would keep doing it over and over and over.

Brandon: Well, that’s where we all met each other, down there.
Iain: I think that…because there was absolutely no music scene. There were no venues to play, there are no local bands, really.
Tucker: In order to have a show, you have to be the show. You have to have your own band, then book another band from out of town, because there’s only one band in the town, and do it all yourself, and because we were from an area where we had to do that, just to even have shows to go to, it kind of reflects on the ethics that we have now.
Iain: Every little Southeast Kansas town has its own little flair. It has its little thing that’s going on. I think that Southeast Kansas is kind of isolated. I mean, you do have to go like two hours just to see another band. You have to drive to Lawrence or Tulsa or Joplin or Wichita just to go to a good show. So, the music that people listen to in Chinook is slightly different from the music that people listen to in Iola or Independence, and so everyone’s kind of in their own isolated bubble, and I think that makes Southeast Kansas kind of weird in a certain way. It makes it…
Tucker: Flared jeans and TapouT shirts.
Iain: So for us to even be in a band and have shows, we just had to do it ourselves and promote the shows ourselves.
Brandon: Yeah. There’s no way you’d be able to get on those other shows that you would like to be on are like two hours away and stuff like that, so you have to just use your resources, find other people that are in bands and just decide to do it yourself. That’s…whenever I was growing up, that’s what we realized. Pretty soon it was like, ‘We’ll just have our own shows.’
Iain: The first shows that I started booking in high school were…We would go to the park and play underneath the storm shelter and use their electricity, and it would just be a free show. We would just get as many people as we could to come out, and it was fun, it was a good time, but it’s just…you can’t bring touring bands to that. Like, we started booking shows in Independence at the Booth Hotel, and you can’t bring touring bands there because you just don’t make enough money. It’s like, they would play with Texas Instruments and play to our four or five friends that would come to every show, and make no money. I mean, it was fun. We could show them a good time. But we couldn’t provide them with the things that bands need. So that’s kind of…why we moved to Kansas City. So we could actually be a part of something that was bigger and greater. Rather than being he only thing that was happening in Independence, we could just be a part of something that was a lot more important in Kansas City.
Brandon: Yeah, that’s one thing that we all realized shortly after we had all met up in 2008, whenever we all met each other and we were all…by the time 2009 came around, I was like, ‘Okay, well, I clearly don’t want to be in this town anymore because what I need to be doing is playing music and providing music for people, and you can’t do that there, so I’ll just move to Kansas City.’ I moved there, and then they moved there a year after.
Iain: But we did write this album in Southeast Kansas. We all moved out of the Gravyard, which was our punk house we had for a couple months, and we moved down to Southeast Kansas in Independence, at Tucker’s parent’s house, and lived there for a couple months, and we just wrote the album there. It was nice because it was isolated. It gave us nothing to do but practice everyday.
Tucker: A lot more babes in Kansas City, though.

We had an amazing time at 35 Denton. We weren’t sure what to expect, but the audience was so generous and the sound man was incredible. Denton seems like a cool town.

We just got off a four month on-again-off-again tour schedule and now we have some time off until probably playing more shows in the fall.
2 years from now: your guess is as good as mine.

Getting pick-pocketed on the Paris subway at 7am after taking an overnight bus from Cologne while carrying, amongst other things, a giant flight case for a synthesizer. I got the wallet back and made a decision: no more big things.

Parker: I think that, really what it is is that I had, when we started Two Knights, I had an idea, but I wasn’t able to play it as much, and so getting…you know, playing, practicing, I— because, pretty much, we started Two Knights because Miles wanted to play drums and I wanted to play guitar, and we had never played those instruments before, and so the band was basically us learning how to play those instruments, and I feel like you can see that from record to record, and so…yeah, I guess we just got better at playing, and since I know how to play guitar better now, I guess I can portray what I want it to sound like. I guess the idea that I’ve always had for Two Knights…I can finally do it, sort of. I guess. And also, I guess we’re super influenced by the bands we play with, too.

Parker: Um…that we have a 10″ coming out and we have a tour planned with Empire! Empire!? There’s not a lot of ways to say it.
DM: Does the 10″ have a name?
Parker: It’s called A Lot of Bad Things Have Happened, But We’re Still Here, and it was recorded a long time ago, and it’s just taken a long time—
Miles: Michael Briggs did it.
Parker: It’s taken forever to get it out, because we’re idiots.
DM: Are there any bands on Count Your Lucky Stars that you’re going to be excited to be label-mates with?
Parker: Kind of Like Spitting is…they’re re-releasing something? I think they’re re-releasing something and putting out a new record, or they’re doing one of those things? I got the privilege of hanging out with Ben during SXSW and he’s the nicest dude ever, and he has some really cool things to say about life. He’s a pretty nice guy. Pretty much every band on that label is just top notch.

Parker: Wait, who said that?
DM: The Internet.
Miles: Where’s your source?
DM: It was online. Answer the question.
Parker: Who on the Internet said that Denton is a cesspool of serotonin-deficient tryhards??
DM: I’m not trying to start a feud. Just answer the question.
Parker: I want to know who said that.
DM: I’ll tell you later.
Miles: We could use that. That’s really funny.
Parker: Um…could you repeat the question?
DM: The Internet describes the Denton DIY punk scene as ‘an incestual cesspool of serotonin-deficient tryhards.’ Being in so many bands simultaneously, how do you respond to these allegations?
Parker: So you’re saying, because we’re in so many bands…we’re trying too hard?
DM: I’m not saying anything.
Parker: I’m pretty sure you’re the one who said that.
DM: How about you just address the half-dozen bands each simultaneously?
Parker: I mean, the only reason we do it is because we’re bored and we’re doing nothing with our lives. It’s just fun. Why not? I don’t see…
Miles: We have a lot of friends that play music and we want to play music with our friends.
Parker: And we want to play different types of music, you know? It gets boring just being in one band, or two bands even. I like lots of different types of music, so…
Miles: I’d say it would be surprising if us trying to have fun came off as trying hard.

Kenny Failes: Rick and I thought that Bill and Reece had too many side projects, so we decided to make one, and it started as him and I, and then we decided to play a show and all of his roommates got in on it, and then…it got going from there.
Beth Dodds: And then we ended up joining anyway, and it expanded to the nine-piece Colossus…but it’s also not always nine people. There’s a Problem Dogg album that’s just three of us…We release all of our practices and live shows as albums, so we have eight albums already.
MB: Are there any particular songs that you like the most?
Rick Eye: ‘Penny Pincher!’
Beth: ‘Penny Pincher’…
Rick: ‘I Can’t Hang Out With Problem Dogg Anymore’…
Beth: The song is called ‘My Dad Says I Can’t Hang Out With Problem Dogg Anymore Because They’re Too Young and Virile.’ We actually played that one…’Penny Pincher’ goes into ‘My Dad Says…’ with the blast beats…

Reece McLean: Back in late late 2009, I just started writing songs. I had an old project, and I wanted to make this new project called Bukkake Moms, which is a name that I stole from an Internet forum and I can’t find that post anymore, so…sorry to whoever came up with that. I wanted this new project, so I started writing some songs for that, and I…I came up with this idea that was supposed to be a trio— drums, synth, and then me playing guitar and singing, and then I eventually recorded the first album by myself, and then Kenny joined in on the second album—
Kenny: Also the first show, too.
Reece: Yeah. We played the first show as just the two of us, the laptop, and that was…a little bit of a disaster, but it was fun. Then right after that, Bill and Andrew—
Kenny: How did that happen again?
Beth: I found the Bukkake Moms MySpace. MySpace was kind of dead already, but I didn’t find another way to contact them. Their MySpace profile said, and I think it was sort of facetious, but it said ‘If you want to be in the band, contact this MySpace.’ So I just said, ‘Hey! Me and my friend Andrew,’ who was our old, other bass player, ‘we want to join the band!’ Eventually, Reece did see it…around Christmas 2010. Which, it was December 2010 when I sent it. It wasn’t like a whole year went by or anything. It was just a couple of weeks. So, Andrew and I joined at the very end of 2010, and we started really playing shows the fall of the next year. We recorded our first album of that four piece— me, Reece, Kenny and Andrew the first time we ever played together. It was a little EP called ‘Not Your Boner Bro.’ We still play a couple of them sometimes, but it’s kind of hard to because they’re not really structured. So, we really started playing out in Fall 2011, started writing for our— well, we recorded Hoping for Murder. That was our third album, and our first as a four-piece, although a lot of it ended up being just Reece, that was recorded like…when did that get released?
Reece: That was April 21st 2011. We did it in one day. On 4/20. Dude, that’s two years old now! That’s weird!
Beth: That is fucked up! But Hoping for Murder was Spring 2011, and we started playing those songs mostly in September, because…I met Nevada Hill around that time, and he got us our first couple of shows, and then Shea Brooks got us some shows. That was our introduction to the Denton scene. I still lived in McKinney and Andrew still lived in McKinney at the time. We were still like 17 and in high school. By the end of my senior year, we had written pretty much everything for our fourth album, Philosophical Perversion, that summer, and we still play a lot of songs off that, and then just a few months ago in January, we saw Bitch Teeth twice and we were like, ‘We need that guitarist in our band!’ So, that’s when— because we had lost Andrew. He moved away to go to school.
Kenny: Then there was a brief period where we would switch—
Beth: Yeah, that’s right. There was a period where me and Kenny played bass and Reece played drums, and that was very short lived. We wrote eight songs during that time, but we play one of them now. We rearranged one of them. It’s one note and it wasn’t that hard to re-learn. So, we play one of those songs…After that, we were like, ‘Let’s go back to the original formation. It’s empty as a three-piece. We need a fourth guy.’ So, we saw Bitch Teeth and were like, ‘Whoa, Rick’s great!’ and brought him in. We just asked him if he wanted to be in Bukkake Moms and he said, ‘Yeah.’ So, we’ve been working on our fifth album, Big Cum. The three songs we played today are going to be on there. ‘Penny Pincher’ is going to be on there, but that’s a secret.
Rick: If you rewind the first track, you’ll hear it.
Beth: Big Cum is only coming out— well, you can download it, but physically it’s only coming out as a double cassingle. Not kidding. Only double cassingle.
Kenny: I thought it was going to be a triple cassingle.
Beth: No, we don’t have enough songs. Double cassingle. Four six-minute sides of cassette tape…it’s a long story about why it’s coming out that way, but it is, and we’ve recorded seven songs for that so far. They’re sounding good. We’re going to do four more in June and finish out the album.
Reece: Five, six more, eighteen more…
Beth: Yeah, of course. And Guerilla Toss, if you’re reading this, we’re going to do a split with you after that. We realized that this band from Boston called Guerilla Toss was basically us, but better, so…we’ll just be on the B-side of whatever split that is.

Beth: Not enough weird. I feel like the four of us have to make most of the weird happen. We have to kick people in the ass. And there’s not…there’s some good drummers here, but there’s not enough.
Rick: There’s some really fucking good drummers here.
Beth: There’s like six or seven that I can think of, but there’s so many like, weak, and they don’t hit hard enough, and it’s just lame.
Rick: I think there’s like, maybe ten really good bands here.
Beth: I don’t know, I’d say it’s closer to like six.
Kenny: Well, that’s an opinion.
Beth: I don’t know. Reece was saying something about this the other day, that I feel like I’ve seen every good band in Denton a lot of times. Maybe there are more of them, but I think I’ve seen pretty much all of them.
Reece: There’s nothing to discover.
Beth: There’s this disturbing trend of nice-boy cardigan bands, with just clean guitar, and it’s not really like math rock, it’s not indie, it’s not jazz, it’s some bland, beige mixture of all three of those pieces. Like UNT jazz kids who are like, ‘Let’s write some pop songs!’ and they suck. They’re terrible. They’re terrible!
Reece: These are your opinions. I’m not saying I disagree with you, but when it comes down to the heat—
Rick: The nice-boy cardigan bands are going to come after us!
Reece: I’m really sick of garage rock bands. I’m really sick of that.
Beth: Yeah. If you’re going to play three chords in a song, make them weird at least! Play dissonant chords. Don’t play C, G and D.
Rick: I’m really tired of D right now.
Beth: Yeah, D chords, uh-uh. There are so many songs in the key of E and the key of D. Just, gross. And we don’t use keys, really.
Kenny: Nope!
Reece: It’s definitely a fact. We don’t.
Kenny: We’ve been playing with rhythms more.
Beth: Yeah, I’d say we’re a rhythm band. We play a lot of things where everybody’s kind of playing a different…it’s different tonality but it’s the same rhythm. A lot of bands—
Rick: We’re all in a different tuning and everything.
Kenny: I’m in standard, Reece has his own tuning, Rick has his own tuning—
Rick: I’m in a fucked up open C tuning.
Beth: You’re tuning’s like an inverted F chord with a 7th in it, right?
Rick: I have an A#.
Beth: A#. So it’s like a…
Rick: C F F A# D.
Beth: Oh, okay. So that’s like a…that’s a…
Rick: Wait, I’m missing one of mine.
Beth: That’s weird. It’s actually like an inverted B minor. That’s fucking weird.
Reece: To get back to the rhythm thing, I think that every time Rick is trying to learn a song and I’m trying to teach him it, I always get back to like, ‘Then notes don’t really matter.’ They really don’t.
Beth: We just play tight. We’re trying to play tight. And we use weird rhythms. We have a song where part of it is in 23 now.
Kenny: I have a really fun bass line on that song.
Beth: We’re writing a new song that’s in a really fucked up 10/8, and stuff like that. We have fun with rhythms. And that’s another thing. If you’re going to kind of hammer out a simple rhythm, make it a weird rhythm. Make it five or seven beats or something. That’s just like the C, G, and D thing. You can have one or two rhythms that are really simple in a song, but 4/4…We’ve had fifty years of that. We don’t need more of that.