How would you describe the vitality and support of your local music scene?
Chris: Madison is a great city. We love it here. There are tons of creative and supportive people. There are also tons of musicians and even more competition. The local scene is great but the turnover rate for bands is very high probably because people often graduate and move to other areas or pursue other things but longevity has been huge for us and although it took a while we are finally getting our name out regionally and even nationally. We really are great friends and have a blast taking this shit-show on the road! We were also lucky early on to have a bunch of different groups of supportive friends who would come to our shows. Since we had a good draw and very thirsty fans, club owners were real nice about giving us opportunities that we built on. It’s an interesting dynamic though in Madison because a lot of out of town bands think since it’s a college town it’ll be easy to draw but that’s not the case at all. Going to school here, everyone ends up knowing someone in a band and will go support their friends but perhaps are less willing to take a chance on a group they’ve never heard of. There’s always parties and competition so you have to be creative and really strategically plan your events. An example is that we have had a “last day of class moustache bash” that we’ve been doing for 4 years now and it’s always one of our biggest drawing shows with the last two years having attendance nearing capacity at about 400. Anyway, I could analyze and write about the dynamics of the Madison music scene for hours but that would need to be a separate article entirely… ha.
Who writes the band’s music? How it is typically presented to the group and how does it then come together?
Steve: As of right now, Chris, Matt and I have been the songwriters for the band. For the most part, someone will come to the table with a song that is mostly structured out on their instrument, and then the rest of us will fill in the gaps. We’ll jam on certain parts til someone finds a catchy hook they like for a certain part and I think that’s where our jammy influences really help out when writing songs. We may jam on a part for ten minutes at first and then that one part may shrink to a tight 30 second section. So really it is a collaborative effort in the sense that I don’t write the bass/drums/keys/sax parts if I bring a song to the group or vise versa. I would just supply the general chord progressions and the changes and then everyone else comes up with their own little parts to fit within those guidelines. But honestly, no song is ever set in stone and songs are always a work in progress. We have gone back to certain parts or jams and tweaked certain things if they didn’t work for us in a live setting.
How do you approach original songs in the live setting?
Chris: Most of our original songs have been worked out over years of playing them live… so we have no different approach. If anything we took a different approach when taking these originals that we had played live and trying to shorten and tighten them up for the studio. Our originals are mainly suited to be high-energy and good live songs that are fun to play and hear live, so that’s never really an issue.
What about covers, can you talk about what songs you toss in from time to time? Who selects them?
Steve: We definitely love a good fun covers. It’s a great way to get people into your music who maybe aren’t 100% sure of what to think of you. Its kind of an unspoken rule for us to not cover songs that are prevalent among the jamband community. For example, you’ll probably never hear us cover “superstition” or “scarlet>fire” or something like that. Don’t get me wrong, those songs are great but they’ve been done time and time again and one of our main goals is to bring something fresh to the table. So in that sense, we like to throw in random tracks that you’ve probably never heard anyone cover before. For example, a couple of the recent covers we’ve learned are “Freedom 90” by George Michael and “1000 Cigarettes” by MSTRKRFT.
In general, we give everyone a chance to toss out a cover they’d like to learn. If its something that the rest of the band agrees would work well for us, we’ll give it a shot. One major thing we’ve been doing with our covers lately is having the sax play the vocal melody. It really opens the door to a lot of songs that we wouldn’t be able to pull off otherwise. For example, I don’t think I’d be able to do any reasonable amount of justice vocally to most MJ tunes, yet we bust out “Thriller” with Andrzej playing the vocals on his sax and it’s one of our best crowd pleasers.
In terms of cover tunes can you talk about any spectacular successes and failures?
Steve: I’d have to say our most successful cover to date has been “Like a Prayer.” Everyone loves this song it seems….which is why we chose it. We play it using the sax for vocals which means that nobody has the chance to look like an ass trying to sing Madonna. We usually extend the dark minor part of this song and turn it into a real dance party.
Chris: We also have had a lot of success covering songs that are pretty unrecognizable. Steve took a trip to Estonia for school a while back and came back with a great cd of a band from there called Genialistad. We loved rockin out to the band and ended up learning a song, ‘kalbassa.’ To date people probably think it’s a steez original but we have no intention of claiming it as our own… we just think it’s a great tune and in our own way we like to think of it as paying respects to a band that we really dig.
In terms of our biggest failures… hmm, the biggest failures are probably the songs that never leave the practice room and no one hears. Ha. We have a pretty good idea of how a song is coming out when practicing and sometimes we get a little too ambitious with what we can learn and can actually do justice. We covered “Bonafide Lovin” by chromeo last year and that didn’t really work out that well for some reason. I mean it wasn’t terrible but it just didn’t work for us. I don’t think we’ve played it since.
No Comments comments associated with this post