How often do you rehearse? What do you focus on when you get together for rehearsal?

Steve: That’s a tough question. It fluctuates depending on what’s going on with everyone’s lives. We just finally secured a professional practice studio for the first time ever and that hopefully will be used at least once or twice a week for full band rehearsal. After practicing in moist basements for 5 years it’s very refreshing and motivating to actually have a legitimate practice space. It amazes me now how we got this far without one. Ha. Last Saturday was our 4th annual last day of class moustache bash, and for a big show like that we rehearsed 4 days last week leading up to the show. At times like that, we are usually trying to learn a few new songs that we can bust out for the hometown crowd. So most of the focus in crunch periods like that is on learning some new tunes or working on a cool new segue that we haven’t done before.

Now that we have this studio, I’m hoping that we will have more practices that are just jamming, working on writing some new material in a true collaborative sense.

Can you talk about some of your performance highlights thus far. Is there a gig (or gigs) that stand out? Why?

Chris: Well, slowly over the years we’ve been growing and playing bigger venues so we kind of keep crossing ones off the list… For example our first summercamp festival experience two years ago was amazing. We had a blast and really fed off the energy of the crowd. Then last year we played 10,000 lakes fest and that probably topped summercamp. And now we are preparing to play our first show at the Barrymore Theatre hear in Madison. Its basically the only venue we haven’t played in Madison other than the coliseum or something. And it really hits home because at least when I first moved here and was 18 that’s where I went to see all my favorite touring bands like moe., the Disco Biscuits, Leftover Salmon, Umphrey’s McGee, Dark Star Orchestra etc. This was about 10 years ago so there were so many good bands coming through for kids who liked jammy music. I probably still have over 75 ticket stubs from shows I’ve seen there so it is going to definitely be at the top of my list as far as accomplishments and is going to be a real treat to be on stage looking at people from the performers’ perspective.

You just put your first studio disc. Can you talk about the experience and also the challenges of bringing your live energy into the studio for the debut?

Chris: For me, bringing the energy to our studio disc seemed like the biggest challenge at first and I was worried it wouldn’t come through. Based on all our live shows and the feedback we had gotten it seemed we really played the best when the crowds were rowdy and the energy was high. Those experiences are a far different atmosphere than the cold snowy Sunday morning that we went into the studio to lay the drum tracks. Luckily we teamed up with a great sound engineer in Andrew LaValley and he really took a proactive role in producing the album and making sure we captured the energy our songs had live. It was definitely a challenge trying to tighten up songs that were consistently played over ten minutes long and trying to condense that into a solid 4-6 minutes. We had about 4 years of material for this album and narrowing it down was a struggle but has paid off even when we play live. The studio forces you to break down the songs to the simplest form and it’s important to see/hear it in its rawness. We had probably played some of those tunes 200 times live but once we got into the studio it was like starting from scratch. We learned a lot about mixing and the nuances of certain frequencies and lot of the science behind music which I found particularly interesting. Again a lot of the credit for this has to be given to the patience, understanding, and teachings of LaValley and his desire to make a great record. I think we are most proud of the disc’s attention to detail and the fact that we set out to utilize everything the studio environment has to offer even if it created a product that was different that our ‘live’ sound. It was a treat to have other Madison artists play on songs which also made the studio versions unique. We put our all into this record and it was a truly collaborative effort and definitely wouldn’t be possible with out LaValley and Ryan Dembinsky (mason jar records) for believing in us enough to provide funding.

Any final thoughts to folks across the country who may be hearing about you for the first time from this piece?

Steez is employee owned and operated. We don’t have a manager or a street team and rely solely on a grassroots approach, so if you like us, tell a bro, look us up on Facebook or something and try to keep in touch. We’re all easy-going, down to earth, immature, mostly sarcastic, and real approachable so if our 1981 school bus makes it to a town near you, check us out… You might just end up dusting off some dance moves you didn’t know you had… til then we’ll be livin’ the dream and welcome any of y’all to come along for the ride…

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