J: With the recording of the CD, what made it so interesting, is that nobody was in the studio at all when we recorded it.  Ryan had to plug in, and I sat behind the drums and we had soundboarding and a sheet around the drum set, and there were no lyrics, I couldn’t hear the lyrics.  Ryan plugged in and I could only hear him, and we recorded the drums.  After that, separately, the guitar was recorded, the organ and stuff, and that’s what was so cool, because he [Erin] would do things… each time it was a new solo.

E: to me, on a couple of the songs, I got it on the first take, and then, I think… I don’t think I did more than three takes for each one.  When I was doing the solos, it was highly inspiring, and it was really inspiring when we were doing the sessions.  I could definitely see myself producing a variety, a diversity of solos, hour upon hour, I can just crank them out.  There have been times that I’ve sat at the piano or keyboard at home over the past ten years just playing for three hours and only stopping to get a drink of water or go to the bathroom or something, you know?  I really feel that when I’m playing that I tap into something else.  Music brings you to another level of reality and it comes from the universe.  It’s just an amazing thing.  I just feel really happy that I’m able to play, you know?

M: When you guys play out, do you extend solos?  Do you extend what you have on the CD?

J: In my opinion, [the CD] is a lot more primitive.  Although that’s complex in terms of what we play, our stage sound is a lot different.  And I like that about us.  Sometimes I get a little nervous … Erin will just say, “Yeah, we’re going…” and I’m like, “Okay.”  You know, you have to have that trust.

R: It’s all about connection onstage.

J: Nobody tries to lead anybody.  And then Erin will pick up the organ and drop it.  and it’s like this thunderous thing.

M: Do you ever get mad at [Erin] for going on too long?

J: No, never.

R: Sometimes he gets mad at me for going on too long.

E: No, Ryan’s awesome.

M: People tell me you have a reputation for having you stuff together.  What does that mean, that you have your shit together as a band?

J: I think they mean the communication on stage.

R: Yeah, that and the experience.  I’ve been in a couple of bands before, and I know what to expect from other people and what they want, you know?  You don’t want to go to a live show and just see a couple of people, a bunch of jackasses just strumming away and that’s about it.  You want a show.  It’s entertainment.  That’s what it is.  I think when people say that we’ve got our shit together, hopefully they are right.

M: You think they are talking about your live show then?

R: I would assume so.  We haven’t really handed out too many CDs.  I wish we could.

M: Is the CD for sale at your shows and somewhere else too?

J: I have to say that I don’t think we really push our product, you know?  Somebody will ask, “Do you have a CD?”  And we’ll say, “Yeah, here you go.”

M: Sometimes it feels wrong to push your product.  Like you have to be salesmen or something.

J: I think that takes away from what we’re…

R: You have to naturally love what you do, and if you’re not in that realm, it’s just pointless.

M: Tell me about the songwriting.  Who does the songwriting?

J: Primarily us and Ryan.  One time we had this really shitty little place in a shack of a recording studio for a while and I remember trying to gather up with Ryan, like, “What’s going on?”  and he’s like, “No, shut up, shut up!”  He picks up this guitar and he’s like, “I was driving here man, I’m going to lose it!”  Then he’ll get a riff or something and that’ll kick off.  But, by all means, Erin will be like, “No, no, no…”  Or I’ll be like, “You know, I think that needs… you know, let’s do this.”  And the next thing you know, it’s like, “OK, there we go.”  And that’s it.

E: Ryan primarily writes all the songs, which are wicked awesome songs.  A lot of times what will happen we as a whole will democratically come to a conclusion, an ending, or maybe we’ll work out a transition in some sort of inverse way.  But primarily he writes the songs, and he’s really good at it.  I write songs too, and I’ve been writing them… I don’t have a ton of songs, but I’ve been writing songs since I was a kid, really.  I’ve been writing goods songs since, say, 1995.  We haven’t really … we need to practice more and integrate.

M: I was going to ask you if you practice.

J: One thing that bothered Ryan … he was in a band at one point that didn’t [practice].  So maybe that reflects the comment that we have our shit together.  I think it has a lot to do with the communication.  We read each other a lot, and I think we really feed off of each other.  If Ryan does something like this [gestures], I know he’s going to change real quick, or if Erin’s going to change because he’s shifting like this, and that’s maybe where we stop and play just right.  That comes from practice.

E: These two guys have introduced me to many new types of music that I never listened to before.  I never heard the Misfits, surprisingly, before I met Ryan and Julian.  I love punk.  The type of music that these guys listen to and the style of music of Ryan’s songwriting has really pushed me to become a better musician and pushed me to become a better soloist.  You kind of have to find your role.

M: When you are playing a different kind of music than what you are used to, you have to figure out what you are doing.  You don’t always have to drive what the music sounds like.  You can be a part of it, and you can find your place in it.  I mean, who wants to be in a band in which you are competing with other people for time or attention or sound?

R: That’s where the ego comes in.

J: That’s why we don’t want to be a band that just comes on and plays without practicing.

M: The listener knows that something is not right.

E: The songs we’ve played … and we’ve played some covers, they’ve just opened my mind to a lot of possibilities.  I’ve learned a lot of songs that were brand new to me in a short period of time.  It really transformed my playing on top of what I already knew before.  It’s been a really positive and excellent learning experience for me.  We need to sit down and the more we practice… we need to practice intensively.  When I graduate from college we’re going to have a lot more time to do that. 

M: But then you’ve got to get a job and everything.

E: I don’t think we’ve really integrated the style of playing that I have used in the past.  Me and my dad have written a lot of music together.  My dad just has a boatload of material.  Our stuff is more heavy-metal oriented, and when I say heavy metal I mean Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden, Judas Priest.  I like Jean-Luc Ponty the violinist a lot.  Cosmic Messenger is a great album.  All that stuff… we’ve got a very… before this [band], I was playing heavy metal piano, per se, and I think that it’s been extremely positive to not integrate that up to this point.  But that’s not to say that that’s all that I play is heavy metal, because jazz and classical… I’ll just come up with stuff that you don’t even know what category it is.

M: It’s hard to imagine heavy metal piano, in a way.

E: And that’s the thing.  I try to be on the cutting edge of heavy-metal piano, such as the term may be expressed.  But me and my dad play a lot of drums and piano, so I wrote a lot of songs.  We haven’t really integrated my previous style with that, but I think that’s good because it’s pushed me as a musician.

M: is that a future direction you want to explore?

E: I think we’re going to keep on with the way that we’re keeping on.  We’re going to keep on keeping on with the style that we’ve got, and I feel that I have a lot of inspirations and ideas, but what you have to be careful of is … it’s hard to explain, but the way the song sounds, like you’ll have a song like an Iggy Pop-type song, you know, it sounds like a little bit between, say, Iggy Pop and the Doors, you don’t want to throw in, you know, an abrupt timing change that’s going to make it sound like Black Sabbath all of a sudden or people are going to … it can’t be so abrupt.  It needs to be integrated smoothly.

M: Because then you are getting more progressive.  You are jarring somebody out of…

E: I don’t really understand the meaning of progressive that much.  There’s so many different subcategories of you know, say, techno, metal, rock and roll.

M: I think something’s progressive if it … there’s a lot of music that comes out now… people call it progressive punk or progressive rock.  When I listen to it, it’s got all the punk and heavy metal… like someone will be screaming, and it’s obviously got a very hard, very heavy guitar texture to it, but it will basically be in my mind like, section – section – section – section that rhythmically varies from section to section, and doesn’t have the form… it’s more a sort of formal thing in my mind.  It’s not a traditional… Iggy Pop or Black Sabbath, they’re still within a traditional song structure, in my mind.

J: That’s what sort of annoys me is when people don’t want to listen to something different, and it’s like, “Really?”  If it pertains to you and you feel it, then listen to it.  It doesn’t matter what genre it is.  I don’t really like the Grateful Dead too much, but I watched a thing on CNN, and the drummer, he started a program where they went to the Amazon and Deep Africa and recorded music there that would have never been recorded, and I thought that was really awesome.  That showed me that it really doesn’t matter what music… music is music.

E: I’d love to tour the world, you know, playing at amphitheaters and stadiums.  That’s the dream for me.  The stage is magical.  It’s a magical thing because it’s the audience, really, and when you tune in to the audience’s vibes and where they are vibing, you can tell the audience is digging it.

J: I think we’re very audience-driven, and that’s why we put on certain shows the way we do.  But I know we played our first show in Orlando, and there were maybe fifteen people there.  Yeah, we played like we did, but we didn’t get the stand-up and cheer kind of thing.  They clapped and we got a really good response and positive feedback, and that was awesome.  But we all got off and were like, “Uhhhh,” because we didn’t get what we normally expect.  Even though they appreciated the music and they said it was good, but it was like, “Really?”  I don’t think any of us ever gets off the stage and says, “Oh, let’s go run a mile.”  It’s like, “Let’s go get a beer,” you know?

E: I’m really happy to be a part of the scene here.  This is actually my first band, other than the band that I had with me and my dad, which was just a duo.  But I’ve done recording in the past.  I’ve been recording since I was sixteen or seventeen, just you know tapes.   We went to a studio once in Vermont.  … There are a ton of bands out there that have great organ, you know.  Brian Auger, I was just recently introduced to.  A lot of stuff like that.  But I always had a fascination for the Hammond organ and vintage keyboards, which a lot of keyboardists probably have a fascination with that.  I bought a Hammond organ I found on Craig’s List.  It’s from between 1968 and 1974.  It’s actually a Spinet, not a B3, but it’s got a sound all its own.  The quality of the Hammond instrument is above and beyond any other synthesizer I’ve ever played.  Synths are great because they give you a great variety.  You get your strings and your techno stuff.  I haven’t played one of the top of the line organ synths because they don’t have them at Sam Ash.  They don’t have them around.  It’s 280 pounds.  It’s oak, actually.  It’s full hardwood, solid oak.  It’s got a tone wheel and a Leslie with a plate reverb system.  It’s all vintage.  The sound is really great.  It’s really warm.  I find that with the synths, they can be kind of detached and cyborg-like, machine-like.  While the sampling is great – and I think there are a lot of sampling engineers that really work hard at these things, they get it – you can’t get those subtle variations.  You can’t get every volume setting.  You can’t get that natural distortion blasting through speakers of all different varieties.  It would take a million years.  I really prefer the vintage sound.  I think that synthesizers have come a long ways.

J: It takes all three of us to pick it up.  if there’s a stage that’s waist-high, all of a sudden there’s a commotion and there’s this big thing and it’s slammed on stage, you know?  And everybody’s like, “What’s going on?”

E: People see it and they do a double-take.  But these guys are so patient and conscientious.  I told them a million times, night after night, snapping muscles, getting minor muscle tears all over the place, bruises.  The thing has a lot of battle scars already.

 J: $75 we paid for it.

 R: No, it was $80.

 E: If I had a lot of money to throw around, I think I’d make an organ warehouse for repairing and stuff like that.  The organ recovery zone.  It’s heavy as hell, and it’s huge, and people see it and they’re like, “Wow!”  So many people come up to me and say, “Wow!  What is that!”  A lot of times, we’ll get there a little bit early, and we’ll sitting against a brick wall in a hallway, and people will be walking by and say, “Whoa!  What’s that!”  and we’re like, “I have no idea!”

 J: There are a lot of hills to climb for us to get a show, but it’s not necessarily a problem.  Growing up with music I was always inspired, and I love to be inspired in a positive way.  I want to be inspiring in a positive aspect.  If we can be something that inspires in a positive aspect, the more to inspire, that’s where I want to reach.

 R: As long as it has enough money for you to get out on the road and eat some food and be happy, that’s all I care about.  That’s all I want to do, just tour, go to places, perform, have fun.  I’m not pushing it to happen.  I’m just being.  We don’t want to carry that ego around, like, “Oh, we want to make a lot of money.”  It’s not about that at all.

E: We’re thinking about touring sometime, like hopefully this summer or in the near future.  I’m ready for the next level, definitely.

 J: We feed off of the energy that’s out there, so the more the better.  I always wanted to be like the Oliver Twist story, you know?  Like you start out in rags…

R: [The recording] probably took us, say, two months.  We compacted everything.  We had days where we had other shit to do.  There was probably a day when I stood in the recording studio for eighteen hours straight, just wanting to get shit done and get it out there, because we had a CD release party coming up so we wanted to be finished with it.  We made a time limit for ourselves.  Surprisingly, I don’t like rushing into anything, but I was very surprised that it came out the way it did.  It wasn’t very sloppy, which is what I thought it would be.  It felt a little sloppy at times.  We were recording from a digital program, so as much as it was new school in the sense of recording arts, it’s better to bring some natural stuff into that recording, so that’s what we tried to do.

M: Lots of ambient sounds on the CD.

R: I like the ocean.  I think we all have some sort of connection with the ocean, as corny as that sounds.  It’s on the aspect of the psychedelic that we like to bring out.  We like to bring out the sounds. 

J: Music makes pictures, you know.  What picture does this make to you?

E: To me, it’s a connection to nature, to natural rhythms, it flows.

R: It was something different rather than just song – stop – song – stop.

J: and the CD cases are recycled cardboard, right?

R: [Harper Sublette] plays Mandolin on “Outside Intermission” and “Pirate Grace O’Malley.”  I’m very grateful to have her name on that piece of shit.  [laughs]  She’s very awesome, very, very talented.

J: Man, we’re in Sarasota.  We go to Pastimes in Gulf Gate, and how many bands [there] come through Philadelphia?  How many come from the North, you know what I’m saying?  And you don’t hear about it.  There are musicians who come through Sarasota.  You never hear about.  That’s what makes me so frustrated.  I wanted to make a blog, but I’m so computer-inept!  I couldn’t keep it up, but I really wanted to go to shows and hear a band from Bradenton, hear a band from North Carolina that came through, and be like, “They played in Sarasota, and this band is awesome…. Why didn’t I read about it?  Why didn’t we get to know about it?  Let’s start a blog about that.”

NEXT WEEK: PART THREE…