The Tarlatans-Carolina

We’ve been excited about introducing SceneSC readers to The Tarlatans for a little while now. We saw one of their videos online and shortly after donated to their Kickstarter to help fund their new album. After hearing their song “Carolina” I knew that it had to be on the 2012 SceneSC Sampler and luckily they said yes. Here is a first listen to that song off their upcoming album and the 2012 sampler due out mid February.

Get to know The Tarlatans

Describe your music for those who aren’t familiar.

We tend to genre hop from song to song but there’s always some folkie/rock instrumentation with catchy pop melodies in each one. Since the beginning, we’ve been big on telling stories in our songs. Over the past year we’ve been working on how to translate them on a studio album where you can sit back with some headphones and relax but then stomp your boots and sing at the top of your lungs at the live shows.

Who are some of your biggest musical influences?

The primary songwriters, Taylor and Ryan, have different musical preferences. Taylor leans more to the modern pop/rock side of things and Ryan is more influenced by older classics. It’s where they overlap in the middle that makes The Tarlatan sound. Between the four of us, we all differ in what we like to listen to. Whenever we’re on the road the contrast can be pretty funny depending on who has the iPod in their hand.

What are some of your favorite parts about the music scene that you come out of?  What are some things that you wish you could change about the music scene?

Clemson isn’t exactly known for it’s music scene, but one great thing about it is you can walk downtown on any given night and at least one bar will be hosting a pretty good free show. We would love to see more support for local artists making original music. Clemson has some great musicians, but the outlets to promote them are few and far between. Fortunately, things seem to be moving in the right direction. One of our favorite coffee shop/bars, Moe Joe, has done a complete overhaul to create a true original music venue that works to foster the craft of local and regional acts.

How did your band get started?

Taylor and Ryan had been living together for a few years and were making music independently, but in the Spring of 2010 they began working together. Later that year, Eric returned to Clemson to join the band while finishing his masters. We had played a few shows with some session drummers before meeting Blake, who lived upstairs. He filled in for us at a show in Atlanta and it was a perfect fit. We’ve been a solid foursome ever since.

What are you most excited about for the future of your band?

Until now, The Tarlatans has had to be secondary to things like school and jobs. The stars have alined in a way that we will all be able to move to Charleston this Spring and finally make the band our primary focus. We’re excited to see what 2012 holds for us.

If you could change one thing about the music industry what would it be?

Honestly, we’re optimistic about the way the music industry has been changing over the past few years. There is no longer one formula for success. A band could put up a YouTube video and Explode over night. For us, Kickstarter has enabled us to fund an album long before we would have been able to do so on our own. The music industry seems to be transitioning in a way that artists have more control over their own fate, and we’re fortunate to be entering the scene at this time.

Who are some of your favorite South Carolina or Regional bands to play with?  What band do you think your fans should check out?

Last month we played with a band out of Richmond, VA called Black Girls. Their song So Sorry has been stuck in our heads ever since. They’re a great group of guys and we look forward to playing with them again.

This time last year, nothing felt out of the ordinary for frontman/guitarist Gabe Simon and the rest of the Nashville based Kopecky Family Band. They had released a spectacular tandem of EPs to end 2010, The Disaster and Of Epic Proportions, and were ready to take their act on the road in a big way.

They just didn’t know how big 2011 would end up being.

“This past year totally snuck up on us,” Simon said. “We weren’t sure it’d be the year it was. We set the bar high at the beginning, but it wasn’t moving that quickly.”

Fast forward to today and Kopecky is riding a wave of momentum and accolades that rivals, if not bests that of any band out there. They played CMJ in New York and caught the eyes and ears of NPR’s music staff, earning them their own Tiny Desk concert. Their second straight year at SXSW included a performance at the Paste Magazine showcase, a publication the band has become close friends with. They put in an energetic showing at Bonnaroo, the mother-of-all summer music festivals, in their home state of Tennessee.

And then there was the cherry on top: being named one of 2011′s top 25 live acts PERIOD, ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD by Paste Magazine, an achievement Simon is still in awe of today.

“I don’t even know…do I agree?” he asked himself of the high praise, followed by a laugh. “Should I be on this list?”

He laughed again, saying “Paul Simon is on this list” with a sense of disbelief at being mentioned in the same sentence with an artist of that caliber.

But there’s no doubt Kopecky’s work ethic has earned them the right to be catalogued with the world’s top performers. Consider this snapshot of their young 2012 as proof – on Jan. 16, they had finished up a nine-day run in the studio; by the end of January, they will have finished a five date mini-tour and will be gearing up for seven shows in less than two weeks to kick off February. Their penchant for touring and connecting with people through live music is astounding, as if they have an insatiable desire to be on the road.

Yet, with all of that touring experience built up over the last few years, Simon still can’t shake the butterflies. He recalled a show in Louisville, KY, where he was the most terrified he’d ever been performing and it took him four songs to get comfortable. He couldn’t really recall Bonnaroo, describing it only as a blur.

But the show must go on, and Simon wouldn’t change a thing.

“The day I’m not so nervous is the day that I want to be skeptical.”

The group is currently recording what will be their first full-length release, one that Simon says will feature 12 tracks and include the “buffer points,” songs that give better transition from track to track on the record, that their previous EPs did not.

“We kind of tried to maintain an air of making something for someone on every record,” Simon said of the wide diversity of cuts that will be on the new release.

As to how Kopecky plans to keep churning along at their current breakneck pace into 2012, Simon used two words repeatedly – excitement and passion – and offered some advice for bands looking to break through the crust.

“Get outside your comfort zone and work as hard as you possibly can,” he said. “It’s about your fans; it’s about hanging out with them, meeting them, talking to them, sleeping on their couches – developing a relationship with these people.

“What you’re doing is a business…but it has to be something you love. Passion is big.”

Kopecky Family Band will be playing at 5 Points Pub on Tuesday, February 7. kemp ridley opens. Tickets are $5 through Scene SC, $5 for USC students and $10 at the door for all others 18 and up. Doors will open at 8 p.m., show starts at 9 p.m. For more information, visit http://www.the5pointspub.com/ or call the venue at (803) 253-7888.

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Kopecky Family Band is Scene SC’s official Band of the Month. In honor of that, you should check out their show at the Pub AND download their track “God and Me (Remix)” from Of Epic Proportions FOR FREE on the right-hand sidebar of their website. Below is a video David shot of them playing in Greenville. Enjoy.

The Fire Tonight’s show in Anderson, SC Saturday brings them back to their roots in a lot of ways. None of the current members live in the same town anymore so the live performance aspect of being in a band for them has become few and far between. But after line up changes, a full length album, and multiple EP’s the band is truly happy with where they are today.

Anderson, SC is like their first or second home. It’s where founding members Collin Derrick and Stephen Russ met while they were in school there. It’s also where they recorded their latest EP …And Then You Were Gone. An EP that they believe captures the full sound of who The Fire Tonight is, even thought it almost ended the band in the process.

“Getting this EP out took forever, because it is extremely personal for all of us” said Russ, drummer of The Fire Tonight. “And the thing that really kept us going is that we knew we needed to do it, even if it was the hardest thing we had ever done musically.”

Over time things changed in many ways in The Fire Tonight camp. Early on they focused on touring and playing shows all over the Southeast. Their first full length album was cut and ready for radio, something in retrospect might not have been exactly who they were.

“I can say with full faith that I can’t stand our first album at all, but I think we’ve really come along since then at least in, doing what we do which is generally melodramatic art rock” said Russ. “We’ve all had a lot of experiences in music outside of the band, Collin teaches recording, I interview musicians, Jesse is in school for music. We also became less concerned about doing what we thought people wanted. You know, “oh we need a slow song, oh we need another rocker” that kind of thing.”

So on their last EP they recorded it Mono, just because it was something they wanted to do and something that they enjoyed bands like The Beatles doing. They also joke that they wanted to beat The Restoration to the punch. For the average listener, it’s a recording nuance that no one will notice, but for them it was a challenge and something they cared about.

As The Fire Tonight settle into their lives away from rock n roll, they’ve figured out more what they want to do. And that’s create music they care about, and to enjoy the live shows they do play more than ever.

In talking about their past releases and the fans relationship to the music Russ says “But music is forever. It’s what people make of it.”

The Fire Tonight will be opening for The Restoration in Anderson, SC Saturday Jan 21 at McGee’s Irish Pub. The show is free and starts at 8 PM.

Hello all,

Cam Powell here, bass player for kemp ridley (and Scene SC intern/writer/booking contact/I don’t know what my title is anymore). 2011 was our second full year of existence, and a monumental one at that. Over the course of the past 12 months, we’ve laid a foundation for what we hope will be continued success and good times playing music for anyone who cares to listen. I’ll try to detail our year in review for you in somewhat chronological order, grouping by event category as well:

iTunes - We released our 5-song, eponymous EP at the beginning of June 2010 but didn’t end up taking our talents to the Web until the second week of January 2011. Getting our music up on iTunes was a much easier process than we thought it would be and just being able to say “find us on iTunes” to the crowd at shows felt pretty awesome. It was a great way for our fans to be able to get their hands on our music outside of buying CDs at shows too, considering we often forgot to make more CDs and wouldn’t have any at our merch table.

Media attention - Even though we’d never sent out press releases, media outlets caught wind of us either through seeing us live or by word of mouth. Seeing our name on the club calendar in the Free Times was probably the coolest thing we’d experienced in print up to this point, so having blurbs written about us by some of our favorite publications (including The State, the Free Times, Greenville Metromix, The Daily Gamecock, The Garnet and Black, SGTV and this site, of course) throughout the course of the year was exciting and motivating.

Jettison Never’d - At the end of February, we played a show with Nashville rock trio Jettison Never at The Watershed in Lexington. Since we were the local act, we were slated to headline that night but hadn’t put much practice in that week. Jettison Never, on the other hand, plays somewhere around 200 gigs a year and is one of the tightest bands we’ve ever had the pleasure of playing with. They ended up rocking our collective socks, underwear and outer facial epidermis off and intimidating the hell out of us before we took the stage. According to people who were there, we played a great show and at least met the bar those guys set, but we knew deep down that they smoked us. We tipped our hats to them for being an awesome live act and took it as a lesson to practice more often/better and make sure that never happened again.

The interwebs - Tired of just giving people links to our Facebook and Myspace pages, Trey and I set out to create an official kemp ridley website sometime in late March. After a couple solid days of hashing through design templates and messing around with Photoshop, we were able to turn the site into something we could be proud of. Thanks go out to the fine people at wordpress.com for hosting our endeavor. At the end of the September we got the urge to put out some free, previously unreleased music, so we started a Bandcamp. Check it out and get yourself a couple free tracks.

Merch and such - After kicking around ideas for what seemed like an eternity, we settled on designs for our first run of T-shirts and stickers, embracing the turtle that is our namesake, and created a functioning webstore to accompany our website. Response has been positive so far. Still waiting for a day we see someone we don’t know personally wearing a shirt or driving on the highway with our sticker on the back of their car.

Festivals - We found ourselves playing a lot more higher caliber gigs in 2011, many of them of the festival variety. We had the honor of taking the stage as a part of both Downtown Alive! in June and Fall for Greenville in October in the beautiful city of Greenville, determining after the latter gig that we’d love to relocate there after college if at all possible. Columbia natives and South Carolina music heroes Hootie and the Blowfish were kind enough to include us on the bill for their Homegrown Weekend festival in Charleston in August; the fact that they even knew who we were blew us away. And of course, our home turf of Columbia was better to us than we ever could’ve imagined. We established a good relationship with Art Bar, playing there for their 7th Anniversary party in July, on their outside stage at the Free Times Music Crawl (our favorite music event ever) and headlining there in November. That last show was literally the most fun we’ve ever had on stage playing music.

Kickstarter/recording - Scattered throughout all of these other events, we somehow found time to write new music. After we’d compiled around ten new tunes since the release of the EP, we decided to sack up and take a shot at making a new record. We started a Kickstarter campaign, spearheaded by some eccentric videos that we had far too much fun filming and editing, and hoped to raise $3,000 in support of the new EP/album between late September and Thanksgiving Day. We still can’t believe we met our goal and are extremely grateful to all those who donated and shared our project with others. The week before Christmas, we began recording with Eric McCoy of Archer Avenue Studio and have finished tracking drums and bass to this point.

After compiling that list, I can barely wrap my head around how good 2011 was to us. Thanks to everyone who has ever supported us in any way; without you, we wouldn’t have been able to do any of this. To you, I propose a toast – to the great year that was and even better years ahead.

- Cam Powell and kemp ridley

Prior to their album release show last week, we chatted with Mike Mewborne of The Lovely Few about the new album and his relationship with the music scene here in Columbia.

Interview and video by Blake Garris.

Freelance Whales – Hannah (We Roll Like Madmen remix) by We Roll Like Madmen

Saturday November 19

Bey’s 9 PM

Describe your music for those who aren’t familiar.

We Roll Like Madmen is a vocal-centric, cross-genre electronic dance project. We perform original material as well as remixes, combining both live band and DJ techniques. In addition to our original sets, we also perform as a DJ outfit.

Who are some of your biggest musical influences?

We are all DJs at WSBF FM Clemson, and we listen to new music constantly. This project pulls inspiration from electronic dance genres including house, trance, glitch-hop, and duckstep while emphasizing an element of songwriting kin to Baths, Miike Snow, The Flaming Lips, and Ben Gibbard when he’s sad.

What are some of your favorite parts about the music scene that you
come out of? What are some things that you wish you could change about
the music scene?

The Clemson music scene is very small which is nice because its easy to form relationships with a lot of the key players around town including artists, businesses, and promoters. However, it can be hard to book events with establishments during the football season. Also, there aren’t any true venues, just bars without proper PA systems or stages. We play occasional house shows, and we’d love to play more of those. Most of our success has come from more electronic-friendly markets that have reached out to us like Greenville and Atlanta.

How did your band get started?

We had audio classes together and discovered mutual musical interests. Each of us have been involved with different musical projects before and were looking for a musical outlet. We first performed as a group for Jordan’s solo project. We wore ridiculous costumes and starting playing with different controllers. After becoming roommates, we started writing songs together focusing on dance music.

What are you most excited about for the future of your band?

This Fall we’ve introduced lights into our performances and are looking to start using projected visuals. We have a few shows left this year including a busy New Year’s Eve, but we plan to focus on writing and recording new material this winter, working towards a southeast tour in the Spring.

If you could change one thing about the music industry what would it be?

Not nearly enough heady crystals at merch tables, Skrillex’s haircut, Phil Collins apologizing for his popularity after retirement, Prince’s futile stand against the internet, guitars without flames on them, requests, the inherent contradiction of the pop punk genre, the term glo-fi, our middle-aged women demographic, real-time bouncing in Pro-Tools, haters, all y’all wannabe, gonnabe, cock-sucking, pussy-eatin’ pranksters, et cetra.

How could you pick only one?

Who are some of your favorite South Carolina or Regional bands to
play with? What band do you think your fans should check out?

We’ve had great shows with Dark Room, Tricil, and Chief Acid Officer in Atlanta, including being a part of Nophi Records’ Nophest this last Summer. Unfortunately, we haven’t had the opportunity to play with many South Carolina acts aside from Vampire Pimp, and this will be our second show with Signs of Iris. There are plenty of regional acts that inspire us like Octopus Jones, Today The Moon Tomorrow The Sun, and Culture Prophet. We hope to play more shows with South Carolina artists, though we’ve had some trouble finding many that are stylistically similar.

Hopscotch vs. Moogfest?

Moogfest. Hopscotch was awesome, but Moogfest had a greater variety of acts that we’re into like Amon Tobin, Dan Deacon, Crystal Castles, Passion Pit, TV on the Radio, Baths, Tobacco, and M83. We also enjoyed playing with the Moog synthesizers and staying in the mountains of Asheville.

Saturday November 5

Where: Kelly’s

When: 11:10-11:40

The Mobros-My Baby Walked Out

How would you describe your sound to someone that has never heard your band?

Motown Soul

Who are some of your biggest musical influences?
Sam Cooke, Ray Charles, and Wilson Pickett

What other bands are you excited about seeing at Music Crawl?

Marshall Brown and The RESTORATION! Daniel Machado is THE BOSS!

What are you most excited about for the future of your band?

We are releasing the music video MISSISSIPPI WOMAN as well as the single pretty soon.

Band: Bass Drum of Death

Hometown: Oxford, Mississippi

RIYL: Black Lips, Blood Circus, Mudhoney, Nirvana, Hole

On October 15, 2011 Bass Drum of Death brought their bonged out Southern Grunge to New Brookland Tavern opening for Toro Y Moi. Like Toro Y Moi, Bass Drum of Death started as a bedroom project, is from a southern college town that is home to an SEC school, has a Blogspot, and comes with a closet full of street cred.  The similarities stop there as BDoD comes off as more of an early 90′s slacker rock band full of irony, yelps, and feedback.  Their high energy live show is shared with the crowd who love to shake their asses while BDoD rock out and swing their hair back and forth.

Interview by Blake Garris

Perusing the Web Thursday, I found myself scrolling through the concert calendar on newbrooklandtavern.com. It had been a while since I’d gone to a local show and I knew I had a scheduling conflict for Toro Y Moi Saturday night and couldn’t find a ride/companion for Trey Anastasio in Charlotte Friday night; I was fiending live music in the worst way.

As luck may have it, I stumbled upon Parachute Musical headlining NBT that night. I had seen the Nashville-based quartet at The Channel in Greenville earlier in the year and was blown away by their chemistry and strikingly complex approach to pop music. Thanks to the power of Scene SC and Twitter, David got me on the guest list.

Not only did the guys put on a terrific, high-energy show (albeit for a very small crowd), they were kind enough to humor me with an interview for the site. Bass player Andrew Samples and frontman/keyboardist/guitarist Josh Foster joined me on venue’s back porch to discuss the band’s new album, some touring hi-jinx and have me make wild assumptions about who I think they sound like.

You guys came out with a new record recently, right?

Josh: We put out a new record called Kill It Cut It Down; it’s been out for just a little while. We recorded it this year in January and…got it out this year [laughs]. That’s an accomplishment for us.

Is there anything in specific, songwriting, etc., that has progressed or evolved from your last effort to this one?

Josh: We released a two-song EP thing – a two-song single I guess you would call it – called No Comfort about two years ago…That was kind of like the gap between our last full-length and this one…It showed a little bit more educated songwriting…it has more pop sensibilities, but we still maintain who we are and what we like to do…Everything’s Working Out Fine in Some Town was very orchestrated and loose in terms in structure, but it was also a storybook record so it kind of made sense to do that.

What would you say that your biggest influences are? When I listen to your music, it’s a hodge-podge trying to describe you guys in my head. There are a lot of pop elements, things you might hear on the radio – one band stuck out to me that made no sense listening to your music, but did at the same time. You guys sound, or have a very similar vibe to Rush…

[Andrew starts laughing]

Josh: That makes me vomit dude.

That makes you vomit?

Josh: I hate Neil Peart, I hate Geddy Lee. I fucking hate Rush [awkward moment]…I’m not gonna beat you up or anything.

[Everyone laughs]

Well, when I listen to your music, you have a lot of unison runs between instruments and well-crafted harmonies. There’s a lot more effort put into the music you’re playing than most typical pop…It feels like each piece feeds off of everything else intentionally, making a really intricate composition…kind of like Rush.

Josh: (Geddy Lee voice) “Living in the limelight, the universal dream…” [I laugh uncontrollably]. Well when you put it that way…

Andrew: We all do listen to a lot of different stuff. I think we all bring what we listen to to the music when we’re writing parts…There is kind of a hodge-podge feel to it.

You’re touring right now in support of the new record – do you have any idea of what you’re going to work on next?

Josh: To be honest, we don’t really know. When we put this record out, we threw a lot of cards on the table to do it. We did a Kickstarter project which raised like $17,000 and we put it all into the record. We’re still kind of, right now, in the middle of fulfilling all the Kickstarter prizes. Like, some people paid $500 to have us write a song for them…we’re in the middle of doing that. I’m always writing. Sometimes it’s for PM, sometimes it’s for a country artist…I don’t know, whatever’s happening at the moment. So one day, I’ll probably sit down and five songs will come out that are perfect PM songs. Then we’ll just have to decide what we want to do with them, you know? I think right now we just want to have fun. We don’t know what we’re gonna do, but whatever we end up wanting to do it has to revolve around having fun. We’re just too old to not have fun.

What would you say your second home has become when you’re out on the road?

Josh: D.C. Besides me, the other three guys are all from the D.C. area, so that’s definitely a second home. We have a lot of big shows there…Knoxville was great the other night, I don’t know what the deal was with that. We haven’t played there in a while. The Carolinas, we come here a lot because regional touring is kind of minimal for us. The East, we’ll hit New York and stuff…that’s become nice for us.

Is there anything that you can take away from the touring grind? Do you write better on the road or do you prefer to sit down and take time?

Both: No…

Andrew: You don’t get any personal time and you don’t really take out your instrument, it’s all packed up and shit. There’s not room to bring other instruments…I don’t know. For me, it’s hard to be creative.

Josh: I come up with little lyrics here and there, but nothing too…I try so hard and it’s always contrived.

Andrew: If we had a bus and we had our own rooms and things like that, with our own acoustic guitars, I’m sure we’d get a lot of writing done since there’s so much down time.

Anything else that you guys want to get across? 

Josh: Ask us crazy stuff. Be the one interviewer to ask us really crazy, weird stuff and we’ll shake on it that we’ll answer completely honestly.

This is the point where drummer Ben and guitarist Tom joined us outside and Andrew stole the show. I can’t possibly do justice in print to the stories that he told , so I’ll provide you all with the original audio recording for each question.

Poop in a bag

PM-Interview 1

The shoe licker

PM Interview_2

Parachute Musical just finished up the short tour they were on with Kyle Andrews, but be on the lookout for them to return to the road in the near future. If they come anywhere near you, it’s your duty as a lover of good music to go see and support them. Check out Kill It Cut It Down and the rest of their releases at parachutemusical.com.

Kenny working with The Sea Wolf Mutiny

When analyzing someone’s presence and credibility in a local music scene, people tend to look for what that someone has given to the scene during his or her time. By that theory, Kenny McWilliams’ time playing in the wildly popular group Baumer makes him one of the Columbia music scene’s favorite sons. Add to that the fact that he’s continued playing after the group disbanded with new powerhouse acts The Internet and Rejectioneers and Kenny becomes a scene legend. Now throw in his being one half of Archer Avenue Studio, he and Eric McCoy’s recording and producing brainchild that has churned out the latest wave of great records from Columbia artists, and Kenny may as well be the Godfather of the scene.

Recently, I sat down with Kenny to discuss his time living, playing and recording in Columbia, the rise of Archer Avenue and this Friday’s Archer Avenue Triple EP Release at New Brookland Tavern, which features CD releases from AAS clients Foley, The Sea Wolf Mutiny and Rejectioneers.

Has growing up playing in bands in Columbia helped you in your producing/recording role in that you have a musician’s ear first and foremost?

Yeah, I think it’s been really huge. In fact, the whole way that this got started is because I was doing that [playing music]. I got interested in recording in high school and bought a little, cheap four-track…literally a cassette-tape recorder thing and started recording. I was in bands that were recorded in studios and I was so fascinated by it, so I started building gear and my dad built this place [the studio shed]. I started by just recording bands that I was in, and then friends’ bands…stuff like that. I think part of the reason that people trust Eric and I when they come is that they know a little bit about our history and that we were on the other side of it. When a band comes to us, we’re not just some stuffy producer that has been doing this for years and years, even though we have been doing it for a while now, but we did the band thing. We understand the budget issues…the scheduling issues because we were there too. I think all of that is huge. Even just being a part of a band and learning how to deal with personalities…those are all skills that help us in here too.

You guys have worked with major artists in the Columbia scene over the years, including Baumer, Marry a Thief and Austin Crane. Because of your work with these artists, have you seen a lot of referrals coming in as clients?

Yeah, actually. Pretty much, up until really recently, every single client that either of us got was through referrals or word of mouth…kind of real grassroots. We haven’t ever advertised formally; we have a promo with WXRY and we’ve started trying in the past year and a half, two years to get an online presence…try to brand the image, that kind of stuff. But really, it’s all been referrals.

This Friday’s Archer Avenue Showcase is the first time you guys have ever done anything like it, correct? With three bands releasing records at the same show?

Absolutely. We’ve talked about it for a while, sort of, but it never quite was the right time…and I think now, piggybacking off of some of the things that have happened this past year, it’s the perfect time to do it – to have three talented bands that have sought us out and are willing to do it. It’s huge for us…We want it to be really community based and I think Emily [McCollum] and Cayla [Fralick] opening…I think they do really well, both of them individually and people will be really intrigued to see them together. Our hope from the very beginning of planning this thing was that people will come at the beginning and stay through the whole show…We’re trying to encourage people that this is going to be a quality show.

With a lot of CD release shows, you pay a higher cover charge and get the CD free as a part of admission. With three bands debuting records at this show, will the bands just be selling their records inside? How’s that aspect going to work?

When we talked about booking the show, I basically told each band, “Look – I’d love for you guys to do this. It would really help us out, I think it’d be cool for you guys because there’d be some cross fan bases…but what we want to do is keep the ticket prices as low as we can.” I told them up front, “I know none of you guys are going to make as much money as you would have if you’d done your own CD release show; done it disc for free, charged $10…” And they were all totally fine with that. What Archer Avenue is doing is with each person that pays to get in, we’re giving them a download card where they can go to this Bandcamp site that we have set up specifically for this show that has one song from each of those three bands…That’s really cool because say a Sea Wolf fan walks in, they get the card and they buy the Sea Wolf record, right? But when they leave they have that card, so they’re not going to forget about the other bands that played that night and they get to hear them. Hopefully, over time, that encourages this “scene”…grows the whole scene as a united thing.

Of the three clients releasing CDs at this event, which record did you spend the most time on recording and producing?

Hmm…that’s a really good question. Probably…hands down the Rejectioneers. I’m kind of in that band, I play with them, so that changes things a little bit. We’ve been working on that thing…dude, we started recording that thing about a year and a half ago or something ridiculous. It was kind of this thing where I would do it whenever I had time or whenever we could get everybody together; it was really laid back. But what that inevitably does is it drags everything out…Foley I spent four solid days on, so we did it fast. Sea Wolf…I want to say we spent probably right at a week; I’m talking full days for both of these bands. Rejectioneers is hard for me to tell exactly how long I spent because it was a day here, a night here…doing it over a length of time is just so hard.

Was there anything extremely unique about any of the recordings for these three bands?

Yeah, I think with Rejectioneers I tried really hard…to not do a lot of overdub stuff. There are certain sections with there’s a lot of overdub guitar, but a lot of it just three guitars – a little more minimalistic. We’re each doing our own thing on purpose. With Sea Wolf, they came to me and were really intent on recording live. I get that often and I try to accommodate as much as possible…They wanted to all be in the same room, so I just decided, “Alright…we’re gonna make this happen.” That was a first for me…probably the most unique of the three.

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The Archer Avenue Triple EP Release takes place this Friday night, August 12, at New Brookland Tavern. Admission is $5 for 21+, $7 for underage guests and includes a free download card that can be redeemed online for a song from each of the three bands releasing a CD that night. Doors open at 7 p.m. and the night’s lineup is as follows:

Emily McCollum and Cayla Fralick

Rejectioneers

Foley

The Sea Wolf Mutiny

For more information on the show, visit www.newbrooklandtavern.com. For more information on Kenny and Archer Avenue, visit their website at www.archeravenuestudio.com or find them on Twitter @ArcherAveStudio.