Date: August 24, 2021
Interview by: Abbey Williams
NB: No, we had students who had an interest in music-and a lot of them were music students, but not all of them-joined this residential community that was in a dorm, but we all signed up for it basically. Not all of us are music majors, I myself am a music major, RIley was a music major as well, Cal is journalism and KiKi is getting a degree in science. But, we all were collectively in that residential community because we love music and could all play and wanted to meet other musicians.
RS: We all have very different influences. Nik is a jazz drummer first and foremost, I won’t speak on his behalf since he’s here. I really like King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard, I’m really into psychedelic rock and just more ambient guitar, many different kinds. KiKi is into some mellow-er stuff, Phoebe Bridgers and BIg Thief are some of her big inspirations and Cal loves the Beach Boys, loves the Beatles, a classic rock guy. He likes a lot of Travis Scott, I think he’s heartbroken about the DaBaby cancellation [laughs].
NB: I’d say like in the beginning since we all met and started playing together, a lot of our influences didn’t really overlap too much. I feel like as we’ve grown closer together as friends and just playing a lot more, more of our influences and how we like to play have overlapped and made more of a cohesive sound. In the beginning we tried to do things that some of us liked that we shared common interests in, kind of like funk and punk and rock were our biggest things that we were kind of shooting for at the beginning, but things have kind of changed over time, I think that we kind of fit the indie band bill a little bit more now than we did in 2017.
RS: We all live together. Our writing process normally is pretty collective because we all live together and we bounce ideas off each other all the time. We also sort of tend to write the songs individually, like chords and lyrics, and then present it to the band and take it from there, everyone else adds a part once we’ve got that foundation. It’s different for everyone, I like bringing my ideas a little less polished than everyone else I think. Kiki and Cal tend to bring full songs, especially KiKi where she’s like got it front to back and we start filling in the gaps. It’s always different, we’re never just trying to do the same thing again so it’s evolving.
CF: We just did nothing but practice really, we did a couple live shows, like live streams but they’re no fun. I don’t get the sense that people really watch them or maybe they do to be nice, but I just feel like it’s hard to connect with people in that way. We mostly just spent time recording the new album and writing it.
RS: I wish KiKi were here, she wrote the song obviously, but it’s about marital stresses and anxieties about how different people’s dispositions would affect how they’re going to be as parents or their future, I mean that’s what she said in another article [laughs].
CF: I think she’d want to say that it’s not about her own parents, she likes her parents a lot, they love each other. She’d want to say it’s not autobiographical.
NB: The album is coming out on September 18 and we’ve been releasing singles every two weeks leading up to the album, so this is single 2 of 4, so we have a couple more coming and the album is called Movie Star.
CF: It is called Movie Star and that sort of came out of us spending the year indoors and doing nothing but playing music and watching movies and TV, just thinking about that kind of thing. We were writing songs and I think that’s just how it all came together. We had the old Hollywood kind of vibe in mind for it and it just came together pretty naturally like that. Once that became apparent we decided to start stringing them together and make it. It’s going to be like an Abbey Road sort of thing, the songs flow into each other. We’re really excited about it, we like it a lot.
NB: We’ve gone on a few tours now, I’d say maybe 3 where it seemed like things were pretty serious. We went on a couple little runs down to the Bay Area probably summer of 2019, or maybe even 2018, that was the first run. We went and did that but we’ve had a couple pretty serious tours that had like shows every day, several hundred miles [sic] pretty much day in, day out, wake up, go to the next spot, play a show, go to sleep, wake up and do it again. So we had a couple of tours like that. We have a tour planned in September and we’re going all the way down to San Diego and playing shows all the way down there, just hitting the Bay and the LA area, so yeah, that’s what’s on the horizon, but we definitely missed playing tours and we had a big tour planned the summer of 2020, and of course that fell through, really sad, but things work out differently than we expect but we gotta keep the steam rolling. We are definitely looking forward to touring, we all love touring, it’s just one of the most fun things for us to do. We are just excited to be back on the road for sure.
CF: [Tour] It’s the thing we want the most in the world right now. Obviously the last couple weeks have been making us nervous, COVID-wise.
RS: It’s culminating in the [album] release. We are headed out, I think our first show is in Portland on the 5th or 7th of September. We’re going to have a couple days after that and then we’re doing Arcata, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, San Diego, Orange County, LA, coming back to play our release show in Eugene and then we are heading off to Treefort.
RS: Funny enough, none of these bands were nearly as famous as they are now when we played with them. When we played with The Backseat Lovers, well we played two shows with them, actually, Portland and Eugene. One of them was just a little DIY space in Portland, like an art collective and that show was really quiet. Between songs there was no noise, you could hear a pin drop drop from the audience. There was a decent crowd there but I don’t know, it was kind of an interesting one. And we got to laugh about it with them because it was just a funny thing. And then we played like a house show in Eugene with them which was really fun and we could tell that they were going to get really famous because they’re just so good.
CF: I think every album we are more and more on the same page and this one definitely reflects that. Like in the number of songs that were written together or collaboratively or just in that even the ones we brought to the table separately from each other, they were still very much in the same vein. We also had the same album in mind which was very nice, very cool. That hasn’t always been the case, which is fine, not every album has to be that way, but it was fun to do this one. It just sort of happened. We didn’t all talk about things like, “Hey, let’s all write a bunch of songs about commercials and TV,” but we just sort of did.