Best of ‘09: Three Stars

Photo by erin_m This was a good year for the Three Stars feature. We got to talk with a lot of up and coming local musical acts who specialize in a variety of styles. We foresee great things happening for acts like Pree and Laughing Man, and we even talked to now-Grammy nominee Christylez. Here, we recount some of our favorite moments from Three Stars interviews we conducted this year. The most interesting and most inspiring moments from January through November are all listed below, as well as some hilarious quotes that you may have missed. Best Comedians: Solar Powered Sun Destroyer Jimmy: We actually have to call each other before shows sometimes to see if we’re wearing the same shirts. Because we all have the same band shirts. Dave: I showed up at Jimmy’s today and I was like, “Oh good, I’m really glad you have a Young Widows shirt on today. And not wearing a Life and Times shirt.” Ross: And Jimmy actually had to text me and tell me, “Oh, by the way, I’m wearing a Young Widows shirt today.” 
 Dave: And we have to do that all the time because we all have the same type of influences for the most part. Ross: And we’ll do that when we go to the mall. And the State Fair. You should see people’s faces when we’re all in bumper cars together wearing the same clothes, it’s like a little gang. But the band is just dead serious. We’re just dead serious. (laughter) 
 Best way to find a drummer: Impossible Hair Jim:…And we met Sammy at the donut shop. Kind of a fluke. The donut shop? Joe: How did we meet Sammy? It wasn’t the donut shop. It was an ad or something. Sam: It was an ad in a donut shop. Jim: Let’s be honest here. It was a donut shop. Joe: An ad for donuts? Best evasive answer: Last Tide on how they met So how’d you guys meet each other? Misha: (laughs) So we went to a strip club…to a Swedish underground bondage party. Nate: Yeah, we’ll go with that. Not on Craigslist, certainly. What I’d heard is the BYTWashington DC section. Misha: Oh, that’s probably in reference to the Great American Challenge. (four questions later) Nate: So have we effectively not answered your question? About how you met each other? Well, I’ll ask again, then. How did you meet each other? Rob: I’m sticking with the Swedish underground bondage party. Kind of like that scene in The Matrix where everyone’s wearing the skintight leather. Nate: So much like it that we’ve never discussed it before. This idea came up totally spontaneously right now. Misha: But planned half an hour in advance. Best conversation about technical gear: Lode Runner Ken: We use Reason, recently we’ve been using Abelton onstage. Our newest evolution is, we used to have some old school stuff and Scott could probably talk about it better, but we had a MIDI sequencer, and we had a drum machine that accepted the MIDI input and then we had a keyboard that would accept the MIDI input, so we’d have this MIDI sequencer that would control all these instruments. What we decided to do recently, partially out of convenience, but also because it offers us a little more control is that we actually pre-record the backing tracks for some of the songs, in, say, Abelton, and then we put it onstage, on a laptop. And then I have a foot controller with a bunch of buttons on it, so I can trigger the different tracks to come in and out of the different instruments, and then kind of do some live effects over that with my feet, to control a lot there. I just got this sweet iPhone and my next step is to figure out how we can use this. I know there’s got to be an app, you can hook it up using bluetooth, you can turn it into a chaos pad. There’s got to be all sorts of cool shit. Scott: Watch, you’ll get a phone call, mid-set. It’ll pause your app while you’re onstage. Ken: You’re right, that could be problematic. Best DJ night recommendation: True Womanhood on We Fought The Big One. Okay, tell me more about “We Fought the Big One.”
 Thomas: We Fought the Big One is a DJ night the first Friday of every month at Mark’s Cafe in Mt. Pleasant. And it’s run by Rick and Brandon. Rick is a very good friend of our band. He’s one of the first people to actually take notice. He did a pretty in depth interview for Brightest Young Things awhile back. Melissa: About us. Thomas: And he invited us to “We Fought the Big One.” They really do a good job of focusing on weirder more out there music. And what they’re playing is kind of commendable. They have this great space in a pretty hip neighborhood in D.C. on a good night and they’re using it to promote music from record labels like Slumberland and What’s Your Rupture? up in New York and local bands like us. Rick has so many connections to bands in D.C. like The Antiques and Exit Clov and tons of bands and he plays that stuff and people are there drinking their Belgian beer, listening to it, soaking it all in hopefully. Melissa: But he has an email list where every month he recaps what he and his friend Brandon have played. And it creates this kind of community. Thomas: It’s great exposure for D.C. ‘cause D.C. doesn’t have the greatest reputation for being experimental I feel like. Part of D.C.’s history is kind of conservative. Not in a political way but in an artistic way. And that’s not to say that we don’t love Fugazi and Minor Threat and stuff like that but Rick’s so well connected with the owners of record labels and stuff like that. When he brings in people to a D.C. DJ night, then he lists the choices of their songs for the night and then he sends them to everyone. Like really really important people. I think it’s just such a great promotion for D.C.. He is a tastemaker and it’s beautiful and he does great interviews with, like, Thurston Moore. Best devotion to the Caps: Title Tracks I notice that your touring comes right in the middle of hockey season. Are you going to be able to make any of the Caps games when you come home ? Because I’m always on tour in the spring, I have many many memories of missing Caps playoff games. It’s almost like a tradition. I remember being on tour two years ago in that series against the Flyers, and during Game 1 my friend Ari was texting me giving me the updates on what was happening as I was driving up through California. Then I remember way back with Q and Not U playing some show in like, Pomona, California in the spring of 2001 and somebody in the front was telling us that the Caps had lost that night and me and Matt, who was the bass player at the time, being very unhappy about that, so it’s just sort of like a tradition. I guess there’s probably a good chance that I’ll miss a fair amount of playoffs againm but I’m pretty used to it. But if they go deep this year which I think they will, I’ll be home after the first week of May, so I’m hoping to be around by certainly the third round of the finals, which I’m expecting them to get to this year. Best alternative venue idea: Frau Eva David:

Well, I had this idea that I wanted to play a treehouse show. That I wanted to play a show in a treehouse. So, I was like, oh, I need a battery powered amp. So, I bought a battery powered amp. Then, I was like, I don’t know of any treehouses. Then I was like, also, my keyboard needs to be plugged in. So, there’s actually a lot of problems, but I have a battery powered amp now. So I just need to find a treehouse and buy a battery powered keyboard. Best band that Weezer covers brought together: Loose Lips Donny: And do you, Jeremy, want to talk about why you started a Weezer cover band? Yes, please do. Donny: It’s very interesting. Jeremy: I was interning in the summer of 2002 and this intern manager named Blair. She was foxy. A fine lady. She admitted that she liked Weezer so I thought I’d start a Weezer cover band to win her affections. So I contacted Donny. Donny: Why did you think of me, actually. I’ve never even asked you. Jeremy: I don’t even know. Donny: It’s funny, I hadn’t even listened to Weezer since like 8th grade. And it’s funny because we were both bass players but I obviously started with guitar and I’m sure he did as well. So he called me up and said, do you want to play guitar so I said sure. Jeremy: Yeah I don’t remember how I thought of you. Donny: Since we were friends in high school. Jeremy: Since we started the Weezer cover band, we had this guy named Jason playing drums for us. We played a couple of shows and the chick Blair didn’t come out at all. Ever. So in that respect, it was a complete shitshow. Complete failure. Best Innovator: Cannot Be Stopped It’s like, everyone’s always looking for a drummer. I even had a drum set in DC, which, when you’re in college is like the catching point ‘cause most people are like “Yeah, I play drums, I don’t have a drum set, though.” So I was like, okay, you can play guitar, you can go to a coffee house, be a weekend warrior, lay down some songs on your own or whatever. But when you play drums, what do you do? So that’s kind of where the whole Cannot Be Stopped thing came from is sort of, how do you play by yourself when you’re a drummer. Best story about meeting your idols: The Tennis System meeting My Bloody Valentine I did catch on from various interviews that you got your name from a Lilys song. Matty: Yes, I love that band. Kurt’s a good friend of mine, dear friend of mine. It’s funny, I actually went and saw My Bloody Valentine in Richmond, saw Kurt and found out he was opening, which was awesome, so, watched that, and My Bloody Valentine was good. Then went up to Jersey at All Points West, ran into Kurt on the train to Jersey, hung out with him there, saw My Bloody Valentine, he went up onstage, I stayed out in the crowd. Then, went to New York, my brother and I and are friend were all hanging out, went over to Library’s, left Library’s, walked down the street. So we walked past a pub, Kurt was standing out front and he was like, “I want you to meet my friend, Kevin Shields,” and I was just like, “What the fuck?” I hung out with My Bloody Valentine all night. Everyone was there except for Drake’s wife. Drake: Bilinda Butcher. Matty: But it was awesome. They were so awesome. Super nice people. I talked gear with Kevin Shields. Deb and I talked for like an hour about sports, it was awesome. And then Kurt, to mess with me, there was a kit there, and Colin was playing drums and Kurt was like, “Oh, I’m going to play a song,” and he played Tennis System. It was unreal. I couldn’t even believe it, it was ridiculous. Best job delineating a very abstract concept: Birdlips Cliff: I think one thing that we always strive for in our music and we often talk about kind of abstractly is a feeling of… Cliff and Lindsay: …Existential longing. Lindsay: Which is hard to really explain how that finds its way into music. I feel like it’s something you can’t really put your finger on or really define in specific terms. Cliff: But it’s that power that music has to kind of to take you beyond where you are right now and almost make you feel like you’re in another place and time and make you feel like you’re reaching beyond the physical reality. That’s something that we kind of strive for. I think that’s something that get strived for in deeply emotional experiences. We always try to write from experience, definitely. Best Explanation of D.C. as an Artistic Lightning Rod: Blue Sausage Infant I’m not sure. Clearly it’s a very concentrated city. You’ve got all the diversity of any other major city but in a very small space. So you’ve got a lot of cultural rub. Within Northwest, you’ve got, nowadays, a good handful of venues that cater to everything from hip-hop and jazz and the experimental stuff. Bossa has been doing the Electric Possible series DC Arts Center was doing it until recently. And there’s something about the rub between diversity in a small space that causes sparks. I think there’s something about that. Cause I didn’t experience it…I spent a little bit of time in Brooklyn and Manhattan but you would expect it. It’s almost like there’s so much going on there that strange is normal. It’s almost invisible and you had to really struggle to find stuff going on. For some reason D.C. works for me, works with my bloodstream somehow. As soon as I moved back, the magic came back and everything started happening. Best Explanation of their Art: Hume How did you get the idea for the Mirroring project? Britton: I had this unfiltered energy and I had to a big project. So I came to thinking about what instrumentation would bring about a lot of energy and immediately I went to the rhythmic aspect of music and set up a piece for two drums. Then I wanted a very melodious aspect to it and I immediately thought saxophone. Then I went to my instrument which is the bass and I decided to double up on that. And I had this graphic image of two rivers colliding into each other and at the base of those two rivers, two trees with the foundation of the roots and at the moment when those two rivers collide there are two birds in those two trees whose bodies run into each other and collide. So I had that graphic image in my head and essentially that graphic image was a journal of the last six months of my life, traveling and reading. The music reflects my use of this thing called retrograde which is taking a musical theme and inverting it somehow either rhythmically or melodically or harmonically. So I used this technique for the second half of the piece when it reaches its pinnacle, when the two birds collide and then it completely retrogrades to the first fifteen minutes which are exactly identical to the last fifteen minutes of the piece. That’s basically what we did on tour and it was quite an experience. It’s something that I’ve never done before and I’ve learned so so much. The past three weeks have been the longest three weeks of my entire life.

Original post:
Best of ‘09: Three Stars