Ashley Melzer asks local bands five probing questions.
by Ashley Melzer
Matt Damron of Bright Young Things
The Citizen: Describe your typical band practice.
Damron: Typically our practices start an hour later than they were supposed to…. Cameron, our lead guitarist, evangelizes about his newest favorite band (currently Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show) and we run through a few songs to get everyone in the right mindset. If there’s a new idea, I’ll play through it and ask for some insight, then we’ll run with it, hoping for some lucky spark. Once we’re satisfied with what we’ve covered (or the beer fridge is emptied out), we move on – usually to a bar.
Eric Hirsch of Orquest GarDel
The Citizen: If your band were a kitchen appliance, what would it be?
Hirsch: Definitely a Cuisenart food processor. Its power is restrained by its simple design and the careful attachment of the variety of accessory parts. You can cut things up many ways, but at the end of the day you’re just making salsa. And everyone likes salsa.
Seth Martin of Sinful Savage Tigers
The Citizen: Who/what are a few inspirations or influences that might really surprise people?
Martin: The name of the band comes from a stray line in a BBC radio comedy from the 1950s called The Goon Show that I became obsessed with when I was 12 or so. I believe very strongly in the idea of counterweights in songwriting. If we’re working in a very rural Southern genre and with folk arrangements, I wanted to have a seemingly alien point of reference for the lyrics and concepts for the songs. A lot of my writing begins with ideas or notions pulled from postwar British radio and teleplays, even if they don’t end up in the finished song. Kind of like hitting a tennis ball against a backstop; it’s fun to see how your ideas get thrown back at you.
Skylar of Skylar Gudasz and the Ugly Girls
The Citizen: What did you dream of being when you were a kid? How’d that turn out?
Gudasz: Then, two of us wanted to be musicians. One of us wanted to be a school bus driver. One of us wanted to be an astronaut, pirate, actress, Peter Pan or a scientist who lived in Antarctica – but especially an astronaut.
Now, four of us are musicians. Three of us are/have been baristas and one of us is in school getting ready for a Real Job. All of us are pirates.
Juan Huevos
The Citizen: Describe the last time you totally jammed out to a song.
Huevos: I was working on a song with Missy Thangs and we were laying down keyboard parts. We were super hype on what we were coming up with and we couldn’t stop bopping around. We haven’t worked on the song since, but we were dancing our asses off.