The Awkward Off Vs. Howlies

Atlanta band HOWLIES stopped by the WSBF studio in CLEMSON, SC for a live performance and interview.

I was goofing off in the radio lounge when they informed me that I’d be doing the interview for the show. Luckily, I’d been a fan of their latest album, so I could make an attempt to disguise how ill prepared I was. Not only did the guys put on a great show, they kept me laughing throughout the whole interview. We even liked them enough to take them to Super Taco, the best restaurant in the history of ever. Howlies came back to WSBF for our spring concert, wowing everyone.

Now that I think about it, it’s amazing the FCC didn’t explode when we did this interview.

Special thanks to Justin Pino for sound production and cohosting and to Claire Lacy for cohosting.

Full Transcript (Audio):

Nichole Bennett: Hey this is Nichole Bennett, and I am here with Howlies, who you just heard three tracks from. If you guys could take just a second to introduce yourselves, that would be awesome. Are we set up?

Aaron Wood: Our bass player just walked down the hall, so we’ll speak for him.

Justin Brooke: I’m Justin, and I play guitar.

AW: My name is Aaron, and I play drums for the band called Howlies.

Brandon Morrison: I’m Brandon, and I play guitar. We’re the band called Howlies.

AW: Buh buh!

BM: And Matt, who’s down the corner plays bass.

NB: Are you guys sharing earphones? I guess so. I guess the first question is what actually a Howlie is.

JB: It’s Hawaiin slang for tourist.

NB: I was wondering if it was a creepy monster or not. Did you know that?

Justin Pino (doing sound): Howlies? No I didn’t know that!

Claire Lacy (cohosting): Tourists anywhere or just Hawaii?

JP: I remember reading that on your Myspace page.
JB: I think literally it means someone who has no soul.

BM: Which is appropriate because we sold our souls to rock and roll.

NB: Ah well, if you are going to sell it… How did you guys decide on that name?

JB: The devil told us to use it when we signed our contract with him.

JP: Considering how much influence you guys have from the devil, you don’t sound like you are from hell.

JB: He said, “This name will sell.”

NB: Especially without a “the.” It’s really difficult to be like I’m here with…Howlies! You guys were Paste’s band of the week last week. How do you guys feel about that?

JB: This week.

NB: This week! This week has not gone by fast enough.

JB: It was good. We also had that happen on Spin.

JP: That’s right.

NB: Yeah, I was just checking that out.

JB: It made my mom proud.

AW: I told my younger brother, and he was like “What’s Paste magazine.”

CL: That’s awesome.

JP: Have you guys already gone over band history? How did you guys form as a band? How did Howlies happen?

JB: We were out in the backyard, and there were some dogs barking. So we started barking too. We had had a few adult beverages. That’s where it started.

JP: Hey everybody, let’s start howling. We sound good howling, we could be a band.

NB: Makes sense. Logical next step.

AW: We actually strung up microphones in the back yard to record the symphony of howling between us and the dogs. We tricked it out with some reverb, and not more than a week later my hard drive crashed.

NB: Like a cracked-out twilight bark. You know, like in 101 Dalmations?

JP: Throwin’ out the Disney references.

JB: What is this you speak of? I’ve only seen 102 Dalmations.

JP: That is like the remake times two.

NB: You guys do have no soul! I guess if we are talking about your influences, other than dogs…what would you say influences you as a band?

AW: My libido.

JB: The moon. Was the moon mentioned?

NB: The pull?

AW: Tidal.

NB: Howlies, here in Clemson with a tidal influence…also sexual.

JB: Also I would say other music has influenced us. Other music that came before our music.

JP: Wait, I wasn’t aware that music happened before Howlies.

AW: Can you wrap your mind around the fact that music existed before us?

JP: It’s that whole chicken and egg thing.

JB: It was called “music” not “the music.”

JP: I bought a box of eggs the other day only it was empty…

NB: Does this have anything to do with what we are saying?

JP: Yeah, the whole Howlies and the egg thing.

NB: So, serious question. If you could replace your arms with anything what would it be?

AW: Two more penises. That’s an obvious answer.

NB: I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.

BM: Can you say that?

NB: Yeah, sure.

AW: Brandon, in addition to playing guitar for our band, also freelances for the FCC. Hey, I have a serious question for you guys and it relates to my last answer. Have you seen the movie Edward penis-hands?

JP: Oh man, Claire just said that.

AW: I wouldn’t even need drumsticks anymore. Justin brings up a good point.

NB: There is the FCC! Someone go get that door. That was just one answer. There’s at least three of you guys in there.

JB: I would replace my arms with two Matt Forsees, life-size. The top of the head would be right where my shoulder is. There would be another one on the other side.

Matt Forsee: Does that mean my face would be in your armpit?

JB: No, you would face outward.

AW: Just think, if you face did face Justin’s armpit, you could apply his deodorant with your mouth.

MF: Then you would have to realize that the things I’d replace my arms with would be redwood trees. So there would be four redwood trees sticking out of Justin.

JB: We would need a bigger van, for sure. I think what everyone is wondering now is Brandon, what would you replace your arms with? And we turn to you.

BM: I would go with bowling balls.

JP: You know what? I heard that that is really cool. I heard it’s not fun not having fingers or elbows or extremities other than bowling balls. But I hear it’s pretty tight.

MF: You could go to the bowling alley and clean your arms.

NB: What weight? I know I use the pink ones that are like six pounds.

BM: I like the twelve.

NB: You can have different things on each hand. You guys didn’t know this?

AW: In that case, I’m going with one penis and one vagina.

NB: We are strictly speaking about anatomy.

AW: I am going to quote a popular song in Atlanta now. You just do you and Imma do me.

JP: This is getting rated R.

NB: This is the best interview ever! What is the most embarrassing CD in your collection? Go.

BM: Nordic Law. It’s like Sweet Home Scandanavia.

JB: I have Kenny G live.

NB: Ugh, I think I just threw up in my mouth.

JP: You know, it’s really not that bad.

NB: No, I’m a saxophone player. No self-respecting saxophone player likes Kenny G.

JP: But he can play forever though.

AW: Kenny G and Sting should get together and have a tantric sex fest.

NB: Oh, I think I threw up again.

CL: No more throw-up questions. Let’s do something legit.

NB: Legit…like, what’s your spirit animal?

JB: Mine is a domestic house cat.

MF: Mine’s a giant scorpion.

NB: Okay, so this band now has problems getting along.

BM: I think mine would be a brown recluse.

AW: My spirit animal is Kenny G.

JP: That just happened. I think you just created a black hole on Earth. Everyone is inside out now.

AW: Actually, new band name. The Kenny G-units.

NB: So how is the Atlanta scene?

AW: The Atlanta scene is amazing right now. There are a lot of great bands there and a lot of local venues where bands can get their start. The last two or three years it’s been getting a lot of attention, and we are happy to be a part of that. That is the most literal answer I’ve given.

NB: If you were in a haunted house, what would you scream?

BM: Who here is a seventeen year old with a fake ID? Where do the high school girls hang out around here?

NB: This haunted house is really scary.

AW: I would throw a live chicken at someone and yell “Bird Flu!”

NB: What song is stuck in your head right now?

BM: I’m a little teapot.

AW: The song that is stuck in my head is “I Only Have Eyes for You” by The Flamingos. I have a bad habit of singing whatever pops into my head in mixed company. I did it on an elevator recently and got really weird looks. This one girl did start singing along.

NB: My life as a musical. By Howlies.

JB: Cherish by Kool and the Gang is stuck in my head.

AW: Can you give us a few lines?

[All of the  Howlies break into song]

MF: Now that’s stuck in my head.

JB: You’re welcome.

MF: I always have the chicken dance in my head. It’s a curse.

AW: The thing about the chicken dance is the bridge.

[singing]

NB: I know it. I went to public school.

AW: The song that is stuck in my head is from Team America, and I’ll omit the swear words.

[more singing]

NB: You guys are headed to Chattanooga next, right?

JP: Where are you guys playing in Chattanooga for our Tennessee listeners?

JB: We are playing in J.J.’s Brohemia. We are playing with Those Darlins from Nashville, TN.

NB: You guys just came from Asheville as we mentioned earlier. How long has this tour been going on?

JB: Since Saturday.

NB: Brand new. That’s why you guys are so fresh.

MF: And nobody’s sick yet.

JP: Where did this tour start?

MF: Greenville, North Carolina. That is one of our most favorite places to play.

NB: So I guess as of Saturday…the best and the worst moments of this tour?

JB: They were both the same moment for me. The best and the worst. I basically had to grab this guy by the neck and slam him down on Aaron’s drumset in the middle of a song. It was awesome, but I was kind of feeling bad about it because I’m a pacifist and I don’t usually do stuff like that.

AW: He was pretty inebriated. It wasn’t like he was fighting back at all. He just went down with it.

NB: And now were are going to play some music from bands that Howlies like and then get back to the live set. Whoa! The CD players are sleeping.

JP: Those lazy CD players!

MF: Question: can we interview you guys? How is college going?

JP: Two thumbs down.

[conversation degrades into lottery talk and Chuck Norris jokes]

The Awkward Off Vs. The King Left

On WSBF-FM in CLEMSON, SC, Corey Oliver from THE KING LEFT called us for a phone interview.

Corey is the singer and a guitarist of The King Left, a band out of New York. They just released an EP called New York Nothing. Join our phone conversation as we touch on the songwriting process, their two EPs, and what it sounds like when God sneezes.

We even talked about the band Howlies, who show up later at WSBF for an in-studio and as headliners for our spring concert.

Special thanks to Ben Lippert of WSBF for letting me take over some of his show for this interview.

Note: the interview starts at the end (last quarter of the file).

Full Transcript: (Audio)

Nichole Bennett: I am here with Corey from The King Left, a band out of New York. Hey Corey.

Corey Oliver: Hey how are you?

NB: Good. You guys are on tour right now. How is that going?

CO: So far, so good. We got a GPS on Black Friday. It’s been working wonders. We haven’t gotten lost yet, which is pretty amazing for us. We usually get lost leaving the house.

NB: Yeah, I was up in New York for the first time in October, and I definitely got lost. Are you guys originally from New York?

CO: No, I’m from Atlanta originally. I went to school in Ithaca, where I met Graham and Ian. I met Mark through them because he grew up in the same town with them. We just decided…why not, and here we are three years later driving to Pittsburgh.

NB: So where does the band name come from?

CO: I don’t actually have a good story for that, and I keep meaning to come up with one because where it came from is really boring. Whenever someone says come up with a band name, I go crazy because I like to think up cool band names. It’s hard to do. I just had too many words in my head, and I was listening to The Beatles. The words just sort of fell together. It struck me because it was a “The” name without being “The Somethings.” It’s a sentence too, which is cool. Then, I ran it by people who were usually harsh with the band names I would come up with, and they were all pretty enthusiastic about it. So we kept it, and I need to come up with a better story than that.

NB: So you guys have been together three years?

CO: Yeah, a little over three years actually. I don’t know the exact date. I don’t know if you count our first meeting or the first time we played together or the first time we had practice. We actually played together before we had practice. We did a recording of a song, and that was how we really came together. We recorded a song for a friend having never played together before, and it worked out really well. We decided to be a band, and we actually started months later when school was over.

NB: What made you guys decide to come together? Just similar interest?

CO: It was just sort of out of convenience. Mark played guitar, and I played guitar, and I played guitar. We all wrote funny songs together at 2 AM after a couple of beers. When my friend asked us to record a song we had, one of our more serious songs, we said “Sure, no problem.” We needed a drummer, and Graham happened to be in the music school. He played drums, and he got us time in the music school to record it. It wasn’t like we sought each other out. We just sort of fell together, boy-band like.

NB: You definitely have your own niche and genre. What would you say are your influences?

CO: We all like Radiohead, and we all like The Beatles.

NB: That’s a good solid foundation.

CO: I don’t know. We are inspired by a lot of different stuff. After those core influences, we branch out drastically in the music that we pull our inspiration from. The way we write songs—we all bring our own thing.  Ween, Beck, Elliot Smith. The good stuff, basically.

NB: A lot of the people here in Clemson, SC are hearing you for the first time on WSBF. How would you describe your music to someone who has never heard it before?

CO: God sneezed. Raucous and messy.  We get a lot of people saying that we sound like different stuff, which doesn’t mean anything to me. We’ve gotten Modest Mouse and The Dismemberment Plan before.  I guess some of our songs are dancey and some are ballady. We’re trying to play as many types of music while sounding like one entity, for better or for worse. Sometimes it doesn’t work that well.

NB: Yeah, I find you guys hard to categorize, which is why I asked those things.

CO: That’s why I liked that term in the early nineties “alternative rock” because it was this blanket term. You sort of knew what to expect by not knowing what to expect. So I guess we’re alternative rock.

NB: So you guys are on tour heading to Pittsburgh. You are on tour with Howlies, right?

CO: They’re great. I love those guys. They’re from Atlanta too, which sort of piqued my interest in the first place. I sought them out and really fell in love with the song “Aluminum Baseball Bat.” If you haven’t heard it, find it and watch the video. It’s amazing. I mentioned them to Graham and Ian, and they said they’d already heard of the. So I was like, I’m late to the party here. When they came through New York, we all made a point to go see them, and I thought these guys are really on to something. Super fun. Very high energy. Great show. I put them at the top of the list of bands that I wanted to see if they’d go on the road with us. Things worked out, and here we are! I can’t wait.

NB: What has been your favorite show so far?

CO: We just started Thursday, so that’s our favorite so far. Hopefully, we’ll top it each night. But I wouldn’t hold your breath. Mercury Lounge was really great. We had a lot of fun playing with the Howlies and a couple of other bands from New York who were there to kick off. It was a great show, but we’re looking to have a lot more fun on the road here.

NB: Yeah I got to see The Mercury Lounge for the first time. I got to see Rival Schools up there. I know you guys have worked with them.

CO: Yeah Sammy and Ian. They did our first two EPs, produced and engineered them. I can’t say enough about those guys they are really great. I am so psyched that Rival Schools are back together.

NB: Yeah they are fantastic live.

CO: Yeah they seemed to be having a lot of fun. It was great to see them up there playing together again.

NB: So how did you guys start working with Ian Love and Sammy Seagler?

CO: Yeah that was happenstance too. Sam Seagler and his band Nightmare View, right before the reunion of Rival Schools, had ties to Ithaca. One of the guys knew Graham, and they were playing a show in Ithaca and asked us to play with them, and we did. Sam was drumming with them at the time, and saw us and saw some potential. He asked if he could possibly work with us recording. We were like, okay why not? It ended up turning into two EPs, and we’re really really happy with it.

NB: You mentioned earlier that all of you guys bring something to the table when you are making music. Tell me a little bit about the process of bringing it all together.

CO: Whoever has a lick or a structure or something they want to build on, they bring it to the table, and we’ll start jamming on it for a little and see if anything comes. If it doesn’t, we might discard it. If we like it a lot, say its mine or its Marks, then we’ll be stubborn and keep it by bringing it out and reworking it. Sometimes I’ll write a song that will just be me and a melody and everybody else adds their stuff to it. You go in with the idea of how something will sound. But you go away with something completely different. It’s become the band’s sound, which is cool. In my head, all of my stuff sounds like Radiohead songs, but we usually don’t pull that off

NB: Yeah, you guys definitely make it your own sound. You have such a conglomerate sound, that I was actually suspicious that everybody was involved.

CO: Yeah there is definitely a songwriter aspect to it, but we’re all songwriters. We’re more songwriters than we are talented musicians. We just come together as songwriters to try to make the best possible song. We don’t have many ten-minute jams, which would just be atrocious. We just approach it as how do we make this song as good as possible, what do we want it to sound like, and everybody puts their stuff in. Hopefully it’s good, and hopefully people can connect with it.

NB: We have two solid EPs out. What is next for you guys?

CO: We have five songs recorded now that we are trying to turn into a full length, if we can, early next year. We did it with a producer that we just found fantastic. We are hoping to garner some interest with these, and get the funds to make a full length and go on tour for that. That’s what we aim for. If we get that, then we’re doing something right. If not, there’s always Taco Bell.

NB: If you guys make it down to the south, WSBF-FM Clemson hosts concerts. We are that in between stop for Asheville and Athens.

CO: Yeah, I’m dying to go to the south. My brother lives in Atlanta. He’d love to see us play. I have a lot of friends in North Carolina too that would love to see us play. It would be nice to get down there and play. We’ve been both sheltered and blessed with our little New York City niche, and we’re trying to break out of that right now.

NB: Almost through with the questions. But I have this one really weird question that I always ask bands: if you were an animal, what would you be?

CO: I would be  tiger, hands-down. Graham what would you be?

Graham Rothenberg (from inside van): Frog!

CO: Frog, that is weird. Ian! Animal!

Ian Bullett (from inside van): Bear or Wolf!

CO: A bear/wolf hybrid.

NB: Yeah, I had someone pick space alien last Wednesday.

CO: I guess that falls under animal.

NB: There’s not that many rules to that questions, so I’ll let it slide.

CO: Yeah that would be an animal. It’s not mineral or vegetable. Unless they were eggplant people.

NB: Thanks so much.