Qual o segredo de Benjamin Davis and Sebastien Schultz?
O duo de Cincinnati lançou seu primeiro álbum chamado Bad Veins esse ano e já são considerados como a aposta indie da vez. Tem um pouco de dramatismo do
National, um pouco das levadas dos
Strokes, um pouco de atmosferas a la
Brian Eno e David Byrne e um pouco das batidas do
Franz Ferdinand; sem ficar devendo personalidade a nenhum desses nomes citados.
i like it.
Agora um passo-a-passo bem legal e sincero, segundo a banda, de como alcançar o 'sucesso' mesmo que alternativo, da melhor maneira possível, muy rico!
Step 1: Find band mates who are just as passionate as you are about making a career out of music. Even before they paired up, that was always the goal for Davis, formerly in a band called Giant Judys, and Schultz, who was in Cathedrals.
“When Sebastien came around, I had my mind set that this was a solo project,” Davis says. “But then I was just convinced because he’s such a fun drummer. I thought, OK, this will definitely take it up a notch. I just took the percussion off the backing tracks and let him play instead. It was pretty much what it is now, instantly.”
Says Schultz: “There are lots of types of music that I just probably could never play because it doesn’t click, but when I heard the Bad Veins song that Ben was working on, I was, like, yeah, this is something I could do.
“Music is difficult, but so is finding a person who’s willing to sacrifice everything to get there,” Schultz says. “The difference between people who make it and don’t are the ones who keep going.”
Step 2: Make your music unique, yet accessible. “I think that I’ve gotten really good at writing pop songs,” Davis says when asked why he thinks Bad Veins has been so well-received. “They’re not like self-indulgent rock and roll songs. They’re just pop songs. People hear them and they know how they go immediately.”
Step 3: Get as good as you can. Sounds like a no-brainer, but many bands skip that step and spend all their time trying to get a record deal, Davis says.
“That’s one thing we’ve always prided ourselves on is we’ve never given our CD to anyone, like ‘Listen to us!’.” Davis says. “We’ve never asked anyone what they thought, and we’ve never told people that weren’t asking that we were in a band. … You do it good enough and they’ll notice you’re there.”
Step 4: Put on an interesting, memorable live show. “I think we have a very unique live show, which largely is because of the way Sebastien plays drums, which is very unique,” Davis says. “And the reel-to-reel is unique. And I think that our aesthetic, the military thing, the flower box that no one understands why it’s there – all these things were there for a reason. They weren’t contrived. We never set out to have a look. It just kind of evolved.”
So why are all those things there? Davis decided the reel-to-reel player, given to him by his father, would be more engaging to play backing tracks off of it rather than an iPod at live shows.
Inspired by the vocal distortions used by Tom Waits and indie band Sparklehorse, Davis sometimes sings through a Radio Shack megaphone
Other times, Davis uses an analog telephone he converted into a microphone and mounted to a box painted with the band’s iconic red flowers – dreamed up by Davis’s girlfriend, artist Chris Salley – so his hands are free to play guitar or keyboard while he sings.
Step 5: Maintain an air of mystery. Perhaps self-conscious that they’ve made Bad Veins seem somehow less interesting by explaining how all of the bands’ props came to be, Davis and Schultz clam up when asked why they call themselves Bad Veins, and why the reel-to-reel player is named Irene. Nor will they divulge exactly what their pop music influences are. “It’s very incriminating,” Schultz says, laughing.
Step 6: Have an entire album completed when record labels come calling. “After our second show ever, we had record labels e-mailing us and we’re like, ‘Oh, this is going to be easier than we thought,’.” Davis says. “And we would quickly realize that no matter how excited record labels might be about you, if the one guy isn’t, it doesn’t mean anything. It always has to be the top guy.
“So I think it was around March of ’08, two weeks before we met our manager, we were like, ‘We’re going to make the record after South by Southwest, with or without a label.’ So we got back in March, and in April we just started working on it, started busting it out. It took us five, six months to get it done. And it worked. We got a deal because we did the record.”
“The days of demo tapes are over,” Schultz adds. “Unless you’re taking the initiative and being proactive, then finishing an album and delivering it, you’re not getting anywhere unless you have something to show for it.”
Davis recorded most of the album in his home studio in Northside, as he did Bad Veins’ 2007 self-released, four-song demo. Schultz added the drum tracks in Richmond, Va., and they mixed the album in Los Angeles with the help of the Black Iris Collective, a group of independent musicians (including Davis) who compose music for ads.
Not only did Bad Veins get a record deal with Dangerbird, but they also got one in which their songs appear on the album exactly as they recorded them, which is almost unheard of. The only change was that the label wanted the band to shorten the original track listing from 14 songs to 10.
Even though they talked to major labels, Schultz says they preferred “an indie label that isn’t totally DIY and has some money and some financial backing behind it but also is able to be nimble. We didn’t want to get lost in the mix.” We wanted to have a small label that had the ability to take care of us and get the album serviced properly.”
Step 7: Don’t let being a band from an under-the-radar city like Cincinnati be an obstacle. Instead, take advantage of it.“Maybe it made us work that much harder,” Schultz says. “We played New York City more often than we played Cincinnati when we first started. Maybe that’s why fewer bands from Cincinnati actually do make it, because you have to make an extra effort, I think. It’s not as easy as just being a Brooklyn or Williamsburg hipster band or an L.A. band.”
Cincinnati’s affordability enabled both band members to quit their day jobs after signing with Dangerbird. Davis had delivered papers for CityBeat; Schultz was an account coordinator at Downtown advertising and marketing agency WonderGroup.
Even though other Cincinnati bands, such as the Heartless Bastards, have relocated after finding success, Davis and Schultz say they’re staying put, at least for now. But Davis does see similarities between the two bands.
“I knew (singer and guitarist Erika Wennerstrom) before the Heartless Bastards got signed, and she always had this attitude of like, ‘This is what I’m going to do,’ ” Davis says. “She got rid of her car, she bought a van, she got a job that allowed her to (tour). She set herself up for success and she worked really hard, and then she made it happen. And I think to an extent, that’s the exact same thing we did. We made all the decisions based on, ‘We’re going to make this happen.’"
fonte: Metromix Cincinatti
Bad Veins - Bad Veins (2009)
http://www.4shared.com/file/125751343/41f96ec3/bad_veins_-_2009_-_self_titled.html
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http://www.filestube.com/86e409c45199cf1503e9/go.html
