The Color Turning --- Five southern California guys who are true artists paving the way through new musical territory. They take their listeners on a journey through thick forests of harmony into a land of sweet emotion. I sat down with these talented music makers at a Thai restaurant on Sunset Boulevard to try and learn more about this red - hot band that is turning other LA bands green with envy.
How would you guys describe your sound?
Steve: I don’t even know what the name of the genre would be, but there are at least 10 or 12 bands that we all know that kind of have something to do with each other just by the way that they sound or feel, and we all draw inspiration from that.
Sean: My dad called us romantic rock. [laughs] That’s like the biggest challenge when people ask you to describe your sound. Traveling through Texas you'd hear things like…"y’all emo?”
I think that the sound of your band compared to other bands is thicker, melodically and also harmonically. At what point do you say, “this is too much, there are too many things going on.” At what point does it turn from music into noise?
Steve: I think we’ve been focusing on that. When we all come together as a band we’re way more conscious of what’s necessary. With the Antidote EP and in these three new songs we have recorded with Alex (Newport) it’s been a conscious effort to really clean up the instrumentation and arrangements.
So, you all write the music together. When you are writing, what do you pull influence from? Do you pull it from literature, or art? What kinds of art, or other bands?
David: Well, musically I get a lot from Film Music and things like that. I look for people who concentrate a lot of their effort on melodies in music and not just chord progressions that they can sing over later.
What about lyrically?
David: I have to say, I kind of nicked some Ernest Hemingway in "The Middle Will Catch us All" on our new EP. There were a couple of lines that we took.
Steve: I really enjoy Blake Schwarzenbach’s lyrics…Bob Dylan.
What do you listen for in other’s music?
Sean: I usually try to listen for the stuff that isn’t regularly heard, like taking, for instance, the Radiohead album "Ok Computer" the song "Airbag" panning left, panning right, you hear interesting things, and that excites me…that motivates me. I really like listening to stuff like that and sounds that aren’t picked up on the first listen. Sounds I can’t identify, you know, undertones – strings, voices. Anything like that makes me interested.
How do you feel about art music? For example when people are writing to write a hit, you can tell, but when people write just for themselves, like Interpol, and they don’t care about what other people think of the band, it comes out different, organic if you will.
David: We've had this conversation between just us in the band, and we all know you know when it’s contrived. You know when it’s coming out fake and phony, and you know when you’re aiming for something false. It’s kind of a fine line, because as an artist I think all of us would love to write “OK Computer” over and over or any Sigur Ros album. It’s catchy because it’s brilliant, and not because it’s necessarily a standard chord progression or lyric that everyone uses. But, there’s the side of you that has to be slightly business minded, by that i mean that you can't expect to write completely unlistenable music and expect to keep your job. So it’s a fine line and at the end of the day you decide if you want to listen to that side of you.
So it’s kind of a balance for you then?
Steve: I know for me, and the band, the less we think about what we’re doing, the better off we are.
How do you feel about indie bands getting so much publicity? Like Sigur Ros just played at the Hollywood Bowl.
David: or Arcade Fire is on the radio
Steve: It seems like a lot more independent bands are becoming more easily accessible – kind of like how skateboarding is now. It sounds like a weird comparison, but I have a lot of friends who are still in that industry and work in skate shops and stuff, and they literally just have skateboards in there because they’re a skate shop. They don’t make any money off of them; they don’t sell skateboards any more. Even though you would think, “Well, where do they make all their money?” -- they sell tons of clothes, and so everyone looks like they skate, but no one really buys the equipment, and no one really skates. It’s more like they just kind of bought into an image. I think when you get to a certain level, you’re selling an image, and I think that’s kind of sad, but it’s just the way it is. The art itself is sort of pushed to the wayside.
David: Also, we hear a lot more what we consider indie music on the radio, and in commercials and stuff, and it’s a lot more since we’re getting older. Some of us who listen to this music and are fans of these underground bands, we’re getting jobs in industries where we can make those choices. Like programming directors or people working at ad agencies, they grew up on the Descendants, and then they put it in an ad, and you’re like “whoa, the Descendants is in a commercial,” and it’s not really as much as you might think that “it’s becoming mainstream”, it’s more like “people are growing up and getting jobs”.
As far as musical training goes, have you all come from playing in middle school, high school, or did you just start playing?
Jason: I played music since the fourth grade. I started on clarinet, and then I went to bass. I wanted to rock, but I didn’t want to take the time to learn chords on a guitar, so I got a bass guitar, because it’s only one finger at a time, and I slowly perfected that.
Sean: I was raised by my long-haired dad who was in a 60’s prog rock band…named Quadrine...yeah. [laughs] My dad played piano and stuff.
Steve: Sean's dad taught him the chords “C, D, & G,”. My dad played in coffee shops as a teenager. He had side burns and finger picked a lot. When I was about 15 I found his guitar. The rest is history [laughs].
Garrett: I have two older brothers and they both had bands that practiced at our house in the garage, and I would always sneak in and play the drums, and that’s how I learned.
David: my aunt just had a guitar lying around, and I watched my brother learn how to play Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” and I thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen.
What are your plans? What is the direction you would like to head as band?
David: Musically I want to be in a playing situation where I am not afraid to have a larger stage set up – have more instruments at my disposal. I think we all feel that way, I mean right now our stage set up is pretty ambitious. Also, I don’t want to have to worry about how we’re going to get to a show…, just worry about music.
What do you have to offer your fans that other bands don’t have?
Steve: "Sweet Emotion." [laughs] I mean it, in a round about way, that’s it.
David: People always say that they kind of lose themselves at our shows, and that’s a huge compliment.
Jason: I like how people can use our songs for so many personal things. It’s specific enough to where you know the specific stories of what our songs are about, but it’s general enough to where you can apply your own life to it.
I think your music is experience oriented; instead of song, song, song… I almost lose sense of time. It’s about relating to people. You don’t know who will be listening to your music, but somehow you are able to relate to everyone who listens to it.
David: I think you hit it on the head. This is exactly what concerns us about pop music. The reason we don’t enjoy writing it as much is because when you write something obvious, it doesn’t tell the listener anything they don’t already know, it just feeds into what they hear over and over every day. It’s like Sean was saying, he looks for the abstract stuff, and the things you don’t always hear, and that’s kind of what drives us in the way that we live our lives. We don’t’ just sit around and do the easy thing or always take the easiest path. I like to think we’re all kind of artists on our own without music, or at least think that way. We all have artistic personalities -shooting for something better; shooting for the fact that life is a lot bigger than just what Britney Spears sings about.
Steve: To me, the most beautiful songs and what our songs capture are the reasons I love playing in this band and because there are different levels to it -you can look into it as deep as you want. If I’m not inspired by a band at some level, I’m not really into it.
David: Music or otherwise, we all look for stuff that moves us in some way.
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