Mates Of State

0:00Alright, well thanks so much, Mains of State. Thanks so much for joining me. Yeah. We're on day two of the big shows in Los Angeles. Yes. How are they going? How's the tour going? You've been on the road for about two weeks and a few weeks? Yeah, we're about halfway through it and it's actually really fun. Summer touring is like the way to go. Yeah. Yeah. We get to go outside and do summer activities every day. Yeah, so summer activities like what? Like water skiing or what are we talking about? We play soccer games, you know, with the World Cup going on, which I had to put together soccer games. We rode our bikes, everybody rode their bikes across the Golden Gate Bridge in the day. That's cool. Even the little ones? Yeah. Yeah, I had a trailer on my bike and he had this like tandem bike with the, with the six year old. So, was there, was it dicey? Yeah, it was fun. Yeah, it was an event. Cool. So you bring the kids everywhere? Pretty much.

0:45Yeah. How come it's nice? How come we do it? How come we do it? Yeah, can we go home? We're trying to get out. Yeah, I mean, I, I guess it's like we didn't want to decide between, you know, what we did. We didn't want to decide between giving up touring and being musicians. Does someone there know about your mind? We wanted both, you know. Yeah, I crossed our mind because we're like, how are we going to do this? But we just sort of take one step at a time. We always knew we'd bring them with, right? We never were like, we'll have to go away for months on end and leave them with a baby. So we never thought that. We always thought like, there was a few of us. Yeah, we knew if you were going to have kids, we were either going to stay home with them or we were going to bring them with us. There was no, yeah, there was no. We were going to be parents if we had kids. Yeah. Yeah, it wasn't like somebody else is going to raise these kids. It was never an option. No, it's really cool. It's very Paul McPherity from the 70s, bringing everyone in the road all the time.

1:33Did you have kids? Yeah, yeah. And Linda brought the whole family in the road all the time. That's awesome. That's right. Paul and Linda. Yeah. So anyway, it doesn't matter. So the tour's going on. You got this crazy, like juggling musicians, musicians, comedians, like a whole circus, almost on the road. It is. Yeah. Where did this idea come from? How come? It's very different. We've done so many tours. We've been touring for like, you know, ten years. It's the same thing every time. Even though I like seeing all these different bands throughout the years. It's sort of like, we wanted to change it up. I mean, we wanted to have entertainment that wasn't the same. That didn't stop throughout the, we wanted to have unique entertainment that didn't, that didn't ever really stop the flow throughout the night for like changeovers and stuff. So it's like, and it's just exciting for us because we get to each town. It's like, there's a bubble magician.

2:18And then there's a guy that's all sorts. And then there's a comedian. I don't know. We're going to make it a party. Yeah. Fun. Like a three hour sort of seamless party. Rather than like an opening band that you don't care about and then 30 minutes of dead time. And then another band you kind of heard of, but you don't really care about. Rather, why not just be entertained for three solid hours, especially, you know, paying good money for these tickets and we think we should give people something to watch the whole time. That's right. And it seems to be selling well in this, like, low level concert season, making your little kids cancel the other day. Yeah. Well, what's the case? The little kids. They canceled it. Like 10 shows or something like that. Jonas Brothers dropped 25 shows today. Those big ones are dropping. It's like now is the time when you're happy that you're in like an underground scene.

3:03And because it's like, there's always people doing that. It's not too expensive. I mean, it's pricey, but it's not too expensive. Yeah. You can play small clubs and still do the same thing. So, yeah. We're happy. We're going to have like two weeks left to three weeks left. Yeah, by the way. One of the plans after that. We need to get back to our original writing. Yeah. Right. It's been two years, three years since last Friday. Two years? Yeah. Not kind of the coverage record that just came out. Right. Which one get two? Oh, okay. Yeah. Don't worry. Let's go on to get to that now since you bring it up. So, how come a coverage record? How come all those songs? Because none of them are big songs. I mean, you got some big bands, all those bass, your death cab, Mars, and all these bands. But not like the big songs from these bands. Yeah, I guess. They're just songs we love, you know? And for years, we've wanted to do a coverage record.

3:48It's like, I think every band kind of wants to do deep down or at least wants to cover those songs. We've got to put a record out. And it's just one of those things where we finally got the chance to do it. And we wanted a chance to kind of work on our home studio for a while without having to commit to our next originals project. So, it's sort of like, we can write, we can do cover songs and record them on our own and learn. And then we came out with the record that we were really happy with in the end. So, I don't know, do you have anything to add to that? Not really, that's the fact. Jason, Jason's really on the show, so he's like... I'm greasy. He's waiting for the show tonight. I'm greasy in the summer. It's okay. We just wanted to have something that was like, sort of broke the cycle a little bit, you know? Of the standard mates album going to a mates site, you know, record.

4:33And this was a fun way to do that and also learn a bit about recording ourselves. There were definitely songs too that, you know, we have loved it over the years and we thought we're deafening it to be on a cover record. And then we got in there, we're like, yeah, we can't do that on justice. That's just a good song on the song. You're not supposed to touch it, you know? So, you learned a lot about songs, actually. It's very easy to ruin a good song by trying to cover it. Yeah, that makes sense. We were very cautious about that. We didn't want it totally, yeah. And disaster. You guys did a good job. Especially the Mars Voltitins. It changed it entirely. That was the hard one, but that was like the third vocals going on in the background. I think your secondo raises. Their fans are hard to please though, and they're... I can see that. There's something on a... I don't think they're hard to please. They're all psych recovering Mars Volta.

5:20Yeah, but then they're listening to it and there are a lot of them are like, You don't understand the Mars Volta. How could you... Really? Yeah, well, like on YouTube someone posted this. I don't read comments. That's exactly why I don't read comments. Well, we knew too like Mars Volta's fans are hardcore. We know Mars and Cedric too and they were just like cool, you know. Oh yeah, I'm sure they were like... But their fans are like, Hessians. A lot of them are Hessians. They're like, you only did the intro. You didn't even do a full song. It's like, we're not going to spend eight minutes of our cover record. Sorry. We just lengthened it. We doubled their song. But I'm actually happy with how that turned out. I do. I'll stand behind that album. Do you want to do it all yourself again? I heard you guys recorded and produced it for the first time, like just the two of you.

6:06Yeah, I think we are definitely our entire life as a fan. We've been trying to get more self-sufficient about everything. I mean, we do. We get help from people. We have more people touring with us and everything. But we want to be like decision-makers on everything kind of. And yeah, it'd be great to keep building our home studio. We're not perfect at it. We need help in mixing and all that. I mean, but we're getting there. Yeah, it's also fun to collaborate with producers too, you know, because they have an expertise that we don't necessarily have yet. You know, we know some of it, but to have them be able to come in and really sort of show us how to achieve certain things sonically is really exciting and creative too. So it's fun to collaborate with somebody in that way.

6:51Sure. Yeah, so I think we will do more in the future. We'll continue. I don't know to what extent, right? You can get the record five bucks online. It's pretty cheap. Yeah, that's the other thing about recording on your own. We didn't really put out physical records except for our tour. It's all digital. We did most of it on our own. And so we really just had to make enough money to make back in our expenses and to pay the original artist whatever, like the chemical money they need. So we were like, why would we jack the price? We want people to hear this. We released it on our own too. So we didn't have like all the, you know, split splits instead of record labels. That's awesome. Yeah. Those songs coming out of lives out of the tour is like a crushes tour. Is it just the whole, the whole shebang? We do a lot of them. Like five or six songs out of the covers out and then we do a bunch of make songs too.

7:38You know, we're not a cover band yet. We're getting there I think. No, no. Were you ever a cover band before? Like we ever in bars playing those kinds of stuff? No, in fact, I think for me at least like I was never the kind of person even growing up that like if I started to learn a song, I would get sidetracked if you want to make my own thing. So I think there's two different kinds of people. I think there's people that have really good ear and they can play anything and they do that. And then there's people that are like daydreamers and you know, they just want to make things. And that's kind of where I stand. So learning the covers like lecture was challenging in some ways. Not that challenging with the internet though. It's really easy to look up tabs. You got tabs. You got medium with tabs like just to be a little like I'm not the kind of person. I'm just saying personally maybe you can figure stuff out more than me. I just I thought it was challenging.

8:25But in a good way. To change it up was the hard part and to like be happy with it. Because we didn't just want to like make it you know like it is but not as good because it's hard to do it. If you do it the exact same way then you're not going to be able to do it as well as the original artist. So that was the challenge in the fun part. That's where you could sell the fans a little bit. Totally. Because they just want to hear the band that they love. So you have more people in the road this time. There's not two guys walking up before you. You have a band now. Yeah. First. We toured the last record with some musicians mostly strings like a cellist and violinist. And this time around we knew we wanted something a little bit different just to change it up. And these guys are like insane musicians.

9:10They're what I was talking about people like to play anything. They can play anything. We feel really like it's easier to I guess experiment with like piano sounds not just all the organ when we have more people playing. So it's really nice. Especially with the covers record to make it sound enough like the recording. Right. For sure. So what are the plans for you? What's next? Right. Right. Right. And record. When do you think we'll be able to get something there? Find the winter. We have like nine or ten songs written. A few of them demoed. So we just have to go put it together and make the album now. Well I can't wait to hear it. Thanks. Thanks so much. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks.