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If We’re Going To Do This, We Can’t $%#@ Around: An interview with Lamb of God’s John Campbell

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Over the quarter-century since 1995, Lamb of God have gone from being up-and-comers on the Richmond music scene (then known as Burn The Priest) to being heavy metal stalwarts and headliners around the world who have left their own footprint on the genre. October 7 marks the return of Lamb of God, as they release their ninth studio effort, Omens. Before the band set out on a massive tour with Killswitch Engage, bassist John Campbell took a trip down memory lane, talked tattoos, and told us what keeps the band coming back for more after over 25 years.

We’re going to go on a bit of a time warp here. It’s October 13, 2004, you guys are up in New York for a stop at Roseland Ballroom. Prior to the show, you have a get together with the Sony and Epic marketing people for pizza and beers. Word starts circulating that Metallica may be in attendance for the performance. They were, saw an amazing show and came away impressed. Is it strange, 18 years later, that you are the famous, established band that people get excited if you stop by to check out their show?

It’s a little strange, to be honest. We are still essentially that same group of people. It’s still… you’re a big kid. To get the big eyes on you, they give you way more authority than you really deserve. We have been doing this for a while, but that was 18 years ago and really doesn’t feel like it’s been that long. I can’t complain, but it’s a little weird at times. It can be off-putting; people can’t put aside the weirdness and treat us with bubble tape.

You have been with Epic Records for 18 years. A lot of bands, especially when it comes to major labels, don’t really get that level of support and longevity. What is special about that relationship that has made it last?

I couldn’t tell you what it is. I’m very grateful that this thing has continued for as long as it has. We just continue to do what we do. We strive to write the best songs that we can, play as hard as we can. I guess Epic has enjoyed the relationship on their end, but they are a business. They don’t have to put that much into us, and they get a lot out of us.

Really, I think it’s just staying true to who we are, to who they signed. Which, they kind of admitted to us that they didn’t really know. They weren’t going to give us direction on the music, because they didn’t really understand why we were as popular as we were, but they saw that we were. What would I attribute it to? I don’t know, except for blind luck and hard work.

Now that you are the mainstays, which bands do you hear your influence in?

To be honest, I don’t. Maybe I should be paying more attention, but I never considered that. One thing that happened, I remember a friend of mine, way back in the early days as we were coming up, he worked at a music store. He told me that kids were coming in, and all of a sudden Lamb of God was one of the ones, the kids would come in and play our guitar riffs.

How did Richmond help shape Lamb of God?

When we first moved there, everyone was in a band. There were really good people in bands, so the bar was set high. I think that pushed us to make it. To be a band in Richmond and have people come to your show, you better be good, or people are not going to pay even a little bit of attention.

Richmond used to have the distinction of being the town that, when other bands came to town to come play, the crowd response is normally fairly cold. Arms crossed watching, and if they liked it, they would nod their heads. So that kind of shaped us. If we’re going to do this, we can’t fuck around. We have to be good. Then, also, there’s all these amazing players. GWAR was the first band that ever took us out on a real tour. That certainly was influential, and helped to guide us to where we are today. Seeing GWAR play live, especially Mike Bishop, him being a bass player, me being a bass player — like, “Holy shit, that guy is amazing!” We have got to be good.

So I think Richmond, as far as influencing, set the bar really high for what we were going to do. Once we were at that bar, and got out of town, that’s what blew a lot of people away.

Metal and tattoos go hand in hand. What’s the best Lamb of God tattoo you’ve seen?

[laughs] The best that I’ve seen was a Mount Rushmore across the dude’s back, but it was us as Mount Rushmore. I’ve also seen some really good photographs of us playing [that] people have gotten tattooed on them. A lot of times people will get the skeleton bird swooping down with the bullet in its mouth.

Going back over the past 10 years, you’ve had a couple of hiatuses that have had people wondering if they’ve heard the last of Lamb of God. What keeps you guys coming back?

I think it’s the satisfaction we get from working together to create music, create songs, and then going out to perform them live. We’re incredibly lucky to be able to continue to do so. I really think it comes from the satisfaction, that we’ve been very successful at being able to do that and play some amazing shows.

You guys are embarking on a huge tour with Killswitch Engage in support of Omens, coming out next month. There are a lot of people that have not gotten so see Lamb of God since the pandemic started. When people go to see you live and listen to the new album, what’s different and new this time around?

If you listen to all of our records, there’s an evolution from record to record to record — to continue get better, and push our boundaries. I think this is a great continuation of that. I don’t feel bad saying this, but I feel like we’ve outdone ourselves and put out a record that was fun to record and play live.  

Lamb Of God’s new album, Omens, will be available everywhere on October 7. Pre-order it on vinyl, CD, and digital formats at shop.lamb-of-god.com, or find it on the streaming app of your choice.

Photo by Travis Shinn

A Vicious Party: The Music Of Piranha Rama

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Shock and awe consumed me while my eyes drifted back and forth across the artwork for Piranha Rama’s third album, Omniscient Cloud Cover. When I first listened to the new record, I was doing some chores around the house, and I had it on to experience it as the average listener might: passively. On my next run, I sat down in front of my laptop to have a cup of coffee and a joint while focusing my attention, so that I may give the music the dissection that it deserves.

The album opens with the deceptive track “DAYLIGHT.” What masks itself as some pretty traditional psychedelia — affected vocals, reverb guitars, and some tasteful use of the occasional flute — lulls the listener into a false sense of security about the nature of the album to come. Meanwhile, deep in the back of the mix, a steel guitar cuts through, giving a taste of what is to come.

Within the first two seconds of the next track, “A DOOR,” it has become blatantly clear that Piranha Rama will pull no punches, as that same steel guitar hiding itself behind the psychedelia jumps into center stage. While it wouldn’t sound out of place at a hoedown, “A DOOR” serves as a signal to the listener to either prepare oneself for the occasional punch to the face, or to get out of the way.

What follows are a number of well-made psychedelic tracks like “WATER, YOU THINKING” and “PLACATE,” interspersed with some truly shocking left hooks. During “GOLDEN BLUES,” listeners will find themselves in the middle of a horn-driven dance number that unconsciously inspires hip gyration, to an almost disco-reminiscent drum beat. Another shocker is the country-and-western-inspired tune “RABBIT MOON,” once again featuring that steel guitar. This time, though, the listener is led in a march on the snare drum, and a perfect replication of mariachi-style trumpet melody flowing just behind the vocal line. 

Bringing it all back around, Piranha Rama wrap up the album with another well rounded psychedelic tune, “TIME BEING.” Serving almost as a bookend, this track reminds the listener of where they started and ties a nice bow at the end of what is a whirlwind of a listening experience. Even as it does so, it states clearly and loudly that this record is, at its core, pure psychedelia. 

Astounded by the work, I scheduled an interview to speak to a few members of Piranha Rama about this new endeavor. We gathered on the lawn of the VMFA on a beautiful August afternoon that was perhaps just a little too hot. I set up in the shade of their garden, in sight of the Neptune statue, while next to me a waterfall cascaded over black slate pouring into the reflecting pool outside the Best Cafe patio. I gathered my notes and got my recorder ready while two girls behind me contemplated love in the wake of one of them having gone through a very empowering breakup. 

First to arrive was John Sizemore, the bearded mastermind behind this newest album, providing multiple things, mainly guitar, to the band’s mix. We chatted amiably for a few minutes before we were finally able to get a hold of singer and lyricist Chrissie Lozano over FaceTime. She was sitting on a beach in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, looking very relaxed in her straw hat. A few minutes later, the band’s drummer, Tim Falen, sauntered up, and we were able to begin in earnest and talk a little bit about their backgrounds. 

Falen began his career in music at the age of 14, when he performed percussion in middle school band while playing punk songs for himself on a full kit at home. He later came to Richmond with a group called The Diamond Center, who moved here in 2009 from Austin, Texas so that the lead singer could pursue her graduate work at VCU. After she finished, the band moved back, but Falen decided to stay, and has been playing in Richmond ever since. His post-Diamond Center resume includes bands like Hot Dolphin and Lady God. He met Lozano while the two of them were playing in the latter.

Lozano grew up in a religiously musical family. After noticing that the church band was where people were having the most fun, she decided to pursue that path. However, church band eventually ebbed away as she began joining punk bands in high school. Sizemore began playing guitar at the age of 15, learning Creedence Clearwater Revival songs by ear with his friends, and cut his teeth in the surf-punk-esque Richmond band Milkstains.

Coalescing under the name of Piranha Rama in 2017, the group quickly began releasing music and have since put out two albums with the project. Their third, Omniscient Cloud Cover, is set for release on September 30th, and will feature some of the most prolific horn players in Richmond. With names like trombonist Reggie Pace (NO! BS Brass, Hiss Golden Messenger), saxophonist Gordon “Saxman” Jones (Corey Harris, Oregon Hill Funk All-Stars), and trumpeter Bob Miller (Bio Ritmo, The Mountain Goats), Piranha Rama is poised to become a towering ensemble in the Richmond music scene.

With such an experienced team and such a long history of playing music in Richmond, the three members of Piranha Rama had a lot to say about the way the local music scene has changed over the course of two decades. Said Falen, “Richmond goes in cycles; you know, sometimes it’s crazy and there’s a ton of stuff going on. Sometimes there’s a real lack of venues and everyone does house shows. But I think it’s really a big core group of people that just continue to make cool stuff happen.” 

Piranha Rama at Toast, August 2022. Photo via Piranha Rama/Facebook.

Falen also noted the hard-working nature of players in Richmond. Since the scene is so small yet devoted, he said, you may see the same players all over town. I told them about my conversation with Reggie Pace at the beginning of the summer, and how half the people I’ve interviewed have worked with him, and everyone knows him. “In my heyday I was definitely doing that more,” commented Falen, “but I’ve been trying to chill out and not play in six bands at a time.” 

While Omniscient Cloud Cover is undeniably a psychedelic rock album, many different genres and influences poke their heads in and out to give the whole record an unpredictable air. This serves as a reflection of the unpredictable nature of music in Richmond as a whole. When I asked Sizemore about the phenomenon, he said, “I get really bored with trying to do the same thing over and over again.”

What almost certainly adds to this desire to change things up is the proximity to both VCU and the thriving local arts and music scene that exists separate from the university. These scenes lends themselves to eclecticism and spontaneity that bleeds into the original music being created here. “You have the jazz talent and the symphonic talent in the city,” said Lozano. “When they start crossing into those grittier spaces, some really creative stuff happens.” 

With such a varied palette, I wanted to know if the whirlwind of genres was an active choice by the band, or if they were the product of an unforeseen force moving Piranha Rama according to its will. When I asked if he felt that he had control over the band’s sound, Sizemore laughed, flabbergasted, and responded, “Wow… I don’t know!”

Lozano stepped in once again to shine some light on this. “I think there’s just so many influences that everyone is bringing in,” she said. “With eight people listening to so many different kinds of music, it definitely takes on a life of its own.” 

Falen countered with a different perspective. “I think we definitely have control over the sound,” he said. “We put everything in there intentionally. I think it is a reflection of the members of the band; the past stuff we’ve done, or what we’re looking to do. I don’t think any of us listen to the same music. We’re just kind of all over the place all the time, and I think that comes out naturally in the music.” 

Photo by Garritos Photography, via Piranha Rama/Facebook.

With the release of Omniscient Cloud Cover Piranha Rama has three albums under their belt, and only three singles. The focus for the group is clearly on entire records and not single tracks, despite the more lucrative nature and digestibility that comes along with singles. As most bands these days shift focus to that market, I asked why they continued to collect and release their music in such an old-fashioned way. “Who doesn’t love an album you can just put on and there are no skippers?” asked Sizemore.

Lozano followed up by pointing out that any attempt to pick “the single” in advance is always a gamble, while albums are able to hang together as a larger work. “I like the way you can build a flow. And maybe you know in the beginning which songs are gonna stand out, or maybe not.”

The process most bands go through to record an album follows a pretty standard rubric: write some songs, play them live, workshop, book studio time, lay the tracks down, mix, master, and release. This wasn’t the case with Omniscient Cloud Cover, though. Instead, the band took a fascinatingly unusual approach. The process began at the beginning of quarantine in 2020, when Sizemore started writing and recording a series of instrumental tracks with no real plan in mind. “When I started making it… I didn’t know what it was going to be,” said Sizemore. “I didn’t know if it was going to be a Piranha Rama record, so I was just trying to make something that felt comforting,”

He began playing around with different instrumental tracks that he was recording in his kitchen. “The first song started with playing a choir patch on the keyboard that was just a C for a really long time, and I was like, ‘This is really cool,’” said Sizemore. “I just zoned out for ten minutes, and I thought, ‘Maybe I could do something with this weird thing.’ Then I threw an arpeggiator on it and built it up that way… It turned into a weird process where I wanted every song to have that feel or vibe; something that felt comforting.” After fleshing out the tracks at his home studio, dubbed The Bat Grave, the band took the developing tracks to the Virginia Moonwalker, where they finished the recording.

Lozano explained her process of writing lyrics this way. “I spent a couple months with this music and just listened to it… and if a song jumped out, I would imagine a phrase that would be part of that song, and then it sort of just went from there,” she said. “When I felt like I had something solid I would send John a photo, and I’m like, ‘What about these lyrics for the song?’”

“She doesn’t really need much help with that stuff,” Sizemore commented, laughing. 

Omniscient Cloud Cover is a chameleon of an album, shifting from one thought and idea to the next seamlessly. While acting on the will of an ever-changing musical direction, the members of Piranha Rama have a maestro-like control over their sound once they arrive at their destination. What comes out of this strange dichotomy is a vicious party, shifting from one thought and idea to the next in a way that keeps the listener guessing. In retrospect, though, it all makes perfect sense.

Top Photo by Lauren Serpa

Freak Folk Earth Folks: An Interview With Høly River

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It had begun to rain as I was on my way to meet with the members of Høly River at Earth Folk, and I drove right past their driveway on my first pass. Having made a sharp u-turn after my GPS informed me that I was going the wrong way, I inched slowly along the road until I noticed a natural archway ringed in leaves and plants of various kinds. I was in the middle of a dense southside neighborhood, so I assumed I was in the wrong place, but I tentatively turned down the dirt road that led into what I can only describe as a hidden forest. 

To my right was a tall house adorned with a colorful mural. Car parts were scattered around the yard. Passing beneath two tall trees leaning over the driveway, I emerged into a clearing where a turn of the century house sat nestled into the trees to my right, and across the way a colorful garage stood out as a centerpiece. Nervously making my way onto the grounds, I noticed off the left an old fashioned teardrop camper adorned with awnings that looked at once comfortable and intimidating. I was at summer camp.

My approach to the door was tentative, as my confidence that I was in the right place was still quite low. I knocked, and glanced above the small doorway to a sign that read “WATCH YOUR HEAD.” It was a short doorway. I immediately forgot the lesson, though; when Laney Sullivan and Jameson Price of Høly River opened the door, I did in fact bump my head on the door frame. 

A brief tour around their home was a journey through time. They bought the home, a 19th century sharecropper’s house, five years ago. It was then condemned, but they have spent a considerable amount of time since turning it into a beautiful family living space. They led me into their bedroom, where they had a couch in the corner, and while I set up my recorder and laptop, Sullivan brought in their daughter Sunny Lu, who would be joining us for the rest of the interview. As they cooed and rocked Sunny into a provisional sleep, the three of us sat down, and they began telling me about their background. 

Høly River at home. Photo by Jay Paul.

Sullivan grew up outside Washington D.C. as the stepdaughter of an organist and choral director at the Cathedral Choral Society, where her mother also sang. Being constantly surrounded by intense choral music, she was intimidated by the classically trained professionals, and never considered herself much of a musician. She didn’t start playing until she came to Richmond, joined up with the house show scene, and began playing the accordion in an all-female punk group.

Price grew up in a parsonage in Mechanicsville. The son of a pastor, Price was constantly around the church, surrounded by intense liturgical choir music. He began coming into the city as a teenager to participate in the same burgeoning house show scene that was developing in the smaller neighborhoods of downtown Richmond. Sullivan and Price met while they were both working at Harrison Street Cafe, and began a relationship. With a desire to travel, the two began picking up seasonal jobs and setting off across the world, before finally making a big move to Argentina semi-permanently.

It was around this time that the two started playing music together under the name Lobo Marino. Without much plan for the future, the group released its first album, Kite Festival, under that name, and then went on to release three more records before changing their name to Høly River. Under that name, the group has now released two albums, with plans to continue further. 

With a basis in freak-folk but with punk origins, Høly River’s music is trance-like, drone-based meditation music with lyrics covering themes of nature preservation and personal spiritual growth. Høly River’s music feels as if it came straight out of the Appalachian mountains, but one could just as easily imagine it as the backing track to a Scandinavian Midsommar festival. It may fill those who listen to it with an overwhelming desire to dance around a Maypole. Price often plays an acoustic guitar or any number of fretted string instruments, but what powers their sound primarily is Sullivan’s harmonium, which usually provides the drone and chord progression that the songs are based around. 

Høly River collaborated with Hourglass Sessions to produce a one-shot live music video of the song “Courage.” You can watch the video on RVA MAG TV starting at 1 PM on Tuesday September 6th, and read further for our interview with Høly River, in which we discuss harmoniums, donation-based performances and music releases, and what it’s like to change a band’s name after they’ve already experienced success. 

Tell me about the harmonium, and how it came about that you started playing that.

LS: I was playing the accordion, and we were traveling around. I had it strapped to my front, with my backpack on my back. I encountered the harmonium first at a Hare Krishna community in Argentina that we were staying at, and I was able to touch a harmonium for the first time. And then we were staying in a commune in California that had a harmonium, and I got to spend more time with it. We purchased one off of a scratch-and-dent website where you can get lightly damaged instruments, and I wrote a bunch of songs that are on our album Kite Festival — that was the first experimentation with the harmonium. 

JP: Harmonium is a really interesting instrument. It’s in the pipe organ family, so a lot of folks here in the United States view it as an eastern instrument. People will associate it with yoga or something, right? But as with a lot of these pump organs, they went through folks, during colonization, going to other countries and bringing these traditional Christian instruments, trying to evangelize the folks. They’ve become these sort of fusion instruments. When we traveled in Europe… it’s still traditional to see the harmonium in choir, church settings, in Sweden or in France. But if you travel with it in India, some folks don’t like it, because it represents colonization. 

LS: So the harmonium is a child of the accordion. It was created in Germany and France, and missionaries brought it over to India. Then, a lot of people in India were like, “You can keep your religion, but we’ll take this instrument.” So now, there are more harmonium makers in India. But you can see from the structure of the instrument, the way it’s made, that it comes from the accordion — with the brass reeds, the keys and the pump. It is a really interesting niche.

JP: It’s such a deep, droning instrument. Playing the accordion, Laney was really just playing harmonies of so many things, right? So I was playing guitar, and then Laney was there playing a melody, or dancing with it. But the harmonium, when she started playing it, became so powerful. You can set a drone on it, and it just became the most powerful thing.

For a while you were known as Lobo Marino, and then the name was changed to Høly River. Why change the name, keep the music on the old account, and then post music on the new account?

JP: I think we knew that it was going to be a hard business move to make, but we knew it was something that we had to do for our soul. Lobo Marino, we named when we were living in South America. Lobo marino is a sea lion in Spanish, and we were speaking Spanish all the time, and so it just felt really casual. It felt really easy to just name it that, because that was the language we were using. We didn’t expect to continue to be a band, if I’m being perfectly honest; we just wrote an album and called it Lobo Marino. We kept going, and then we noticed that people kept asking about our name. “Tell us about Lobo Marino.” And at some point, we had so much distance from that trip, and so much distance from living in a Spanish-speaking country, that it felt like we were rushing the origin story just to get to talk about what we wanted to talk about: an interconnection between nature and ourselves. It started to feel like it was no longer authentic to our mission. 

LS: Now Høly River’s on the forefront, and what does that mean? And in one sentence I can tell you: we drink the rivers, and they become part of our bodies, and we’re connected to the Earth. And that’s one of the reasons why we need to do a better job of respecting it, and treating it with care. But also “Holy River,” our song that we wrote as Lobo Marino, has been a completely transformative experience. So many people have told us that they use that song for birth, or death, or marriages, for all these different really important rituals in life, and it has different messages for people in all of them. We just realized the power in that particular song that, in some ways, feels like it’s beyond us. We didn’t try to create that.

JP: We think of our songs like kids, right? You can birth this song, but then it goes on to live its own independent life, and it’s just doing its own work. But “Holy River,” since it was our most powerful song, definitely our most popular song as Lobo Marino… we knew we also wanted to honor the lineage of Lobo Marino, so fans of that band would connect to something.

I want to pivot a little bit and talk about the music that y’all are releasing now. Are you doing pretty much exclusively streaming?

LS: No, we’re not doing exclusively streaming. We have all our music in almost every capacity that you can produce music available, we just only sell it in person at our shows.

JP: And our Bandcamp has vinyl.

LS: And we’re going to be working to get our vinyl in a digital store. Shipping is just hard, because we tour so much. Yes, we stream on all the platforms, but also on Bandcamp, and everything on Bandcamp is pay what you want. So you can download it for free if you put zero [dollars], but you also can download it for $100. We just wanted our music to be accessible, because we think it’s important that people can listen to it if they feel inspired to.

JP: And even though touring is our primary focus, that is our job, that’s how we primarily make our money, we really are hyper-focused on donation-based shows, and pay what you can. 

LS: You know, the Richmond DIY punk scene — making things light in scale, making things donation, making things all ages, make the music as accessible as you can. Don’t whore yourself out to capitalism [laughs]. 

JP: I don’t want to judge. Anyone else can value their art however they want to. This has just been important to us as a personal practice. So everyone else can make whatever choice they want to make, but for us it felt really important to continue to carry that ethic; it resonates with us. It’s never given us a reason to challenge it. Because we feel like we’re cared for, because we are financially stable through our music without having to challenge that sliding scale donation-based pay-what-you-can [model]. 

LS: It always balances itself out. 

So what went into your decision to release your music on vinyl? Because everyone I’ve spoken to, save for a few, are doing it now, and I’m always interested to hear all the different approaches and philosophies that artists have for doing it. 

LS: We released a full length on vinyl in 2015 — and they’re sold out; you can’t find them anymore. That was We Hear the Ocean. This vinyl that we have now is a special release with our new band name changed, so it’s a 7″ that’s a single of “Holy River” remastered, and then a remix of the “Holy River” song on the other side. It sells slowly, but our CDs sell more than this vinyl. For us, at least, when we’re playing shows. We’re not in stores. Plan 9 and local places will carry it sometimes, when I go through the process to give it to them. Being a local DIY band, I don’t have a database of stores around the nation that I can ship to.

JP: I think we’re still figuring out a lot of our online distribution. So much of what we focus on… and again, it works for us, so we understand what we want to work on. But for us, touring and being in person and the in-person connections… We screen-print all of our own shirts, on shirts that we get from thrift stores. We hyper-focus on things that we know we’re gonna go on tour with, and that’s the main vehicle of how our music is moving.

Holy River at Unity Fest. Photo by Sarah Sha, via Holy River/Facebook

Well, how do you go about writing your music? It’s very trance-like, and there’s clearly a message to it, but where does the inspiration come from, and is there a specific way that you approach it?

LS: Well, they happen in different ways. Sometimes they start just passing through the ether, and you have to catch it. I’ll catch it by making a quick voice memo — that is a seed of a song. [For] our last album, Courage, we had a writing retreat.

JP: It was the first time we had ever done that, and we felt really rewarded by that ritual. Before, we were always just collecting the songs. This is the first time we just sat down and collaborated so much, on so many songs. I would say most of our other albums are collages of primarily Laney’s songs with some of my influence, and primarily my songs with some of Laney’s influence, whereas with Courage… those songs do exist on that album, but it’s a strong fusion of our work together. I think, luckily, we both like writing poetry, and process our feelings in a poetic way. So we’ll come with a lot of words and lyrics and things already prepared, or things that we’ve been sitting on that maybe didn’t have a melody yet. 

LS: I was telling a friend today about songwriting, and how, when I go to write an album, I feel like I’m going to the well, and I don’t know much water is in the well. I don’t know if there are going to be songs there or not. If there are songs, I am struck and in deep gratitude of what’s coming through, but it’s not a cerebral thing that I’m doing. It’s more of a feeling. I try to switch up the instruments if I get stuck in a pattern — because I will with certain instruments — and do different practices to break up the patterns and see what comes out. 

When a rock band tours, you will see them playing dingy bars and clubs, or maybe places like The National, but this last tour you took was not like that at all. You were playing a lot of open fields, communes, vineyards… is that what most of your tours are like? 

LS: Yeah, and I feel like… we’ve opened up this genre of Earth Folk, which is what we call this place [their house]. And there are other bands that have used that term, of being Earth-based folk music. And I feel like through this culture that we’re creating — of people who are intentionally trying to live in better harmony with the Earth, people who grow their own food, live in community — we focus a lot on those places, and people doing that kind of work. We go to them, because we’re all networking, sharing ideas, and learning from each other to build this big network. It’s actually a global network — the tours look the same in Germany. We go to some cooperatively owned house where people are sharing a vegetarian potluck.

JP: Maybe a farm or a community center. The place where we end up crossing over a lot with our fans is at festivals, right? But festivals, if you’ve been to them, they can set vibes very distinctly. 

LS: So we go to grassroots festivals a lot, or burn-esque festivals. We were just at Flowjam, which has elements of burn culture, but also yoga and healing arts. And Mountain Run Jam, which has primitive skills and farming and agriculture workshops, stuff like that. So, we’re just working more with people who are working with the Earth, and that inevitably leads us to these stages outdoors, with plants and people who are making mead and celebrating the solstice.  

So tell me about making the Hourglass Session, and what inspired your very interesting choice to have ballet dancers along with your performance. First thing though: where did you film it?

JP:  It’s the pump house in Pump House Park, right near the Seven Nickel Bridge. The pump house used to be an old hydro-electric plant, and the top part of it was turned into a ballroom. So we were in that ballroom section of the pump house, which they’re procuring funds to rebuild. It’s part of the James River Park system. So that attracted us to being there; not only is it a beautiful building, but it’s also raising awareness of a place that is trying to raise money — to both rebuild this place, and also for the James River Park system itself. The Virginia Ballet… Laney actually has connections to them, because she had been in contact with the ballet for a collaboration we had been talking about for a long time, and we’re actually doing this year. We are raising awareness of our waterways and our watershed to dancers at the ballet, and so it’s gonna be a multimedia [presentation]. We’re playing music, the dancers will dance, and there’ll also be some spoken word about our waterways, and the interconnection of our watershed to our bodies. We had already been in contact with them, and when Hourglass asked us if we wanted to do a session, and if we had a place in mind, these connections were already there. And so we thought, “Let’s just do all these things together.”

LS: I had been talking to Mac, who’s from Friends of the Pump House, about… he was wanting to have musicians play in the pump house, and I was like, “Yeah, that sounds great.” To help raise money to help rebuild some of the windows, because it’s in pretty bad shape. I had been talking to some dancers from the ballet about dancing to some of the groups that are playing, and he was like, “Oh my gosh, that sounds incredible. We need to document this, and we should live stream it.” It was during COVID, so they were gonna live stream it, but I had done enough live streams at that point. I had seen things be live streamed in a way that did not honor the experience – just somebody’s crappy stagnant camera on a tripod trying to capture this.

And at the same time I was having these conversations with Mac about the ballet playing, Tyler from Hourglass Session wrote and asked if we would be interested in doing an Hourglass Session. And I was like, “You know what? I’m in this conversation with Friends of the Pump House and the ballet about this live stream there as a fundraiser for the Pump House. Would you all want to be the production coordinators for that, so that we could have nice audio production and visuals?” And they were like, “Yeah, that sounds rad.” So it was pretty miraculous that all those things happened at the same time, and everyone was just down. So they filmed… I think we did seven songs that we streamed as part of the fundraiser, so there’s more. But that one piece, “Courage,” is the one that Hourglass Sessions did in their style. But I edited all the other audio and visual pieces that Tyler and Dillon collected, and I edited a whole show that would be live streamed for the fundraiser. 

You can watch the Hourglass Session for “Courage” by Høly River on RVA Mag TV starting at 1PM on September 6th. Their music is available for download on Bandcamp, and for streaming anywhere you normally find music. Høly River will also be performing on the main stage at Mountain Run Jam, in Sedalia VA, on Saturday, October 1. More info and festival tickets can be found at mountainrunjam.com.

Top Photo: Holy River perform at Okechoobee Music Fest in 2018. Photo via Holy River/Facebook

Connection: Avail Takes Over Brown’s Island With Over The James 2022

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I think the first time I saw Avail was at Dayton’s More Than Music fest in 1993. In an era of hardcore where 90% of Midwestern affairs were just a wall of people standing with crossed arms staring blankly at a band just exploding, Avail provided the experience I had dreamed of since I first heard about punk via the episode of the Chipmunks where Alvin gets caught in the mayhem of the pit. From minute one, they were a surge of frenetic energy — an orgy of bodies flying, screams, singalongs, and mayhem, all being directed by cheerleader extraordinaire Beau Beau like a conductor leading a symphony. 

Fast forward 29 years, I find myself with more pounds and less hair than I would like, celebrating this band with several thousand potential friends yet again. And while the Brown’s Island concert experience on Saturday, August 6, 2022 was light years away from the random building owned by meth-making bikers in the middle of a field on the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio in 1993, the sense of connection and commonality Avail provided was the same. 

Terminal Bliss. Photos by Michael Thorn.

This was driven home by the selection of the bands leading up to the headlining event. The day started out with a blazing sun and a sparsely populated field, accompanied by the blistering, noise-soaked hardcore of Richmond locals Terminal Bliss. Made up of former members of Pg99, Iron Reagan, Stop It!, etc. they tore through a rapid-fire, scathing set of hardcore punk which was seemingly over before it began. They are a must-catch next time they roll through a basement or warehouse near you. 

Screaming Females. Photos by Michael Thorn.

Screaming Females hit the stage as ominous storm clouds started to roll in – led by guitarist Marissa Paternoster (coined the 77th-greatest rock guitarist of all time by Spin in 1982), they are a band which makes the point that punk rock is less what you sound like and more about how you do it. While they play a more traditional rock style, complete with mountains of fretboard dynamics and jamming solos, they cut their teeth in basements and DIY spaces, and by releasing records on independent label Don Giovanni. 

Unfortunately, as their set concluded, the thunderstorm my Lyft driver predicted (and I scoffed at) began to take shape – eventually causing the island to be cleared, minutes before Los Angeles’ Ceremony was about to start. Thankfully it only delayed things about an hour, and the rock was back on. 

Ceremony. Photo by Michael Thorn.

Ceremony has had so many style changes across their career, yet somehow they’ve always made it work as a cohesive project. Moving between moments of Wire-style tension, Prince-inflected dance music, stomping hardcore, garage rock and more, they were the first band of the day which really feel like they caught the crowd’s attention, getting them singing along to their cover of DC hardcore legend’s Red C and Ceremony’s own track, “Sick.” Unfortunately, their portion of the day was cut short thanks to the storm.

Cave In. Photo by Michael Thorn.

Boston’s Cave In started off as a moshy, heavier-than-thou riff machine some 25ish years ago and slowly morphed into a rock machine, pulling from elements of space rock bands like Hawkwind, and the desert rock slowburn of bands like Kyuss. Focussed primarily on tracks from their recent LP, Heavy Pendulum, they briefly dipped back to the year 2000 to hammer out the track “Big Riff.” 

Quicksand. Photo by Michael Thorn.

The sun began to dip below the horizon as Quicksand plugged in, tearing through a slurry of heavy, groove-oriented songs spanning their whole catalog — from their recent Distant Populations all the way back to their eponymous first single from 1990. For me personally, it felt like the latter half of their setlist was tailor-made for this graying old man, as they hammered down on bits and pieces from Slip and Manic Compression, aka ‘the hits.’ By the time they unplugged, the sun was finally gone and the island was finally full, just in time for Avail to take the stage.

Avail. Photo by Michael Thorn.

I could probably write several thousand words on Avail — their importance to me personally, to Richmond music, to hardcore punk on a national level, etc etc. Richmond has long had a strong underground music scene — White Cross, Honor Role, GWAR, Four Walls Falling, Inquisition, Strike Anywhere, Municipal Waste, etc. But it has always felt like the most important was Avail. If there is any band who put the city on the map, it was Avail, as they slogged through tour after tour, playing explosive shows across the country and the globe, building connections with people, bands, and scenes along the way.

Avail. Photo by Michael Thorn.

It’s these connections that matter most, and this was on full display as thousands sang along and danced to anthems spanning their whole discography. In many ways, the Avail presented this past Saturday wasn’t far removed from that band I saw nearly thirty years ago — just the scale of the thing has changed. From the moment Tim stated, “Hello, we’re Avail from Richmond Virginia” to the closing strains of final song “Scuffle Town,” the band and the audience were one cohesive, furious organism radiating energy in a symbiotic relationship. The give and take between band and audience generated a passionate storm swell, filling the island and spilling into James River. 

Avail, with special guest CSX train. Photo by Michael Thorn.

For me, one of the craziest moments was having a CSX train came roaring through on the tracks mid-set, blowing its whistle almost on cue — connecting Avail, a band held in such dear regard the world over, back to the town which made them. There is so much about Richmond which is manifested in the music and lyrics of Avail, and those things are part of what make them so special to both this place and the world over. A beautiful day indeed.

More scenes from Over The James 2022 at Brown’s Island. All photos by Michael Thorn:

AVAIL:

QUICKSAND:

CAVE IN:

CEREMONY:

SCREAMING FEMALES:

TERMINAL BLISS:

Getting Lucky With The Mitras

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Between musical goals and professional ambition, Richmond band The Mitras are truly attempting to do it all. From regularly releasing singles to grad school, nursing, fan festivities, and being the actual three best friends that anybody could have, they are getting a lot done. Best of all, it seems the harder they work, the luckier they get.

The Mitras — Sean Moran on vocals and guitar, Austin Miller on bass, and Russel Redmond on drums — got their name from an unlikely place: Moran’s former boss, Mitra. 

“She had this incredible work ethic I thought was so cool, and the name is very unique. I knew I was going to name the band after her and never tell her about it. One day if she finds out, then I’ll know word of us has spread,” said Moran. “I think it’s a name that means friendship, which is fitting for us anyway.”

Photo by Ashley Travis Photography.

The Mitras came together during their time playing in other local bands. After seeing each other play separately, Moran began to lure Miller and Redmond away from their projects to join his own. The respect and admiration remains reciprocal between them, and has helped them to develop a sound as unique as their name. 

“At some point in 2019, Sean started to steal Russel and I to his really small scary practice space on Broad Street, and that’s where we started playing as a three-piece and getting to know each other,” said Miller. “Things started to click and flow. We’re still going strong.”

“I totally stole you guys,” said Moran. “I checked out their band a couple times and just thought, ‘Well, I want a band.’” 

“I remember seeing Sean play one of our first singles, ‘Dirt,’ at an open mic, and I got goosebumps. I thought, ‘I really wish I had written this song.’ That was one of our first songs we got to develop together,” said Miller. 

After releasing their first EP, Meet The Mitras, in 2019, the band had to take a break due to the pandemic. However, they’ve come back strong, with numerous releases since 2022 began. They set out with a plan to release a new single every month this year, and so far they have released five fantastic, floor-shaking songs (two are available on Bandcamp; the other three are only on streaming services). With inspiration from the likes of Tom Petty, Nirvana, and New Zealand band The Beths, and a sound reminiscent of the era of 90s post-grunge, every song is new, yet wildly nostalgic to the ear.

“It’s been nice to release them on that cadence, to keep people engaged in what we’re doing, instead of putting out an album every year or something,” said Moran. “We thought it’d give us more traction, to put them out on a regular basis.” 

“With the pandemic we took a break and assessed what the world was doing. Now we’re playing catch-up with all of the singles we had intended to release already,” said Miller. “We’re looking forward to our newer music that we’ve been writing as a group since we started playing again last year.”

When The Mitras began playing this past year, it was no easy task. The pandemic had set the tone for a lot of postponed show dates and unused tickets, and the guys have faced their share of cancellations while trying to get their footing as a strong contender in the local scene. 

One show that got disrupted took place back in January at The Camel. It almost never came to be. The Mitras were meant to play with fellow Richmonders Toxic Moxie and The Firnats, but just two weeks before, both bands pulled out due to health concerns. The guys were now faced with a choice — lose the show they worked hard to put together, or change course and set up something new. 

“I decided we would keep the show, but just do seven 20-minute sets with any band who wanted to play last minute. I reached out to seven or eight bands we had played with before, and to my surprise they all agreed to play,” said Moran. “For a hot second, we thought the show would just be over, and we were worried it wouldn’t be a good idea, but we leaned into it and it was a big success.”

“It was really surprising,” said Miller. “Sean had gotten Adobe photoshop, and started teaching us how to use it. He made our Last Minute Fest flyer in the same style as the When We Were Young poster.”

“I think that helped our success with the show, because of how much of a meme that poster had become. I changed all of it to our bands for that night,” said Moran. 

Photo by Joey Wharton.

The Mitras are working toward more successes like this, as well as the steady release of more music. In the coming months, expect to see more singles and many more show announcements from the trio, as they are hard at work building relationships and a platform in the city. 

“We want to take our operation and go to different recording studios all over Richmond to work with as many people as possible and get our feet in the door. We have a few more singles that are ready to go and we want to record them with different engineers to develop the sound,” said Moran.

Coming up this weekend, The Mitras will be showcasing that well-developed sound on Saturday, July 30, at The Camel, their home venue. They will be playing with Toxic Moxie and Nancy Raygun at an event dubbed A Pink Moon Showcase. Doors will open at 8pm. For only $12 at the door, this will be the best money and time you could have spent on your Saturday night. And who knows, you might make some friends and share something as special as the bond between the guys of The Mitras.

“I love you Sean,” said Miller.

“I love you too,” replied Moran.

To find The Mitras, you can check them out at their bandcamp, on spotify, or through their social medias like instagram. They regularly update their platforms with show information and new music releases.

Top Photo by Joey Wharton

You Were There Or You Weren’t: An Interview With Halfcast

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Jason Tyler and Alex Moore of the band Halfcast showed up at the front door to my townhome in the fan at 11:01 for our 11:00 AM meeting; about as punctual as can be expected from musicians. Both were casually dressed in jeans and t-shirts, a “MOM” tattoo poking out from beneath Tyler’s right sleeve. We exchanged pleasantries as I gave them the tour of the house and showed them my basement studio where I often work and record my music. Ryan Dickerson showed up a few minutes later wearing a shirt emblazoned with the logo of what I can only assume to be his favorite hot sauce and smiled at me as I opened to the door, apologizing for his fashionable tardiness. I sat down on one couch in my living room to begin the interview, while they all sat shoulder to shoulder on a separate couch, despite the ample seating.

Tyler growing up in Alexandria begin teaching himself guitar from an early age. What started as a fantasy after playing a game of Guitar Hero turned into a reality as he got older and began working in music stores in order to be around the instruments he wanted to learn. Starting the project that would eventually be called Halfcast in 2012 with a friend, Jack Hubble, Tyler felt that they had a high-concept story to tell and they began work on what would eventually turn into Year of the Fox, Halfcast’s first studio album. Writing and recording in Hubble’s basement, playing almost every instrument himself, Tyler continued working on it over the course of the next four years.

When Tyler came to Virginia Commonwealth University to study classical guitar, he met Moore, a drummer from the Eastern Shore of Maryland who had been playing music since the age of seven and playing in bands since the age of eight. After moving to Richmond, Moore lived next door to a friend of Tyler’s who heard him playing drums and offered to introduce him to Tyler. After a jam session in which the two bonded, Tyler asked Moore to join the Halfcast project.

Dickerson, born in Nashville, was raised in Short Pump and moved downtown later in life to attend VCU. Playing trumpet throughout his youth, Dickerson was primarily a drummer when he first moved into the city. However, seeing a need for bass players around town, he decided to pick up the instrument and slid perfectly into the niche. Running into Tyler frequently on campus, Dickerson made his acquaintance through numerous mutual classes. As the release of Year of the Fox loomed, Tyler was looking for a bass player to help him play his songs live. Attending a rehearsal, Dickerson clicked with Tyler and Moore, and in this three-piece lineup, they decided to begin promoting the album created by Tyler. 

Listing among their influences An Endless Sporadic, Failure, and Queens of the Stone Age, Halfcast also serve as a callback to progressive rock of the 70s and 80s, but with a taste of the heavy dirty guitar tones and screaming vocals that often flavor today’s prog-rock. Halfcast’s sound on their new album, Return, is marked by Tyler’s virtuosic guitar playing, which is not only technically proficient but versatile and dynamic as well. Seamlessly switching from atmospheric and dissonant arpeggios to riff-based shredding lead, all while singing, Tyler defines what it means to be a guitar-playing frontman. Moore’s drumming and Dickerson’s heavy bass playing form a rhythm section that offers strong support for the riffs Tyler plays, while also offering an excellent, rhythmically dense counterpoint to Tyler’s smooth vocal lines. They don’t just play a supporting role, though — for example, the song “O.S.I.T.C,” from Return, opens with a quick punching beat by Moore, accented by Dickerson’s flowing bass, which shows off his melodic chops. 

Halfcast partnered with Hourglass Sessions and The Byrd Theatre to create a truly unique video for their song “Blue & Gold,” from their new album, Return — out now just about everywhere you get your music. You can watch their Hourglass Session above, or on RVA MAG TV on Tuesday July 19th at 1PM. Then continue reading for our interview, in which I talked to Halfcast about their music (the old and the new), their process for writing, house shows, and how to be successful in your field, even if it’s not in the way you might have expected.

Note: lightly edited for clarity and ease of conversation. Edited for length. 

A few new and young artists I’ve spoken to are concerned about older established bands and cover bands that sell beer dominating venues that they would like to play and not leaving room for them to be able to break through and establish themselves. What are your thoughts on that? Is that a concern y’all share? 

Alex Moore: That’s a great question, and we’ve been going back and forth a lot with that ourselves. We have a separate project that is and event band — a wedding band — and up until the last year, we were resolute to never do covers. We’ll do a cover a set maybe, but we are not a cover band. Knowing that we want to do this — music, that is — for a living, long term, it’s a necessary evil, so to speak. Not that it’s all bad. We still have a great time doing those gigs, people have a great time, but I think as long as you can leave space for that creative side and that original project, which we’re doing, and not lose sight of that… one can feed the other. You’ve got to have money to feed the other project, and that’s kind of what we’re doing. We’re making it work.

Jason Tyler: And I would also like to add to that: I think these younger artists have nothing to worry about. The thing that made me fall in love with the Richmond scene, the thing that made me join the first band that asked me — The Alberts, way back in 2014 — was the fact that the house show scene was ALWAYS moving; it was fluid. I could go anywhere on Marshall Street, or Clay [Street], and just find a random house show that [I] could play at. 300-plus people would show up. And the cops would be called, and it was chaos, but it was wonderful. It’s like every old head would say: “Those were the days! Those were real shows.” But it fluctuates. It goes away for a year, and then it comes back. But then COVID hit, and I feel like we’re on a rise now. With the rise of social media, I’ve been seeing a lot of these new venues in all these different areas come out with these shows. They only have original bands that sound like nothing I’ve ever heard. Now, if you’re trying to argue that you want a show at River City Roll or something like that, yeah, you might need to play some covers for that. But if you’re worried about the gigs, and older bands playing covers, then I feel like you have nothing to worry about, because there’s always gonna be someone to open their house. 

AM: The same people at those house shows like to go to venues and see shows too, and I think that the house show scene, that DIY scene, helps feed into [the club scene]. If there’s a buzz about you, then a venue’s gonna hear about it, more than likely. Especially if it’s through social media, then you’re going get to picked up in that way, or seen eventually, and probably gonna get an opportunity. If not, then other bands are gonna want to pull you onto bills. But yeah, it’s tough. It’s something that’s not going away. 

Ryan Dickerson: People talk about the “Richmond house show scene,” and there’s never been one scene, at least as long as I’ve been here. I’ve been trying to find the hardcore scene. [Laughs] But you’re talking about worry… the only thing I’m worried about is if I can’t find any house show venues around. Cause I miss those chaos days of… maybe they’re still out there and I’m just not 18 or 19 anymore, but I miss those living rooms filled with people. 

It is such an underground scene. The news doesn’t report about house shows and they’re not advertised, you either see a poster on a wall somewhere or someone sends you a message on Instagram. 

JT: It’s either you were there, or you weren’t, and the people will talk about it for years to come. You just have to find those places. I get worried about it sometimes too, [but] they’re out there — you just have to keep on searching. You’ve just got to have faith in Richmond that you’ll find it, and that you’ll be a part of it.

Photo by Andre Mags

Your first album, Year of the Fox, from 2016, is monstrous at over an hour long, and you didn’t release anything save for a single here and there up until now with your new album, Return. Why keep the name if the lineup completely changed between the two albums?

JT: The name was something that was very important to me. I think back then I was just a young kid who wanted to release music and didn’t care how I did it. With this new album, we’ve all looked a lot into the business side and marketing strategy; how people react on social media. Back then it was like, “I want to make music. That’s it, and that’s all that matters.” That’s all that should matter, and there’s a little bit of naivete that comes along with that, but I think now it’s just the thing that has lasted. It’s always been Halfcast. I wouldn’t say these are concept albums, but they definitely have a theme to them, and they definitely connect to each other. So me changing the name, even though I didn’t release music, just kind of seems like a cop out. 

AM: [The name] Halfcast kind of marks the formation of this group as it is, because that name was really put on it when we started playing. We had another name, but it happened at or around the same time that we all started playing together. 

That first album does vary a lot sonically, but there’s something unspoken that holds it together: there’s choral arrangements, acoustic guitar, and it goes all over the place. You mentioned it’s mostly you [Tyler]; what holds that album together? 

JT: I think it’s kind of the mood. It’s what I was going through at the time. The whole thing is based upon the story of a boy. The character, he’s out of high school, and he doesn’t really know what he’s doing. All he knows is he’s going to get out of what he’s doing; he wants to get out of this place that he’s in, because he doesn’t like it, and he’s going through trials and tribulations in order to escape. At the end with “The Aberration,” that 11-minute-long song, he realized there’s no way out other than death; not a physical death, but death of himself. He has to change from a boy to a man, and that’s the whole journey.

Then there’s that bonus track, “Dawn,” which we released later, and that’s the hopeful part. That’s him leaving. I think the thing that holds it together is that it’s a story, and I don’t think people do this with albums anymore. They just have a collection of songs, and that’s fine, they’re good and they stand on their own, but when we write now, and when I wrote back then… I want [an album] to tell a story. I want it to convey a message, and I think that’s what holds it together. The music is very different, and it’s written at different points: there’s different drummers and there’s different instruments, and they sound different from track to track. They’re mastered differently. The story is what holds all of it together.

Moving from Year of the Fox, which is all Jason, into this new album Return that is coming out, what has been y’all’s process for writing music? 

RD: There’s not really a lot of organization to it [Laughs].

AM: Strictly speaking, and in general, when it comes to everything going into this album, let alone writing, Jason definitely does the heavy lifting — there’s no question. Jason will usually come in with a riff or an idea, and we usually just do our thing with it, and it evolves from there. We’ve grown together, we’ve learned a lot, we fight really well, and we write really well together; we do all of that really cohesively. It ends up being something that we’re all proud of. I think we’ve grown throughout the process. 

RD: There’s two things that are nice about this band: one is that our weaknesses and strengths as writers all kind of overlap in very helpful ways. We tend to check each other’s better impulses. Like if this is getting kind of long in the tooth, the person who’s all about cutting things down will step in, but then if this is a little bit underdeveloped, then person A will step in and say, “Here’s all the stuff we can add to this.” It’s also nice having a drummer who knows how to write. I can’t overstate how much of an arranging role Alex has. He steps in very early and very quickly to…

AM: Sometimes forcefully, let’s be honest.

RD: But he very quickly steps up to really push the song in a direction that we might not have been expecting it. 

Photo by Andre Mags

JT: The way it typically goes is I have an idea or a riff, and then Alex goes, “Well, we’ve used that rhythm before, so let’s try this rhythm,” or something that I would have never thought of. And then Ryan, being the great bassist that he is, comes up with a bass part, almost like a rhythm guitar part, that is a counterpoint to my melody and my lyrics. Or does the same thing that I do and jumps out when he needs to, which is the progressive element that our music inspires. So, that’s typically what happens, but now we’re trying to go in different directions to keep it the same but different. 

You must. Ego is going to get in the way when you’re writing, but you have to try and not let it. Most of the music that you’ve released so far has been on streaming services or Bandcamp, but a lot of other artists are doing vinyl releases. I see you’re doing the Direct-To-Vinyl thing. Have you found streaming revenue and Bandcamp sales to be sufficient? Your new album is coming out on CD and USB, but have you done this in the past, or are you just getting around to it? 

AM: It’s something that we’ve gone back and forth on. We have physical copies of things — not as many as we might have bought five years ago. For this album we might have [previously] gotten 500 or 1000 copies — we have a fraction of that. Just because we’re trying to adapt; we know most people tend to download anyway. We’re also trying to be somewhat innovative and doing USBs now. Most cars if it’s after 2016 don’t have CD players, so it’s tough. It’s nice to have a physical CD, though. I think we’re just trying to adapt and make it easier for people to listen to our music, but we want to have all forms if possible. 

JT: And we’re all in agreement here: vinyl is on the way. We are going to do vinyl.

AM: It’s just expensive. 

JT: Right. Exactly. Like I said, when I first released Year of the Fox it was all about the music, and then I ran into problems about release, the media, the social aspect of it, and obviously the cost. Whenever we do something, we want to make sure that we can turn a profit. Not because we’re money-grubbing capitalists, but because we want to be able to do this longterm. 

AM: It all goes back into the band. We’ve never paid ourselves for anything. 

JT: Everything we’ve ever made as Halfcast goes into a band fund that goes right back into the band. Hence the Party Favors [their wedding band], and that will hopefully give us more income. So, I think the whole reason is that this is our job, this is our passion, this is our career. In order to do that, you have to make it worth your while. You can’t just do things because it’s nice and it feels good; you have to make money off of it so that you can continue to do it. So vinyl is definitely on the way, we just need to figure out a way to make it worth our while. 

AM: The one thing we have invested heavily in, and it has paid us back every time — it has helped us pay for this album, for example — is just merch. Shirts, and things like that. It’s probably what we make the most on. Even vs. what we get paid at the gig. If nothing else, [if we] sell a few shirts, it was a good night. If nothing else, you sell one shirt, and that’s support. That feels good.

RD: That’s where Direct-To-Vinyl comes in. They reached out to us and a few other Richmond bands, and that was just the first cost-effective way we’ve come across to record vinyl. Leesta Vall is the name of the studio, and they do a unique live take of a song, and they press that directly to a 45. So, everyone who gets one of those 45s is the only copy of that.

Photo by Andre Mags

Speaking of earning money: this wedding band. It is essentially just you all, but you’ve also hired two other singers and a keyboardist. A lot of bands are unwilling to play anything they don’t want to, but then I see y’all playing top 40 hits at weddings. Obliviously it’s more lucrative, but what else spurred the creation of it? 

AM: Back to what I said earlier: we want to do this as a living. We all have day jobs — well, Jason in the last year has kind of transitioned into only music. He does lessons and the band; that’s how he makes his living. Which is cool. Ryan and I are trying to hopefully, eventually, be on that same team, so to speak. But looking for a day job in music, to be sure. I want music to be the job. That’s one way to get there, but it’s also that we need to pay for things. We want to tour with Halfcast, we want to do other things. How can we fund that without having to come out of pocket? Eventually we came to the idea that this can be good for us individually, for a career, but also this can fuel our passion project.  

JT: And furthermore, after just a few months of doing this, we have gotten tighter as a band — with Halfcast. We practice for these event shows with the Party Favors, and we’re like, “Oh, we have that Halfcast show! We’ve got to get back to our old music. All right, we’re gonna have to have about two weeks of practice just to get our chops back.” And then we do it in one night, because we’re on the same level of tightness — we can bounce off each other. There are things that you don’t see, or you don’t think about, when you’re doing this, and obviously, there’s these bands who don’t want to do this stuff. Then you don’t have to do it. But the thing is that we wanted to do it, and this helps out. We like doing music. We prefer our own music, we love writing — that’s the big passion. But playing other people’s songs has never been this big ugly thing. Even if it’s top 40, you can make it your own. 

RD: And it’s dance tunes, so that’s what teaches you to lock in as a band. When you’re trying to make other people dance… you’re not allowed to show off at that point. You just have to listen to the kick drum and lock in. 

AM: And this goes back to your original question and point. I think for anyone who is considering doing that, or [thinking] if it’s worth doing a cover band to try and make more money, put the money aside and all that. When you’re a musician and a live performer, the reason we do this is how we feel up on stage. And when you have a crowd of people, regardless of the genre you’re playing, when everyone’s kind of moving, and everyone’s into the music, that is payment in itself. And with these kinds of bands, to be fair, you’re at a wedding, you’re at a bar, you’re at a corporate event, people are probably dancing, man, and they’re having a great time, and that just feels good. You can still be creative with it. 

Even if it’s a worse version of the thing you love, it is still the thing you love. So, tell me about the day jobs, and what you do otherwise to keep the money flowing in. 

AM: I’m the general manager of a clothing store. I basically sell suits for a living. I’ve been doing that for about nine years. I love doing that, it’s something [I] can kind of do in my sleep, it comes second nature. But I really want to make music the job. 

RD: I’ve been in restaurants for about six years now, and currently I’m an assistant kitchen manager. So, I’ve just been cooking for a little bit.

JT: I’ve been doing music lessons, mostly guitar, but also piano and ukulele, and all that good stuff. 

Do these jobs give you the freedom you need to pursue not only Halfcast, but also the Party Favors? 

AM: At the moment, for me, yes. I’m able to create my own schedule, while still trying to adhere to what my store needs. But it’s worked out to where I can make sure I’m always at practice. We practice twice a week with both bands, so it’s been nice to make sure I can be available. Weekends can be a little tough. That’s part of the reason I know that eventually I’ll have to get out of that altogether, so that we can do events on the weekends. 

JT: Mine’s pretty cool. The places that I work at are very supportive of what I do, and they know my band, and I have private lessons to so obviously I’m in control of that. I used to work in kitchens before this, so comparatively this is the perfect scenario. I’m always playing music, I’m always playing my guitar, I’m always thinking about music, and my life is wrapped in it. So, yes. 100% yes. 

RD: Restaurants are kind of a double-edged sword. You can ask off whenever you want if you give proper notice, as long as it’s not during busy season. So, I have plenty of freedom in that sense, but also the amount of energy you put into a full-time kitchen job can sap you a little bit. I can always get the time off that I need to make this work, but I’m hoping the Party Favors can pick up a little bit of that. 

Photo by Andre Mags

And I hear you’re starting to book gigs, so that’s great, but I want to hear some endgame stuff and get a little bit more abstract: when will you have succeeded? 

JT: I’m quoting somebody else here, but it’s difficult to put a finger on it, and I go back and forth on how I feel about it. Personally, success is not a destination, it’s a journey, and we have gone through a lot of trials and tribulations. We’ve been around — this incarnation has been around for five years; the whole thing has been around since 2012. It took four years to do the first album, but it was for free. We survived COVID, not playing shows, and a lot of bands fell through the cracks, unfortunately, in Richmond. I think success is a lot of failures. Obviously, it’s a little cliché, and I could go on, but success is failure, [and] getting up from failure. Going back to one of the previous questions you asked, “What’s the writing process?” Everybody is happy, 100%, with whatever we have ever done, period. I can say that across the board for every single song, for every single record, for everything we have ever done. We have been completely and utterly happy with it, and this album took a little longer because of that. We had to spend a little bit more money because of that. But we are 100% proud of this album, and with everything we’ve ever done at the time. So, that’s what I would consider success, is that I am completely content and happy with this, and I am proud to put it up. We’ve already been successful, in my opinion. 

AM: Personally speaking, I think success for me would be getting to the point where… [I’ve] kind of failed and learned enough to where I don’t sweat the small stuff. Getting to a point where I can be content and okay with what I have going on. It’s okay to eventually pivot and just make do with what’s going on, but to have that happen a little more instantly. 

RD: I can’t add a whole lot more besides that I think we all feel a certain amount of success just out of the fact that… I think I can speak for everyone when I say this is the best band that any of us have been in. That feels good in and of itself. 

JT: Can I change my answer to money?

[Rooms laughs]

JT: Last little tidbit: someone asked us recently, “Where do you want this band to go?” And my answer was, “As far as it possibly can.” So, I’m happy with the success we have, and I would consider it very successful. More success than I’ve ever had before, so I’m thankful for that. But that doesn’t mean that we’re content; we’re going to continue pushing as hard as we can to get whatever we can. 

Now I’m gonna give you to chance to tell me what is next for y’all. What can people expect? 

JT: The biggest thing we have on our plate right now is that Halfcast is releasing its sophomore album Return on June 24th, and that’s the thing that’s been on our mind for the last year. It was recorded at Elephant Ear recording studios with the wonderful and illustrious Jeremy D. Simmons. He helped us create this. He was basically the fourth member, and that was a great process. It was mixed in analog, which is fun.

AM: And expensive.

JT: And expensive. Prices were good at Elephant Ear. Mastered by Dan Millice, the guy who actually did Riverless for Night Idea. We didn’t know that at the time, which is great, because I love that album. Artwork done by Nathan Tersteeg, and we’ve worked with him for a while. It’s what we actually sound like, I would say. Because Year of the Fox was great, but that was just songs I wrote, and it was a different part of my life. Now this is the new and improved form, and we’re super proud of it. 

RD: That’s the biggest thing, is putting out a record that sounds like you. Because bands at our level, you can watch them and they put on a great show, and then they put out a record that’s either way sloppier and doesn’t sound anything like them live, or it’s way too pristine and doesn’t sound anything like that band. So, I really appreciate when smaller bands can put out a record that just sounds like them. 

AM: That and the Direct-To-Vinyl. We’re going to be doing preorders for that soon, and that’s the next thing coming up that we’re gonna be promoting. But the album is here. It took over two years, but it’s here. It’s finally here.  

Photo by Andre Mags

So, what was the experience of making your Hourglass Session like? Has it helped you along the way in promoting your new music?

JT: It all started when Hourglass Sessions hosted a competition to see which artist could best make a cover song sound like their own. The winner would get to direct their own live video shoot with the company. We’ve seen some of Hourglass’s work before, and we knew if we had a chance to collaborate with them, we should take it. We submitted a cover of us playing our psychedelic-rock version of Radiohead’s “National Anthem,” and by some miracle managed to win. 

We picked the Byrd for the location of the session due to its huge influence on us and the Richmond community. Seeing how the Byrd is almost one hundred years old, we wanted to give the video an old-timey vibe. Fortunately for us, the clothing shop Bygones was right next door. We purchased some 1920’s garb, wrote up a script that allowed for multiple shots of the theater to be seen, and got some of our friends to dress up and act. We even hired Bob Gulledge to play an intro of our song in the beginning of the video on the Mighty Wurlitzer. Not going to lie, hearing your own music being played on a 70-year-old instrument that can shake a literal building was one of the top five experiences of our lives.

The actual shoot was a blast, everyone was having a great time. Though we had a script, a lot of the shots were improvised by the actors, who seemed to be encouraged by the creative energy in the room. We had to do a couple retakes because of the actors making us crack up on stage when they played their roles. The videographer/audio engineers, Tyler and Dillon from Hourglass, were professional as hell and brought our vision to life without compromise. The power only went out once, so we would say it was smooth sailing. 

The video has helped us the most with connections in our industry. We’ve been getting a lot of great gigs lately from amazing places, and amazing lineups from all around Richmond, ever since the session came out. We’ve made friends with Tyler and Dillon at Hourglass Studios, who have worked on other video projects with us. This whole process has also made us realize that we don’t need to stop at music as a creative medium. We are more than capable of including other areas of artistry into our work, and we have plans to do so in the very near future.

Halfcast will be playing on Sunday, July 31st at The Camel, along with Asylum 213, Ugli, and David & The Subdivision. Tickets and additional info available at The Camel’s website. Halfcast’s new album, Return, is available now as a digital download on their Bandcamp, and is streaming in most places that you get your music. You can preorder their upcoming Direct-To-Vinyl lathe-cut vinyl release at Leesta Vall’s website.