{"id":5160,"date":"2019-04-24T05:00:47","date_gmt":"2019-04-24T05:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/scadradio.org\/?p=5160"},"modified":"2019-04-24T01:32:59","modified_gmt":"2019-04-24T01:32:59","slug":"a-conversation-with-telethon-milwaukees-finest-power-pop-punk-band","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scadradio.org\/2019\/04\/24\/a-conversation-with-telethon-milwaukees-finest-power-pop-punk-band\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation With Telethon: Milwaukee’s Finest Power Pop Punk Band"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
SCAD Radio Event Director Maya Looney sat down for an interview with Telethon, the band behind albums like the rock opera, The Grand Spontanean<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Maya: Can you guys real quick just explain yourself and what you do for the band?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Erik: I\u2019m Erik, a.k.a. drums. I play drums.\nThat\u2019s pretty much it. (Laughs)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex: I\u2019m Alex, \u201cDeepsoundz\u201d is the\ndescriptor. I play bass and backing vocals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erik: I do want to note that I do all the aux\npercussion, it\u2019s not Gene Jacket.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex: He was wrongly identified on our last\nalbum as doing so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kevin: I\u2019m Kevin. I\u2019m lead vocal and rhythm\nguitarist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jack: I\u2019m Jack, and I play lead guitar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erik: And Gene Jacket who isn\u2019t here plays\nkeys, glock, and synth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n How long have you guys been around as a band?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Erik: So we made an album called Witness<\/em> back in the winter of 2014, beginning of 2015. Kevin was out in California. We hadn\u2019t spoken in many years. He blindly texted me, it was a pretty rude text. He asked me if I wanted to play drums on this project he\u2019d been working on. He did that with just about everybody except Alex.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex: I wasn\u2019t a part of it at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erik: We recorded Witness<\/em> in Whitewater, which is where I was going to school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex: The band was known as Fitness at the\ntime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erik: It was me, Jack, Kevin, and Gene Jacket,\nwho played third guitar. He didn\u2019t play keys yet for us. We were still trying\nto figure out our sound at the time. We made that and released it in 2015, and\nshortly after that Alex joined.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kevin: We went through several options and he-<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex: …was the only one who said yes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kevin: Don\u2019t put that in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (All laugh)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex: Kevin had made more songs and invited us all out to California\u2026So we all learned the songs separately and flew out and recorded our second album Citrosis<\/em>. That was the time that we finally became a \u201cband\u201d and started playing a lot of shows after that with that album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erik: It was originally going to be Citrus<\/em> by Fitness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why the\nname change?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Kevin: There was another band in the same\ngeneral area that was called Fitness that made similar music in description to us,\nso it was just way too confusing. So we changed the name and then instead of Citrus<\/em> we called it Citrosis<\/em> because the rhyme wasn\u2019t there and we thought it was kind\nof a stupid name.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erik: We cycled through a lot of bad names.<\/p>\n\n\n\n You\nwent out to California to record the first album, which you did with your last\nalbum, The Grand Spontanean<\/em>. How is\nthat process of traveling to record instead of being more local?<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex: Honestly, it\u2019s pretty easy. It\u2019s not\nsomething we would\u2019ve done if we didn\u2019t have a really good time with that guy\n[Jack Shirley]. We toot that guy\u2019s horn a lot. But he totally deserves it. He\u2019s,\nlike, Grammy nominated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erik: He has everything that you need to\nrecord out there so all you have to bring is yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Jack: Also, when you go somewhere else to\nrecord it makes you focus only on that and nothing else which forces you to\nthrow your whole self into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Erik: Which Modern Abrasive<\/em>, the EP we just released last year, we recorded\nhere.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex: Jack Shirley mixed and mastered it. I\u2019ve\nkind of seen that it\u2019s really hard to find a really cool audio engineer who\u2019s\nnice and helpful and really good at what he does.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kevin: And by now he just gets us\u2026He\u2019s almost\nlike a 6th member of the band at this point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Your last album was your 90-minute rock opera The Grand Spontanean, but your new album is not in the same vein at all. It\u2019s a proper full-length. What were the challenges of transitioning back into that?<\/strong> <\/p>\n\n\n\n Kevin: Originally this was supposed to be\nanother concept album\u2026 I was writing the lyrics as we wrote the music and about\na month or a month and a half before the record was going to be made, I was not\nas far along on the lyrics side or the story side as I wanted to be. But at the\nsame time I was going through a lot\u2026 So just for fun, kind of like a thought\nexperiment, I started to rewrite the entire [album]- everything I had\nlyrically- just stream of consciousness, like my own head, and by the time I\nknew it everything was rewritten and the concept was scrapped completely.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Alex: Musically, the long concept album is\njust trying to throw everything together, whereas this album we focused on\nreally honing in a shorter amount of songs. I think we all agree that this is\nour best and favorite album. The songs are way better and more developed than\nanything on The Grand Spontanean<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n