Interview: Surrogate
Tuesday, August 11th, 2009Surrogate released their second full length record, ‘Popular Mechanics’ on Tooth & Nail Records a little bit ago [July 14th] and so we wanted to talk about it a little bit. Here is a short and sweet interview with Chris Keene. If you have not given the newest album a listen yet, you really should.
TAP: Could you give a brief history of the band up to this point. [By Brief I mean the length of 1, maybe 2, twitter posts]
Jordan (Drums) and I were in a full time touring band that played a very different kind of music. I wasn’t really involved with the creative process for my old band, so I decided to try my hand at writing and recorded some demos when we had time off. I ended up showing the demos to Jordan and he expressed interest in playing them with me. When our original band broke up, we demo-ed about 20 songs, got signed to Tooth and Nail and made two records.
From a listeners point of view there is a lot different when comparing ‘Love Is For The Rich’ and ‘Popular Mechanics’, but from the band’s point of view, what has changed between the 2 albums?
With LIFTR we incorporated a ton of different styles into our record… we had our country song, our folk song, our dance song, our 60’s pop rock song. And I’m still really proud of all those songs, but they affected to co-hesiveness of record in a negative way, I don’t think we gave the listener a feel for who we are as a band. With ‘PM’, we really tried to tie the record together stylistically while still retaining the range of influences from the last record. On top of that, ‘PM’ was recorded in an actual studio as opposed to my bedroom, so the recording it self in much higher quality.
