Michael: Did you guys all grow up in Jersey?

Nick: Yes, we did all grow up in New Jersey and 4 out of 5 of us all grew up in Westfield. The fifth member, Mike, grew up right down the road in a nearby town village (laughs). In Rosedale or in Elizabeth did you grow up?

Mike: Rosedale Park.

Michael: What was it like playing shows around there?

Ian: Most of our shows tend to be in New York. Growing up, most of our shows were at our high school playing to the kids there but in terms of like now when we play our area it tends to be, I don’t know, how would you describe it?

Henry: We mostly play in New York over New Jersey. I feel like the only New Jersey experience we really have is at our high school, its just local kind of like small shows that weren’t really put on by like..

Michael: So now you guys are more trying to go over the river and play some more shows in the city. It’s always been like that, I guess, living right in Jersey it’s so close.

Henry: Yeah I mean we’re only like thirty minutes from the city. It’s a pretty easy drive in.

Michael: That’s great.

Nick: We’re actually in a perfect location. Philly is only two hours away not even, New York is like right up the parkway, and even to get to Boston or Rhode Island, anything, we’re right in the perfect location.

Henry: Easy venturing.

Nick: Yeah it’s easy to get out to many of the important states.

Michael: I hear yah. So any venue you guys have your mind set on that you’d like to play in the near future?

Henry: We’ve always really wanted to play Maxwell’s in Hoboken, which we actually are playing in October (10/13 – buy tickets here!).

(Laughs)

Henry: Dreams coming true! As far as New Jersey venues it’s a place I’ve always really loved and wanted to play and its finally happening.

Michael: You guys are set to release, I believe, your first EP, “Laces,” this month?

Nick: Um I mean it’s actually not our first EP its our third but we’re kind of looking at it as kind if it’s our first. It’s our first EP that we’re releasing out of being in any school situation where it wasn’t our main priority to be in a band. “Laces,” is kind of like a new beginning because to make it we all left our respective colleges. We had always been in school before that and the EPs took a lot longer to make since we had to be students.

Henry: I mean we’ve had two EPs previously, but those, looking back on them, definitely feel like demos. As far as quality with recording, this is just so much more professional in just having an actual sound. It definitely has the most character of anything we’ve done so far.

Ian: The other times we just kind had a couple of songs and took the best ones and recorded them. This time we tried to craft them more.  We worked with Andrew Maury who produced it and we kind of tried to make an EP as a work rather than as a collection of demos.

Michael: How was it working with Andrew?

Henry: It was awesome! We really liked having a producer in with us. Previously, we would just walk into a studio and the guy would sit at the booth and hit record and we’d play. But this, we really took work seriously any suggestion he had considering he offered a lot.

Michael: He’s pretty good at what he does. That’s how I found out about you guys.

Spencer: I play bass in the band, and as far as I go, recording with Andrew Maury actually really helped me develop my own sound. Overall, the band has found exactly what we want to sound like. So that’s the other reason why we consider this EP a new beginning because everything is like the way we wanted it. We don’t want any of our old stuff to reflect what we are.

Henry: The old recordings just sounded so dry and bland. Andrew just helped us develop a specific sound.

Michael: Yeah the tones you guys have on your instruments are so full and rich.

Henry: It’s pretty cool.

Michael: Did you guys do single track recording or live recording?

Nick: We did both. We’re a pretty live band and we’re definitely in our element when we’re playing live. There was over dubbing and secluded track recording and things like that, but we would try to get a lot of character out of a live track and then we would go back in. I know for “My Parents Lied” (download here!) we worked really hard on the guitar parts in that. Like Mike’s part, like Mike, the process of recording your part in “My Parents Lied” is definitely not just like a live thing that we did.

Mike: We did everything mainly live but obviously there was somethings that we had to overdub just to make sure they were precise and accurate.  But it was, for the most part, a live thing.

Michael: Do you think with the accessibility of recording, say in your house or anywhere, versus not going into a studio, that the process becomes a bit tedious in the sense that you’re not paying for time necessarily, and you can take your time on takes and you could actually become devoured in how much time you spend on one take?

Nick: Are you talking about it in terms of the fact that we recorded it in a church in our town?

Michael: More like the idea that now, everybody’s got an MBox and you can just set up anywhere that sounds good.

Nick: For us it was, um, we weren’t paying by the hour but we did have a time limit in that Andrewis a very busy person. And um, we knew that at each point we recorded we only had a couple of days to get done everything that we wanted to. I mean I thought it was a really great set up because I feel like if I paid by the hour then I would have just felt bad about myself being there all day, which we tended to, like into the night, like I would be watching my money disappear. But with this we knew we had a couple of days to really get our best takes and we could focus as much as we wanted on it and I liked it more than paying by the hour. I felt like I could really focus more.

Michael: You said you recorded in a church. How did that play a role in your recording? Did you think about how you’d like to record the EP as you were writing the songs?

Nick: Obviously we’re just starting out so we don’t have a ton of money, so like a good studio was out of the question.Andrewsuggested looking into like a school auditorium or a church or somewhere we could just set up shop and have a great vibe. But we definitely didn’t write the songs thinking about where we could record them. Most of these songs were developed in my basement, which is where we’re sitting right now, and it’s kind of a miracle that we came out with these songs. If you could see this basement, it’s like polka dot and light blue, so recording in the church definitely added a vibe to the songs and character that was previously I think not in them yet.

Henry: It’s just also just being in a big space that offered a lot of possibility as far as sound because there are definitely songs on this EP that we wanted to sound live. Like we set up mics so it had a very roomy feel to it where others had to be very precise and tighter. We were recording drums for certain songs with mics like thirty feet away.

Michael: In addition to all the mics that were close up to give an overall spectrum of sound.

Henry: It gave us a lot of options.

Ian: Another really cool thing about not working in a studio and with someone who hasn’t done that much recording for bands in the past is that basically everything we did was an experiment and we could do just like the craziest idea we could think of. We were putting microphones in like paper towel roles and putting them under a rug somewhere and testing out the craziest different ways to get different sounds from our instruments.

Michael: The paper towel microphone sounds pretty interesting.

Nick: We did that more for like a specific song.

Ian: I don’t know if we ended up using that or not.

Nick: It doesn’t even matter if we used it or not. The best thing about working withAndrew, even though he’s only a few years older than us, he’s like a genius. I don’t know how he learned how to do the things he did. He would think of an idea and he would be like a little kid on Christmas. He’d be like I just figured out that we could fit this mic into a paper towel roll.  And we’d be like yeah? And he’d be like yeah! Let’s do it! It was really bizarre and I definitely think that we wouldn’t have gotten that if we had just gone to like a studio where the guys would be like alright lets just set up and do it. That’s what it used to be like.

Michael: I like how you describe it as a little kid on Christmas.

Nick: Yeah, you should just see it.Andrew face would light up like I know exactly what we’re going to do. And even if we failed his face would be like at least we tried it guys.

(All laughs)

Henry: It was just awesome because he was as enthusiastic about recording as we were. That was definitely what we were looking for in a producer.

Michael: I think that’s the best type of situation. You have somebody who, like you said, is just as enthusiastic about doing the recording as you guys are about writing the songs and hearing yourselves back. It just helps when somebody is that into it.

Nick: It is also great because we were really his first recording experiment so he was kind of learning how to make these sounds on his own. If it didn’t work for him and it didn’t work for us it was just like we were all learning together so that was pretty cool as well.

Michael: Are you guys planning on touring the EP?

Ian: We’re setting up dates now for the fall so that we can go around and hit up all the cities and promote it. It’s probably going to be focused on the northeast for now. We’d like to spread it out to the southern states and midwestern states.

(..And the western states)

(Laughs)

Ian: ..As well as Alaska and Hawaii.

Michael: Just hitting them all.

Ian: I think that’ll come later.

Part Two of The Static Jacks Interview coming tomorrow so be sure to stop back!