Evaline – 30-11-2011

Interview with: Evaline
By: Elvira Visser

Evaline is a band coming from California and was founded back in 2003. It took them some time to release their first album that will come out early this year. In those years they have been touring with quite some names. We asked them how it is to be our tour with those bands and how this would effect their writings for their debut album.

How would you make the sound, sound like the Evaline sound. So how to distinct your own music?
Sometimes it can be a wall of music, some particular, , I don’t know it is the way we go about the melodies and the amount of effort we put into the songs, whether it comes out well or not. We do put a lot of effort in it. As we like to get the best from ourselves, most unique and well things.
constantly try to find ourself, the music that we make is very processing, very honest music. We do not force ourselves to much. We make an effort to keep an unique sound jet not be to obscure

is this something your fans like?
We hope so, we hope people will enjoy our music because it is
it is kind of an issue with that, the pro’s and the cons.– we can fit it with so many tours….
we not really a trendy sound, so it has it pro’s and its cons. But hopefully there are people attracted and do notice our unique efforts, hopefully.

Isn’t it hard to when you are writing a song, to use parts or riffs from the music that you like. Because you get influenced by the bands that you like?
There is so much music out right now, so it is almost impossible to be completely unique. But we are very conscious about what we write and if it sounds like anything remotely the same, we disregard it. Or when it reminds us of something, we will point it out to each other and look it up and if it does we trash it. We respect other artist. You often rehears and try something out and if one says that remind me of this band we check it.

You played gigs with for instance Bush and Placebo, do you still learn from those bands when you are their support act.
Of course you do, when you tour with bands who are season veterans you know you learn so much, just to how to prepare yourselves on stage and you see how they do it, and even in song writing to. You know those crazy amazing songs, you start to realise you do not have to write these to have success. You can make simple songs, that still have unique qualities to them which do the same trick. We have learned a lot on that aspect of touring with bands like Placebo and Bush.

From what band did you learn the most while being on tour with them?
I must say, I don’t think we can answer that. It is not so easy to say as you pull different things from each bands. When we talk about learning things, we shared a bus with a touring crew and I think we learned a lot about touring. They learned us a lot about our technical stuff, they would help us out with our technical difficulties. So on that tour we would learn something completely different then from the tour before or after. On every tour you learn something. About how they work, how they arrange things, how they are as persons. You pull from that you see how you would like to have your band. You can implement the good things. I mean, it is like when you grow up you realise characterising you either like or you don’t and you see characteristics in the people around you. You might not like it or you do. Being around different people that adds to your repertoire of characteristics, you live and you learn those same things when your on the road.

Dir and Grey and Apocalyptica
It was really awesome to tour with both bands. Dir and Grey have a very cool following and their fan base is really amazing. You can say that Dir and Grey have a very odd sound. Nothing like our sound at all, not even poppy. Their fans are very receptive to anything. They are very passionate and they were open-minded to other music, so that was a great. Because they gave us a chance to show ourselves, the would listen to us even if it was different they Dir and Grey. And they were the most hard core die hard fans, most fans were following the band the entire tour. Those were at each of the shows. So the fans also got to know us and our music. The band themselves were great to. They did not speak any English but they are very nice guys and super respectful. Apocalyptica they were nice too….we had a few drinks, and some good experiences with them. Really cool guys. Those bands were amazing to tour with surprisingly.

What would you do when you have to do the opening, but there is no response…what then? How do you keep yourself going?
Luckily we had never a crowd who turned their backs. You have to emerge yourself in your music. We have been opening for bands so long, as long as we can remember that we learned learned ourselves to get lost in our music, to play for ourselves in a way. So you need to find your own way. You should not only play for the audience so you do not really have to perform for the crowd, you just prove yourself by your performance. So it is all about how you are on stage not only musically.
and we learned to interact with the crowd when their receptive, you have to respond to that.
something, you know in the history with our band we have been constantly playing with a crowd that have never heard of us. Sadly that is how it has always been. So we are very use to it. Every show we play, by the end of the show we won over some people, and I don’t feel we ever played a bad, well really bad gig. Even if we felt that it was a terrible show, we can say that at almost every show we played – by the end of the show we won at least some people over to like our music or to get a reaction from them. I enjoy being on stage and entertain them, I can’t even pretend when I do not like it. Even if you do not enjoy our show you are at least entertained. Why not go out there and be passionate about it. I love to do what we do and the crowd sees that. I can’t fake that. So yeah.
It is just why we like to play music. But it is so difficult. Hopefully the crowd is receptive to it, to what we do. We will stand there anyway, we will bang on our drums, they always love that and it is hopefully fun to watch.

Did it ever happened, that half way throughout your performance a technical problem occurred and that there is no sound at all?
We mess up all the time, that is nothing new to us. Like yesterday we had a problem with our bass player. When your a support band you usually do not have a lot of time to sound check. I mean when we came here in Europe it is not our own gear and you do know fully know the equipment you are playing with, we are not that comfortable with it. The positive thing is that we have so many members and there is always somebody that can pick it up and we always make something out of it when something goes completely wrong. Luckily we have never had that something completely shut down, but it has been close. Usually it is just one and then the others keep playing so people that have never seen us before might not even notice that something went wrong. But to the fact some equipment just did not had any sound, well it has been close. It is kind of the
We made up the song right on the spot, someone’s shit was down and we just had to do something.
what if everything falls out – oh we start dancing…well probably we try really hard and would do an accoustic set…..and maybe even smashing guitars would be fun. Oh yeah the others agree.

For you, is the looks important as well as the lights?
Lighting, everything is important and we are all into fashion. We are fashionable guys, it is something that we like, but it is not that we agree that we have to dress in a certain way on stage. It is just the way we like to dress, and yeah we like fashion and to dress.
When talking about show, dressing up it is nothing huge but lighting is very important. However as support band you usually have shitty light, and we have to accept that. But yeah, when we have great lighting and the shows goes great – of course the light will add to the show and the overall feel. When you have great light other then our songs, and the lights are done well it makes a huge difference.

Tumblr, how do you thing guys social media is really important?
You guys use it is a good way, do you think it is important to reach fans?
They can see what you are doing, it is important to keep it up to date. It is important. Everyone is doing it nowadays, so you have to do it pretty much. The market is doing it. You want people to have a kind of attention to what your doing, so you want them to check it out.
And you want to have people to have that kind of attentions to your band.

What about your movies, do you also involved in making those or thinking about the concept?
“Yes we all like to participate I mean for “There, there” – they edited together”, while speaking of the other guys, “and a lot of the concepts come from ourselves”. “We all keep a close hand on everything. We do the art ourselves, one is pretty good in that and the other might be better in the actual audio recording and picking it up. So yeah, we like to do this. Not necessarily because we are control freaks, we do it just because it is part of the fun. It is important to be apart of the process ….and it is cheap”. – all laugh.

For the debut album you guys had a lot of songs, like 30 songs – How to pick those who ended up on the album?
“That was kind of a different process. What really helped us in this process is that we were having a producer, we piked him because he shared the passion and had the same ideas. He believed in the ideas we had and wanted to see them done, to the best they could be done. So he came in and there are 6 of us and there are so many opinions that it is hard to agree, we hardly ever agree”.
“There were a few tracks that some of us wished they were on of off this record. In making those decisions he helped us by sharing his opinions – it was more like an extra band member to reassure our thoughts. And we voted a lot resulting in the fact that we licked the outcome or sometimes we didn’t. We voted on the track listing for example Hand having him in there really helped us to get it right”.

Is there any story behind any of the songs that made it through the album?
Well this had become a pretty dark record, we didn’t know what was going to happened with the band, or where the band was going to be. We wrote most of the songs during that time, somehow just writing to write. A lot of the lyrics are about that dark period, and are just about going a dark dark period, pretty much just about you are just trying to get through, with the rest of your life. Songs were scattered apart over the span and quite a bit of time and kind of gathered them all, and put them together – and somehow this worked.
It kind of worked because it was a really hard time, and depressing time. It really had a sound that worked, in our opinion and I really like the overall sound that has this dark maybe even a very negative side to the sounds but even with all that negativity the negative has some positive side on it, you know that makes in beautiful. So it is like you are in that dark place but there still is a light somewhere, a positiveness.

Did you ever wonder if you should continue with the band?
we still do, I mean it is clear to everyone that music is that we want to do. But you can be doing music in all sorts capacity, but we all chose for this way of making music. Naturally there were times we did not know if we would continue or that we could get where we are today. I am surprised we got this far. But in the end we did, and that is something to be proud of, I think. That is why this record is such a milestone to use. To get it out, and to get it released. It was like an energy release for us that it is finally out and having that period of time on the road documented. it was something we needed to get out of our system. And give it to the people who were waiting for something. For the people that were waiting since the EP and who wanted something new from us. If feels really good to have it out and now we are really happy to be on the road. And be able to experience how it will effect our fans while playing live. hopefully all in good ways.

After this we coninued talking a bit about songs they wish they had written and how they hoped their gig would going to be that evening. We talked about how their music had changed throughout the years and their favorites to play on stage. But this is all for another inteview, when they are back on tour after releasing their album.

Links:
Evaline Official