TWO UPDATES IN A ROW? What in the world is going on???
We have a show coming up this Saturday in Mendocino! Mendocino is such an interesting place with such a cool vibe. We're excited to play there.
Is our KALX live set now available on YouTube? You better believe it! Enjoy!
This is perhaps my favorite example of stage presence. It's certainly a goal worth aspiring to.
When I started writing songs as Devoted Fans, my songwriting logic was generally to blend what I perceived to be the style of the Field Mice with the style of Beat Happening. I don't mean the sound of either band, but more the intangibles of both (including the live performance dynamics in the embedded video clip).
When I was younger, I found myself getting so excited about certain bands and wanting to make carbon copies of their songs--not in a plagiarist kind of way, but I'd find myself being so into how certain songs sounded that I wanted to write original songs that did similar things.
As time went on, I found myself wanting to blend the sound of certain things. For example, what if I blended my c86 influences with the textures, tonalities, and ambient style of Belong? What if the Cramps were on Factory Records? And so on and so on.
I'd try to aim for these dynamics with my own songwriting and then I'd get a bit discouraged. I found that there was still a lot of "me" in what I would come up with and I'd perceive that negatively. A friend once told me that he can tell when I'm involved in a musical project because it has a particular sound to it--sort of a sonic fingerprint. At the time, I was disappointed to hear that. I tried to make my projects sound kind of different from each other (especially My Red Dress with Sophia from LSD and the Search for God).
However, I started to see that as a strength. Despite wanting my projects to sound individual and to stand on their own, I'm happy that there is a sonic consistency to the songs that I write and in my production style. I see it now as an affirmation that I'm writing authentically and that I'm not losing my musical voice or that I'm not trying too hard to be like the music I love.
Since having some of these reflections, I've really found that I no longer write music to sound like other artists. Instead, I tend to find influence more in the way that specific artists or songs make me feel. I try to let that guide my own songwriting.
Additionally, I have been increasingly writing songs to explore whatever direction I feel like exploring in that moment. Hyper Devotion was the first set of songs that I made with this mentality. Every song had a degree of spontaneity to its creation, but songs like "8 Ohms Into 4," "Advice From and Old Japanese Maple...," and "Happy For My Friends" were especially flash of the moment creations that were devised very quickly, that are a bit different from the others (in my mind), and that were not agonized over for very long. 8 Ohms Into 4 is an especially notable example of this philosophy. I largely wrote and recorded the music for it while awaiting a friend who was late to meet me. These ones are a bit different from the others, but I hope their spontaneity contributes a liveliness to how they're perceived.
There you have it! You've gotten a second news update. More to come! We're about to go back to El Studio to finish up mixing our forthcoming record. We're excited to share it with you!
Well what do you know? Devoted Fans now has a website!
Will it be updated regularly? Probably not! We're a San Francisco-based band, so we need to work long hours just to survive.
We've been doing some exciting things lately, though! We've played some excellent shows lately (including opening for the Autocollants and Rob & Jay at the Bottom of the Hill in June). We've also been making some progress at SF's El Studio for our upcoming EP! We're temporarily venturing out of home recording to give you a higher fidelity than you might be used to from us! We also played a live set on UC Berkeley's KALX radio station!
This upcoming EP will be the first time the full band (Ryan, Jim, Serena, Mike, Jules, and Jules) makes an appearance on an official recording. How exciting!
Thanks for reading! More to come soon (maybe)!
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