Bands traditionally form through a shared love of music, a group of people come together with an instrument, then they play together in a garage or a rehearsal space, once they’ve written a small catalog of songs they play their first live show.  Only after playing a number of shows together and honing their craft does a band go into the studio and record an album.  The The The Thunder took that storyline and turned it on its head.

That storyline isn’t a blueprint for success, Lindsay Schief and Greg Olin of Solid Home Life built their amazingly sweet album through home recording sessions and never played live.  The The The Thunder’s story is even less typical, they never played live or even played all together in the same room at the same time until months after the release of their debut album All At Once.  In June they embarked on a mini East coast tour and for the first time rehearsed and performed live as a single unit.

This bicoastal band is split between Brooklyn and Seattle.  Dan, Julia, Artie and Glen making up the New York contingent with Nick and Jill in Seattle.  The band arrived in Seattle with little more than bass drum, acoustic guitar, and keyboard tracks recorded from a Civil Defense session in Brooklyn.  From there they put the remaining pieces together one at a time at the Push Pull studio.  But still they never played all together.

What I find so amazing about TTTT is that you get no hint of this division in the album.  They compliment one another perfectly with a thoughtfully crafted and honed sound that you would think they’d been playing for years.  

Equal parts Lou Reed, the Talking Heads and dare I say DEVO, TTTT knows not of the neofolk movement coursing through the veins of the indie music scene.  This is hard and fast rock and roll, with soft and gentle undertones.  Each member is a piece to a jigsaw puzzle that when placed together forms the portrait of a truly great band, they were destined to be so.  If you believe in such things.  When you barrel through the obstacles placed in front of you (like an entire continent) and release an awesome album, I’d say it was their destiny.

If this is what they can do with fractured elements organized into multilayered music with heart and soul, what could they do with more time to coalesce?  They set the bar so high on All At Once, amazingly they can only continue to climb higher from there.

Back in early may I entertained Nick and Jill at my home while Dan and Julia were Skyped in from their home in Brooklyn.  This was the ultimate test of my technological capabilities, and it surprisingly went off better than some of my more straight forward two people in the same room with microphones, episodes.  This was a loose and fun bunch who despite being just a few steps up from a hypothetical band, answered my questions like old pros.

Notably This interview was recorded prior to their East coast tour, and prior to their first full rehearsal.  I entered the interview fixated on the idea that they were separated by an entire country, at the time I wasn’t even aware that they’d never actually played all together at the same time.  Then I became fixated on that idea.  Some time in between the interview and this profile I came to the realization that they did play together, just not in the way we typically imagine a band playing together.  I look forward to interviewing them again some time to see just how things have changed, if they’ve changed.

What follows is an excerpt of my interview Nick, Dan, Julia, and Jill.  The full audio version can be found in itunes here, or in the podcast section of the website.  It seems that I say every episode is my favorite, which isn’t really true.  That said, this was my favorite interview.

 

brian
It almost sounds too surreal to be true, but your first show took place at a Country Western bar in Japan?

dan
It did, but it wasn’t the full band.

julia
We were in Kobe, Japan and we saw a bar called City Lights Country American Music Station Bourbon and Coffee.

dan
That was the full name on the sign.  We were like, “I don’t care what that is but after dinner we’re getting drunk there.”

julia
We went there and our friend was talking to the bartender, and said something about how Dan played guitar.

dan
I said no, but saying no sometimes [in Japan] if you don’t say it strongly enough means yes.  We were politely saying “no, no, no,” which means, “yes I’d love to play guitar.”

julia
As soon as we say no, he gets up from the bar and starts hooking in cables and amps, hands Dan a guitar, and starts yelling out names of chords.

dan
We wound up covering Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley.  This owner, who clearly music was his life was like, “play some of your own songs.”  So Julia got involved and we played three or four songs.  So we count that as our first show.

brian
At that point was there a band?

julia
We had a band, it was just broken into two pieces and we didn’t know how we were going to put them back together.  That was after Jill and Nick moved to Seattle.

brian
How did it happen that you all come to play music together?

nick
We all knew each other in High School and we’ve all been doing our own musical thing for years.  How I became involved, which is how Jill became involved is that I was playing with a different band, and we played a show in Brooklyn and Dan and Julia came.  After the show Dan came up to me and was like, “we have to do something, we’ve been friends for ten years now.”

dan
We were working on songs and there was this moment of “Why have we never played in a band together?”

jill
I often don’t play well with others, so playing in a band with these two guys [Nick and Dan] was threatening to my relationships as far as I was concerned.  So I said no.  When they decided to come out here and record the album, and Nick started listening to the tracks again.  The song I heard was Emergency Room, I looked at  Nick almost angry, “Why didn’t you tell me it was this good?”  Then I said okay.

brian
Had any or many of the songs on All At Once been played live for an audience before they were recorded?

nick
Not a one, unless you count Bronson Kobiashi [from the Japanese bar].

brian
What was it like to make an album that never had any audience reaction to it?

dan
It’s scary.

julia
Up until the day we released it, and still it’s scary.

dan
There was a moment when we were done mixing, where I was, “please I hope people like this thing.”  Because you don’t know.  You try and please each other and build each other up and be our own audience.  There’s always that fear, what if people don’t understand what we were going for?  But the reaction to the record’s been positive.

nick
It is a weird thing, because I have at least played these songs with the band.  Jill hasn’t played any of these songs with anyone in any live or rehearsed situation.  But then my favorite song Hey Forever [on All At Once] I never played that with the band at all.

jill
Our first rehearsal is June 8th and that will be the first time all six of us are in a room together playing these songs.  It’s not only going to be new to the audience, it’ll be new to us.  We know there’s chemistry there, that’s in theory.  We have to put it into practice.

dan
We’re a theoretical live band. ***

 

I often take special note as to how I get introduced to a band; through a show, bandcamp, word of mouth, or a website profile. In this case Jill works with my friend Meghan, were it not for that little twist of fate it might have taken me years to find out about The The The Thunder, fortunately for me, I was right there at the beginning.

Fresh off their East coast tour The The The Thunder will be taking the West coast by storm.  You can catch them August 24th at Le Voyeur in Olympia, August 25th at the LoFi Octopus Fest in Seattle, August 29th at the High Dive in Seattle, August 30th, at Bombs Away Cafe in Corvallis Oregon, and August 31st at Silvermoon Brewing in Bend Oregon.  And don’t forget to grab a download of their stunning album All At Once on their bandcamp page, thethethethunder.bandcamp.com.  You can listen to the full audio interview on our website or in itunes, where I hope that you can take two seconds and please rate and review the podcast.