friends! eva here! over the past year or so, (thanks to underground), i've gotten the opportunity to join in and fully experience my local music community, something i hadn't really done before. I never imagined there'd be so many talented artists so close to where I live, all creating music and other forms of art. a couple of days ago, I got to meet up with one of the many talented bands in the area, faceplant. I got the chance to ask them about their newest album, live performances, and what they have planned for the future. check out the full interview below!
Can you guys introduce yourselves and your role in the band? Nate: I'm Nate, co founder of Faceplant. I play the guitar. Or I guess, I don't know, I’m lead guitar. But I play the drums in our live sets. So I guess I'm also the drummer. Sam: I'm Sam, I play bass and occasionally do backing vocals for the live sets. Ryan: Ryan; I do guitar, vocals, piano. Sam: and on the album he played drums. What was the writing and recording process like for your newest album? Ryan: So we started writing it in July, we started recording demos. It was a really slow process, because Nate goes to school at Temple in Philadelphia. We did a lot of stuff, just kind of sending back and forth iPhone recordings, kind of bouncing ideas and calling each other all the time. And eventually, we had nine songs that we were really happy with, we saw potential in them a lot. We then decided we're going to go to the recording studio, which is something we hadn't done since 2016. So we decided to go to the studio just because, I mean, the second big album, we were looking to sound professional. We also went to the studio just because we wanted to use the studio itself as kind of an instrument for some of the new songs that we had. After those three days in the studio, we had our producer send us the ProTools session, and we just finished it at home for three months. We would rerecord stuff, we mixed it, and we would have to work really late nights. What was the hardest obstacle you had to overcome while writing and recording? Sam: Nate being in college Ryan: Yeah, Nate being away Sam: Trying to work around shifts, you (Ryan) would work until 7 or 8 Ryan: Yeah, work schedules. Just a lot of distance in between sessions. Sometimes we would have days where we just felt a uninspired. The first song we had to work with six different versions of it before we found one that we were happy with. The first song on our album probably is the hardest we've ever worked on a song, we spent hours and hours on it. So yeah, I guess just getting in the groove. Sam: A month before we went to studio, I was finishing up my first solo release, too. So I had to go from that mode to this mode, pretty much within the span of a day. And that was a bit tricky for me. Nate: I’d just like to emphasize how tricky the first song was, I think honestly, that song was the most difficult thing we've had to do because we recorded the skeleton tracks with Kevin, we worked on the song for three months, got it to a point where we thought it was good, and then we had a listening party the night before the album came out, and nobody liked it. So we recorded it in less than 24 hours. Ryan: Yeah, that sucked. Nate; Now it’s everybody's favorite song on the album. Has the DIY scene in Maryland influenced you or your music in any way? Nate: We’ve pretty much been through every phase of DIY. We've been through pop punk. Hardcore. And now we're doing I don't know what this is. Indie rock? Sam: Well, you also went through a lo-fi phase before too. Nate: We did lo-fi chill beats to study to. Ryan: Yeah, I guess there's like, like, healthy competition between us and other bands. I mean, we work with a lot of other bands, Tyler (member of local band “The Dune Flowers”) took a lot of our recent pictures, I mean yeah you know, we’ve got bros. Yeah, I saw you guys at The Spider Dome probably a year and a half ago with Stranger. I noticed that everyone who was performing were friends with each other, it’s a nice community Ryan: It gives us a really cool feedback circle for when we’re looking to show each other new songs or looking to put on a release show.
How do you incorporate all of your personalities into your live performances? Nate: I think that the environment we want to create at our shows, is a place where you can do whatever you want. I do what I want. Y'all do what you want. We don't interfere with each other. Ryan: We’re just ourselves. It’s like a release when we play live, there’s a lot that’s kind of built up. We don't really get to play live that often, not as often as we want. So when we do actually get to play live in front of a good audience, it’s like a sweet release. What does music in general mean to you? Nate: I think that a lot of us, well there's only three of us, have feelings that would be difficult to put into words, it would just be less efficient and less interesting to put in words, so music is just another way of communicating, it’s like a language where I can make connections with people. You're expressing something that couldn't otherwise be expressed. Sam: For me I'm especially emotionally affected by sound in particular. I can overload easily, if I'm hearing two or three songs at the same time it screws with my head a lot, but that also means if I find something I really like I get really affected by it. Who are some of your favorite local artists at the moment? Ryan: Water taxi, The Dune Flowers, Ben Chase, Lil Pussy Bitch, that’s Jesse from Water Taxi.
Where do you guys see yourself going from here? Sam: Philadelphia Ryan: Yeah, Philadelphia. we want to just kind of expand our audience and really find the right type of people that are going to like our music, college kids. Because I mean, we're all going to in college next year Sam and I are going to our first year of college, Sam’s going to be at Temple and I'm going to Howard Community College. Yeah, we're just really hoping to market to some college kids and build a real name for ourselves. Yeah, we can make weirder, more expressive music as we go along.
I would like to thank Faceplant for sitting down with me and hanging out! Check out their new album streaming now.
Photos by Tyler Drager
