Interview: Still Flyin'

I chatted to lead singer Sean Rawls of this up and coming band about having so many members, videos and cover songs.

How did the band form?

It started as a joke. I was in another band in Georgia, when I was at university, and I had this joke reggae song called ‘Never Gonna Touch The Ground’. When I moved to San Francisco I was still kind of obsessed with that song, so I built a band built around [it]. I invited everyone I knew to be in this super reggae band, then we started playing and it was a lot more fun than anyone had imagined. Architecture in Helsinki asked us to go on tour and we’d been a band for like, six months. We were like, ‘what, go on tour? We can’t do that there’s too many of us!’ There were fifteen of us, and there still are, but now we tour a lot there aren’t that many people. We were never really interested in touring but it was really fun, so we were like, ‘huh, maybe we should record in studio’ and then we slowly started becoming a real band.

How did you cull members when it came to going on tour?

We all determined that there’s like, the ‘Super Seven’ that have to be there in order for us to sound how it’s supposed to sound, basically. So we were like, anyone else, if you wanna come and there’s room for you in the van, then you can come but you have to like, fly yourself. Some people do that… the seven tends to stay the same, then there’s all these extra people like, ‘ok, ok I’ll do this tour’ and it’s more like a vacation for them. It works out good actually.

I read that you have different members in other countries that you pick up when you get there.

Yeah that happens. It started when we toured Sweden a couple of times for some weird reason, like we toured Sweden before we even made it to the east coast of the US! We have a lot of Swedish friends there and they’ll just play with us when we go there, and then we toured Australia and there’s a lot of Australian friends that we have and they all joined the band. Now that we’re touring a lot we always have the same seven people no matter where we go. There’s still a little bit of that though, this time two friends from Sweden have been playing with us.

Isn’t it a nightmare trying to rehearse with so many band members?

Yeah, it’s a nightmare to do anything! On Tuesday it took, like, thirty minutes just to get everyone to just walk up these stairs and sit down and do an interview. So if it’s that hard when everyone’s together in the same place to just move to another room, you can imagine what it’s like to try and schedule a practice! But it’s all worth it because when we play it’s a lot of fun, it’s like being at a party with all your friends.

How did you guys go about getting signed? Did you approach them or were you doing your own thing and then someone saw you?

Moshi Moshi, one of the guys that runs it, Stephen, he put out Architecture in Helsinki records and Architecture in Helsinki were like, this band are really great you’ve got to listen to them. So he listened to us way back when we just had demos and he was interested but he was like, ‘not quite’. Then he kept talking to us sporadically for several years and when we finally recorded our album he was like, ‘I hear you’re recording your album, let me hear it’ so we sent it to him and he was like, ‘alright, let’s do it!’ So it was good. They’re a really good label.

I also saw that you refer to yourselves as ‘hamjamming’… is that just a jamming ethos or something else?

We have this band guru type of thing, which is [a] hippie kind of thing I guess. He designs all our album art and shirts and stuff, even writes these tour itineraries for us, with like, insane goals and stuff we have to do to keep it interesting. He made up the word ‘hamjam’ which just means like, having a really wild, good time basically, and we decided we’re hamjam music. I guess we could call ourselves a party band.

Who are your influences? Pavement I think are a big influence of yours?

I don’t think musically we sound like them at all. When I was growing up, they were one of my favourite bands ever, their attitude to stuff had a big influence on me. The easy way to describe it is like, the slacker thing, I don’t think that we’re slackers or they are but it’s the whole thing and the sense of humour that they have going about stuff left a big impression on me. And I really love their music a lot.

So if they don’t directly influence your music, what artists do?

Erm, well, I would say a lot of like, cheesy 80s people influence us now. At first it was reggae, but now it’s like the cheesy 80s, like Lionel Richie, Eddy Grant’s Electric Avenue, stuff like that. I wanted to make songs with a feelgood vibe, like Matthew Wilder that anybody could get into. Not necessarily that cool, but you hear it on the radio and you’re like, ‘oh yeah, this song!’ We’re always changing and one of the goals I have is never to do the same thing. Not change so much that it alienates people, but so that it’s slightly new and something different. Expanding our palette basically, that’s the whole goal and so far we’ve kind of been doing that.

If you could collaborate with anyone, who would you choose?

I always say this answer but I guess it’s true… we want Matthew McConaughey to play bongos with us. That’s the ultimate goal.

Ha! While he’s high, sitting in some random person’s bedroom?

Yeah, not a lot of people know that story! That’s what Still Flyin’ is all about, just really absurd, funny things, you know? I mean that is just hilarious, and he seems like a really funny guy to hang out with.

The alternative scene is very different in America to how it is here. I mean, bigger bands like The Killers mention how they make it big in England before they do in America. Why do you think that is?

I don’t know. I think for a band like Still Flyin’ we’re very… it’s easy for people to be too cynical about a band like us that’s so positive and fun and happy, they’ll be like, ‘what is this shit?’ In America, people are like more, I think they just can’t let themselves go. We’re a dance party band where people dance. We play in San Francisco, our hometown, where all of our friends are there, but there are a lot of people at shows who stand completely still and we always say those are the worst because they just don’t do anything. Then we go and play in Australia and the people are going crazy at our shows and that’s so much fun. I think in certain countries in Europe and definitely Australia, they just don’t care and they’re ready to have a good time no matter what. We’re the opposite of this pretentious band, we’re silly and stupid. In Australia they really get behind it.

When I first heard your music I got such a sense of fun, there’s so much energy. And then I watched the video for ‘Ghost Town’, which is brilliant. Did you come up with that?

Thanks. No, actually most of our videos I do come up with the basic idea and the concept but for this one, there’s one person in the band, her name is Isabelle, she makes videos and does animation and stuff for a living and so she makes all of our videos. That was all her idea and it turned out awesome. Earlier today we were making our new video and I came up with the basic idea.

Where were you filming that?

Just in a loft space that a friend of ours has. It’s like, black, and we’re gonna have animation in it, kind of like green screen kind of stuff. But it’s all stop motion with our faces when we’re singing, like Peter Gabriel’s ‘Sledgehammer’. We weren’t really going for it but now it’s sort of turned out like that and it’s gonna be really good.

What single is that for?

It’s a new song, we have a new EP coming out over here in September and it’s a song called ‘Bullriff’. It’s good, I’m excited to see what people think of the new stuff.

Is it quite similar to the stuff on your current album?

No, there’s more keyboards and electronic drums and percussion instead of bongos, and a lot less horns. What horns there are, they’re really processed so you can’t even tell they’re horns. But it’s still us, it’s still Still Flyin’, it’s just like I was saying earlier, we wanna change every time.

What are three songs you wish you’d written?

Oooh that’s a good question, I don’t think I’ve ever heard that one! Honestly, I would wish I’d written Under Pressure. (Long pause) What A Fool Believes by Michael McDonald and Break My Stride by Matthew Wilder.

Do you do any cover songs?

We’ve covered Young Turks by Rod Stewart which was awesome. So awesome in fact that we played it and the crowd started screaming ‘again!’ immediately after we’d finished playing, so we had to do it again.

Really? That’s incredible. Where was that?

In San Francisco, at our Halloween show, they were really drunk. That’s about it. There’s so many of us that it’s really hard to decide as there’ll always be some people like, ‘that song, I hate that song!’, and we don’t wanna force someone to play a song they don’t like, so we can never decide on covers. Another drawback to having so many people in the band.

What’s next for you guys? Obviously the EP, but what are you doing before then?

We’re going to write some more songs in the summer and work on those and probably record in the fall. Touring in Europe in September, UK and Europe. I don’t know… I guess that’s it. That’s not that much but I guess we’re taking it easy a little bit.

This interview was originally published on www.culturedeluxe.com