Issue date: 4/11/08 Section: Campus News

Iron Hills How did the band get its start? Dave Estey: My brother and I were supposed to play an acoustic set with at a local restaurant in Parsippany, New Jersey, and me and Brain [Plunkett] met up a week or so before that and I asked him to play and. Brian Plunkett: Hey do you want to play some comedy…? DE: So it was like, yeah, we ought to throw something together, so we did. And this is how this whole thing started. Caleb Estey: Kind of just panned out. Tim [MacKenzie] and I had been writing together for a while so we kind of just manifested the whole thing and the band happened. Chris Huynh: I just kind of jumped in after. DE: He's pretty good though. CE: Chris and I go to school together so we had been jamming. CH: We're both seniors, graduating. *Laughter* If you could claim similarity to three other bands, what would you say they were? CE: You could throw some Chili Peppers or Sublime… Sublime big time, some of the songs sound like Sublime, but the hard stuff has more of a tinge of Metallica, but not Metallica style. DE: I say it has guitar and bass of something that's a little harder like Metallica, and I always try and do stuff that's representative of older music like [Led] Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, but Led Zeppelin mainly. Creatively, what makes you unique? DE: Timmy dances like Freddy Mercury. CE: Our cooperation and our ability to diversify. DE: To pull different styles into an original format that works. CE: We honestly come from all different backgrounds of music. I listened to Metallica my whole years growing up. I used to play them constantly, but after that you get kind of tired with it since there's only so much you can do with metal and then after that you can kind of take that bring it to the table somewhere else and incorporate it in other styles of music. If you ever hit it really big, mainstream, would you sacrifice what makes you unique to be more popular, and what part of it would you sacrifice? DE: How much money are we talking? *Laughter* CE: I think we're pretty content with playing the smaller venues and not having to sacrifice as much of our own original style. I think collectively if we could move on to… The thing we're looking to do as a band is to pay our bills and still continue to play. Tim MacKenzie: And there are sh*tloads of bills to pay. CE: I think that there are loopholes in going mainstream and I think that it would be great if we sacrificed certain things, because that creates change, and I think change is what really puts a test to somebody's musical ability, what kind of stuff you can play, and the range of it all. You could play pop stuff for the rest of your life, you're set and one of the greatest musicians ever because you can stand those songs for that long. DE: That's it though… That's the whole thing. We can stand our songs. We like playing what we do. CE: Any time you do get big, or you get a producer, and they try to tell you what to play and all that, to some extent they know what they're doing, they know how to evaluate what direction you're trying to go. At the same time, you don't want to get lumped into that category with everyone else, and you sound like exactly like this band, Panic! At The Disco, you sound like Fallout Boy, or you sound like Green Day, but you don't want to get lumped into that, because then you're just becoming part of that mainstream "blob" of music. Nothing's really setting you apart from that. I think that's the most important thing we're going for, trying to stay out of that and make the production. TM: If we could stay indie as long as possible, and still make the money to cover our sh*t, then… DE: Dumba**. What influences do you take or have you taken from other forms of media, like TV shows or movies? Not from other musicians. CE: I like to take lots of gimmicks. You hear on the radio and you see on TV all these drummers and all these great musicians that have these gimmicks. Angus Young, he had the walking around in circles on the stage. Keith Moon had the ridiculous speed and all that passion. I try to take gimmicks out to make this burned impression into your brain, of "Oh, wow. That's Caleb Estey, the dreadlocked drummer." TM: As an entertainer, it transcends music to movies and there are certain characteristics about personality and presence that I try to capture as the lead singer. So as you're listening to music, there's a show going on onstage at the same time. DE: Plus Caleb looks like Animal from The Muppets. What one moment in the band's past, if there is one, defines the idea of "sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll?" DE: So we were driving back from a show in Clifton, right. One of our friends was puking out the side of the car, and one of our friends threw a beer bottle outside while a cop car was passing us. The cop turns around and checks it out, and a beer bottle had spilled in the back of the van, so there's beer spilling out into the road, as we're driving down the road. And the cop pulls us over. We thank God every single day after this event happened. He pulled us over, he shined a flashlight back there, and there's like 10 people, no seatbelts. CE: We use the family's piano van as a gig van, and the whole back, as far as our gear was, there's just people just scattered all over the whole thing. TM: And then he pulls us over, right. I'm driving. And he's like, I'm just going to let you go because I've got better things to do tonight. He asked us, 'You guys know this isn't safe, right? You guys might want to get rid of those empty beer bottles. You might want to think about throwing those away. So I'm going to run your license and then I'm going to get you out of here.' So I give him my license. He's like, 'Do you know your driver's license has been suspended?' I'm like, 'No, that's news to me. I guess I'm going with you then, doesn't it?' DE: So then Timmy's probably the third most sh*tfaced person and the cop looks at him, he's playing it straight… CE: I had been talking to the cops since they pulled us over. I jumped out of the back of the van. They asked if anybody was good to drive, so I was like, 'I'm fine, I'll get this thing all the way home.' TM: We drive away… DE: The girls were flirting with the cops… So we walked away with nothing… TM: I have a court date for that… A few hundred dollars later, lawyer fees, fines, that'll be a nice day. CE: Pay your parking tickets, you f*ck. That was the last question I had. TM: Thanks, we appreciate it. The Title How did the band get its start? Evan Handler: One day I was making a techno song in my room, just playing around. And Nick [Esposito] walks in while I'm making it, and he's like, 'I can sing to this if you want me to,' and we had been playing acoustic guitar for a while together, so I knew he could sing, so I was like, 'Why not?' If you could claim similarity to three bands, what would they be? Nick Esposito: Similarity? HelloGoodbye, The Secret Handshake. EH: Daft Punk. What makes you creatively unique? NE: The vocals, and the instruments we put in we make completely from scratch. All the patches and stuff are completely our own now. The beats, if you listen to them by themselves, are hip-hop beats, they don't really lend themselves to the music. And when we put it all together, we make something that no one else really does. If you ever made it big, would you sacrifice what makes you unique for greater popularity? NE: I don't think we could do that… EH: Then we wouldn't be who we are. NE: We're really… it wasn't like we planned it this way, but our audience is the pop mass appeal, 'I want to dance to this' sort of audience. So it's not like we could really sell out, because it's really what we do. What one moment is your past, if there is one, best defines the statement "sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll." NE: For me personally, well I don't do drugs, and I wasn't having sex in this instant. We were playing Spark's nightclub in Bridgewater, and I think it was our third show ever, and we packed the friggin' place. And everyone came right up to the stage. And I stood on the edge of the stage and leaned into the crowd to sing, and everyone held me up. It was really cool. That was that moment for me. EH: For me, it was probably one of our shows at The Main Stage. We would finish playing a song and the crowd would cheer, but the crowd was so loud that it sounded louder than the drums in the ear next to me, and that was just amazing. And then at the end of that set, we got our first ever encore request, which just blew my mind. NE: That was so cool, hearing "One more song!" We did today [at Bokenstock], which was kind of nice. EH: That's always my, wow, this puts a smile on my face. *Editors Note: Interviews compiled by Andrew Scagnelli, full interviews can be found on The Stute's website at www.thestute.com

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