Vera Violets: Q&A

<img src="http://www.qromag.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/veraviolets.jpg" alt=" " />Brought about by the creative mind of Jonathan Beadle, the Vera Violets can be described as billowy, lush whirls of soothing psychedelia.  QRO recently asked...

    The group has announced that their new album, Dirty Rainbow will be available this summer, via Safranin Sound and Tonevendor.  Here's what he had to say:

QRO: How would you describe Dirty Rainbow, in comparison to your past recordings, such as Sunshine Dust?

JB:  Well, there's more of a group effort on this record.  We've gone through some line changes and the people playing in the band now have had a lot to do with playing their own parts on it, and bringing a lot of new instruments into the recording studio.  So, where Sunshine Dust, Drone Dimension, and Last Kiss were mainly me.   Now we've kind of evolved to a band where its not just my project; it's an actual band with six people who are all contributing to the record.  And we went through this whole phase of experimenting with synthesizers; we just fell in love with keyboards for a little while.  So, while we were making the record we went through that, and then got back into guitars.  We were just coming up with all sorts of different ways to record guitars, that we never had done before.

The whole recording approach was completely different this time.  We didn't do anything on that record in the style that we did in Sunshine Dust or Last Kiss, besides using the same recording program. But besides that, the mics, the instruments, even the feel of the songs… this album is probably more upbeat.  It has a really good solid rock 'n' roll kind of feel to the album, but then at the same time, it's kind of reminiscent to the shoegaze stuff I’ve done and other psychedelic things.  It's still there but it's just different now.  It sounds bigger.  We used more keyboards than ever.  We used over dubs of keyboards and guitars.  We just kept over dubbing and over dubbing, to get it to sound big.  We did some guitars through the mic, others were recorded directly.  And, like I said, being able to have access to bigger rooms. 

When we did the drums, we used a whole entire room to get things to sound bigger, and even the excitement about making it – just the vibe everybody brings to it – you can kind of hear it in the songs.

There are a lot of what I consider hit songs on this one. We wrote some catchy stuff in the past like "You Turn Me"; it's almost a whole album of stuff with that feel. It slows down and goes like in a weird direction, but we always kind of bring it back to that.  So when it comes out and people hear it, I think it will catch on more than the other records because there are so many more of those really catchy songs on one album.  And usually those songs are the ones you want to sound big, because you know that they're really catchy, so you want to just produce on those to make them as polished as you can get them because you know that they'll be very effective, especially live.  We've been playing a lot of our new album live, and it seems like we're getting more of a response and bigger turnouts lately.

QRO: Do you have any favorite tracks in particular on the new album?

JB:  Yes, there's this one called "Love Candy", the second song on the album.  I think that we're going to do a music video for that one, and definitely put it out on the internet as soon as the album comes out, and put out some sample tracks for people to check out.  That will definitely be one of them.  It kind of has an early BRMC feel on it, and we really kind of always wanted to do some stuff like that. With really fuzzy guitars, three organs, two synthesizers, two tambourine tracks, two bass tracks, and just the melody of it is really catchy, you know.  It has the guy and girl vocals, its fast, you can dance to it…  In Tampa on Saturday nights, they'll play britpop stuff, whatever, and people go dancing.  It would totally mesh with all of that.  We played it people would go crazy for it, you know the same as they would if they played a Killers song.

QRO: You've signed with Safranin Sound.  Will you tell us about that?

JB: Well, it [the new album] will be more available than the other albums.  The other albums were available on Tonevendor, by Paypal, and Soulseek.  I’ve done searches and found all sorts of rare recordings I didn't put out on there.  So people find it on there anyway, but as far as being on Safranin, there's more distribution.  You'll be able to get it on iTunes, Safranin's online store, and we're still going to be keeping Tonevendor stocked.  So, it's just more ways for people to be able to get the music, and we're working with people who are kind of where we are too.  Because all the other bands that are on this label, we're kind of affiliated with them anyway.  The two people who run it, Jake Reid and his wife Kim, played in this band called Alcian Blue, and we've played shows with them before up in DC and Virginia.

And another band on this label called Ceremony – two of the members are from Skywave, a band that was a huge influence on the Vera Violets and especially the early Drone Dimension stuff.  So its kind of a collective of these bands, all coming off of the same record label, and its good in that sense because the audience of people who are into that will see all of this stuff that they are into, its all kind of connected somehow.  And the way they run the label, they're just trying to help out bands like us and bands that we're friends with who are going to put stuff on Safranin, too.  We're just kind of all helping each other out.  It's small, its not like a major label or anything, we're not getting any money to go tour or to do anything at all.  It's just kind of, they'll put out whatever we make and we plan to release a lot of stuff this year, besides Dirty Rainbow.  We're also putting out a live album called Space 66.  It's a good hour of live material. 

Also, a remastered Last Kiss is going to come out this year; It's going to be all the original songs plus all the outtakes, so there will be 18 tracks on the new release of Last Kiss and that comes out this year, and we've reworked the album cover a little bit, kind of vamped it up a bit, so that's gonna come back out.  Also, a DVD of all of our music videos.  We've compiled them on to one DVD with some live stuff too.  We try to film every show.  So its like four different releases this year from now til the end of '07.  We're just going to keep putting stuff out.  The first thing that will come out is Dirty Rainbow, then after that we'll put out Space 66, and then Last Kiss will come out again, and hopefully by Christmas we'll put out the DVD.

QRO: Have you found Tampa to have a decent follwing for shoegaze and psychedelic music?

JB:  There are a lot of people around here who definitely appreciate what we do but, I think we kind of stand out around here.With the other bands that are very good, (not doing what we do, but I still like what they do) their shows are more… a real indie-looking kind of a thing – most of the bands just kind of do that – really stripped down. But we put on a whole fucking show ; visuals, smoke, we all dress up, and nobody around here does that, so some people really think it's awesome, and other people will be like "no, you know i'm not really into that kind of a thing".

There is definitely not a huge audience in Tampa for shoegaze, or psych, or whatever that we do.  I mean it exists here, you know, we've been playing around here for a few years and we still always get turn outs.  Probably not as big as some other local bands around here, but it's not a key place to be for this kind of music.  There aren't any other bands around here that sound like this.  There are tons of bands, a lot of them are really good, but no one really does what we do around here.

QRO: Well, you have a rare sound.

JB:  Thank you.  I think what you were saying earlier too, that you felt like there was a wall of sound present in the stuff we did in the past.  I agree.  I think that we did, but I think its probably something we've always done and something we always will do.  There's just something different about it, it just sounds new, kind of like reinventing our sound, but without completely abandoning what we do, and I feel like for the first time we have a really solid lineup. 

Pretty much the whole band are people I've been best friends with for a long time, and we're finally working together.

QRO: Does that help with the dynamics, in recording?

JB:  Yeah, it definitely does because you know, where we would normally just be hanging out anyway now we hang out, we make records.  So, the people that I've usually worked with in the past, my whole relationship with them was just pretty much just work; I'd see them at practice, I'd see them on the recording or doing the show, but not anything that was unband related, you know.  We wouldn't hang out.  I had my band, and then I had my friends, but the way that the lineup is now, its just everybody that I'd normally hang out with, all playing in the same band now.  We're all musicians, we're all doing other things,but we've got this together and it's working out really well.
 
QRO: Is there a difference between your the instruments you record with and live equipment?

JB:  Yes and no.  Everything we use live, we use on the new record too, but we don't bring as much of that equipment to our shows.  Even with six of us, there's no way to play everything that we use on the record.  So, it's stripped down live.  Live is two guitars, one keyboard, bass, drums, and you know, vocals, tambourine… We don't bring organs to the live shows, and the keyboards, all sorts of different guitars and shit, we just bring what we need.

QRO: Will there be a tour following the release of the new album? Any shows in South Florida?

JB:  No, not yet.  But we're definitely going to come down there this summer.  We talked to this guy last night from Fort Lauderdale, who was at our show last night.  He's going to try to help us out with getting some shows down there.  If it all works out, we probably want to travel up toward the DC area this summer too, and play some shows with our label mates Screen Vinyl Image and Ceremony.  So that's probably all in the summertime, but I don't know exactly yet.  Probably nothing until after June and July would be the soonest that we get ourselves out there.

QRO: Your music is very psychedelic; some songs are very dreamlike,and some are more up tempo. Does this affect you while recording or playing live?

JB:  Yeah, but in a good way.  We try to make the songs live flow on the setlist the same way they do on the album.  We don't always play the songs live exactly the way they sound on the album, you know.  We do different versions of the songs and we try to make things flow.  We tend to not play much of the slow stuff live though. Most of the slow stuff just comes out on the albums.  At our live shows, we usually play our faster, catchier stuff.  We'll do some slower stuff like "Euphoria" and then mid-tempo stuff, but the really slow stuff like "Pale Girl" and "Nothing's Adding Up Tonight", stuff like that, we never really do that kind of stuff live.  People have yelled it at us sometimes, like they'll say things like play "Down" or play "Serotonin" or something. "No, sorry. We didn't rehearse it, but thanks for knowing our song titles!"  So we know people actually have the album.

QRO: Would you tell us about your journey from Drone Dimension to the Vera Violets?

JB: Basically, we branched out from being a pretty strictly shoegaze band.  We were just totally in love with My Bloody Valentine, Slowdive, and Mary Chain, and the list goes on.  Lush, all that stuff was the early influence and it was almost all I listened to.  For a long time i was just totally into shoegaze; I still love all of that stuff and still listen to it.  I did all of that on Drone Dimension and on Last Kiss.

By the time I got to Sunshine Dust, I wanted to start branching out and doing other things that I wanted to do that I like , because I've always…as much as I love shoegaze, I love psych rock and wanted to do some psych stuff too.  Spacemen 3 and Spiritualized are some of my favorite bands too, I love them just as much as My Bloody, Slowdive, the Velvet Underground, and things like that. So I wanted to do some of that stuff too. We started doing that, and just kind of kept on.  This is probably the best thing to tell you from the new album; Everything is summed up now.  You could see us kind of dabbling with shoegaze in the early stuff and then in the middle with Sunshine Dust it was kind of both, it even sounds like two different albums, we've managed to mesh all of it together now.

The way we sound now is everything we've ever done all combined into one thing, and made a new sound out of that. Now everything just kind of flows.

The Drone Dimension album and Last Kiss flow very very well, because all the songs are in the same vein. And Sunshine Dust has it's own flow, but it's up and down.  It's also very symbolic of the state of the band at that time and my own personal life.

So I'm glad that record turned out the way it did.  But at this point, everything is going very well and we've brought everything we've ever done into one sound.  So this album will flow like earlier stuff we did, but with our sound now, which is kind of Last Kiss meets Sunshine Dust, but with more rock and more attitude now; ballsier.  There's a lot of dirty, low end sound.  Really fuzzy bass and low guitars, it is a little bit ballsier in that sense.  So, thats why I say "with more attitude".  It's heavier, but it's not heavy. Not a heavy record, but its definitely a rock 'n' roll record.  And we're still doing guy/girl vocals, but more up front.  Not tucked back with lots of reverb on it.

QRO: What have you been listening to recently?

JB: Recently i've been listening to David Bowie, Screen Vinyl Image, the Jesus and Mary Chain, BRMC, and some Beat Happening.  So that's kind of what I've got on rotation right now.  It's always changing up but that's what I've been playing the most this past week at my house.

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