What is your name and role within the band?
Lou + Vinny (songwriters).
How did you start?
V – Me and lou were in a few bands together that always focused more on the live performance than making a great recording or refining a good song into one we thought was really great, so after a while we ended up without a band and bought our first 8 track tape decks and basically started Bleach Day after that.
L – Totes! Once we got the tape decks, it was really inspiring because it felt much easier to get our ideas out without having to explain them in some convoluted abstract way.
V – Yeah make the record and then let the record become the band by itself.
Where are you based?
Burlington, VT.
Please give an example of your music writing process?
L – We usually write a song that’s pretty bare bones and record a demo version to get some perspective. While we’re listening back, we look at the details of the songs – like the transitions between sections – to see if we can make them pop. Then we go on Craigslist to look at the all the shitty cars that are under $500. I don’t know why, but that is surprisingly helpful.
V – One listing in Michigan was literally a car crashed into a frozen pond and like “come get it”.
What are you working on right now?
V – We’re playing some shows coming up in the late summer in Vermont and Montreal and putting in some work on our upcoming album.
What is your gear setup?
V – We’re pretty much straight Tascam in the studio. I have an MSR-16 and 388 and some cool preamps and weird mics. Lots of random, random, old things to run sound through.
L – Haha ya, the Tascam luv runs deep in our house. I have a 38 and a portastudio. My Pops just let me borrow an old Telefunken preamp, which has a certain clarity that the Tascam stuff doesn’t have. I also scoured every avenue I could to find some oddball guitars and sleeper amps trying to find the sounds in my head.
What do you like to do outside of music and does it affect your music?
V – I’m a graphic designer and I like to garden and design stuff. I think I write/produce music in pretty much the same way as I design or garden. It’s all really similar to me.
L – I honestly don’t do much besides music. I got an organelle, so I was trying to learn how to code using pure data to design my own patches, which was actually a miserable failure. But, failing can be fun sometimes. Cooking, drawing, and writing are cool too.
How would you describe your music genre?
L – Warble Pop.
V – Weird Pop.
Do you know any music theory?
L – Kind of, but I try not to think it those terms while I’m writing. It’s more useful for figuring out things live and teaching our band mates the songs.
V – pretty much the same deal. We definitely both play mostly by ear.
What are your plans for the future?
Both: quit our jobs lol.
How did you get into music?
L – My dad is a guitarist and songwriter. He and his brothers played music together a bunch too. So, I got to play around on their instruments. When I was 4 or 5 my dad made me a miniature Rickenbacker and a little wooden mic that I would pretend to be John Lennon and scream like the Beatles did on the Ed Sullivan show. Then I got really into drumming and that opened up a completely different musical world. Music is just addictive.
V – When I was a kid I mostly dug big ass holes and recorded weird stuff on this little portable cassette recorder my parents had, then when garageband came around, I taught myself guitar by playing to tracks of myself playing and slathered that in effects. I was usually trying to just make new sounds, not really even songs until the more recent few years. I took a few music lessons but it was hard for me to learn from other people because I’ve never been super interested in playing other peoples’ songs.
What are you listening to at the moment?
V – The new Washed Out 😛
L – That Bedouine album and some SoundCloud peeps.
Image credit : lukeawtryphotography.
Who are your top 5 influences and icons?
We’d rather not name names, but Noname is on both of our lists for this Q.
When are you playing next?
August 7th at Higher Ground with Phantogram.
https://www.facebook.com/BleachDayBand/
https://www.instagram.com/bleachdaiii/
https://open.spotify.com/album/1BLkAYMwjh3ZFhvoOSzEoY
