|
The following is an excerpt from the book
"How to Become a Successful Band," by "Fighting
Gravity": "Put together a band. (Hopefully this goes
without saying.) Tour constantly. Try to play at least 200 dates
a year. Release 4-5 independent albums and sell upwards of 100,000
copies of them. With a fan base built up and with the success
of your independent albums, this should net you a major label
recording contract. Note: This process may take up to 13 years."
As you have probably gathered, the members
of "Fighting Gravity" followed their blueprint to success,
and it worked (heh-heh) exactly as planned. After 13 years of
hard work and constant touring, they now have their major label
debut, "You And Everybody Else," not to be confused
with the similarly titled "Yourself Or Someone Like You"
by "Matchbox 20," or even with the way my editor answers
the phone when I call, "Who the hell are you???"
They started out at a Richmond college
as a ska band, but over the years as they've matured and their
influences have changed, they've managed to find a sound that
mixes elements of ska, reggae, and rock with rhythms and textures
found in world beat music. It's an interesting marriage of styles,
and one that works quite well, at least on this album.
The first track, and also the first single
from the album, is the straight rocking "Wait For You."
The four members of the band don't attempt to blow listeners
away with power chords. Instead, they let the musical interplay,
and the talents of the vocalist, carry their music. Lead singer
Schavious McGee has the perfect vocal style for this sort of
music. He is similar to the lead singer of the "Spin Doctors,"
in the sense that although his voice may not be the absolute
best out there, you can't imagine anyone else fronting this particular
band.
On the next track, "Bend The Light,"
the band makes it's first foray into the world beat sound. The
bass and drum tracks on this song sound like they'd fit right
in on Paul Simon's "Rhythm of the Saints" album. This
is also the first track that you really notice their horn section,
which is an integral part of later songs. One thing listeners
will notice after the first two tracks, is that the band is not
trying to sell albums fueled by teen angst, anger, disillusionment,
or morbid songs about love gone bad. They are simply crafting
music that is fun to listen and dance to. (God forbid! I ended
that sentence with a preposition!)
The third track, "Forgotten,"
is a fairy tale set to words, telling the story of "princes
and dragons." This segues into the lazy "Turn To Me,"
which uses a slow-motion reggae beat to accompany the wistful
vocals. If listeners have any worry that the rest of the album
will be on the same pace as this song, they're luckily proven
wrong with the next track, "Mission Bells."
"Mission Bells" is my personal
favorite on the whole album. Everything works on this song. It
starts with a really catchy riff by guitarist David Triano, and
goes into a full-blown, danceable reggae number. This is a number
that would translate well in a live show, and I'm guessing it
is one that they perfected live before they ever recorded it.
"Walk Into My Eyes" is a bouncy
track in which the horn section takes center stage. Listeners
may or may not find themselves singing along to the vocals, depending
upon their own vocal confidence, but even the shyest listeners
will find themselves playing air horns or air drums in accompaniment
to the song.
"Waterfall" finds the band doing
an acoustical world beat number yet again. On most of the tracks
the lyrics feature the common elements of water and light. This
leads me to believe that either the songwriters were trying to
mine the veins of symbolism inherent in the concept of light
and water, since a lot of their lyrics are rife with symbolism,
or the songwriters were born in a swimming pool.
Two extremely up-tempo songs follow, "Lost
In The Rain" and "Real World." "Lost In The
Rain" begins with yet another impressive Triano riff, and
features the lead singer trading licks with the horn section.
Lyrically, this is one of the best songs on the album, asking
questions like: "And I feel all right. Should I feel this
way?" "Real World" is pure ska fun. Elements of
madness and English Beat merge with Fishbone-like funk, to create
a song that's imminently listenable and one that makes me want
to drop everything and dive into a ska pit.
The album closes with the slower, drum
heavy "Promise." Studio effects make the vocals seem
to float above the music, which provides an interesting touch.
The horn section creates almost an Arabian sound, playing a riff
that would seem in place played by a snake charmer. It is a decent
song, but seems to be a total 180 degree turn from the two previous
tracks.
Overall this album is one of the best I've
heard in months. It's obvious that the band has learned a lot
from their 13 years of struggle previous to their major label
signing. It is refreshing to see a band that makes music to be
enjoyable, instead of preachy or depressing. This is another
album that I don't skip tracks on, and though I've said this
before, to me that's the highest recommend an album can have.
Interview with David Triano Guitarist Fighting
Gravity
AMZ - Tell me a little bit about how the
band got together.
DT - We started in Blacksburg at the college
of Virginia Tech in 1986. We're coming up on 13 years of being
together now. The drummer, the bass player and I started the
band in college. We started out writing songs and playing gigs
like your typical college band, kind of like a hobby gone mad.
I guess we were all too foolish to believe that we wouldn't be
successful.
AMZ - Was it a surprise when Mercury asked
you to sign with them?
DT - Yeah, because at that point we had
been doing it so long, and we had released 5 of our own CD's.
The last 3 we released have sold between 40-50 thousand copies
a piece, so we would put out a CD every year and a half and just
tour. We made it on a grass roots fan base, and worked really
hard that way. We were perfectly happy. We had done the dance
with several labels, the mating dance I guess, but nothing ever
really came of it. A lot, too, was because some of the labels
were into stylistically some of the styles that were part of
our past, like the ska and reggae we used to do. Since that was
becoming popular, we were being courted for our back catalog
stylistically, while we were really moving more into a rock/world
beat direction. Mercury was really in tune with that. That was
what made it really appealing when they started to come see the
band.
AMZ - Is this album all new stuff, or did
you pull some from your back catalog?
DT - We pulled three of our more popular
songs from our last record. They had gotten a pretty heavy push
regionally and since most of the world had never heard of us,
Mercury wanted those songs on the record. This was fine with
us. We would like to have done a record with all new material,
but we understand their point of view.
AMZ - I guess it's also good to have some
fan recognition of songs when you start touring. I say "start
touring." What I mean is start touring in support of this
album. You've been touring for what. . .almost 13 years now?
DT - Yeah. We're on constant tour. About
every 4 months we take a weekend off.
AMZ - Do you think bands that start out
by touring constantly, and make their name that way, have a stronger
fan base than bands that are just sort of discovered and signed?
DT - Yeah. I think those bands (the ones
that don't do a lot of touring) have a much tougher time. We
have a mailing list of over 15,000 people, and our e- mail list
is over 5,000 people, so when we're doing something or something
interesting happens with us, we get the word out. We have people
in every state on our mailing list, so it's definitely not a
hindrance. Plus, we've toured so much that we're very comfortable
on stage, comfortable doing in- store acoustic stuff or playing
on the radio. All around, it helps you. Bands that haven't toured
a lot. . .some of them do fine. Also, there's the dynamic of
getting along with other individuals on the road, living with
other people on the road. That's worked out and we're all still
very close friends, which is pretty amazing after this long.
AMZ - Does Mercury have any plans to re-release
some of your older stuff?
DT - If this record does well, we've retained
the rights to our old CD's, so we'd love to work out some sort
of distribution deal with Polygram. That would be ideal for us.
Our last record was done with the same producer that produced
this one, and we're really proud of that record still.
AMZ - I really like this album a lot, and
I enjoyed the world beat feel you've introduced on it. Who were
some of your influences?
DT - Personally, Paul Simon. A lot of the
stuff he's done, "Rhythm of the Saints", "Graceland".
. . My all-time favorite as far as lyrics is Neil Young. I like
Bob Marley and Bob Dylan too. Those are my personal influences.
AMZ - I hope you'll pardon the comparison,
if you don't agree with it, but I was reminded somewhat of some
of the stuff the "Police" did on songs like "Mission
Bells."
DT - Oh yeah. Actually, the "Police"
were one of my favorite bands too. I can see that. Especially,
we have some of our earlier music that definitely seems more
"Police" influenced with more of that reggae guitar
style. That stuff is definitely what we cut our teeth on. We
started out as primarily a ska-rock kind of band and we were
influenced by "Madness," "English Beat,"
the "Police," "Elvis Costello" and "Joe
Jackson." Those would be collective band influences early
on.
AMZ - Do you have a primary songwriter
or is the songwriting pretty much a group effort?
DT - At this point, it's pretty collaborative.
Early on, there were people that wrote the majority of the music,
but now everyone is bringing ideas in and helping each other
with their songs. The songs have evolved for that reason.
AMZ - I think in a lot of cases you can
tell when there's a collaborative effort because you don't just
hear one person's ideas. There is more variety musically.
DT - Yeah. I think our album has some pretty
much straight ahead rock stuff, then it's got some world beat
feeling stuff, then some reggae touches, so there is definitely
some diversity there. I think that's good. A lot of labels want
to know exactly what you are stylistically so they can market
you in a certain way, but I'd don't really like to define what
we're doing. I'd rather other people tell us what style we're
playing and just write songs.
AMZ - You're touring now in support of
the album. Is there a place where tour dates are listed?
DT - Yeah. On our website at www.fightinggravity.com,
the tour dates are listed. We're doing a lot of regional stuff
trying to hit all the markets we're really big in. The majority
of our fan base is on the east coast, so we're gonna start there
and then work our way across country and see where the tour takes
us. We've got a pretty interesting date on October 9th - we open
for "Aerosmith" at Nissan Pavillion in front of 25,000
fans.
AMZ - Are there "dream bands"
that you would love to open for, or have open for you?
DT - Yeah. Right now I would love to tour
with the "Barenaked Ladies." I've been a fan of theirs
since their first record came out, and I'm really happy that
now they're having the success they're having. As songwriters,
they're so clever. I know they're on tour and for us that would
be amazing. Other bands I really like are "Verve" and
"Semisonic." It would be cool to do dates with them.
And for me, the ultimate would be to go out with "Neil Young."
We're all huge fans of "The Dave Matthews" band too,
so that would be pretty cool.
AMZ - As I said earlier, I like the rock/world
beat combination that you guys do and I'm hoping more bands will
pick that up.
DT - It's definitely fun fusing international
rhythms with pop sensibilities. It's really fun to play. We just
had one of our percussionists start learning new things like
the congas, so we're starting to incorporate that into our shows,
which gives us another rhythmic texture that we haven't used
yet. By the next album, you'll probably see a lot of that in
our songs.
AMZ - Do you do a lot of improvisational
stuff live?
DT - Oh yeah. Our shows are pretty much
a 2 1/2 - 3 hour show on most nights, and every night the songs
take their own form. You're not just gonna hear the record. With
our 6 records now, we have 70-80 songs that have been recorded,
plus some that have never been recorded, so our shows vary every
night as far as set lists.
AMZ - I like that. I pay my 16 bucks for
a CD, and I don't want to hear it again when I go to a live show.
DT - Exactly. You want to hear different
arrangements and hear the songs stretched out. I can remember
seeing "Sting" in solo concerts and watching what he
did with his songs, and stuff like that was really influential
in how we did our live songs. You change melodies, change chord
progressions, change the style of a song even. If the song's
reggae one night, maybe it's kind of punky the next.
AMZ - Another thing, I don't think it's
easy to put out a "perfect album" so it's good to see
live bands try new things with their songs that maybe work better
than what's on the record.
DT - It's weird, because by the time we
go to record, we've been playing all the songs live that we're
gonna record, and we've kind of worked them out - except for
this record. A lot of these songs we wrote right before we recorded
the album. We didn't get to tour and see how they would do live.
Now they're taking shape and some are totally different live.
AMZ - That's one thing that struck me about
this album. Every song seemed to fit on the album. I see some
bands that write 7-8 good songs for an album and then they're
stretching to get that last 2 or 3 songs for the album, and there's
a fall-off in quality. It didn't seem like there was a fall-off
on this album.
DT - Wow. Thanks. Maybe that's because
we had three of the old songs that we used. They were the first
three we knew we were going to put on the album, actually. It
worked out for the best. We're really happy with the record and
we worked hard to get it the way it is.
AMZ - Thanks for your time, and good luck
with the tour! |
