Like one of those old, what is it called? The Alex free phone with the voice. Answer machine answering machine. That's what I'm going for.
There we go. Hello and welcome to WNC, original music, episode 123, the ABC episode, I guess. Very happy to have them to show this week. The old features are an indie rock band consisting of Matt Cremens and Danny Wringle.
They've been playing music together a long time and for a long time to come, if everything works out. I'm assuming they're self-produced band and you can find them at theoldfutures.bankamp.com. You can also find them on Spotify and it is well worth your time to look up the old features on Spotify. But you can hear them right now.
Here are the old features. Cherokee. We are a D-I style band. We do everything ourselves in my garage for the most part.
Matt's got a little studio that we're hanging out in now. We've tried to record over here. We actually, I think, jammed in Cherokee over here one time. Yeah, that's where I think the idea was born, maybe.
Yeah. Something like that. That song was pretty awesome in the fact that we recorded it in like a couple of takes. It was like a third take.
We got it. I live right next to where I work. I come home on my lunch break. Matt meets me and we actually recorded most of our stuff on our lunch break.
We're always joking that we're going to call our projects a lunch album project or something because most of our stuff is recorded on our lunch breaks. We recorded the drum track first and then I did some overdubs. I actually recorded most of the song one morning. I was really motivated before work.
Most of that song was recorded at like 4.35 in the morning before I went into work. That's pretty interesting to me I think. Yeah, after we recorded the drums he sent me the demo and after just just one morning of recording he knocked almost everything out. I was like, damn.
Nice. Yeah, and it was early too. It was like 7.30. So he's like, what do you sleep?
Can you tell the difference? Hold on. Are you thinking, don't need to wait. Oh, I thought he just quit the band.
Yep. That's pretty unusual. I think recording early morning, I guess people that have studios in their homes, I'm sure do that a lot. I edit the podcast a lot first thing in the morning and I can tell a difference in my voice.
I'm doing like the voice over. Like my morning voice is a lot deeper and stuff. But do you notice a difference? Like can you hear something?
You're like, oh man, I'm not quite getting this. I think this sounds like something I could do tomorrow morning at 4.30. I think I can get a better track. Yeah, I feel like sometimes you sing a little bit better first thing in the morning, you know?
I don't know. It's just a question. It's a good question. It's the time of day that I had to do it.
I tried to fit it in there. And I was just motivated that morning and it just all popped out. Tell me a little bit about the band itself, like how it started. Well, we met and I met like in 2003 or four.
We were trying to talk about this the other day. We can't remember exactly two or two thousand three or four when we were late teens or whatever. We had a previous band and we played some shows and did some home recordings like we kind of do. We played a prom.
Oh, we played a prom. That was a highlight of ours. They didn't let any bands play after that. We shut it down.
We shut it down. And then we kind of quit playing for a little bit and Matt made me play. I wouldn't say made me, but he kind of nudged me to play in his wedding band. I kind of hadn't been playing too much music and kind of got the spark going again.
And we recorded CME Now, which is on our EP from last year. And I was like, Hey, man, this is a pretty good song. We should do something with this. We should make the project.
And we put the green and like, let's write some more songs. So we just took off running about halfway through the project named it. And now we're still trying to make some more. And all the while we had been like recording songs and Danny's garage.
Like for a while since like 2016, something like that. But you know, it was just having fun. Nothing really stuck until then. This song Cherokee, this was a this was recorded after our EP.
And so we had gotten a little bit better at recording. And you can kind of tell like the difference between this song and the EP and it's not as raw sounding maybe or it's just more dialed in. You can tell we're, we're perfecting. Hoaning stuff in.
Has always been you two guys in the band or have you ever had other people in the band? It's pretty much just been us. We've we've played like, I don't know, I guess so long together that it just kind of clicks, you know, the two of us. And then I do a lot of the overdubs and stuff.
We're trying to expand. We're like, Hey, this is growing a little bit. Let's try to bring some more people in because how will we play it live? I have no idea.
Right. You could do like, I don't know if you remember, you guys are so you don't remember there was a band in the 80s. I think it was a husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend. They had a song, The Future So Bright, I got to wear shades.
I don't know if you hear that on like 80s retro thing. And they were a it was a man and a woman and they when they played it was just those two, but then they had a boom box that had like the bass and drums on it. And they just had all their all their tracks, bass and drums on this cassette. And they would play even when they got big, they had concerts.
They just put Mike's in front of the boom box. You know, you can use that idea. Feel free. Yeah.
I might. Also, I was trying to figure out different ways to make noise and get an actual boom box. Don't make my job easier. Yeah, don't bring like MP3s on the computer stuff.
Like go old school cassette, boom box, you know, bring that back. Yeah. It was too hard. Yes.
Oh, I'm done. I know just true of you. Yes, you. Actually started co-writing it with another friend of ours and he had recorded a demo of it.
And it to me sounded it not exactly but had like a Tom Petty vibe like rock sound like easy going rock. And he sent it to me and I was like, Hey, man, you mind if I take a crack at it? And he's like, Yeah, sure, go for it. And I just put my phone in front of me and recorded it in a totally different way and send it back to him.
He's like, that's pretty good. Like I like that we should try that version. So one morning as I was cooking my kid's breakfast, they're eating oatmeal and I just was practicing the song and I slid the phone up. And it seemed like like captured something, you know, with their sounds and song natural.
None of that's added in. So the song is actually a voice memo song that I put into the dollar or whatever and added some more stuff to it. Yeah, he's in it to me and I was like, that's it. That's the one.
Which took some convincing. I was like, No, you can't do that. You don't need to be recorded. You can't do that.
And he talked me into it. We went with it. It's pretty cool. Yeah, it's cool.
I talked to a lot of songwriters who have, you know, everybody always says pulls out their phone and says, Oh, I have, you know, 500 voice memos with songs, but no one's ever said. And this is the this one right here is the one that you're hearing, you know, on this recorded track. So that's so unique there. Yeah.
Yeah, just the extra sounds and everything put you in in that atmosphere, you know, scraping bowls, the kids talking and stuff. And I just thought it was so cool. And it really brought the feeling of the song out. It's kind of a dark song.
And it's like the kids kind of sad. Yeah. And the kids like lighten it up. It gives it this like nice atmosphere, you know.
It's going to be cool too when I get older and I look back and like and hear my kids talking in the background, you know, and I can hear because, you know, I'm their parent. I can hear what they're saying. And I've heard that conversation a million times. They're talking about their did you finish your oatmeal?
You know, Hey, I'm done with my oatmeal. You know, but they timed it perfect. We're almost seems like you edited that in there because they started the beginning by cineverse and then, like, right after the chorus first chorus, they just start talking to each other, which was pretty neat. I was like, Hey, you could make that up, you know.
So we had to put it. How old are the kids? Yeah. At the time of that, they were probably like 18 months and three years old.
They're about 19 months apart. And we actually incorporate them later on in the album too. Oh, yeah. At the end of the album.
Yeah, which I actually also I wrote about my buddy, our buddy Nate who wrote this song. I wrote the last stand of this one but yeah, he wrote this and he's actually an aspiring comedian. So I wrote the last song, Pagliachi, about him for context. You guys have so you do all your own recording.
Do you have like recording training background? You know, just all self self talk self talk self talk and what's what sounds good to us. How much is how we roll. Sounds great.
Cool. Thanks. Just try to serve serve the song or the idea that you got. Have you guys been in previous previous bands previous projects other than the the prom band?
Matt Matt's been in a couple bands. I'm kind of a hermit. I've only been in a band with Matt and I've recorded like my own solo stuff that I put out which I haven't done in a while. But no, this is pretty much two bands for me.
I was recently in a work band called the Meat Sweats. Just a bunch of guys from work just jamming on blues and rock and stuff. That was fun. So that band name is available.
Oh, the Meat Sweats? Yeah. Okay. I got a call real quick.
Chad, I got a band name, buddy. The pandemic killed that band. Yeah. It's a play on the night sweats.
This might have been what you meant, but did you mean the pandemic killed it because just the pandemic or because it was just bad to be associated with meat anymore because of COVID? It works on so many levels. Yeah. You read it so that's so quickly.
Yeah. Trying to fuck off CDs to me so I'm kind of like. See me now is a song that kicked off our whole project. That was the song we first recorded.
We're like, hey, this is pretty good. We should put this out. And that song is kind of funny because we were jamming with bars. And we were playing kind of like a folky song and I had this riff.
And we literally played for like a couple hours and like the last five minutes. I was like, hey guys, what do you think of this riff? And I played that guitar riff or whatever. They're like, that's pretty good.
You should do something with that. And I was like, well, it's pretty close to this song that we were playing. And I was like, oh, that's a good idea. I never thought of that.
I always kind of held it. Like if I had this chord progression, it's done. Like that's that song. I have to come up with an entire new thing for another song.
And he kind of broke me up. He was like, no, just change around, make it a different song, make it your own. And that's kind of where it was born. And the lyrics just like came to.
It was like one of those writing moments where you're like trying to keep up with the pen, you know, just, it was just flowing out. So that was pretty cool. I love that feeling. As far as the writing process goes, you guys covered this a little bit already.
But you do a lot of writing together, or is it more like one person brings in an almost finished song? The other person adds to it? Or what's going on there? We are like the, what was that band?
We're like the postal service almost. I write an idea. I send the voice moment to Matt. He either adds to it, tells me what to change.
I change it, or I make a demo. And he's like, oh, turn that down, turn that up, you know, kind of deal. Like that. And then we'll have like a pretty decent little sounding demo.
And then we join up in the garage studio and we'll try to track it. Yeah, switching lyrics back and forth. Yeah. Or I send him like a song I've written or some lyrics or something.
And he just makes it that much better. I send it to him. And I'm like, oh, screw you. He sends his version back to me.
And it's like, OK, yeah, we'll go with your version. That's very nice of you to say. Not always true. Well, the screw you part with it.
Yeah. I'm at the best. It's out of jealousy. So you guys, it sounds like you haven't played.
Yeah, I've never played any of this live or any other reason. Okay. Nope. We have not played a show that whole pandemic thing happened.
We can barely remember our songs. I'm going to go that far. We started this as like a recording project. We really didn't have any aspirations to make it like a band or anything like that.
Right. And so we kind of like he just alluded to that we barely remember songs because we kind of just record a song and then we're like shelve it. And then we'll move on to the next song. Yeah, there's no rehearsal after the recording.
Yeah. No, yeah. We practice it enough to get a good take. And I'm always just hitting record hoping for the magic or whatever you're looking for.
That's a take. I've been in a band where like someone might bring in an old song they have that they never they recorded, wrote, you know, wasn't right for the band they were in. They bring it in. And then we all had to figure out how to play that song because it's three years old.
He's forgotten. You know, he's like, what was that chord? You know, what was this league? And you play it?
You know, I can't play it anymore. I think I just got lucky that day. You know, it was a mistake. And now we got to figure out what to do.
Yeah. Yeah. But are you guys are you guys thinking you will want to play live? You kind of want to keep it a mostly recording project.
I think so. Yeah. I think I would like to play live. We definitely want to play around town and stuff.
A lot of cool venues and you know, that feeling of playing live. There's not much like that. Yeah. More from the old futures in just a moment from Danny and Matt want to remind you to check out their music at the oldfutures.bancap.com also on their Spotify channel.
And like we were just talking about look for them to play live as soon as you get a chance. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcast. If you're listening to this right now and you haven't subscribed yet, then I think you really feel like you should subscribe. I feel like it would be the best thing for you.
A lot of times you don't get to make some really positive life decisions where you don't have to, you know, kind of go back and forth in your mind to feel a little tortured about it. But this is one of those. This is one of those that you cannot go wrong with this life decision and it'll get your week started off on a good foot or for your week has already started off on a bad foot. It'll it'll write that.
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Oh, yeah. Correction from last week's show with Kendra and Zach Harding from the Brown Mountain Lightning Bugs. Eddie, Maggie Brain, Hazel played the original version of Maggie Brain and Michael Kidd, Funkadelic played the live version. So they were both right.
Hi there. This is Nathan Story from You're listening to WNC, original music. All right. Do you have any musical impressions?
Can we do other other impressions as I have to do musical? Yeah, it doesn't have to be musical. Because Matt's got tons of impressions. Yeah, right.
Let's hear a man. No, my kids are really little, so I'm stuck watching cartoons all the time. So I can do, I mean, Elmo, I can do Mickey Mouse, I can do Oscar a little bit. I can do some Randy Newman.
Oh, I'm here. Randy Newman's probably the strongest. Randy Newman's. Randy Newman's.
Yeah. Yeah. All right. Up here.
You got a friend in me. Yeah, you got a friend in me. Some of the people a little bit smarter than I am. Bigger faster to.
Now can you do Elmo singing the same song? Okay. All right. You got to get a piper there for Elmo.
It's the same Randy Newman. So here we go. You got a baby. I think that's about the end of it.
It was pretty cool. That song took us a while to nail down. I started like another voice memo riff. I sent it to Matt and I was like, Matt, you got to tell me what this sounds like because it sounds too familiar.
Like, it sounds like something. What is this? You know, like that happens all the time when you're trying to create something. And I finally nailed it down.
It's a use me bill withers. That's where I was getting like the little riff. The chord changes. Not the same chords, but the chord changes.
But the chord change or whatever. And right about that time was when he passed away. And I was like, man, I got to write. I got to finish this song now.
And I'm going to write this song and try to use in the bridge or whatever. I use the words use me kind of pay a little homage to him or whatever. And that's all I took us a while. Like I said, I was looking through my voice memo was the other day.
It was like three months of voice memo was of me just annoying Matt sending a voice memo. Do you think about this? When you think about this? You know, just obnoxious.
Yeah, that's great. But it was pretty cool. That one was another lunch demo song that we recorded. And I we got together.
We laid the drum track down and I had. And Matt kind of surprised me with bongos in it. I was like, I think I might add some bongos. And I was like, when I came back, I was like, that is perfect.
That's exactly what I was looking for. Yeah. Yeah. Did that during lunch?
The bongos and actually the drum track the bongos. Well, I stayed later. And did the tambourine as well. And yeah, that song was where I just, you know, there was a groove and I stayed in the pocket the whole time, which is very rare for me.
And it's hard as a drummer. Like 10 years of my life was lost. Not being in a band just like late at night playing drunk with your friends and just jamming out. And, and so, you know, that has a big part in my drumming is is I have to lose that sometimes because I just want to jam out and, you know, do whatever, rather than play to the song and find that just the right groove.
I think you do that pretty well though. Like that's one of my favorite things where I was one of the play music with Matt is that he really is like really musical with his drumming to me, at least where he, I don't have to tell him like play this play that I just start playing. And then he just starts adding. I'm like, oh, that's so much better than what I would have thought of doing.
I love that. That's perfect. And we normally, most of our songs happen now. Like we don't really really have to like think about it too much.
They're not very complicated to that house, but he's got a good knack for like finding the right part like pretty quickly. And he's pretty sporadic, which is also really fun. Yeah, I have to pull the reins back sometimes, for sure. Where can people find your music?
We're on all the streaming platforms. We're on bandcamp is what we prefer bandcamp. They like to give a little bit more. But yeah, Spotify iTunes, YouTube, Deezer, there's quite a few of them out there.
Deezer? Did I ever even heard of Deezer? I thought you were throwing in something you made up just to see if I knew I'd be. Oh, yeah, Deezer.
Oh, yeah, that's awesome. It's on Wampus. I have it on Timbuk to it's on a free money MP3. It's also there.
Anyplace unusual. Like I know a lot of people put their music on TikTok now. Have you ever done that? I did search it here recently.
And I don't really know how to work TikTok. Not a TikTok user. So the clips. The clips that they were using, they didn't seem like the best clips for the song.
So I didn't end up doing it. But we have had the great idea. Matt is a painter. And we've had the great idea.
A friend of ours was like, we need to just put TikTok videos with our songs in Matt just painting. Bob Ross style. And I've been trying to coax him into that. But like a live show.
I'll just stand up to the side while you play. No, no, no, we play the music in the background. And then you know, no, no, this is where the boom box comes in. We set up the drum track with the boom box and I just stand up to the side and paint.
Yeah, there you go. I'll take that. One of my favorite things on TikTok is even though I can't draw, I've always wanted to be able to draw. So I watch instead of practicing drawing, I watch TikTok, how to draw videos.
And they always have really good music in the background. It just shows, you know, this guy, he makes two circles, you know, an oval. And then 30 seconds later, he's got George Clooney. Perfect.
You know, and I'm like, Oh, that was cool. And I heard a good song, you know, and I don't ever actually try to do it myself because that's work. You know, it was good. The fools is one of the new singles that we released this year, Matt had a baby recently, which was pretty awesome.
And so we were trying to rush before the baby came and record these songs, you know, we, that, that one, Cherokee, the fools. And we had another one, Armah. The Cherokee came so easily. And then the fools we labored over, we recorded like three or four times and we never could nail it down and we finally, finally got it.
That was pretty interesting. Tested out my falsetta range in it that hadn't really done a lot of it. Now it's kind of become a staple of our sound. Oh, yeah.
I love the do up vibe in the song for sure. Danny nails it. It was originally, it was originally, we were going to do Cherokee and the fools as a part A part D song was what the idea had because the riff was kind of similar. And I was like, you know what, it would be cool to do like an A B song, you know, and then it ended up not being that anyway, even though that there are some of the same chords bouncing around.
But it was a good idea to start with, I would say. And the only note I have on that is maybe should have done the claps all the way through. I always have to talk them into like extra percussion stuff. You think a drummer would want to just drum on everything, right?
I'm like, dude, we need to say the claps for the end. Yeah. Damn it should have kept those. We should have added more.
Well, that could have led us down the wrong path. We submitted some of our songs to a submit hub. I don't know if you're aware of submit hub. It's a place on the internet.
You go to submit your music and you know, just get cut in half. And we submitted, I think I think it was Cherokee and the guy, one of the guys, he actually responded to me. I was like, so what would make the song better. And the first thing he said was like ditch the maracas man.
And I was like, there are no maracas in the song. It's a tambourine. I was like, damn critics. I mean, you don't kind of don't trust his opinion after that.
Yeah. I know. After he said that, and then he said a couple other things. And then he said, well, if you did all that, we probably changed the song too much.
And I'm like, I know. Thanks for nothing. Give my dollar back. This is a classic example of, you know, don't judge a song too early because Danny brought this song to me.
And I was like, man, it's okay. He said it sucks. Didn't care too much for it. And then it turned into my one of my favorite songs on the EP.
And yeah, I freaking love it now. It was one of those inspiration songs where like you have to again drop what you're doing and go right real quick. We had some friend for dinner or something. And we were all joking about, I want to be rich enough to have like a vacation trailer everywhere in the country or in beautiful areas.
And I was like, man, that's a great idea. And I was like, like a timeshare like trailer park or something like that. And I was like, that's a song. And I ran and I wrote just wrote that down in the next morning.
I had most of the lyrics. And I told Matt about it. He's like, that sounds kind of lame, man. And we played and I played it before him.
And he was kind of feeling it or whatever. Even the voice of him. And I said, I'm like, now dude, I don't know about that. It was like the beginnings of something.
Yeah, it was like, you might have something here. He showed up to jam and I had like taped the tambourine to his kick drum. And I was like, dude, trust me, do like a floor on the floor. Kick drum tambourine thing going.
It's going to rock. And he's like, okay. And then I was messing with the drum kit. I was like, try this, try this.
And we recorded that whole song in that one night in like two hours. It was, I think it was like the second take for the drums. That was it. Yeah, it was like second or third take.
We were super excited. We were like, we're jumping out and my wife. She came out. We were making a lot of noise.
And I was like, we recorded a song in like two hours. This is so great. Check this out. It was done.
It was pretty much done. Except for like some of the little guitar parts. Yeah, there was a couple of tweaking here and there. The guitar at the very end.
It was funny. Recorded that in like the first take. And you could tell like it almost sounds like you don't know. I don't know exactly where I'm going to go next because I am not a lead guitar player by any means.
I'm a really guitar player. I'll tell anybody. But you know, I can fake it a little bit. So I'm like trying to figure out exactly where I'm going to go.
Like I was. I was like, I'll clean that guitar up later. You know, I tried for like a week trying to come up with different guitar solos and Matt wouldn't let it go. He's like, dude, you got to go with that first one.
It had it had like a feel to it. And finally I was like, you're right. Yeah, I mean, and like don't get me wrong. The other guitar parts were solos were better technically.
Possibly and they were kick ass, but this not first take was just you were in it. and it just had the feeling the tension is there. You can feel just those pauses and adding to like the energy of the song and yeah, I wouldn't let it go. We were listening to Link Ray, that 1971.
Is it subtitle? Yeah. And he recorded that with a little four track in his barn or something like that. And some of the guitar parts for that album, they just turned the amps all the way and actually recorded it from like outside of the building.
Oh really? And that's kind of the feel that I wanted it. I didn't get close to it, those guys are amazing. But that's just kind of what I did.
It was just like a, just crank the amp. The mic was pretty far away actually. And just go with it. Let's break down Unpack how we will say it.
The idea of a timeshare trailer that you would be rich enough to have timeshare trailers all through the country. And that you're not rich enough where you still are too good to live in a trailer or a vacation in a trailer. So let's say you could have like 20 timeshare trailers or you could have eight timeshare condos or you could have like 49 timeshare tents. So you can use that if you want to in the sequel to the song.
Yeah. Yeah. I think you got to go with the trailers if you're from around these parts. Right.
We're from. Yeah, we're from. Yeah, it was just a funny idea. And most of our stuff is a little bit more serious and melodramatic or whatever.
And that one was pretty light-hearted. I think that's why I had to sell Matty on it. Because he was just like, that's such a funny idea. I'm all about the light-hearted.
No, you are for sure. And like little jokes and songs. We definitely don't take ourselves very seriously. Yeah, John Primes is the king of that.
I try to take a lot of notes from him. But just within lyrics and having that lighter side. Yeah. We should write more other parts on.
Trailer parts on. That's what's up. It's where the money's out. Sounds like you got your next album title.
Yeah. I'm going to try to find some songs. OK, I want to thank Matt and Danny for being on the show. Just had a great time talking to them.
Again, the band is called The Old Futures. Make sure to check out their music at theoldfutures.bankamp.com. And there's also links in the show notes for their Spotify to stream that as well. And one more time.
Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. Also, I recommend it to people you like. Don't recommend it to people you don't like because they don't deserve to listen. And most importantly, go and support the musicians that are on the podcast.
The podcast would not at all be possible without them. The podcast is free. And the musicians donate their time. And their music to the podcast were free.
So make sure to go and support those musicians. The closing song this week comes from Painful Town, which is a singer-songwriter project from Quebec, My Home Town. Oh, excuse me. My Ville and the Tile.
You can find them on Spotify. Just search Painful Town. Also, of course, there will be links to their music and their social media and the show notes. Here's Painful Town.
Have a good week. Hey, said to me, I'm really surprised that you like this, which was very nice when I'm saying this is awful.