On Saturday (6/15), St. Louis-based music blog (and our buddies)
I Went To a Show celebrates its third birthday at
Off Broadway with a
trio of local bands/artists.
The Blind Eyes will be releasing a new EP,
World Record, and
Beth Bombara will also be releasing her new EP,
Raise Your Flag. Local garage rock-pop duo
Bruiser Queen will open the show.
Here's one of our favorite songs from The Blind Eyes, just for good measure and blog cred.
We recently caught up with Seth Porter, lead singer/chief songwriter of The Blind Eyes.
You've played plenty of shows in St. Louis the past few years. What is still exciting to you about playing a place like Off Broadway?
Off Broadway just feels like home at this point. We've spent the last 3 New Year's Eves there. We released
With a Bang there. We've played and seen a lot of great shows there over the years, so it seems like the right place to do this. Releasing new music is a really special occasion for a band.
Talk about the difference between recording your last album, With a Bang, and your new EP, World Record.
This was our first recording session since Andy has joined the band, so that made things a little different right from the get go. I think he gave us a nice jolt of energy as well as the new challenge of figuring out how we were going to approach being a 4-piece band. We did this record with Brian Scheffer at
Firebrand Recording again (same as
With a Bang and
Modernity) so having that challenge helped us to avoid getting too comfortable and making the same record over again.
Does writing lyrics come easy for you? There are a lot of guitars on this EP, and perhaps the words can get lost. Talk about their importance. And you can talk about the guitars, too.
Writing lyrics is definitely the biggest challenge in the songwriting process for me. I know some songwriters have notebooks full of lyrics waiting for music, but I am always musically 3-5 songs ahead of my lyric writing. I think we play the kind of music that you can enjoy whether or not you pay any attention to the lyrics, but I hope that there is some payoff for those who do. Not to say that it is great poetry or philosophy or anything, but I have to sing those words at the top of my lungs, so I'd certainly prefer that they were worth something. I hope the words aren't entirely lost in guitars, but on some level we're a rock band, so it is just a different animal than the acoustic guitar/storyteller type stuff.
There's a sentiment on the opening track, "Now, Again," that "it's never going to be good enough." What were you thinking about when you were writing that song?
I guess it is about perpetual procrastination and the feeling of not really moving forward in the ways you might have hoped. When your New Year's resolutions sound suspiciously like last year's New Year's resolutions. "Wait until tomorrow!" you tell yourself. And then you tell yourself again the next day.
Lastly, a general question, because I'm curious: Talk about some of your favorite shows you've seen in St. Louis the past few years.
Lots of good ones, but off the top of my head from this year: Old Lights and Demonlover at the first Tower Groove singles club release show, So Many Dynamos 10 year anniversary show with Nee, the Grace Basement record release show with Cassie Morgan, and Plaid Dragon at Foam. A really high percentage of the shows I attend are locals, if you couldn't tell. I recommend it.
