NEWS
EVENTS
An Interview with Odesza
House | Wednesday 10th September 2014 |
If you haven't yet heard of Seattle-based duo ODESZA, get ready to hear their songs all over the radio very soon. We were lucky enough to catch Harrison Mills and Clayton Knight on a rare off-day to have a chat about their hotly anticipated new album, ice cream and the craziest thing to ever happen whilst they were playing (its a good story)!
Hey guys! It’s great that you’ve managed to get time to talk to us because I can imagine things must be pretty busy with the album coming out and all that now.
Yeah well we got a day off right now so we’re feeling pretty good!
Ok, so let’s get started. Can you talk us through how you met each other and decided to start making music together? Were you at university?
Clayton: Me and Harrison met in a school called Western Washington University, its like an hour north of Seattle, kind of like a liberal arts school… and yeah there were other people making music that was similar to our style so we met through a mutual friend that I was living with at the time, kind of traded music back and forth, and the summer I graduated we decided to sit down and try and make something... and that’s kind of what the first summer of Odesza was all about.
What were you studying? Do you think it ever had an effect on your music or not really?
Clayton: For me, I was studying physics so the science part was a little different and this was more my creative outlet I could do when my homework was done
Harrison: I graduated with a new media design degree so its been nice to be able to use that on shirt design and posters and that kind of stuff.
That’s pretty handy!
Yeah it’s been fun!
How did you decide on the name Odesza? It’s quite an interesting one, is there a story?
Harrison: I guess there’s a story if you could call it a story, its pretty anti climactic to say the least - we really liked “Odessa” with two s’s for a number of reasons, but after doing a little research we found out that there’s a UK screamo band that actually had quite a legit following so I thought scratch that, and decided to put a z in it! And it looked cool and we were like ok we can run with this and that was the birth of Odesza. If it looks cool….
You’re probably a lot more well-known than the original other band called Odessa by now… you could probably claim that S back!
Change it back haha?! It actually worked out for the best because it’s easy to Google us, there’s a Ukraine Odessa, there’s Odessa taxis, there’s a bunch of other Odessas, but there’s nothing with a z in it so it makes it easier to search for us which has been a good thing I think.
Yeah definitely.
So this is your second album thats coming out now, it’s been a fairly short amount of time considering this is your second album now and you were pretty much straight out of uni when you started… How did you get inspired for this one - how did you put it together and keep the creative juices flowing?
Well I think that we just keep trying to change how we make it and go about it, the first one was us kind of meeting and kind of experimenting with instrumentals, and then with the second… we kind of put out a little EP between and it was more like stuff we were playing on the road that was more like harder-hitting that we made for live shows, and then this one was more of us trying to become more like songwriters, and get vocalists and make more full songs.
Yeah I can definitely see the full song aspect, like some of the songs I can imagine working very well on the radio ..
We’ll see!
Speaking of which, this might be a difficult question but would you be able to say that either of you has a personal favourite track from the In Return album?
Yeah, I’d say its the Its Only track, the other one featuring Zyra. She actually did a really good job with the melody and its a really good track with how it progresses.Yeah its dark, but its somewhat hopeful in some way, its weird, its cinematic.I think it draws from a lot of things we like
I actually found that the general vibe on the album was quite upbeat actually, its nice! Would you say you’re very upbeat people andf thats where it comes from?
*laughs*Oh my goodness, I guess kinda.., I think for us what it comes down to is something that we’re gonna hear about a thousand times can’t always be sad… we spend so much time working on it that the last thing you want is to feel bad while you’re doing it, so that’s our argument for it.
That’s a good point actually, fair enough!
Yeah so you know speaking of where you get your inspiration, do you have any musical influences that you can pinpoint as you were growing up? Everyone’s got an interesting story with this normally…
Clayton: Yeah so my dad was a classically trained pianist and he’d play music all the time while I was growing up. So I had a lot of that in the house, and then I actually took up piano and started studying classical piano as well. So i was doing a lot of that throughout high school and middle school. But when I got into college I got into more experimental music like Animal Collective, and that was all a huge inspiration for me. And then I kind of moved into the dance world, and hiphop and it just kind of grew from there basically.
Harrison: For me, my mum listened to a lot of different kinds of stuff, from like soul to Frank Sinatra to like Celtic music , it could be anything… I never thought about it that much until I started doing interviews but my mum definitely has a wide range of music that she listens to. And then I did trumpet really young but it didnt really click with me. Then when I was about 19 I got really really into like old school hiphop and I got a little keyboard and a sampler and I just started trying to make my own instrumentals and piano songs and it grew from there, from hiphop into electronic to like film scores and stuff so it all kind of naturally happened.
So you’ve got a bit of everything really, its so diverse. I think it definitely comes across in your music, almost like each of your tracks kind of has a slightly different feeling - like even when you mentioned the Celtic music I definitely spotted some world music type influences which was pretty cool.
Thank you, yeah we definitely go for that.
I guess you must have had a pretty busy summer season with festivals and stuff, do you have any in particular that stand out?
Well we just played Shambala and that was really really fun and we played…. not necessarily Coachella, but we played *at* Coachella…
We played at the Do Lab stage which is technically not actually part of Coachella but like its a weird inbetween.
It’s *in* Coachella but its not necessarily represented by them, its kind of weird…so it’s not on the lineup, but its on the site, its a bit strange
Its a lot of up and comers from around the world that play the Do Lab stage.
I think its acts that arent necessarily well known enough to play Coachella but are still like kind of known - at lot of cool people like Chrome Saprks and and Slow Magic and people like that played it too, it was fun.
Ok cool. Have you ever had anything weird or crazy happen to you whilst you’ve been playing, because a lot of people have some quite funny stories for this!
We have one that we always remember, its infamous! Basically while we were playing I couldn't hear myself out of the monitor on my side of the stage, and I was like why is nothing come out of this? So I go over to the side of the stage and there was a girl leaning over the monitor and I was like thats weird, and tried to ignore it, and I went back and I was like I still can’t hear anything! What is that girl doing? So I went back over, and I realised that someone was having sex up there, over the monitor, right on front of the stage, and about 20 minutes this goes on, and the crowd was just whooping and accepting it fully, and it was the most horrible and hilarious thing I’ve ever witnessed!
That is officially the best story I’ve ever had for that question, congratulations!!
So, you’ve got your In Return tour coming up in autumn, and thats like a headliner, you’ve got some sold out shows and am I right in thinking you’ll be going outside of North America for this one?
I don’t know if it’ll be technically part of In Return, but we’re gonna play some comedian shows and we’re definitely announcing some European stuff, like tomorrow…
Ok we’re doing the Set It Off tour, which we did last year, it was XXYYXX, Slow Magic, a bunch of other people all in one big lineup and we’re doing it this year with us, Slow Magic, Craft Spells… yeah so it should be fun, we’re doing tons of dates.
And that’s all in Europe? So you’ll be coming to the UK?
Yes! That is the plan.
Good! Because I was thinking actually, what's interesting listening to your album is it did remind me of a lot of the very popular stuff that’s come out of the UK recently, I’m sure you’re probably sick of getting these comparisons but like Bonobo, Lone, and with the vocalists like a little bit like Alunageorge as well.
We’re huge fans of theirs so we’re not offended by that at all! It’s not like you’re like wow you really remind me of Soulja Boy! hahaha
So you do like those guys?
Yep, we did a small stint of shows with Bonobo and it was amazing because he was definitely one of my musical idols.
Yeah I was actually going to ask you about that because I noticed that according to your press release that the new In Return tour is gonna be a new live performance and obviously you know that’s kind of what Bonobo got pretty well known for doing and your sound isn't too dissimilar from his style.
Yeah definitely in a lot of ways, very much so.
I think in the tour, we’re gonna have a whole new light show and us doing a lot more like live drums and using more things but I don’t think we’re gonna have a full band.
Oh so are you not gonna have vocalists and live musicians?
We’re saving that for the next one really, right now we’re focusing on our set and hopefully by the end we can add some more pieces
Yeah that’s great, it’s actually quite interesting because I looked at your tour dates and they pretty much were all in America... so I was wondering if you had been at all influenced by the UK scene because I could see the similarities in your music.
Yeah a lot of stuff, I mean I’m newer to the house world and I know house is really big over there, but lots of UK artists, especially instrumental beatmakers and stuff are great.
Yeah we think a big solidification of that influence is that Counter Records, the Ninja Tune imprint in the UK signed us so I think… I mean we’re huge fans of Ninja Tune and Counter Records is their new imprint so its just kind of a blessing I think for us to be up on it.
So you’re based in Seattle, did you both grow up there?
Clayton: Yeah basically I think we both consider ourselves Seattleites at this point,
I was born in Winsconsin and moved out here when I was younger, so I spent a lot of time in the midwest but yeah most of my life I’ve been kind of West Coast.
Harrison: Yeah i was born in California and moved up here when I was about 8.
Ok, because I kind of associate Seattle with a bit of indie and a bit of rock, do you think being in that kind of environment influenced you at all?
Yeah Seattle is very folk and indie orientated right now, and it used to be more rock.
It also has this underlying indie hiphop thing, like Macklemore comes from here so…
Yeah we love all that kind of stuff, Local Natives for example.
Cool, so I was wondering if there’s any moments that you can pinpoint so far as a career highlight? Where you were kind of like wow, is this life?
I think there’s been a bunch of those, but probably the biggest most recent thing was being signed to Counter… it was like a long process and we were talking to a lot of labels and to have Ninja Tune or Counter even considering us was like a huge deal to me, they were kind of the home I always wanted to be a part of. It was big that they kind of came out, flew out and saw our set, talked to us
I think a huge thing was when we were putting out our record they responded with just all of this feedback, like song by song feedback, and it was great feedback - you could tell that they were passionate about what we’d created and that was just such a big deal to me that someone had taken time out of their day to really listen to us.
Another big highlight was when we did a little tour with Pretty Ligths, we were opening for him for a couple of dates and we played a show in Washington so pretty much our home town. I think that was one of the biggest crowds we’d ever played for and I was really nervous and wanted everything to go right, so after that show that was definitely one of those moments where I was like woah this is real, it definitely stood out.
It was our first stadium show too.
Well now looking more towards the future, obviously you’ve just released a new album so I’m not expecting you to have any more in the works already... but do you have any major plans in the next couple of years that you’re hoping to work towards?
We’ve still got a couple of ideas that we’re hoping to try out, and now I think because we’re rising a bit in popularity and buzz we can actually hit up artists that we really like to collaborate with and a few have actually hit us up. I’d love to see where it goes from here, but only time will tell… I think we’re just gonna keep chugging along and working as hard as we can to take control of all these opportunities and make use of them.
Yeah more collaborations in the future definitely, that’s something we wanna do.
So do you have any dream collaborations?
There’s a lot of people, like you said we like so many different styles of music that you’d like have to give us a genre… but um I mean there’s a lot of singers obviously, like we’d love to work with a soul singer and try to do a soul song, funk or something like that, we’ve recently been talking to KImbra about doing something and she’s super cool and its awesome to talk to her about stuff. She’s sent us some new music that she’s been doing and its pretty mindblowing for me so I’d be excited to work with her.
Nice one! Well thats all the questions I’ve got written down here, but a funny one that someone asked earlier today that I might reuse on you for a bit of fun to finish the interview… if you were an ice cream flavour, what would you be and why?
*laughing*
Would it be a complicated Ben & Jerry’s or would it be more of a classic?
Harrison: Its hard for me to disassociate just the ice cream I like!
That’s what i find as well..
Harrison: Er, I’m just gonna go with cookies and cream because its my favourite one, makes sense, What about you Clay?
Clayton: I’d be a chocolate vanilla combo because I’d be like the classics, I like to keep it simple, I think people overcomplicate things so I’m one of those guys that likes to look at things in a simpler light most of the time.
That’s a good answer!
Ok cool, well thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me and I’ll leave you now to enjoy your day off!
Well thank you so much and hopefully we’ll have the opportunity to talk again soon!
Yeah I can’t wait to see what happens with you guys in the future!
Our review of In Return: http://guestlist.net/music-reviews/11097/odesza-in-return/
Odesza's Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/odesza
Website: http://inreturn.odesza.com/
@MiriamEJohnson
