The Material interview

They just might be the most promising new rock band to emerge from San Diego since Stone Temple Pilots, with songs that range from dire tales of regret to hopeful pop-oriented numbers. Lead singer Colleen D’Agostino filled me in on how the band came together, the progress they’ve made on their upcoming summer album, and she reveals the album’s title in the process…

So you guys started off as a college band?

I moved to San Diego to go to college, that’s why I ended up there from The Valley, and I met Noah, our first drummer, while I was in college. I don’t know if were a college band. I was the only one going to San Diego State when we formed, but we all kind of transplanted there. Noah, our drummer, was really the only one that was from San Diego. So we were all transplants.

If you were the only one going to college, I’m guessing the rest of them were thinking they wanted to make a career out of the band. Were you thinking that as well?

I actually got my music degree from San Diego State. I was studying classical and opera and pretty much everything. Jon, our guitar player, joined the band and then eventually went to two years of college at San Diego State as well and got his music degree. So he graduated from there after I had already graduated. But yeah, we both studied music, we wanted to do music full time. My situation was my parents were like, “You’re going to college, otherwise you’re gonna start paying rent at home,” and I figured hey, I might as well use this opportunity to let my parents pay for school and help me move to San Diego, which was pretty awesome, so I was able to do both at the same time. But yeah, if I could go back, I probably would have just started touring in a band and not done the college thing. But it was a good experience.

Let’s hope your parents aren’t reading this interview.

Yeah [laughs]. I mean I don’t take back anything. It was definitely a good experience, and I think it’s one that every kid should find out about. When I was eighteen and graduated high school, all my friends stayed here in The Valley and no one went away and experienced any kind of life outside the bubble. So I was happy to get out, and I don’t think I would have come to San Diego had it not been for college. So I guess I don’t really regret it.

I look at your latest EP is To Weather The Storm, it’s got three songs, you did another EP with six songs, and a new single. Why put the songs out in chunks? Why not wait until you’ve accumulated ten and then put them out as a full album?

At the time, when we first released our Tomorrow EP, which is the first one that we did, we were really eager to get songs out there because we didn’t have anything and we wanted to put it out there. But not only that, then there’s the fact that we were all college students, or most of us were, and we were all starving and we didn’t have a budget. We didn’t have a label , we self-funded that first EP to start generating income, paid ourselves back, and then started putting money into the band. After that we started touring. Being a DIY band, it’s like you have to release your music in chunks so that you can afford paying for a few songs and then pay yourselves back. I mean now we’re a lot more financially stable just because of the fact that we’ve been putting out music, we have a song on the video game Rock Band, all that kind of stuff helps fund the new music. But at the time we released those, it was more a matter of money and the eagerness that we wanted to get the music out there, and not that we didn’t have songs, because we have tons of songs that haven’t been released.

A lot of bands are getting their shows used in TV shows now, it’s kind of all the rage. But your new single What Happens Next is being used in a digital TV show in Australia, of all things. How did that come together?

That was actually one of the coolest opportunities so far. Our management is SKH Music, and I don’t know if you know Steve [Karas] and Toby Yoshimura, Toby had done the shows Amazing Race and a bunch of other TV shows and he was friends with Steve. But it came together kind of randomly. Toby had called Steve and asked him for some kind of help in licensing some songs for the show, and Steve said hey, why don’t you check out some bands on my roster, and he came back and “The Material, I want The Material, let’s use their music exclusively, let’s have them write a title track for the show.”

Does that mean you’ll have to go tour in Australia now?

Oh yeah, definitely. I would love to be out there, so hopefully if the show keeps moving forward and if they plan some kind of event out there, we’d love to get out there. International touring is top on our wishlist of things to do.

What Happens Next is such a happier song than something like Unforgivable. Do you have to be in a different mindset to write those kinds of songs?

I think it’s a lot easier for me to actually come up with lyrics and melodies when I’m going through a tough time, which is sort of unfortunate because then all your songs end up sounding kind of depressed, but to me it’s just a catharsis of when I’m going through something, and I just have an easier time of putting the emotions down on paper than expressing them, so that’s kind of my way to express those feelings, just to put them into a song. But with What Happens Next, it was kind of cool because they had sent us the trailer for the show, and you got to see them jumping in the waves, and it’s Australia, it’s beautiful, palm trees, and it already had an upbeat and fun looking atmosphere to it, so it was actually really a lot easier for me once I knew what they were going for, to write a song. But I didn’t want to write it necessarily for the TV show, I wanted to write it so it was relative to the band at the time and relative to our fans, and not just a theme song for a show.

It just so happened that the day before we got this offer to do this song, our drummer since the very beginning quit the band. And so it’s weird, he’s still my best friend, so I’m happy at the fact that he’s moving on, but you can hear in the lyrics, it says things like “So tell me what happens next, I’ve been dying to see, will we finally move on, it’s so bittersweet.” So it’s happy in a sense, but there’s still some kind of, I don’t know, memories going through and things that you can hear in the lyrics that talk about retrospectively sad that you’re moving on.

You tend to think of the lead singer as being the member of the band who has all the veto power, and band that have one female member, even if she’s the bassist or the drummer, will often say that she gets to make all the decisions. So what’s it like being the female lead singer of an otherwise all-male rock band?

Out of the band, I’m kind of the one that’s the most organized. I take care of the money, our band is an s-corporation and I’m like the president, so I definitely feel like I make a lot of big decisions but that’s not to say that the guys aren’t good decision makers, either. I think we each have our own job in the band, and mine sometimes tends to be band mom. But, you know, that’s just what you’ve got to do, I guess. It’ really fun to be on tour. Growing up I always got along with guys, I think, easier than girls because I’m not one to be into gossip or the kind of cattiness and drama that comes along with a group of girls, which is great at times, but the guys are just so much easier to get along with and I really can’t see me in a tour van with four girls. I just don’t know how that would happen. So having four guys there that calm me down when I’m stressed out, to take care of me if I get kind of stressed out if the van breaks down, or tire pops and we’re stuck in the middle of nowhere, I just feel safe with those type of guys that would drop anything to come help you if you needed help.

So it’s fun, but yeah, there’s times when it smells really bad in the van and the guys refuse to shower.

You’re recording a new album in May. Is that all new material, or will that include stuff you wrote in the past?

We moved up to Portland and wrote the album in November, when we got back from touring. Those songs, they sound like Portland, a lot of them. They’re edgier, like we were talking about earlier. And then we came back here and we wrote a song like What Happens Next. So it’s kind of hard to put all of those songs together, but I think we’re going to try to write a few more upbeat ones and pick and choose the ones that we wrote in Portland, and then we might include a couple from the To Weather The Storm EP, because there’s three on there, I know we’ll probably, definitely put Before The Ship Goes Down on there, to bring in some of the poppier stuff, to go along with the edgier stuff. That’s the plan as of now, that could change any time because we’re still writing.

We thought we were doing the right thing by putting out To Weather The Storm electronically and then on digital download cards, but everyone wanted it on a CD. So I think they won’t be bummed if we do put some of those songs on the actual CD.

“Sounds like Portland.” I’ve got to hear these songs just to find out what that means.

When we were on MTV, we played with this band called The Myriad, and they’re from up there too, I think they’re from Seattle. You can hear where a band is from, I think sometimes, when you listen to it, and the whole time we were up there it was rainy and dreary, and I think a lot of emotion came out in those songs. I was going through a tough time with family and they kind of reflect that, and they just sound like Portland to me.

We’re turning over a new leaf with the What Happens Next type of more upbeat stuff, so we’re gonna try to mix those together. We kind of had the discussion about the fact that we’re still an independent band, that’s not to say we’re not looking for a label, but while we still have all the creative decision making on our side here, we’re gonna put out what we want to do, because that’s what we are. All those songs are what we are, and I think that’s gonna be the title of the album: What We Are.

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