Farewell Flight interview

It takes a certain level of dedication to be in an unsigned band. You have to do it all yourself— promotion, distribution, touring, the whole nine yards. It’s even harder when all the money you make at a crummy job for six months gets eaten up by a six month tour of the country’s various dive bars. It is a vicious cycle (work, tour, repeat) that Farewell Flight knows all too well. They are a rock band from central Pennsylvania that has been working the underground music scene for about five years. They could probably recite this hard-luck story verbatim and insert some interesting quips here and there too. I spoke with Robbe Reddinger, the bass player of the band, and got his perspective on things. His is one you don’t typically hear from musicians. He talked about being broke, the definition of indie, and what happened before the cops came…

How did the band get started?

We started by meeting each other various ways. Luke and Robbe knew each other from church but never were friends or played music together until Robbe heard Luke was looking for a bassist and trying to tour. At the time, Robbe was working as a reporter for a newspaper and quit his job to join the band (er…mistake?). Marc was playing for a different band and knew Luke through that. For the first 6 months, it was only those three, and then their first lead guitarist, Timmy Moslener joined the band (a friend of Robbe’s from college). After playing for two and half years, he quit the band, and the current guitarist, Brian “Rabbit” Campbell, joined.

Who were your influences growing up?

I think we all had a range of influences. Growing up, Robbe listened to a lot of Radiohead and U2 (leading to ill-conceived pipedreams), while Luke’s favorites include Counting Crows and Jimmy Eat World. Marc listened a lot to The Cure and Mr. Big. Rabbit grew up on a lot of singer songwriters like Cat Stevens and Simon and Garfunkel.

How do you work as a band – do you write and compose the music together or separate?

Mainly Luke hears the whole song in his head and will demo all the instruments out and bring it to the band and then we’ll bring our own ideas to it, mess around with it a bit and see what the final product is like.

It seems like you work for a while then tour the country. As an unsigned band from south central Pennsylvania, that is quite a task. Where does your motivation and drive come from?

From hating our jobs and knowing the only way to get six months vacation a year is to tour. Also it’s kind of just believing in the American dream, that if you work at something hard enough and are good at your craft, sooner or later the pieces will fall into place. But we really love to tour and being in the road really is a kind of escape and it feels like we’re doing something and accomplishing something, except of course when we play to one bartender and a guy who is trying to jump on stage and play drums who then gets thrown on the street, cracks his head and is passed out and bleeding on the sidewalk then gets arrested by the cops. It happened.

Of all the bands that you have shared the stage with, is there any particular one that has taught you something valuable about the business or life in general?

Basically all of the 1400 awful bands we’ve played with have showed us that this is a ridiculous swamp in which to be wading, which may be a good life lesson in the future. Also that life isn’t always fair and that pushing through the hard times will make us better people and musicians in the end.

You recently replaced one of the band members, Timmy. What happened and how did you meet Rabbit?

Timmy was just tired of the touring life, because it is a hard life. It’s hard being broke all the time and wondering if we’ll be able to make our bills each month, and eating only one pseudo meal a day on tour, and sleeping in a van when it’s 35 degrees out sometime and having to do that for week stretches at a time, and traveling six hours only to have the venue’s doors closed and the promoter not answering his phone (sorry about the run-on sentence). That stuff sucks. But, we love him and are still best friends with him and hang out all the time. Rabbit is Robbe’s best friend’s younger brother, so they’ve known each other for quite some time. We were at the end of our rope trying to find someone and we somehow thought of him and it turned out he had only a cell phone bill, lived at home, didn’t have a girlfriend or a job (but money saved up), which equals the perfect touring specimen. Also, he can do impressions of seriously anyone or anything, so it couldn’t have worked out better.

Are you hoping to make it big one day? How do you think your band would change if you were signed to a label?

Yes, we want to be rich out of our minds and sell out in every way, not even joking. People thing that not being “indie” is selling out. It’s not. It’s called trying to get out of living in poverty, pay off school loans and save some money so that maybe one day we can enjoy life without stressing out and freaking out about our futures every day we wake up. It depends what label we would sign to, but we probably wouldn’t change at all. We’d just be happier, at least if it was a good label.

At many of your concerts, you make it a point to basically witness to the crowd. You seem to be very firm in what you believe. What do you believe as far as religion goes? Do you find that it translates well with your audiences?  Being a Christian, I must say that I find it extremely refreshing to hear!

We are firm in what we believe cause that’s who we are, and we’re not trying to hide that, but at the same time we’re not trying to convert people or whatever. We think that God has been a source of inspiration in our lives and that the real Jesus (not the one paraded around by right wing crazies and abortion clinic protesters) just loved people with everything he had, whether they followed him or ignored him or killed him. He just did it, not out of personal gain or for God points, but just because he wanted people’s lives to be better than what they had. And that’s all we want to do. Just love others, especially those who need it the most. We’ll tell that to any crowd, not all the time, but some of the time, and from churches to the dive-iest bars in the world, pretty much everyone is receptive to it. But we’re not a Christian band, at all. We don’t even like to call ourselves Christians because of all the bad connotations that go with name when a lot of people hear it. It’s like if someone follows Jesus’ teachings but is a painter, he doesn’t advertise himself as a “Christian painter.” We’ve seen too many band try to make a quick buck off their beliefs, and we probably could too, but I’m pretty sure God’s not into that.

What’s on your iPod right now?

Silversun Pickups, Passion Pit, The Avett Brothers, Joshua James, The Gaslight Anthem, Andrew Belle, Lorien, and our new album, Lonesome Traveler.

For people who are not familiar with Farewell Flight, why should they give you a listen?

Because we make good music.

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