Too much momentum. This room feels like it's going to explode. Too many angles. Too many factors to cover. Waiting for signal. You're searching for network. You have to fight to stay in control. You have to fight to stay in control. No, you don't have to fight to stay in control of the situation. Against Me! - borne on the fm waves of the heart.
please listen to these guys! they're from my school, couple years older than me, maybe 2 not sure, but even though , iv'e never talked to anyone from this band, they really mean a lot to me. i saw them for the first time tonight i felt the emotions go right through me. they are very talented and have so much ahead of them!
Nazareth, PA's FM Waves have opened for Patent Pending a few times, and I got the chance to sit down with the band for an interview before their show at the Sherman Theater in Stroudsburg back in September. Read on for the interview!
CIRCLES & SOUNDWAVES: For the record, can you please tell me your name, what you play in the band, and one random fact about yourself?
FM WAVES:
Kyle: I'm Kyle. I play guitar and I sing, and I don't like writing songs about girls.
Tyler: I'm Tyler Kern, I play bass, and I eat two Poptarts every morning before I go to school.
Nate: I'm Nate, I play the drums in the band, and I record all of our music.
C&S: What's the story of FM Waves- how did you get started as a band, and how did you get to where you are today?
Kyle: Well, in eighth grade Nate and I just started jamming with a bunch of people, and we ended up being the only two who took it seriously. We used to be really into metal music, like Metallica and what-not, and then when we went into ninth grade, we realized that we liked pop-punk music a lot more. Nate and I were still jamming and writing some really crappy songs. I met Tyler in Spanish and he jammed with us a couple times, then started playing bass for us.
C&S: You've done a Good Charlotte cover and you were talking about doing some blink-182 covers; how do you manage to pay tribute to these old-school pop-punk bands while at the same time making your own sound?
Kyle: You know, we get accused of sounding like blink-182 a lot, I guess, because nobody really has anything else to compare us to. But we'll take all of our influences and choose to cover one of their songs once in a while, but at the same time we're creating our own sound: we take their sounds and kind of just put them together with our own creativity and it turns into our own thing.
C&S: You mentioned blink-182; what are some other bands that you think you sound like or that have influenced you?
Nate: I've heard New Found Glory before.
Tyler: Sum-41.
Kyle: Some people think I kinda sound like Tom Delonge.
Influences- [Nate] really likes Set Your Goals, so I guess some of his drum parts are influenced by that; Four Year Strong; stuff like that. Mostly pop-punk, but then we take some outside influences like Circa Survive and Transit.
C&S: What does the music scene look like in Nazareth, Pennsylvania? What kind of stuff is popular?
Nate: It's not a good area for playing shows, I mean, there's no venues. That's why we have to come up to Stroudsburg and Allentown; it's not a great area for music, but it is what it is.
C&S: What are some of your favorite local bands?
Tyler: Refuse the Conformity's not that bad.
Kyle: Yeah, we're good friends with them. We have similar sounds. There's really not a lot of music that's like us. Uh… Kim's Comeback… that's pretty much it. It's usually bands from other areas that we play with.
C&S: You're shooting a video for your song "Eighteen"; what made you choose that song for the video?
Kyle: Our new song "Eighteen" is about how when you get out of high school, you look back and you're like, "Wow, I did really dumb things." I cared about being popular and stuff like that, and now that we've all graduated, you look back on it and you're like, "Why did I want to hang out with those kids? Why did I want to be a part of their group? I should've done my own thing." Now I'm my own person and I can just look back on all my schooling as a whole and just take different experiences from it.
C&S: What's the concept of the video?
Nate: We want to do it in the high school that we graduated from; we think that would be a pretty good setting. We want to try and gather as many people as we can.
Tyler: We're going to have the story revolve around maybe a kid getting picked on at school or something like that, and then after high school he's this big hot-shot and making a lot of cash.
Kyle: We're just trying to show the message that it doesn't really matter if you're cool in high school, because as soon as you graduate you get a whole fresh start and you get to be whoever you want to be.
C&S: Besides the video, what do you have planned for the rest of the year?
Kyle: For the rest of the year, we plan to get out a five or six song EP; we're not sure of the name of that one yet.
Nate: We're just trying to play as many shows as we can. We're trying to go on a tour this winter, over break.
Tyler: With Refuse the Conformity.
Kyle: [The EP] is not as much pop-punk, upbeat stuff as it used to be. It's still upbeat, but it has different sounds. The songs are a lot more meaningful to me. I don't like writing about girls cuz-
Nate: Too many bands do it! It's every single song. It's okay for once in a while, but…
Kyle: We might call it Seasons, like different seasons of your life have different meanings and it all kind of comes together. We're trying to create a more distinct sound and be a little bit different from all the other pop-punk bands out there.
C&S: What's your response to haters or anyone who doubts your band?
Nate: Haters gonna hate, gators gonna gate.
Kyle: I mean, if somebody doesn't like my band, that's okay with me, as long as they're not a jerk about it, telling me I suck.
Nate: We had that happen once on Facebook.
Kyle: Somebody told us we sucked at a Battle of the Bands.
Tyler: And then they asked us to play a show.
Nate: Yeah, I didn't really understand that, but I guess that's okay… "You guys suck. Hey, let's play a show together."
Tyler: Everybody likes a different type of music, so as long as they can respect our type of music, I can respect theirs, and we can all live in perfect harmony. [Laughs.]
