Planet Radio Interview, 10/13/2016
Carl and Leia interviewed by Neel
N: Hey guys, this is Neel here at WUML and we are joined here in the station by some of the members of the band Planet Radio, you guys want to say hi?
C: Hey
L: Hi! Carl is here and I’m Leia
N: Alright so we have Carl and Leia and they are here to promote themselves because they have a show here in Lowell at Mill No. 5 tomorrow [October 14th, 2016] door open at 7:30pm. Were really pumped up for it, its been promoted a lot at the station. So tell me about the type of sound you guys bring?
C: Well, we had a hard time describing that for the longest time so we came up with a little thing, what was it?
L: Futuristic Soul
N: So how long have you guys been a band?
C: Like 2 and a half years. And it was interesting because it started off our friend, the bass player of the band, Mark Zaleski, who is kind of the unofficial band leader, just threw together a gig and kind of just put a band together, as musician do, for a completely unrelated, it was just covers or whatever and we had such a good time playing together that we started writing original tunes and we kind of turned it into more of a original thing.
N: So before you guys made the band you were just a group of musicians that all knew each other?
C: Kind of. I didn’t know Leia
L: Yeah some of us knew each other for a long time and some of us kind of just met through this project.
C: I was one of the odd men out. A bunch of them knew each other and i only knew like one person in the band. Now we’re buddies.
L: Its quickly become a family. For sure. It happens fast.
N: Awesome. So i'm guessing you guys are from different parts, so where are you guys from, in terms of hometown?
L: So i grew up sort of in central mass, i grew up in Groton, Massachusetts. It’s not that far from Lowell. And a bunch of us are from Massachusetts, not Carl though.
C: I’m from Illinois, that explains the “bad behavior” *laughs* but yeah, we all live in boston. Actually the drummer Patrick is from Canada. Shout out to Quebec!
N: So i haven't gotten a chance to look at your discography, but you said you guys did a lot of covers, so in terms of original content
L: yeah so we just started off doing more covers because that's the way the gig started, but after as we came together and realized we have something sort of special with this particular group of people i think it inspired us to do writing as a group and for those of us that wrote individually to bring tunes to the group, so now for our shows we do pretty much exclusively original material.
C: we have like one cover that we do in sort of a signature style.
L: yeah which we do with a very different sort of style, it’s sort of special. You can actually check it out. We do a cover of Higher and Higher, the Jackie Wilson tune and we have a video for that that’s up on YouTube that’s kind of a fun thing that we did about a year ago. But yeah for the most part its original stuff now pretty much entirely.
N: So what kind of artists did you cover in the beginning?
C: Well we actually did a Britney Spears cover at that first gig, Circus. But it was like, have you ever heard of that band Dirty Loops?
N: Yes
C: So you’ve seen the videos where it’s just like ridiculous? Mark like transcribed, learned it note for note and wrote it down and then brought it in.
L: we did a cover of a cover i guess
C: Yeah cover of a cover, and then we did some Michael Jackson stuff
L: Stevie Wonder
C: a little bit, Donny Hathaway. So what brought us together really was out love of this R&B backbeat soul music. And that was always the basic, even from that first day when we weren’t really “Planet Radio”. I mean that day like, that gig, wasn’t this band really. But what was this band is that we all love this type of music and that's kind of like what we’ve put into our original tunes now.
L: yeah and i think each of the band members sort of has, you know, a different perspective that they’re coming from and a lot of the folks are sort of trained and jazz and have that background or Patrick, our drummer, does a lot of world music stuff, and with this group though we were all coming together with our soul kinda thing so it was coming at it from that perspective even though people may have been schooled in other things.
N: so the CD you have right here, is this an album? An EP?
C: this is an album.
N: your debut album?
L: It is.
C: our debut album, produced by us 100%, no help. And it’s all originals except for the Higher and Higher cover, Jackie Wilson, we did pay for the rights so do get no ideas. And yeah, we’re actually going in the studio, we’ve already begun work on our second record. Were going in the studio in November to track the second record and then Pat, the drummer, is going to be, like, galavanting around planet earth for about six months
L: so we’re getting all the basic tracks down while he’s here and then we’ll work on it while he’s gone
C: Were going to try to have an album by the time he gets back.
N: In the music industry now it seems more that there’s a strong suggestion that you don’t just get involved as a band but you also get involved in the industry itself, whether it’s starting a creative collective, labels, or just getting involved in the merchandising stuff like that. What have you guys planned to or have thought of or have already done to kind of get into those different areas.
L: I would say that’s an area we need to work on, i think that each of us tries to kind of take on different roles in this sort of business aspect of things.
C: Leia's our social media representative
L: yeah i try to. We have someone that definitely pushes a sort of booking and reaching out in terms of a network, trying to push the social media stuff. The label stuff you're talking about is an interesting kind of aspect of things that we haven’t really gotten into yet. Not for any reason other than that we haven't had the sort of push for it yet.
C: there's no reason to have a label really, at this point. You can put anything out, anytime you want. We are a label. The whole point of a label up until the 90s when the internet sensation really happened and took over music you had to have a label to make a CD you know. Now people are making professional albums on GarageBand, so you don't need the big label money. It used to be that you could only get access to studios trough a label, you could only get access to the production companies to print CDs through a label. I mean in Warner Brothers called and tried to give us a million bucks we would be like “Heck Yeah” but
L: I think to something that we've talked about a lot is that idea of putting out a lot of content, or trying to be able to really keep up because everything is so fast paced and there's so much content all the time online, you know whether it's the social media stuff or not it's like this idea of not waiting for anything to put out your material.
C: Its creative control in a sense
L:yeah exactly! Because there is this ability to do so much of it yourself in terms of all of it, it makes up more able to put out content because it's like “Ok we can just do this whatever time we want” the only thing stopping us is ourselves, so we have to keep going with that
C: and a lot of the reason we can do that is all the, we've been playing now for two years, and we've played a bunch of gigs and rather than taking the money and splitting it up, as would be customary, we take every single cent that we make and put it back into the music. So when we go to a show, like tomorrow at Mill no’ 5, or at planetradiomusic.com, and somebody buys a $10 CD, we take all that money and we put it back into the music so we paid for all the CDs through the support of listeners, we have T-Shirts that we have funded through the support of the listeners. The second record will be paid for by people coming out to check out the show. Which i think is really, thats like a huge part of why this thing works, we could either make a couple buck a piece or the band could make substantially more.
L: if you keep feeding the project and making the brand bigger and bigger through doing that.
N:No you kinda like the idea of that you guys don't want to depend on anyone else, more like we try to do things ourselves and fund ourselves.
C:yeah. I mean the ultimate goal would be to be like, you know, huge or whatever
L: we could get some help at some point
C: Yeah if that was a thing but you know the most important thing is that the music needs to be made and the music needs to be heard.
L: The thing is too, i'm just thinking about the record, like you designed the cover of the record, you know it's just like if you can do it yourself and make it happen in a certain way that's really authentic than why not, you know?
C: Jeff Dantona, who plays keys, designed The website, put the website together and kind of maintains the website, i drew the logo, i'm kinda like the merch manager dude, and i also play guitar.
L:Mark does all the bookings
C: Mark plays bass and does all the managerial stuff. Jonathan Bane who plays saxophone is kinda like, he's like the clutch “I'm going to bring 60 people out to the show”. Hell be like “I don't know i got a couple buddies coming out” and the whole gig will be his friends. Leia does the social media stuff and sings and writes. Pat is the drummer. He doesn't do a lot of the other stuff but he is just the most ridiculous, incredible, in your face musician of all time.
L: Creative, out of control.
C: just the highest level of musicianship, so that's his gig.
N: So basically you guys are a self sufficient machine
C: Yep.
N: that's awesome. Especially in the music industry where it's difficult to go off record labels it's very important that you kinda have your own system set up, an that you're doing your own stuff because it's very difficult to make that leap fo instead of finding the leap you make it yourself.
L:Yeah
C:One thing we're noticing to is that there is no leap really, it's like a slow crawl. And like every day, like coming to lowell to do this radio thing right, as chill as it is right now, that's something that takes you to the next level and all those opportunities add up, and really trying to reach out, it's about people at the end of the day. It’s about hopefully making music that people want to listen to and that people want to come and see, and that's our goal. To deliver the best thing that we can.
N: One thing that's kind of plaguing the scene is a sense of kind of consistent, basic copy and paste. There's a lot of band out there, and you guys aren't the first to do a kind of general soul style, what do you guys do to make sure you stick out and that you guys make a bigger impact. Whether it's in the writing process or the branding, what do you do to take it a step further?
L: well i mean i guess the first thing i think about musically there's a couple of things that we do differently as a band. I think one of the things carl and i are the vocalists in the group and one thing that we really are going with in our sound is this kind of dual vocal sound, so sometimes he's singing lead and sometimes i'm singing lead but i think the sort of sweet spot for our group is when we're both singing. So we do a lot of tight harmonies and a lot of like double vocal lines for lead signing, which i think is kinda uniques adm really adds to like the sound of the band and is different from what a lot of people in that genre do in particular
C: It's becoming more so all the time, were trying to achieve both of our voices being like one spirit, one voice
L: right, so that's definitely something. I think also because there's a lot of a jazz background of the group, something that's unique about this sound is that, i mean it is very much an R&B soul vibe and the wiring is that way, it also has these elements of like really energetic soloing and instrumentalist. We can showcase each of the instrumentalists so that's something that i think is unique about it.
C: And we do that unapologetically to, like you might go see a band and there's a little solo or something but it's not uncommon for one of our tunes to be, it might be four minutes on the record but live it might be eleven minutes because there's like an extended crazy solo that gets built to the point of, you know, destruction, and then it comes back and we smooth it out or whatever. But i think that's a unique thing, its could be like a song in the way of Marvin Gaye but with the spirit of Jimi Hendrix at times. So it really crosses dynamically into many different universes
L: and i think, when i'm thinking about the live show, i think a lot of people are struck by the energy of that for sure.
C: also i do think that our writing is very unique, while we're not the first group to do this, were not relying on invention in the way that, you know when you reference electronic music and the copy and paste thing, that's a convention that people are accustomed to, and looping and all that. While our music does not employ that anyway, we're not going like “Oh cool this James Brown song. Lets steal the chord changes and make our own song” which is a real thing that people do, and that's cool i think there's a place for that, but i'd like to think that our music is more searching than that. I think it's evidenced in the art that we make, it's like we're trying to do new stuff that is totally unique. I think a lot of it is, in my opinion.
N:i just have one more question. So When you perform live, i know you improve. Do you have a setlist of songs that you do and then see where it goes from there?
C: kind of. For example we have songs where Jeff, the keyboard player, He starts it, and its understood that he begins the song. But we don't necessarily know what he's going to do. We know that there's a framework, a set of chord changes, but one day he might play a two minute intro and one day he might play a much longer intro. I start some songs where somethings i begin the song right away, like the straightforward song thing, other times it's like in my heart to like play more so like it's not uncommon for there to be like a like five minute guitar intro before the intro of the actual song even begins. I think that's a huge part of it. Leia and i do vocals constantly like i feel like, at least me, i'm constantly trying to surprise you [Leia], i'm trying to surprise them. Like i know if i can make the band be like “Yeah!” then i'm really doing it because they like know these tunes and if we can make it fresh for each other then we know the audience is really digging it.
L: Exactly. And i think the audience understands that energy to like, you know if we're excited about what we're doing and it's a new experience for us then that energy translates for sure. And i think vocally to, like that's an area where sometimes it would seem like it would be hard to improvise but i feel like we have a good sort of thing working where were able to kind of like let one person roll with an idea while the other person kind of catches on, you have to be really listening and be really open to that sort of improve journey.
C:I Mean there have been times where we like legit, like Leia and i are at the front of the stage like close to one another as the front people, and there have been times where i am literally like “i don't know how we just did that” You know like “that was crazy”. Theres like tons of times where somebody in the band does something that is unexpected and were all just like “Woah!” so that like, his band really, when i play other music now i long for that freedom that we have in this thing, like it's the most supportive free, unlimited thing i've ever been apart of. It can be anything at any time. We're always working from the song, like it's about that song but like it could change
L: Yeah like that the road map and we allow ourselves to take it where we want to take it, you know?
C:Yeah it's different every time in a way.
L: And i think a lot of bands do, like a lot of bands have, in terms of recorded music, is you know, a little more thought out and planned this particular way or produced in a particular way and that's sort of the fun of a live show, being able to expand on what you've done with the record.
C: A lot of people don't, this is my opinion i mean, i know that speaking personally a lot of times i'll take a chance, and there's always a risk involved in improvisation, like if you're truly improvising you're playing something completely spontaneous, not this tried and true thing that you know is going to work. So sometimes it doesn't really work.And sometimes i'll play stuff that is just like not. The price of that risk is that sometimes you do fall down or whatever for a second, but because we know each other and we respect the musicianship we can always pick it back up and often times the guidance won't even know that there was something weird but it's like the cost of admission for truly improvisation is being willing to take that chance to do something and maybe it doesn't work.
N: Well i'm definitely going to listen to this CD. Check out Planet Radio's debut album at Mill no’ 5 tomorrow at 7:30. Thanks.
