Under The Rotunda

The guys in Apollo Sunshine are not only stellar musicians, but great people as well. That goes for pretty much every artist who I've had the chance to interview -- but Apollo Sunshine take the cake, being the first band to ever offer to buy me a beer. Maybe that was just because I had to wait around an hour before they were free to chat, but it was certainly worth the wait. As I to a nearby Thai restaurant with guitarist Sam Cohen and drummer Jeremy Black, we started to talk about Berklee College Of Music, where all three members of Apollo Sunshine attended at some point in time. “We met there in 1997 at the Berklee summer performance program.” “That’s where Jeremy and I met, and then we met Jesse. We were still going to school, he had already stopped going." While Sam and Jeremy studied Music Production & Engineering, bassist/keyboardist Jesse Gallagher took to the more rock 'n' roll lifestyle, dropping out after a few semesters. Still, Berklee has helped Apollo Sunshine along in their careers in more ways than one. To start, it was there that they met professor Andy Edelstein, who would record their debut album, Katonah. "Andy came out to Katonah, which is where I grew up. Sam and I had a bunch of classes with Andy, he was a really cool teacher. He dug what we were doing and offered to come out and produce our first album." Jeremy and Sam both seemed equally positive about their experience recording their first album, with Sam saying, "He was amazing. The way we recorded the record was for several months we were going back and forth from Boston to Katonah -- spending four days of the week in Katonah and three days of the week in Boston -- and he scheduled all his classes on thoses three days, it was super hardcore, the way he got involved in that project. And that's the main thing I can say about the school: I met my bandmates there, I met Andy there, it's a place where you can go where people from all over the world are really enthused about music and want it to be the number one thing in their life. And that's the best thing about it."

Berklee came to their aid again during work on their second album, Apollo Sunshine. "We had some financial issues finishing the second album and the Berklee [student-run] Heavy Rotation label offered to put up some money to finish the record. So we agreed to let them co-release it in exchange for that. That was cool of them to do. It was a little strange because there was a lot of press that came out around the time of that album that was basically claiming that we were just a Berklee-created band or a Berklee-bred band, and we definitely backlashed against that a little bit. Obviously not because we didn't appreciate our education that we got at Berklee, but we didn't feel like a band that was created by them or that our music sensibility had anything to do with the school."

This time around, Apollo Sunshine have signed to Headless Hereos, a small indie label part of the World's Fair group, to see the release of their third album Shall Noise Upon. While I dearly love Katonah, they sound more in control these days as their sound continues to “grow up”. The spastic, wild attacks are less frequent on this album. Instead, they are replaced with musical explorations in a variety of different styles. When I first heard “Happiness,” where an acoustic guitar progression is surrounded by beautiful woodwinds and strings, I could hardly believe that this was the same band that produced the intense aural attack that is “Happening” (from Katonah). There are moments, full of majestic melodies and lush orchestration, that I’ve never heard Apollo Sunshine do before. And it sounds wonderful. Now, they’ve still got their energy, don’t worry. There are still times on the album that remind you of their roots, such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience. "The Hendrix experience was definitely a band that inspired us a lot when we first started up Apollo Sunshine. Just because it was a trio that could make sound that was way beyond what most three person bands could make. And I think that's been something that's been in our model from the beginning." With Shall Noise Upon added to their discography, Apollo Sunshine are sounding better than they ever have before. "I think it's reflective of where we're at with what we want to hear on a record and the music that we're into now. It doesn't necessarily seem varied to us or too eclectic to us, because it's natural that it's the music we come up with." "It sorta flows like the way we would listen to music. If you came over to one of our houses and listened to music for 38 minutes, it would kinda flow like that."

It seems that they like to keep things mixed up, or at least that's how things have worked out for them. It wasn't just their songwriting that evolved with their latest offering, but their recording process was a change as well. "It was pretty drastically different. It was the first time that we really went into the studio and wrote most of the record in the studio. We were given an opportunity by our label -- they put up the funds for us to live there for about six weeks. Although there was definitely some stuff that was pre-written, like Sam wrote 'Happiness' and 'Honestly' and some other stuff. But as far as the recording process it was all done by us, together living in a studio." "It wasn't stuff we'd been doing live, so it was stuff that had been written but only existed as a skeleton of a song. So that was the first time we'd ever made an album that way." Another change for the band was going back to a three-person band, without some additional members that they played with on and off in the past. "Right now we're working as a trio again. We always tend to fall back to that at some point. But it's always good to throw in those little curve balls. Some of the people we've brought into the mix tend to shake things up a bit and help us reflect on what we're doing as a trio and help us expand our sound in different ways. It's good for us to go back and forth; we've always enjoyed that."

Apollo Sunshine - Fear Of Heights (from Katonah)
Apollo Sunshine - Singing To The Earth (To Thank Her For You) (from Shall Noise Upon)

Labels: Interviews