A Conversation with Milo Greene’s Andrew Herringer & Graham Fink – HuffPost 4.16.12
Mike Ragogna: What is this “Milo Greene”‘s origin story?
Andrew Herringer: I was living in the Sacramento area in California and I was doing music with Marlana (Sheetz) who’s the female vocalist in the band. I went to school with Robbie and the two of us had started to exchange music online. I was doing the band on my own, and Robbie was singing lead in a band as well.
MR: That’s Robbie Arnett.
AH: Yes. The two of us decided to meet at a cabin one weekend, when I was doing some housesitting for friends. We took all our recording gear and he asked if Marlana could come along. So that ended up happening and the three of us locked ourselves away for a week and started recording. Those three songs became the foundation of something we knew was special. About six months later, we did another demo session, and by the end of that, we knew that maybe this was something that had some staying power.
MR: Graham, when did you come on board?
Graham Fink: Somewhere in the middle of all that. I was in another band in Los Angeles also, and I played some shows with Robbie’s band and we became friends. As both our bands declined, unfortunately, we were bonding, and he had these demos that they had started making that he sent me and asked if I would like to be involved. I was pretty taken with them, and we got together and started working from there. New songs evolved and here we are today, about a year and a half later.
MR: You’re being worked up by Atlantic’s Chop Shop, and you’re associated with Fueled by Ramen. That’s a pretty big endorsement. How did that come about?
GF: I think John at Chop Shop started coming to our first shows–we played our first show just under a year ago, so we’re about to hit our first real anniversary as a band. From the very first shows, he was coming up and fell in love with the band. He nerdily started courting us, we fell for all his mannerisms, and he actually dropped us off at the hotel, so we had gotten quite close with him.
MR: You played SXSW for a few nights. What was the experience been like?
AH: Pretty chaotic. We’ve had a couple great showcases . Just getting in front of a whole bunch of people…the thing that strikes me the most is seeing a lot of repeat people come back. Seeing the same faces is what I like the most.
GF: Yeah, it’s nice to have return customers.
MR: (laughs) How would you describe playing live vs. your studio approach?
AH: Well, I think I would go with the recordings and describe them first. We like to call our music “cinematic pop.” We like to see it as a soundscape, and I think there’s something for us in the recordings that we add. To actually play the recordings live, we would need ten people in this band. We dub a lot of instruments and so when we go to play live, we find the things that need to be there and cover everything. But I still think that the songs are the things that really sell people. I think a lot of the arrangements, too, we worked really hard on. I think live, it’s pulled off, even though it may not be exactly what’s on the recordings.
GF: I think we rely a lot more on raw energy and there’s a different feeling to the live show. It’s a little bit louder, a little bit dirtier, if you will.
MR: Although you’ve been classified as a folk pop. Is that right?
GF: Sure.
MR: (laughs) Okay, “1957,” let’s get to that. It’s your latest single, and you’re going to be having an album out at some point this year?
GF: July is the hopeful release date if all goes according to plan.
MR: Does it have a tentative title yet?
AH: I think self-titled probably.
MR: Milo Greene introducing Milo Greene. Everyone is going to say, “Who is that guy?” What inspired your naming the band Milo Greene?
AH: Robbie and I were in college together and we were both doing other bands. There was a group of musicians, and we were all trying to do the DIY, just make in the music industry. We realized that in order to become a little bit more legitimate, we needed a booking agent. We can get anyone to be our booking agent, so we created the “Milo Greene” character. We created an email address, and Milo would send out booking emails for us. That actually had a degree of success to it. We always joked that we would have a band called Milo Greene in the future to pay homage to…
MR: …ooh, ooh, I know…to the guy who got you places!
AH: Exactly!
MR: Now, I imagine you’re using a lot of your social networking to keep your fans on board and to let them know about events, etc. What kind of social networking and marketing concepts are coming from your end, beyond the label’s promotion team? What are you doing on your own?
GF: I think when we started, we utilized Bandcamp a lot, which was helpful. It has a lot of ways which provide fans with free downloads and different kinds of incentives so that they’re constantly being given material and given opportunities to be involved and not lose the attention of the fans that are out there.
AH: I’ve enjoyed Twitter, especially when we were out on tour with the Civil Wars in the Fall. Just seeing every night, there was an immediate response. People could talk to you and you could talk back to them. It creates a relationship almost immediately that you could not get without that kind of medium, that technology.
GF: Yeah, we’ve had a number of experiences with strangers through Twitter that have just been amazing memories like bonfires with fans in Seattle that just invited us over to their home for dinner, probably not thinking that we’d write back and say what time we’re coming. So there’s been a lot of a fun thanks to strangers in the internet world.
MR: What advice do you guys have for new artists?
GF: I’ve got some. Like Andrew was saying, we had been doing this a long time with other bands before we got Milo Greene going. The one thing that sticks out to me with respect to the success we’re having so far is that we made a decision to get everything up to a very solid level before we put our foot forward. Rather than just starting playing shows and figuring out how to be a band together at shows, we practiced, and we recorded, and we demoed and got to a point where before we played our first show, we felt confident. That’s not to say that we haven’t grown together over the past year, but we really put in the time to making sure that before we got on stage or sent out music, it was up to a level that we were happy with, and not just a foundation of something to come.
AH: Yeah, when we announced our first show, we had a couple demos we posted on Bandcamp, we had a video that we posted on Youtube, and there was definitely a professionalism to it all that we wanted to make sure was there from the beginning. I think that has allowed our success to be catapulted a little bit more this last year than I think we even thought possible.
MR: Basically, when looking at a new artist or band, you feel your example is something they could follow?
AH: Yeah, I think there should be a standard of quality. There is so much music out there, if you don’t break above all the other stuff going on, you’re just going to get lost in it.
GF: First impressions are just so important. It’s way harder to come back from a bad first impression of something and change someone’s relationship with your band name or your artist than to just have a good impression to begin with.
MR: That’s a good point. Creatively, how do you guys do it, how do you create the music?
GF: Hodge-podge.
AH: We’ve got a lot of heads involved, a lot of writers involved. The thing I really like about that is that it really makes us focus on what’s needed, what’s catchy, what hooks people. We’re all about writing pop songs and then camouflaging them with a vibe that we think is cool, that hits us emotionally. I think the best part about all these writers together is we can filter each other. Because we all trust each other, if I write a part and the others don’t like it, I say, “Okay, I trust you guys.”
MR: When you’re writing a part, in the context of the arrangement of the song, do you guys go through many variations of the arrangement as you’re camouflaging?
AH: Sometimes. Sometimes a song hits right away, sometimes it takes a while. We’ve had a better experience with a couple of songs.
MR: Has the band’s identity evolved since the beginning?
AH: Yeah, I think we’re still figuring it out. I think the cool thing about this collection of songs is that it’s not all over the place. I think it feels unified through certain arrangement things like how we do vocals, we like cymbal swells a lot, and things like that. But there’ll be a lot of arrangement things that carry over. I think that some songs like “1957” has an old country feel at times. We have one called “Perfectly Aligned” that sounds like a little bit more of a dark, edgier thing. I think we’re still trying to find our voice and I think, because we have so many writers involved, we’ll always have these cross-genre things going on.
MR: Cool, and what’s the future for Milo Greene?
GF: Hopefully, the record will be out in July. We’re going to be doing some touring in May, including a few more shows with The Civil Wars, and then in July, I think we’re going to do a bunch of US stuff on our own. Hopefully, we’ll be touring here and everywhere in the year to come.
MR: Milo’s life going to be like in the future?
AH: We’ve had a really amazing year. We don’t have a record out, we have four songs online that are demos that we did in our apartment, and I think that we’ve built up, through that, through YouTube, through The Civil Wars tour, we’ve been able to build up an anticipation. I think that once we get the record out, we will truly be able to see what we’re capable of, and who we’re able to reach. I’m really excited to finally get that out, but I’m also excited that we’ve kept it in and built up that anticipation, which has really made people eager.
MR: Thank you very much, both of you guys, I wish you the best. When you have the album out, you need to come back here for round two.
AH: Absolutely!
GF: Thank you.
Transcribed by Narayana Windenberger