July Talk – HuffPost 6.30.14

Mike Ragogna: Hey July Talk, what advice do you have for new artists?

Leah Fay: Do your thing. Don’t give a f**k about what anyone else thinks. You’ve got to hone in on what it is that makes you, and what it is that you want to say and try not to be affected by that human urge to compete and compare and talk down to and all those things. At the end of the day, you’ve got to be a good person. That’s the important thing. You can’t be a s**thead.

Peter Dreimanis: I think the biggest thing is just staying on the idea that if you make a mistake make it again and capitalize on it. That’s what people are interested in seeing. They’re interested in seeing human beings, they don’t want to see this glossy thing that has nothing to do with real life. That’s what we’re into. I don’t know if it will work for them.

Ian Docherty: Play a lot and tour.

Josh Warburton: I’m kind of reiterating, but I think being sincere in what you’re doing is important. It’s really easy when you’re a musician, and especially in this industry, to start to model certain elements of your act around what’s working around you. I think when that stuff happens, you get a lot Frankenstein bands, both visually and sonically. If you can stay the course and find what it is that influences you and then if your songs can translate and play well just on the acoustic guitar, then you’re golden.

Danny Miles: I full agree with Josh, being true to yourself, and Ian as well, working hard. It doesn’t come easy. We are a new band, but we’ve all been working hard for years before this.

LF: Try to be as smelly as possible and make all the people fall in love with your pheromones.

MR: [laughs] Where do you want July Talk’s future to go?

PD: I think we very early on decided that we needed to know what we were in it for. You obviously don’t become a musician to make money anymore, so it’s very important to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. Josh and I had that conversation when we first started the band. “What do we want?” I remember Josh’s answer was to make a great record, one of those records that people remember. My goal, if you want to call it that, was to have a show that people knew and could come and enjoy and see multiple shows in a tour and still feel like they wanted more. As soon as we started developing that, well, right now our live show is where we feel at home. We feel totally rewarded by it and we can’t get enough of that. The record is the next step, moving forward. You’re always trying to create that sound and capture that moment on record. I think that’s next for us. I hope with this release in the States we can continue exploring that.

LF: I think when you start a band, what you really want to do is take over the world but then the checkpoints of world domination keep getting farther and farther away and the world just keeps getting bigger and bigger. I think that’s kind of the motivating point to keep going, you just have to accept that you don’t know anything. For us, as long as this project keeps going and we’re constantly being pushed back onto our asses, it makes us want to stand up again and work harder and keep learning.