Freezepop: Interview Part Deux

You mentioned Seth Damascus Kennedy…

Yes, but now he’s Bananas Foster.

Bananas Foster, Michael Diamonds and Créme Bruleé

How did he get that name?

You really want to know how it happened?  We were at a Bennigans in Florida, and it was terrible!  It was really gross, and there was one of those little menu cards on the table and it had Bananas Foster on it and we just said “Seth, that’s your name”.

So now you have two band members named after food…

Actually if you count Crème Brulee (Alex Chen), there’s actually three.  He was originally another temporary fill-in guy.  He actually played the first PAX we performed because Kasson couldn’t come out to that one.  He’s toured with us a bit.  It’s weird.  We don’t actually have a rotating cast of characters but there’s definitely certain fill-ins that we use.  Actually, for this show Seth (aka Bananas Foster) is the Best Man at his friend’s wedding this weekend so we brought out another guy to play drums, Michael Diamonds.

Are there any other members?

Those are kind of the three main people that we’ve been using for a while.

So you knew Seth from Sean’s other band

Yeah, Seth and Sean went to high school together.  They’ve known each other for a million billion years.  We’ve even been roommates.
How do you know the other guys?

The other dudes?  They’re just like friends of ours.  Crème Brulee and Michael Diamonds are in a band together called Boy in Static and we’ve actually toured with them.  They would be our backup guys but they were still their own band.   It made it easy because we all traveled together.

A new song… Special Effects

No big tour bus. Just going in your car?

Our ideal tour vehicle is a Sienna LE because you can fit five people very comfortably and we don’t have that much gear…  Yeah, no big vans for us.
Listening to the albums chronologically it seems that your sound has developed and gotten more sophisticated over the years.  Some of the first albums are really simple but have really catchy tunes, but Future3 Perfect is more complicated sound-wise.

Yeah, our music is kind of a progression.   It’s weird.  If you look at the three albums in a row you can kind of see, but the jump from the first album to the third album is… you kind of need the second album to put it in perspective.

Do you think the sound has progressed because of the technology or as everyone has become more experienced?

I don’t think it’s an experience thing.  Initially the point of the band was to keep things really simple and everything was done on the QY70 (like just QY70 and vocoder).  For the second album we used the same tools but Kasson added a bunch of things on the computer.  For the third album the songs were written on the QY70 but we brought more stuff in.  We basically did everything we could do with the QY70.

You still write with it?

A little bit. Sean actually got his own, so it will still be around.

I thought that computer sequencing software would have made it obsolete by now.

Well, it’s kind of our “thing” so we’re not going to abandon it totally.

I saw a YouTube video of Sean totally shredding on a guitar during your tour this year.

Yeah, that’s his little dirty secret.

Sean rocking out with Seth on guitar

So has he considered playing guitar for Freezepop?

We’ll bring it in on a couple of songs here and there but we’re mostly an electro-pop band.  It’s a stylistic choice I guess.  Sean does play guitar in his other bands, though.

Does he actually play Guitar Hero?

Not really, no.  The thing is drummers are really good at that game because it’s a rhythm-based thing.  It really has nothing to do with how well you play guitar.

You’ve been on every Harmonix game up until Rock Band 2… and you’re not present at all on Rock Band: Beatles.

Yeah, what’s up with that? (smiles)  When Beatles was announced Kasson asked if we were going to have a song in there. (laughs).
For Rock Band 2 we didn’t have any new songs ready at that point and it seemed like we had anything appropriate in our back catalog.  We attempted to write some new stuff for it but nothing really fit, so we decided to hold out for the DLC (downloadable content).

Actually this weekend we have some DLC coming out.