who are some of your influences? It’s funny when we get asked this because I feel like most bands come together based on a shared appreciation for certain music or similar tastes. We seem to come together based on our differences; our tour van playlist is probably the best reflection of that. We’ll roll with everything from the standard indie fare, to Bollywood soundtracks and gangster rap. A lot of that has to do with our individual musical backgrounds; I taught myself guitar while listening to Zeppelin and Black Sabbath but people like Sejal (violin) and Patrick (keys) grew up doing orchestra
and theory classes. It’s cool though, I think that we combine all our experiences to make something that’s a little different from what you usually see in the indie scene. We do share a common appreciation for groups like The National, Arcade Fire and Broken Social scene, which are the bands we get compare to most often, but we’re always discovering new stuff or sharing our individual tastes with the rest of the group. I look back on Left In Places with a fairly critical eye, but also a certain level of fond
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ness. In the end it was really just an album made by a group of kids who had a lot of good ideas but didn’t really know what they were doing. That’s not to say that its bad, but I think we’ve just moved past it. When I listen to it I hear the weakness in my voice, the parts that could have been cut shorter, lyrics that needed resolution and empty space that needed something to fill it in. I also remember all the graveyard shift recording times we fit in to save money, how big the studio felt and the amount of
time it took. That was a year long process of working around the studio schedule and attempting to coordinate time amongst ourselves. When we made Raised By Wolves we wanted to feel in our comfort zone, so we literally took the experience home and recorded it in the garage, with George doing all the engineering. We had 12 hour days sometimes, we recorded and scrapped a lot of different ideas, brought in friends to listen to our progress or record different parts and were able to finish the whole thing within a month. This way we weren’t thinking about how much money we were spending or when