NEW ARTIST SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW
THE SUFFERS
written and photographed by: stephanie tacy
The Suffers are an eight-memeber Gulf Coast Soul Band Out of Houston, Texas We sat down with the lead singer, Kam Franklin in August after their set at Float Fest. Be sure to check out their newest album Everything Here!
How did y’all decide on the name, The Suffers? “Anybody that you know gets crazy with the grammar, they always like to correct us and say shouldn’t it be, ”The Sufferers”. We were called The Sufferers and that is not as fun to say over and over and over again. It is a reference to a movie from the 70s a Jamaican movie called Rockers where in that movie the sufferers are the artists that want to do what we do for a living but they’re not rewarded for their art, they are chastised, they’re robbed and berated and yet they still overcome because this is what they love so they keep doing it even though they’re suffering to do I.”
How did all of you meet? “We met at different times in our lives. Some of the guys have known each other since they were children, some of them met in high school and some met in other bands. The common denominator for us all is that we all played in punk, ska, or reggae bands when we were younger and then we started this one, it was started by the bass player Adam Castaneda and the keyboard player, Patrick Kelly.”
What’s your favorite song of those that you have out now? “I will say my oldest favorite, from the first record, is called “Giver” and it’s really an immature song when I hear it now. I just wasn’t really loving myself and I was giving all of myself to this guy at the time and he just wouldn’t love me back no matter what I did, and I just couldn’t understand why. On this new record, my favorite song is called “You Only Call When You Need Something” and it’s only one lyric and it’s super dramatic and has overthe-top background vocals, pedal steel, and organs, but the reason it’s my favorite is because it’s this proclamation of fuck you, you know, I’m tired of feeling like shit, I’m tired of losing all the time. It took me realizing while writing this last record that I don’t have to lose. I don’t have to date bad men. I don’t have to have a bad relationship with people that love me because I’m irritated with people that don’t. It’s a very emotional thing where you punish those that love you because the people that you want to love don’t return it and it’s just a weird cycle and so I’ve been working on just overall programming myself and my mood and just trying to make better decisions overall with my life. I think a lot of it started when I turned 30, its weird, you know, they always tell you when you’re younger that you’ll turn 30 and all of these things are going to change. Then one day you turn 30 and you’re like “oh whatever,” you know, and honestly it took me turning 31 to realize what turning 30 did to me and I’m so grateful for it and now I’m in this “I don’t take no shit” headspace that I wish I could have had when I was 21 but I’m grateful that at 31 I am now approaching it.”
I know that y’all recently dropped a new album, Everything Here, but could you tell us a little more about it? “The new record is called Everything Here on our label Shanachie out of New Jersey. It deals with every relationship that affects who you as a person and your growth as a person, so it deals with romance, just calling your parents back while you have the opportunity to, it deals with setting boundaries, loving yourself, telling people when to fuck off and being clear. There’s a song called “What You Said” that deals with the context of how you say things, you know, it’s sometimes not what you say to a person that makes them upset, it’s how you say it or how you did it and being clear and saying “Hey, you know, I have feelings” and I don’t think a lot of people realize how valid their emotions are because so many people tell them that they are not worth that or that they’re overreacting and you know we don’t always live the same way. Some of us feel very different things and take words a very different way and I always hated the saying, you know “sticks and stones.” yeah, fuck whoever came up with that. Whoever came up with that is a fucking pushover, you know, sometimes you need to defend yourself, not physically, but sometimes you need to be able to say “I don’t like being spoken to that way. I don’t appreciate being spoken to that way and if you’re going to be in my life that can’t happen”
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