by Christina Wagner
What: One Small Step for Landmines and Yearling
Where: Brewster’s Pub (14003 Beach Blvd)
When: Thursday February 7, 2008
Tallahassee has always been a little foreign to me. I've never really been a fan of college towns and the music these sort of "scenes" produce is usually a joke. I can only take that damn Jack Johnson song being covered so many times. Hopefully these guys will rekindle that potential fire I have deep in my chest for Tally. Hopefully.
Although the first song I came across didn't exactly knock my socks off, the second tune, ‘Everything's Going to be Alright,’ reeled me in like a nice foot massage after eight hours of walking in heels. They're not reinventing the wheel, but sometimes that can be a nice vacation. One Small Step for Landmines is the power pop outfit that includes three dudes: Kevin, Steve and August. Kevin was kind enough to answer a few of my deeply introspective questions about life, love and the our shared endearment toward Perez Hilton. One Small Step for Landmines will perform at the Pit in Brewster's Pub on where I'll get to brush up on my cage dancing (if you've been there before you know what I'm talking about). I'm anxious to see how their recorded material will translate on stage.
PS – I hear Kevin can kick anyone's ass in a beard-off, so they can't be that bad.
EU: How do you occupy your time when not out on tour?
Kevin: This past month is pretty much the longest streak we have gone without actually doing some form of touring. Since the album came out in September we have done at least a week of shows every month somewhere in the US if not longer. So for this month off we got some work done to our bus and rested up. We've got a six week string of shows starting next Wednesday.
EU: Be honest. If you knew you were never going to be able to make a living making music, would you still do it?
Kevin: Honestly, there will always be a way to get by making music. I really feel that way. You don’t have to live in the nicest apartment and have the brand new car and whatever it is people do with money, but you can totally get by. If somehow I wasn’t smart or creative enough to figure it out I would definitely still be making songs and playing them anywhere that would have me.
EU: You went on tour with Jewel as a guitar tech, how did you get hooked up with that gig? What was it like?
Kevin: I worked for Jewel for a summer, I got called for that gig because one of my good pals from my days of living in Los Angeles got hired as her guitar player. I was seriously sitting on my sofa in Tallahassee wondering how I was going to make rent when he called me
and asked me if I wanted the job. I told him I had no idea what I was supposed to do and admitted how unqualified I was but he seemed pretty okay with explaining the job as we went along. It was great fun and I got to see a ton of cool places from new perspectives, I’m used to touring in a van and playing in the not-so-pretty parts of town and sleeping on floors. Tour buses and nice hotels were a new way to travel to me. I enjoyed it very much.
EU: You recently had a little mishap with your veggie-mobile. What happened?
Kevin: I was at the shop that installed our conversion kit to allow the vehicle to run on waste vegetable oil and I was soooooo excited. It looked so beautiful in our bus and my mind was blown by the fact that we would never have to pay for fuel again. I was cruising back to
pick up our gear, which was being stored at my parents’ house in Tampa, and someone pulled out in front of me. It wasn’t a terrible crash, but the bus was definitely undriveable and had to be towed off. I was a very sad boy.
EU: Am I mistaken or did you at one point have some ties with Doghouse Records? If so, what happened?
Kevin: We still have ties to Doghouse records. Our album was released on Civil Defense League which is an imprint of Doghouse. They handle all of our manufacturing and distribution and a small amount of marketing. It’s a pretty cool relationship, we got to do the album ourselves and basically just turned it in, no hassle, nobody asking to hear demos or visiting the studio. I guess we are just that good. We look forward to many more releases with them.
EU: How did you first hook up with Jim Ward? What's it like working with him?
Kevin: I first met Jim Ward when he picked me up from the airport in Los Angeles. We drove around for a while and chatted, I was coming from Tallahassee and I was supposed to begin working for his band Sparta. Over the course of the next eight weeks we became really close and I ended up staying with him and his wife for a bit in El Paso. He knew about our band and as we talked about it more he realized how hard we were trying and all the stuff we had in the works. One day he just said, "I'm going to release your record." And that was that. So far it has been great getting to work with him and he does an incredible job of looking out for us and guiding us as we move along.
EU: Name one good thing about your relationship with your label, Civil Defense League. Name one bad.
Kevin: The best thing about our label is that at any time on any day I can call the owner of the label on his cell phone and he will pick up. The bad thing about our label is that when I call the owner of the label he picks up the phone every single time, and sometimes I am in a
state where I’m not making much sense and I fear I am making an ass of myself, then I have to call back the next morning and explain how many I had to drink.
EU: People say that there is no such thing as bad publicity, and although I genuinely love the band name, the Onion awarded you boys with one of the worst band names of 2007. Have you gotten more hits since the write up or not-so-much?
Kevin: I think that the mention we got in the Onion was definitely cool though I must admit I haven't seen our fan-base grow as a result of a fake news publication citing ours as one of the worst band names of the year. Hopefully we can win again next year.
EU: The power pop genre, albeit very popular and easy-to-swallow, is also incredibly competitive. There are more bands now then ever fighting it out to stay on top and rise above the rest of the herd. What makes you guys different from everyone else?
Kevin: I think the fact that there are only three of us in the band kind of sticks out when people see us. I think for a while it was almost a contest to see how many people you could fit on stage with a lot of bands. I mean, seriously, do you NEED three guitar players? Probably not. How about just getting one guitar player who actually knows how to play. That's the main difference, that and the fact that we actually spend significant amounts of time on our craft. Also we have a drummer who is nicknamed "the face," for obvious reasons, so there's always something nice to look at.
EU: When it comes to amazingly terrible music, we all have a guilty pleasure. What's yours?
Kevin: I turned off my "crap filter" some time ago so I no longer hide the stuff I like or really dislike all that much. We all really enjoy really smooth music and the bus is constantly pumping the music of Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Sade, lots and lots of Sade, and some good Christopher Cross. Anything smooth is good.
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