A Few Pints is a segment where we meet up with our favorite bands at a local bar, buy them a few beers, and hope they reveal the keys to longevity, wealth, fame, and the secrets of the universe…or we just bullshit with them for a while about their band, what they love, and what they are currently up to. Good times and free beer for them.

Dan Harding is part of Good Night, States and was gracious enough to join us at Sharp Edge in Friendship/East Liberty to have a few pints and talk about the status of the band. Below is a transcription (which took me forever to do) that pares down the 2+ hours we spent with Dan a week ago. Huge thanks to Dan for being awesome, talkative, and for laughing at our jokes. Also a big thanks to our friend Matt who hung out, drank beer, and added someone really great follow up questions to the mix.

So we are officially going to start this. Just so you know, this could possibly be the worst interview you’ve ever had, because we’ve never done this shit before…

[Laughs]. Well you could look at it two ways: this could be the worst interview you have, or the best and it could all go down hill from here. It’ll definitely be your first…

First question off the bat, Dan – discuss with us your role in the band and how the band has changed over the years, since it’s inception in 2007?

Well, my name is Dan, and I’m happy to be here.

Hi Dan…

Um, I play drums in Good Night, States , I play percussion, I have a pretty cool and extensive electronic rig that lets me play cool electronic samples and also big percussion instruments that are too heavy to lug around like xylophone, tubular bells and that sort of thing. And, I’ve been involved with the band, since, well, we all went to Grove City together. Our lead singer, Steve, our bass player Trevor, and I were in a band called Like Summer for about 5 years or so. We played with Ben Hardt who later formed Ben Hart and His Symphony – later we went our separate ways and he started his symphony and we started a new chapter in the band and decided to call it Good Night, States . Later we invited Joe, a guitar player, and our current keyboard player Megan, to join us. We immediately got to task writing the songs for our debut album Short Films in Self Control. It may have been 07, or 06…I’ll get back to you on that one. We have the strange oddity that three of us live in Pittsburgh and our lead singer lives in New Jersey…

What took Steven to New Jersey?

He was dating , was engaged, and is now married to his wife and they were both offered their dream jobs and couldn’t pass that up. Unfortunately, the band is still here and we hope to be in the same city sometime in the near future. With that being said, we’ve been able to get a lot of song under our belt doing it this way – about 2 and half full-length albums.

When did the split actually occur?

Before we were GNS .

So your entire existence has been 7 hours a part?

That’s correct, but we still think of Pittsburgh as our home base town. We’ve been able to take part in some decently high profile shows and in Pittsburgh we can definitely count on people coming out to see the shows.

With you guys here and Steve out in New Jersey, do you feel it changes your sound?

No I don’t think so. I mean, Steve, he literally doesn’t know anything that’s going on in modern music. Really. That’s an exaggeration…

He’s in Steve Land right now.

Right right. He doesn’t really live in a part of New Jersey where he can be part of the “scene” or anything like that and I don’t know if he would do that if he had the chance. I’ve always admired Steve to be his own person and he’s more comfortable being in his own skin then anyone I’ve ever met. We were friends in college for a while before I even knew he played. We were in his dorm room and I said “Oh, I didn’t know you played guitar” and then he played some of the most beautiful songs I’d ever heard. And that was it.

How did Joe Tanner recently leaving the band affect you guys? Was it a big kick to morale, either up or down? Does it affect your sound?

Change is inevitable and being a part of this band has really taught all of us that. Joe leaving the band was a bummer to all of us personally because we are all best of friends. It’s interesting that we were all such good friends before we started the band together, which means that are good times are really good and our bad times are really bad. Joe had his reasons and he’s the type of musicians that’s totally comfortable in his own skin. It’s hard being in a band – you get kicked in the gut every so often and there were some of the harder parts of being in a band that he was able to forego. We are still really good friends, we talk all the time and he actually called me as I was walking in here. As far as how it changed the morale – it was a good place for a break anyway, and we had planned to stop and write songs and it was the best time to close that chapter on Joe. As far as sound, well, I’d rather not reveal that until the songs come out. Speaking from behind the drum set – I’m thoroughly excited. We had to do some serious rearranging and it forced us to think outside our comfort zone.

We know everyone has their own personal musical taste and style, but would you say you guys have common influences…that you pool your favorites together , ike “Hey that’s the sound we want to go for”.

Well that’s an easy answer since there is no answer. We all have a pretty disparate method of influence. I’d say Steve is really influenced by older rock and roll. He has a very sharp lexicon when it comes to traditional rock and roll. Trevor and Megan are my go to people for what is current – they should start a …wait…no…they should write for your blog! I totally need to put your RSS feed into my Google Reader.

Who are some of the current people you guys have been listening to?

What’s funny is that when we are in the van traveling, we have such good conversation that we never end up listening to music. I was asking Trevor what he had been listening to currently and he gave me his iPod to look at the currently played list and then the conversation changed and I forget. It’s hard for me to answer, but as a whole, we all love Wilco. We’ve all been on a really big The Band kick recently. Steve recently read Across the Great Divide and some of Megan’s recent role has had Steve referring to Garth Hudson’s playing on so and so song…

Would you call the break a hiatus? What prompted that – is it only for songwriting purposes or were there personal issues involved?

We’ve actually been calling it a sabbatical. A day of rest after six days of really hard work. The amount of work that needs to be put into Good Night, States in order to make it sustainable requires so much behind the scenes work. It’s fairly indescribable to the public. People just going to the shows are only seeing the tip of the iceberg as to everything that goes on behind the scenes – booking shows, promoting shows, songwriting, practicing, etc.

We can definitely attest to that. The amount of time we spend on social networking sites is incredible. All the time that is spent working on the site that doesn’t actually show up on the site is staggering.

There was a really interesting interview with Ted Leo in, I think, Spin Magazine. He must of put off this affect that “I’m getting burned out”. Spin basically put into the article that Ted Leo was retiring. Well, Ted Leo put a retort on his blog that said “Hey, I’m not retiring , I’m playing music for the rest of my life and some of the best songs of my life haven’t’ come out yet, but you have to understand that to keep something like Ted Leo and the Pharmacists going there’s a lot of stuff that I’m not interested in and it’s not paying my bills, so , I’m going to finish out 2010 and then redesign what life looks like. “ For Good Night, States it’s interesting that we can empathize with someone who is that much more well known and successful than we are and we have the same sentiments. Right now it’s a season in the band where we have to create the best songs we’ve ever had and after this season is over, we’ll get back to whatever it is we can make happen and be in the public eye. So that’s what we are doing. Right now, I’m itching to let other people know what’s going on, but we have reined all of that in. We’re just doing the songwriting thing.

Just from speaking with you and getting the feel of the band, it seems like you guys are very family oriented.? Close as friends, but with your own separate wives, husbands, and kids.

Megan and Trevor, our bass player and keyboard player are married to one another.

Wow. Ok. We’re smarter than we thought. Congratulations to them!

Yes, haha. Five years coming up. Steve and his wife have a baby, I’m married and we have a baby. So yes, we all certainly have our own personal families, but as the band goes, we definitely think of us as a family and then have a very large extended family when you put all of us together. The saddest part to me that we aren’t all in the same city is that we don’t see each other as much as we could and we have such a blast together.

Has there always been that family mentality or did you ever have that stereotypical rock and roll attitude going around?

The family aspect kind of overrides everything, but in the same sense that you wanted to beat up your little brother, we have all of those parts to the relationship as well. We know how to push each other’s buttons. We spend a great deal of time in the band trying to figure out how we can work better together tomorrow than we did today. There were some dark periods where we didn’t get along or some relationship got in the way but we came through them. My personal idol when it comes to this type of thing is U2. A bunch of jokers with a bulletin board in a high school have now been together for 30 or 35 years.

So we did our research and we were totally intrigued by the whole DIY thing. Being engineers and total nerds, the fact that you guys build tube amps and effects pedals is really interesting to us. Where did that originate?

There’s a part of us that’s wired for materialism and you have to fight it. Specifically when it comes to musical instruments, there’s a relationship there. Some songwriters I’ve heard say “there are songs left in this guitar that I haven’t found yet”. Steve and Trevor are really interested in this kind of stuff – they started building simple effects pedals and from there it skyrocketed into Steve and Trevor having their own effects and amp companies.

Wow. That’s incredible. What are the names?

Trevor’s is TRVR Hand Wired Electronics and Steve has Memphis Dauphin. Joe was into it too and he is actually part of the Memphis Dauphin. It’s to the point where Steve will get to a show and say, “I didn’t like how this sounded last night” and he breaks out the soldering iron and changes it or “I like the sound of all 4 of these pedals, I’m going to build one that has all of them together.” Personally, I don’t do it as much as they do, but I have restored old drums and I feel a connection to it. They get so nerdy about though that Megan and I try to distract them and talk about custom lamps to counter their nerdy electronics talk.

[As an editorial aside, if you weren’t aware of this (we weren't), GNS did a really interesting project that incorporated playing live and audience members using a band programmed iPhone app. Check out the story in engadget and for the full details and go here to see what lead dude Steve Gretz had to say]

Biggest question we have for you guys. Now, you may want to take a sip of beer before you answer it and I’m going to ask it exactly how we wrote it out. Toothbrushes…what the fuck? We saw them for sale on the website.

[laughs]. I’ll try and see if we can find some for you, they aren’t really for sale anymore. All of us are into dental hygiene, Megan more than anyone. There was a small window of time where we considering some nighttime merchandise like pillows with our faces on them and other night time themed things. We google searched it and found a company that would allow you to print anything you wanted on a toothbrush. We actually ran out of them.

So they were hot sellers than?

Probably the hottest selling thing we’ve ever offered. I don’t know why bands don’t move into that territory. Maybe someday we will move back into those, but they weren’t ADA approved, so that’s a bummer. We would love to get endorsed by Oral B or Braun. That would be the bee’s knees.

So the meat and potatoes of the interview is the upcoming show at the Warhol with Meeting of Important of People. First gig since January. How excited are you guys for this?

There’s not a whole lot to say because the gist of it is we are super excited to play. We haven’t played in Pittsburgh since January and we couldn’t be more excited. We played a show in late January in Boston, but that’s the last time live.

There are so many components that go into someone wanting to be in a band. If you don’t have the desire to offer whatever you have to offer in front of a group of people and see how they react, then why are you doing this? We love playing live shows. Aside from trying to write amazing songs, playing live shows is the number one thing we are interested in. I get butterflies before a show because I get so excited and I’m starting to get those now for this one. We’re also excited to try the new lineup and see how people react to that.

Meeting of Important People are among our best band friends in Pittsburgh. Outside of going to each other’s shows, we love to hang out. To me, they are an unstoppable force that many more people should know about and their recent successes are indicative of what they are capable of – which is a lot more people hearing them. Josh is an amazing songwriter and they write together as a band in a really exciting way. I can’t wait to hear their new album and see the songs live. We would all be huge MOIP fans even if we didn’t know them or playing in another band, etc.

How did you hook up with them? Just from playing out?

Yes. When we were Like Summer, Josh had a band “This Band Is Called The You” and we just got to know each other. We followed each other through different permutations. MOIP and GNS are part of the same sub group of bands that hang out outside of shows and support each other – Lohio, Ben Hardt, Harlan Twins, Boca Chica, Triggers, the list goes on of bands that are all good friends.

What’s the set up for the Warhol show then? It’s outside, correct?

Yes it is outside show and they’ve done a really cool deal. It’s $8 for the show and that gets you the new MOIP album and admission to the Warhol Museum. The show is 8 to 10, we play at 8:00 pm and they play at 9:00 pm.

Is this the only show you guys are doing in the foreseeable future?

MOIP and the Warhol asked us concurrently “would you play this show” and we couldn’t say no. We haven’t played in so long, but no, there are no other shows planned right now. We’re all itching to play shows regularly both here and out of town but we need to wait till the timing is right for the music. We’re also anticipating that more people will want to come out and help us release this album to a larger audience and we need time to coordinate that – PR people, managers, labels…

…blogs…

Yes. Definitely blogs.

We’d fail as a news source if we didn’t ask about the timeline of the new material. Can you tell us or would you have to kill us?

[laughs] We jokingly say the new album will come out by 2015. It’s really hard for us to rate the speed at which we are working. Certain aspects come together in an incredible way outside of your will and others have to be hammered into place and the effort is what counts. Right now we have about 20 songs we are actively working on, and whether they turn into two albums or they all make it, I have no idea. We have a lot of music that we want the rest of the world to here and they just aren’t done yet. I don’t know…a realistic estimate is that we would be recording by winter, but that may be generous. We hate to put timelines on these types of things. We’ll just have to be patient and see how it all pans out. All I know is that I’m excited.

Once again, huge thanks to Dan to being the best interviewee we’ve ever had and just a generally awesome dude to talk to. Do yourself a favor and hit up the The Andy Warhol Museum show on July 30th to support Meeting of Important People and Good Night, States. Tickets are a ridiculous $8, show starts at 8 pm. You can buy tickets HERE.

Filed under: Homegrown Goodness, Interviews, Live Music