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.

Lohio is a busy band these days! With a new EP digitally released and a tour starting just days away, Greg and Liz were kind enough to invite us to chat while they screen printed their DeBolt designed T-shirts at AIR on the North Side. It was quite the experience, being surrounded with all the beautiful art inside of AIR and getting a chance to see Lohio hard at work and then speaking with them at a quiet outdoor table across the street. Blake came prepared with a sixer of Rolling Rock and we got a chance to speak about the new EP, the tour, the creative process behind the band, and the KISS Army (No, I’m serious. Just for a second though). Here’s how it went dahn:

… So we’ve talked to a lot with the local bands and it’s such a close knit community and we’ve heard that Lohio’s been through some permutations with different local musicians playing with the band over the years. You guys have been around a while now, where did this current line up come from?

Greg Dutton: Well the original line up – we had Matt Miller, Josh Verbanets, Erik Cirelli, and Craig Smith. That was the band for about a year and a half, up until the point that Meeting of Important People started to become more focused. So Josh and Matt left to become more focused on that. Liz had joined a couple months prior and so by that point a couple things happened. Craig Smith, who was a doctor, …his work schedule changed so he had to focus on his job and we were getting more and more wanting to tour so it didn’t make sense. So we kind of had a split and we had Sven come in on drums and Chris Ryan come in on keyboards. And really there hasn’t been that much upheaval until Sven then moved to Philadelphia and Paul came into play drums. I guess one reason why it seems there’s so many permutations is that we expand and contract the band for different shows. Like we played the Arts Festival and we brought a lot of people to come in and play that show. I don’t feel like it’s this ambiguous thing that’s always changing. Erik still plays guitar for us, I sing and play guitar, Liz plays bass and Paul Smith is our drummer. To answer your questions where this permutation came from – Paul was a good friend and he played drums with Emily Rodgers who’s a friend. I mean you play so closely with so many people when you need someone to fill in they’re more than happy to do it.

So there weren’t any craigslist bandmates? These were all people that you knew?

GD: No no. Even the original line up was friends made through the music scene. When I first moved here after about 2 month being in the city I wandered into Club Café and Boca Chica was playing that night – it was Hallie Pritts, Suzanna Meyer, and they had a banjo player. Someone filling in for the night. I really liked the show and afterwards I went up to Hallie, I didn’t know her, and said “Hey if you ever need a banjo player…let me know.” I went to college for architecture, but I did a lot of furniture making and wood working so I had just recently built myself a banjo. I was a year removed from that and playing banjo a little bit but this was an opportunity to play more and that’s what I was thinking in my head. To her, I said I was an ace banjo player. A couple weeks after that she followed up with me and we grabbed a soup at what is now Remedy and I joined Boca Chica and through them…it’s a funny thing because Hallie was living with Emily Rodgers and Emily Rodgers was dating someone who Eric was in a band with and automatically I just met all these people and cultivated these friendships. A year or so later I kinda wanted to start a band, at that point me and Craig were already going out for beers, I knew Eric, I knew Josh, I kinda knew Matt and he was playing drums in another guys bands. So I knew this guy, whatever whatever, and conned these people into forming a band with me. All through friendships and it’s kind of been an organic thing…except Liz, who I didn’t know before she joined the band.

Liz Adams: Yeah that was through a mutual friend at Carnegie Melon. He’s the drummer for Triggers…Buddy. I knew him as Rich, I didn’t know he had this rock and roll alias. [laughs] I had just bought my electric bass, my Rickenbacker…

Beautiful bass…

LA : Thank you!…I had wanted to join a band because I had just started practicing…I studied classical bass at CMU studying to get a masters I never finished in music performance and really started missing playing in bands. So I asked Woody and he knew people. He thought Meeting of Important People needed a bass player so he got me in contact with Josh, but they had someone and he said “But I might know this other band….[laughs]

And how long have you been in the band then?

LA – Two years, almost two years exactly. Around this time I was leaving school…

Is there anything that makes the current lineup or experience different compared to past lineups or experiences? Have things changed over 2 years?

GD – Yeah I’d say so. When we started the band I was kind of working as a singer songwriter so we recorded that first record and I played a lot of the instruments because I was actually recording as I was forming a band. So the first batch of recordings were these folk songs that I was applying instruments to. Matt Miller played drums on it and everyone played on it here and there but all that stuff was written before there was a band and before I had a band in mind. I think now, the way I write song is totally different and removed from that. I don’t write songs on acoustic guitar anymore and things are written with certain people in mind. The approach in general has changed a lot.

That’s great…..Blake, you wanna hit number 2?

…Number 2….so this is something we’ve asked a lot of bands we’ve talked to and we always get interesting answers, but are you guys full time musicians? Do you have day jobs that support your music habit? How do you work that…we’ve met extremes of both.

GD – Well it actually feels like we have two full time jobs. I work as an architect so that’s my 9 to 5 job and my 5 to midnight job is Lohio…

LA – Or 2 or 3 in the morning if we have a gig.

[laughs] We can sympathize with that.

GD – Yeah probably much like the way you guys run this blog. Like for instance today I came home, Liz came straight from work here, I came home, walked my dog, came here and we’ll be busy till ten or eleven tonight. That’s kind of our routine. We work till 5 or 6 o clock and then work on the band till we go to bed.

What about you, Liz?

LA – I’m in the same boat. I work at The Saturday Light Brigade and the Children’s Museum. And that is a full time job and right now I’m racking up extra hours so I can go on this tour – about 50 hours a week. After work, it’s band stuff and if it’s not one thing it’s another. We save money printing our own shirts, but as you can see it’ll take up potentially three or four evenings of the next couple week. Two band practices a week leading up to the tour, so that’s four nights out of the week and if we have a show than that’s five and then there’s radio promotions we have to do…

GD- Yeah we do the whole business end of it, so that’s a couple nights a week or after hours a week…

LA – Emailing and stuff…

Drinking beer with bloggers.

LA – I do that like four nights a week [laughs].

So on the ninth night of the week…[laughs]. You kind of touched on this a second ago, but are the jobs accommodating? How’s that work?

GD – I just have a pretty sympathetic situation at work, so it’s all right. I kind of work as an independent contractor at my job, so I have a little bit of freedom.

Consultant. That’s how you do it!

GD – That’s kind of my trick to making some hours that work favorable to also being in a band.

LA – My boss is really really sympathetic, but I’m also on salary so we work together to find a system that works. He’s awesome.

I think if I told my boss I was leaving for the next 3 weeks she’d say “No you’re not” [laughs]…So we were standing inside there watching you print your shirts and do your own promo stuff. Is that something you choose to do and have always done?

GD – Yeah, we do it by choice. It’s kind of like a big part of what we enjoy about being in the band as well. From the beginning, I’ve always done the artwork for the band, designed the t-shirts, kind of laid out the art work for the albums and made the posters. I really enjoy that kind of stuff, going to school for a visual medium. I think being in a band for me has always been about…the fun part is obviously the music, but I’ve always enjoyed everything that goes into being in a band. The visual aspect of it, the photo shoots, art directing, the t-shirts, the posters, and how all of that works into one larger thing. I think all the bands I really liked were very cohesive in that way and the music related to the artwork and then related to the visual aspect of the band.

You definitely are an architect.

GD – [laughs] Yeah. So I like looking at things from a really broad perspective when it comes to everything that a band can be about. It’s exciting to me. Then also with doing the booking – as much as that can be grunt work, that can be exciting and fun. How do you write an email that a booking agent will respond to?

LA – Then when you land stuff it’s like winning.

GD – There’s an art to all that kind of stuff.

Would you ever consider getting help? Like you got a booking agent or a manager?

GD – Oh definitely! Like we said before, that kind of stuff can take up so much time that you start worrying that you wish you had more time to focus on other things and maybe you’re spreading yourself too thin.

LA – Then everything starts to suffer a little bit, not just the music. You can’t manage all the other stuff in life to the level you want to. But doing all that stuff really informs you so that when you do hand it over to someone else you can direct them and you understand better what you want form the service they’re offering. If you’re paying someone…

GD – Yeah, you can really get into trouble when you hand over the reigns and just say “OK, do your thing!”. You don’t want to blindly hand stuff over and you’ll get what you manage if you’re not careful.

From some of the other bands we’ve talked to, the Pittsburgh bands, it seems like there is a DIY thing going on. Good Night, States, maybe a bit more intense, making their own electronics, but I read that you (Greg) and Josh from Meeting of Important People had built your own studio. It seems like a Pittsburgh thing and it’s awesome…

LA – Creating anything in general is so much fun. I mean creating music is great, but it’s not a visual medium and it can be really frustrating to work with something intanglible. There’s not a codified language in rock and roll. I come from classical music where it’s very codified, and certain words mean something, but in rock it’s anyone’s game. There’s some confusion and the dialogue isn’t as streamlined. So a lot of the times it just becomes really intangible, so it’s really fun to then turn and do the Arts Fest set where we were spending like 60 hours of week designing this giant set.

GD – Cardboard and fabric flowers…

LA – It was so fun and great to see the work and to communicate in a platform that was easy to understand and see.

GD – And it’s really nice to set your music in a context. It kinda helps…I mean in any kind of art the goal is to communicate, so as many ways as you can use different mediums to communicate the same message really helps get across what you’re trying to get across.

That was great….hmm. I’m trying to move fast here so we don’t keep you too long…

GD – No no, we’ll take as long as we need.

LA – We’ll get our shirts done by hell or high-water, don’t worry.

Well when we’re done we could help you print. A big assembly line. Henry Ford style…we’ll be Lohio bitches.

[laughs] Our slaves.

Ok, ok. So the Family Tree EP. We’ve been listening to it for over a week now. I’m gonna buy it I swear, from the Bandcamp website – which is an awesome platform.

LA – Oh it’s so great. So smart. Once they let you put your tour information up, I just don’t really know…just that and a blog and a homepage and that’s all you’ll need.

Yeah, no more Myspace. That’s what Myspace wanted to be. It’s just so much more appealing to the eye, too.

LA – It looks good, it’s really clear, so easy to purchase things and it lets you have high quality audio on there. So when people buy your album, they’re buying CD quality files.

GD – Myspace just seems so slow now. It takes a while to load in and listen to the songs. Slows your computer down…

Oh totally…so with the Family Tree EP, can you talk about the cover art? Blake absolutely loves it.

LA – So you didn’t look her up yet, huh? Oh man. Emma Hardy is her name and we were really lucky. She’s had things in Vanity Fari and does celebrity portraits and stuff in England. We were interested in a few of her photographs and we emailed her and she said that was the only one we could have at the price we were talking about…but that was the one we really wanted! So we were really lucky and she was really gracious about it. She liked the music so it helped for sure.

How did you find her? Was this someone you were a fan of?

LA – A photo blog search…

GD – Yeah there’s an art blog that I look at out of San Francisco and we didn’t find her on there but that site lead to another where we came across her work. It seemed like it really fit the themes of the record…which I’d rather not get to deeply into. [laughs]

Can we talk about the influences behind the record? Listening to “Adelai” I immediately thought Sufjan Stevens, not to say it’s a carbon copy or anything.

GD – Oh wow. Thanks, that’s really nice to hear.

…But we’ve talked to some bands who say “This is what it sounds like when you put all our ideas together” and some bands almost filter their songs through what they are listening to…

GD – With these songs, it was a bit different. Some of the older stuff was written as folk songs and built up from there. With the songs on this album, the songs were based on ideas and came out of a few different instruments. A lot of them were piano based, so you’ll notice a piano lick in “Funeral Song”, which is how that song kind of formed and is much different method for me. As far as other artists, there’s a large range. I tend to just pool from a large array. Neil Young is always someone I’ve listened to since I first started getting into music. I mean I still listen to Neil Young like crazy, and some of these songs and especially the older ones it might be understandable that he’s a major influence on me. Sufjan Stevens…Blur was my favorite band and still is my favorite band. I don’t know if the melodies recall Blur, but a lot of the things they did on Blur‘s 13 and the way they kinda deconstruct song has always been a big influence.

So it seems like you’ve gone about songwriting on this EP differently when compared to the older songs. Is that true?

GD – Yeah. Id’ say it was partly intentional and partly accidental. I bought some instruments…I think this is probably true and most musicians would say this, but when you pick up a foreign instrument that you haven’t…like you could pick up a different acoustic guitar and there’s number of songs inside of that guitar. You’ll pick it up and say “This sounds different than my guitar” and immediately start firing off ideas. So what I did was purchase a Fender Rhodes and there was a certain number of songs and ideas in it. Then I would sit down at my organ, which I’ve had for a little while, and the same thing would happen. So that kind of influenced me to pick up some things and try different ideas…almost a way to fake inspiration or something. Pick up the banjo and there’s an idea in this banjo. So that method changed the song writing on this record with fooling myself to be inspired.

Is it a collective process when writing a whole song or do you have ideas for Liz and you want Erik to play something like this?

LA – It varies. I think that some songs it’s evident what you’re supposed to do and other songs you need more direction. There were some songs that were really difficult to figure out.

GD – Even up until the point and after that we recorded them. We went into the mixing process we were still trying to figure out what the song was. Some of the songs…if there is a certain drum beat you have in your head, then the bass has to do a very specific thing to compliment it. Some songs were a little bit different from what we’ve written before so we were all in the dark as to what should be happening there.

LA – And if it’s all based around a piano instrument and you come up with a bass line that doesn’t work with the piano, well the piano part isn’t going to change because that’s the bedrock of the song. So there was a lot of building up and breaking down and building up again. I think that people’s natural abilities and inclinations are welcome but it might not always work. Sometimes it’s a matter of what’s the best idea. Often times people have an idea that’s really great or close to what it needs to be but that’s not always the case and you have to let go of something that you’re really attached to.

Is that fun or frustrating?

LA – Both [laughs]

GD – For me it’s a little less frustrating and more fun. It becomes more frustrating when you’re searching for what a song is…

Like you have a great idea up there but you can’t pull it down.

GD – Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of that kind of comes from…I’ve come to accept the way our songs come together when before I was kind of fighting it. Where it comes from is…the education I got to become an architect is they train you a certain way. It was this idea that you have an initial design and then you would have to come up with several more designs on top of the initial spark of an idea you had. And they would make you develop all of those ideas to a certain point and I’ve kind of used that process in songwriting. So the songs done and you are working on the arrangement and maybe it could be a rock song or a folk song or whatever and I’ve carried through with the idea that a song can be a bunch of different things. You finally settle on what you want from it. It gets kind of frustrating where you feel like you’re always searching for what this song could be but for me it’s…

Exciting?

GD – Yeah. Exciting.

LA – I think the frustrating part really for me is if I get attached to a certain version and it’s just not working like it should and I have to let it go. I can recognize it’s not working but letting it go can be difficult.

GD – To finish that thought…music is pretty intangible, so to be working in a collaborative effort and somebody is saying “No, a song is this” you never know what that person is really saying. “No no, the song should be like a circus!” and you’re like “What the fuck is he talking about”. [laughs]

LA – We make it work just fine. It can be frustrating but all creative processes are.

This is a hard question, but what’s your personal review of this record? Is it your best work, is it your most experimental, is it your rock group release, etc etc. Any words you could use to describe it?

GD – Umm….with this release I’m really excited about it. One – I really love the songs on it, but that’s kind of a given. On top of that, what I really love about it, is I felt like I was narrowing in on an idea that I was trying to get to for a while. It feels like the closest attempt at honing in on this thing that I’ve been working towards…figuring out some things about the creative process of the band.

LA – I’d have to agree. I’m really happy with…well, the entire creative process in making this record was really enjoyable. I think that as a result I’m really attached to the album. I think for me, this is the first time I’ve entered a process like this where it’s this in depth where we sort of had to figure out the end result as we were working towards it. We were dealing with a lot of concepts and what I mean by that is applying concepts to a song in a way that I’ve never really worked before. So it was really gratifying because it was a way to kind of measure how well or how close we were getting. It’s the clearest I’ve ever been in constructing something. We created some guidelines for ourselves that were really strong.

Could you pick a song or two that you are most proud of? Is that a horrible question to ask, like which child you love the most?

GD – I’m gonna pass on that. I don’t want to add any extra context to any of the songs…like ”That’s the one that Greg likes and I don’t agree!” [laughs]

LA – Do you guys have songs you really like? You like “Adelai”?

Yeah we both really like “Adelai.”

GD – Great, cool. That one was a hard one to find. We really had several different ways for that one to turn out.

Well it turned out great. “Family Tree” is another one that really stuck.

GD – Wow thank you. That’s really nice to hear.

And totally worth the $5 dollars on Bandcamp. Kind of ridiculous really…

LA – It will be a bit more for the physical CD…

Great lead in! So there is going to be a physical pressing of the disk then?

LA –Yes yes yes.

GD – October 3rd. It’s available now on ITunes and physical copies will be arriving at my door in a few days. It’ll be available at our shows on tour and available in the city on October 3rd.

LA – But you could get it earlier on tour if we come to your city!

Well with the tour on the horizon, what’s the feeling within the band? Nervous, excited, emotional?

GD – Oh we’re so excited.

LA – I’m afraid I’m going to like it too much. It’s going to be something I want to do a lot more than I’m actually able to. I’m really looking forward to it.

GD – Since we booked this tour on our own we’re really invested in it and we’re really excited. We’ll be going through a bunch of towns and get to catch up with some old friends.

LA – Hit up some cities we’ve been to before like Columbus and Louisville. We’ve never been to Lexington, though. Some new and old places. It’s nice to play places you’ve been before so you know what to expect and at this point you can get more out of it. You’ve gotten to case the joint before and maybe you have some press contacts and we’ve been lucky enough to get some in-stations in most of the places we’ve played numerous times. New cities are always fun because you just don’t know!

Is touring the best way to get your music across?

GD – There’s different point of views on it. Now with the Internet, people say there’s so many different way to get your music heard, but I think now more than ever the live show is still the most important thing. Something that’s happened the last ten or fifteen years is it’s become way more affordable to make music and record. Back in the 60’s you had to be a band of a certain stature to even record. Everyone now can exist as a band. Its kind of hard to tell now who’s doing a bedroom project and who’s actually out there playing live. I feel like now, how you sound live is how you differentiate who’s out there really working hard and honing their sound and who’s churning out recordings and hasn’t figured out how to connect with an audience yet. I got to a lot of shows and every once and a while you’ll go to one and someone will just flat out blow you away and you’re like “There’s no way this person isn’t going to be a professional musician. The Low Anthem played at my friend Cindy’s house and afterwards we’d hang out. Then they came back through after they recorded the album they are promoting now [ Oh My God, Charlie Darwin ] and they played “Charlie Darwin” in my friends living room and I was standing in the hall and it just blew me away and that’s rarely ever happened. If you heard it you were like “Ok. This band is going to be successful” and three months later they’re on Nonesuch and opening for Ray Lamontagne. Seeing them live you know they have to be successful, so there’s case in point to hone your live sound. It can set you apart.

Absolutely. They are an amazing band…so try not to make us too jealous, but what’s it going to be like hanging out on the road with your friends Donora playing music every night for two weeks?

LA – It’s going to be so great.

GD – From the very beginning we’ve been two bands that have kind of matured together and we’ve always been friends. It’ll be a lot of fun to be with them, not just because we’ve played a lot of shows with them, but because they are people that are important to us.

Sounds like a vacation almost.

GD – [laughs] Yeah, almost.

So this is a question that Josh from our last interview kind of came up with himself…

GD – Oh no, now I’m nervous. [laughs]

He kind of layed it on us how Meeting of Important People wants to be a big band. What kind of goals do you guys have? Do you want to hit it big ? Some people are OK with just making their own music somewhere…

GD – We’re really ambition and I think we want to be a large band. With the kind of music we do, I think our aspiration isn’t to be Green Day, but we’re not opposed to becoming Sufjan Stevens or someone on that level.

LA – I think a lot of bands just want to follow a natural arc of success. Like one where they continue to build on themselves and then more opportunity presents itself, which allows them to increase their operation, which allows more opportunities to come in.

GD – Like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Coldplay. Two different levels of success. Maybe like an Animal Collective where you go to any city and people know who you are and you get good reviews – that would be amazing! I don’t think we operate in a way where we are striving to become U2 or something, but we definitely want to become successful and reach as many people as we can. We aren’t looking to just be regional or colloquial.

How are you going to do it? Does it entail moving to LA or NYC or something along those lines? Do you have a plan set out?

GD – I mean we have long and short-term goals for the band and what we lay out will lead us to an end result. How’s any band get successful? You write good songs. What we’ve tried to do is develop and understand what our band is. It’s about all aspects of the band and honing that large concept. We try to do everything really successful, like building stage sets or doing photo shoots or drafting emails to record labels. We try to do everything the best we know how and use that as a compass on how to gain success. I don’t know if I really want to divulge our plan to everyone…

LA – If you don’t write a hit single then you have to demonstrate you can operate in a certain capacity. You have to demonstrate you can do certain things on your own and that you’re a business that can function without someone’s full support.

GD – It’s funny. If you read these books that are written in the 90’s like “How to Record” and “How to Make it in the Record Biz 101” it says stuff like “Don’t worry how your demo sounds the record label will understand that they need to develop you” but I think the idea of developing a band doesn’t exist anymore. You need to be a fully formed idea that they can recognize and will want to start a collaboration with you. You have to operate as your own entity and hope that someone is excited about what you’re doing and will invite you into their network. Our plan is to communicate what our band is about and do it really well and hope that people respond to that.

Lohio is a total package. It’s the music, it’s the theme, it’s the artwork, it’s the live shows, and it’s everything. I think there’s a difference between a “rock band” and an artist or group of artists…

GD – Sure, yeah. The Flaming Lips are an extension of Wayne Coyne. You go on his blog and read what he says and he’s talking about things that he’s encountered that are a major part of the visual aspect of the band as well as the lyrics, etc. I think there are some bands where someone has told them specifically what they are, and others understand what they are. No one had to explain to Stuart Murdoch what Belle and Sebastian was. He knew very well what he was creating. He did the photo shoots for their albums and his songs follow this theme throughout the band. I think there’s very much a distinction between some bands or a rock band and an artist.

You’re taking an artistic approach to the band as a whole.

GD – Uh huh, yeah. I mean KISS, what band has understood themselves better than KISS ? To franchise that thing and to know specifically what this thing is and turn it into music and art . This is what KISS is and they spread it all over the world as the KISS army…

–

Thanks again to Greg and Liz for taking time out of their busy schedule to talk to us. Hopefully we didn’t set them too far behind that night. Also, thanks to our photographer Todd for the amazing shots.

Lohio’s tour with Donora starts this week, so check the schedule and make sure you catch them in your city when they’re passing through. Tell ‘em Draw Us Lines sent you and maybe they’ll give you a high five. Check out the new EP here, buy it on Itunes, and for all you Pittsburghers, be sure to catch them October 3rd at Brillobox for their official CD release party. That one’s gonna be crazy.

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Filed under: Homegrown Goodness, Interviews