Founding member Troy Thomas introduced new album Frank Starr Rock Zappa and describes his band as:
“Our band is like the Pixies and Nick Cave had a weird, but really fun baby. One of those babies that never cries and only laughs at stuff. The only reason it started was because my dad died and I needed a reason to scream at things and strum a guitar hard because otherwise it was going to therapy. I’m poor, so therapy wasn’t in the cards. That grew into years of getting better personally and musically which led to me finally going from a solo artist to a full group. This was the best decision of my life because as it turns out my friends are incredibly talented musicians and things clicked right away.
Asking them a few questions about themselves, here’s what they had to say:
Where are you from/how did you get together? We’re from Phoenix, AZ and we got together because I had been writing music for myself for about 7 years and my friend/producer Josh Medina, who is the drums on a good 90% of the album, was like “Listen, you aren’t making a record and haven’t for years. I’ve been waiting and we’re gonna make it.” So he recorded me and my friends who are amazing musicians and the rest is history. Now we’re a band who does gigs when we can and it’s a blast.
How long you have been playing/what are you about? I’ve been playing guitar for about 17 years, but I started writing songs after my dad died in 2012. That’s when it really ramped up. I’m pretty poor financially and the choices were write songs or go to therapy. Since therapy costs way more an hour than I can afford, I decided music was the way to go and it really did keep my depression at bay for a long time there.
What inspires – How do you write your music? A lot of the time it will be a melody I can’t get out of my head and then I start putting it to guitar and then I fit words around it and figure out a story for the song. Sometimes I’ll get a really interesting story premise for lyrics that I feel like I have to get on paper and it happens organically that way.
Musical influences..favourite albums ? I’ll go ahead and list bands and the albums from them that inspired me. The Beatles are a huge inspiration on me when it comes to melody. They just knew what to do when it came to putting together a song. My favorite Beatles record is Please Please Me. Queens of the Stone Age are huge when it comes to inspiration and my favorite from them is Songs For the Deaf. The White Stripes are big for us and our favorite from them is De Stijl. Led Zeppelin is also enormous as an inspiration for us, my favorite album by them is hands down House of the Holy.
Gigs/tour? Our next gig is in February at the Tempe Tavern in Tempe, AZ, the exact date hasn’t been solidified yet. Right now we’re working on putting songs together for our second album entitled “David Bowtie”.
Anything else you want to include? You can buy and stream our debut album Frank Starr Rock Zappa on all services that sell and stream music digitally! I’ll leave a mess of links here
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