EP161 PROTECT YOUR HEART

When did you kind of form and how did it come together?

There've essentially been like, I guess, three like formation chapters, if you want to call it that.

So like in 2018, Aunt Jake and I, all like worked in the dance music world together, we're all making like trap and dubstep and drum and bass and like doing the whole DJ thing.

And we had been doing that since like, I don't know, 2012 ish.

And in that time that that whole world just sort of changed like it because of all the money and the sort of like insomniacs that like it just the vibe changed the people that used to make that music were people like us coming out of band land making aggressive music and now they're like oh I can do that on the computer um and as the money came into it and things started changing that was no longer the case and it just became very sort of like clicky and high school-y and we just you know at that point just kind of like burnt on it and so um As we're all individually getting to that place in that world, we all decided to go to Warped Tour.

I had never been because growing up, the closest one to me was a three-hour drive and convincing my parents to drive six hours round trip to a Warped Tour was just a non-starter.

You know what I mean? Yeah.

And so my wife bought me tickets.

We all made like a big group trip out of it.

And like, as we were riding up there, it was in Ventura where, um, Ventura County where Maddie lives just outside of LA.

As we're driving up there, we're listening to like under oath, they're only chasing safety and like the used and like all the stuff, you know, that we grew up on and just kind of like talking like, man, wouldn't it be fun to like, just see if we could do that? Um, yeah.

because we all came out of that world we were making like drum and bass which is sort of notoriously the most difficult genre of of like dance music to produce just based on like the speed of it and the production and all that stuff like I feel like we could do it um and literally like two days later um two or three days later jake just sent some like riffs in a group chat and it was like riffage two and riffage three and that just kind of like as soon as that happened everyone just kind of like that's what we're doing now uh it was like a unanimous decision that we're just like done we we've closed out all of our like dance music releases and just started focusing on getting together every weekend and writing songs on guitars um and so that happened for about two years um and at about the year and a half mark jake was like we have to stop doing this if we don't have a singer like what are we doing we're wasting our time this is dumb it's not going to go anywhere we're just like you know nothing's going on and so we started this sort of like mad scramble to find a singer and we're struggling really really hard Um, but through the dance music world, we knew an artist called high society who, if you've seen our catalog, you've probably seen his name on a couple of things.

Um, he had worked with Maddie on a song called fireproof for a label that I used to release on and do the album art and all that sort of stuff.

And so I was supposed to do a remix of that song.

I had the stems in my downloads folder on my computer.

And around that time I was like, Those vocals sound like they could maybe fit what we're trying to do.

I hit up James and I was like, can you just give me his contact info? I'm just gonna shoot him an email.

And so I shot Matty an email and was like, hey man, here's what we're up to.

We'd love to get on a call and chat about it and see if you're down.

Here's kind of the demos we have.

And he didn't answer me for like, what was it like, it was like at least a week, maybe two weeks.

And at that point, you know, Jake's getting answer and answer.

I sent Maddie a Facebook message like I went that far.

I was like, I'm gonna get in touch with this dude.

So he was