Farewell to The States

It made me sad when I read that The States played their last show this past Thursday. Especially since I couldn't be there.

I met this Brooklyn band during South by Southwest in 2006. I happened to walk into one of those free night show because I wasn't sure what time the band I wanted to see was performing. Luckily for me, The States was already onstage. Even though I only caught the last songs from their set, I instantly became a fan.

After their show, they started striking up conversations with the crowd and handed out free demos from their record that was released at the time. I saw this as my chance to introduce myself and ask for an interview. They were game and the rest is history.

I kept up with this band through the years, catching them every time they played in Austin. They even contributed a track for one of my compilations. I have all the albums and recently I wrote a review for the newest one “We Are the Erasers” for Accent, which you can read here.

So farewell guys, I'll miss ya and your shenanigans. However, don't fret. Turns out Chris Snyder, the vocalist/guitarist, has been working on a little project called “ThreeSixFive Project.” His goal is to write, record and post a song every day for a year.

You can check out his progress here.

Now to share with you the last interview I ever did with The States during 2009's South by Southwest's Music Festival.

Introduce yourself and what do you play in the band.

Chris: We're the States. We're from Brooklyn. My name's Chris.

Joe: I'm Joe.

Pete: Peter.

How's South by Southwest treating you so far?

Chris: Friendly as hell. Hot. Wonderful weather. Hot wonderful women. Yeah, it's been great.

Pete: Beer, food, barbeque, sleep, sleep.

Chris: Yeah, it's great. It's our 3rd time down and probably the best one of the ones that we've been so.

Did you tour on the way over here? How did that go?

Joe: It was great. We drove first to Nashville. We did our last record over there with Chris Grainger and just did our mastering, final mixing session with them. That record got mastered like a day after we left so we played a show and finalized the record. All of it. Everything's done so third record's in the bag and we went to where?

Pete: Mobile, Alabama. We got to meet some of our fans down there from the internet. Came to see us for the first time.

Joe: The interwebs.

Pete: Then we drove to New Orleans and that was vacation day.

Chris: St. Patrick's Day.

Pete: St. Patrick's Day and so we went to a St. Patrick's Day parade. Got to see the sights. Eat the eats. Drink the drinks. Stayed in a scary hotel.

Joe: Yeah, it was a crack house. It was awful.

Pete: It was prostitution, cross dressers, roaches, rats, the whole thing. And then from there, drove down here.

Chris: That's right.

Pete: Across here, I guess. Got to see the Mississippi. Was that Mississippi we went through? Where'd we go through?

Chris: *shakes head*

Pete: That was all Louisiana all the way across, I guess.

Chris: Yeah I think so.

Pete: We've been here since Wednesday night. Played a show Thursday.

Chris: Yes and two today. That's it.

Pete: It's been great.

Have you seen any good bands since you've been here?

Chris: Birds and Batteries from San Francisco. We're sort of like friends of friends and it was way across the river and it was really awesome. I can't describe it but it's really awesome. I think they should have a website if you google it. Birds and Batteries.

Joe: I think it's birdsandbatteries.com

Chris: That's likely yes.

Joe: And then Planeside. We saw our friends from Planeside down here and a bunch of other people we've bumped along the way.

Chris: We stopped in Nashville with a group called Luna Halo who are from Nashville. Great guys. Awesome band. We saw them probably two or three times. So far so all good. All good shows.

Joe: It's great.

So when do you think the album will come out?

Joe: Don't know. Right now we're figuring out our next six months. We're going to try to see if somebody's going to pick it up and pay for it or we're going to do it ourselves. That'll be decided in the next three months probably. Then our back up plan is to do U.S. touring by the end of early summer, late spring.

Chris: Long story short though. Record will probably be out at the end of this year. It'll certainty be available online very shortly. A month. Maybe a month. Yeah, we're excited about it.

Joe: We're going to leak it. We're going to leak it all.

Chris: Yes. We're going to leak our own record.

How do you feel the music has changed since Pete took over the bass?

Chris: Well, I don't know if it was because Pete took over the bass or the direction we were moving anyway, or some combination of the two, it's probably that but the music is more band music now. It was very produced before the last record, the last time we talked to you. And this one, we really wanted to focus on three guys in a room. I mean, trios are special for a reason and so we were trying to focus on that. I think that came across. It's got a lot of space in the record. It's not shock full of stuff.

Joe: Extra stuff. It's basically us playing in a room together and that's really what we went for. Pete is really good at seeing the fat in parts and taking it out and helping the groove of the beat and the groove of the song flow. So it was something we were never able to do before. Just like look at something as it doesn't need all this shit to be in the song. Pete was the catalyst to help everything kind of move along in a better direction.

Pete: It's kind of like same band, different process. More or less. It still sounds like The States. It was just a different way to get there.

Yeah, it's kind of simplified but not really. I don't know how to explain it.

Chris: The last record, we just couldn't play all the stuff live. There was just three guitar parts all the time. It doesn't really make sense. I mean, it was fun to do and we liked obviously our record, but we wanted to do things that we could play together. And yeah, that does mean that it's simpler but it also means that the essence is more pure.

Pete: Definitely more of a spiritual record. At least it felt like for me. The way we collaborated was very personal. Where I know where the last two records kind of came from, this felt like it was like therapy for me. Some of the content Chris talks about kind of hits me in certain ways. Almost like I'm outside of it but within it. This record just took me to a different place than anything I've ever been in.