So Many Dynamos: A play on words..

So Many Dynamos is an indie band out of St. Louis, Missouri. They are finishing up a new record which has no release date yet. These awesome guys took some time out of their busy schedule to talk to us.

When did each of you get your start in music?


I think each of us started in middle school, even though we didn't know each other at the time.  We each got our start in concert band.  Norm and I played percussion, Griffin played trombone, and Aaron played alto saxophone.




Has music always been an element of your guys' lives?


Definitely.  I met Norm through high school drumline, and we got to know Aaron through playing in bands in high school.  Then we met Griffin at a Weezer concert.  Without music, we probably wouldn't even know each other.




What inspires each of you?


I think we're all inspired by the idea that we can bypass normality and play in a band for a living.  It's pretty remarkable, really, whenever we're able to pay our bills and feed our bellies by playing music.  Other than that, we're all definitely nerds about the instruments we play.  Aaron is a keyboard nerd, Norm is a drum nerd, and Griffin and I are guitar nerds.  Griffin is also heavily inspired by steak.


Does the area you live in work its way into your music?
Probably more than we realize.  We've always wanted to make references to St. Louis inside of our music, and we have a few lines on our new record about the Arch and the fact that our city lies on a gigantic fault line that's constantly waiting to destroy us.  I think musically, St. Louis is a challenging city to musicians and the standards are pretty high.  For a band to do well here inside of the indie rock circle, they kind of have to kick ass.  So the bands always competing with each other in a friendly way, feeding off of each other and trying to raise the bar and such.  It's pretty fun.


How did you come up with the band's name?
We wanted a name that was some form of wordplay, so we figured a palindrome would be subtle enough to not be too gimmicky.  We went through lists and lists of palindromes online, and So Many Dynamos just kind of stuck.

[sidenote: a palindrome is a word that can be spelled the same both backwards and forwards]



Do each of you do your own part and write for it?  Or does everyone  
kind of venture around, musically?
It's very rare for somebody to write an entire song from front to finish.  Usually somebody comes in with an idea and we all arrange together in our basement.  Sometimes an idea has parts that come with it, like sometimes two guitar parts get written at the same time, but it's completely different depending on the song.  We're pretty democratic, and it takes us forever to write songs because of it, but we end up with less baggage by the time a song is done.




Have you guys ever encountered any difficulties with being in a band?   
Whether in the studio or on tour, or both?
Oh yeah, where to begin?!  The life of a touring band involves never having any money in your pocket and having family members that just kind of don't understand what you do and why you do it.  You just have to deal with it.  Also, driving a big van with out-of-state plates makes you a target for law enforcement, and police officers are constantly convinced that your van is full of drugs, open containers of alcohol, and underage girls.  This is rarely true.


What's been the most interesting to see on tour?
One our favorite parts of the country is a stretch of about 15 miles in California, near Arizona, where there are literally thousands of electric windmills.  It's just this magical, hypnotic part of the country that we are always in awe of no matter how many times we drive past it.


You guys seem like you have a ton of fun on stage, have there ever  
been any accidents?
Yes.  I busted ass during the first song at a show we played in Austin for South By Southwest and just lost my footing.  I've accidentally jabbed my guitar into Aaron's back before, which wasn't fun for him.  At one of our first shows, the makeshift stage at the venue split apart right under Aaron's keyboard rig and he basically fell in.  This was before Griffin was in the band, and Ryan Ballew, our guitarist at the time, stood on top of a speaker and did a guitar solo to "create a diversion." 


Do you have a favorite song to play?  New or old?
"Search Party" is the only song that we've played every show since we wrote it and I don't think we'll ever get sick of playing it.  It's kind of written to be fun live.  "New Bones" is one of our newer songs, and it's fun to play because it's really difficult to pull off and there's a lot of toys and sound effects involved in that song that I think people are sometimes surprised that we do live.


What was it like to see such a huge response to Flashlights?
Well, I think it was received pretty well, I wouldn't say "huge response."  We set out to make a record that challenged us creatively and as musicians, and there was a lot of blood and sweat in that reord and even though we had a great engineer in the studio, we were mostly on our own to make all of our decisions.  It was kind of an exercise in self-producing a record.   A lot of bands like us, that get labeled as "spazzy" or "angular" or whatever, aren't making records you want to actually listen to at the end of the day.  We're glad that people seem to like it, because in the end we really wanted it to be a welcoming, friendly record. 


What's the response you've seen to "New Bones"?  Both at shows and  
online.
People seem to like it!  We posted that song first because it's the recording we're the most proud of.  I remember sitting in the studio listening to playback of the basic tracking and just thinking "how the hell did we make this song?"  That song was such a skeleton of a song before we started recording it and before Chris Walla started plugging everything in backwards and putting drums inside of drums and taping shit to hi-hats and stuff.  Making that song was such an adventure.  In the end, it's way different than what we've done before but I think it's still very "us", it's just "us" in a way we weren't capable of before.  




Does the recording blog fuel any of the new record?  Or is it just an  
informative thing for fans?
It's an informative thing for friends and fans and also a way to vent and have fun.  I probably go a little far with it sometimes, and I try not to turn it into my personal blog, but I am just addicted to posting on it.  It definitely kept us sane while we were actually recording, and you can go back and read posts that are like "oh my god, there's no fucking way we're going to finish this record. ahhh!!!!"




When can we expect the next album to come out?
ASAFP.  We're figuring out the label stuff now and we'll make a big deal out of it when we know anything for sure.


What's in your future, as a band?
We're taking the summer off, and we'll be going out on tour again in September and October, and we'll probably do something in November as well.  Our general plan as a band is to just keep going.  Keep touring, keep writing, keep making records, and not really change too much about how we're doing it other than to just get better.  The big thing we're trying to do this summer is to start making some videos and to start our own Youtube channel with videos of us playing songs in fun ways and telling tour stories and just fun things like that.  It'll be cool.  Other than that, we're just going to keep being So Many Dynamos.


Check out their song, “New Bones” off of their record along with some older stuff at www.myspace.com/somanydynamos

- Sara “it can stop raining now” Garcia