Interview: Drawn from Bees
Drawn from Bees are one of the most innovative and engaging new art rock band coming out of Australia today. They’re based in Brisbane, are signed to a local label, Bonefinger Records. And they’re about to release their fourth single “Run Away” – followed by an album.
How and when did Drawn from Bees form
Our first gig was in august of 2008 so we are still a very young band.
What is your musical background?
I was brought up in a family of opera singers and artists. My father used to come home late at night and practice, I have memories of getting out of bed and sitting with dad and singing along with him as he practiced. As a result I grew up singing operas rather than twinkle twinkle. I was also listening to the white album over and over because it was the only tape we had in the car so I was listening to a strange mix of classical and experimental rock. Other than that I played trombone in orchestras during my teenage years and at some point decided to throw it all in to learn the guitar and start bands…
How would you describe your music?
I would think of our music like a collection of old books that sit on the shelf waiting to be discovered. We all have wild imaginations and have always thought of music as a form of creative story telling. We are always hungry to experiment with the traditional rock setup and we love to create strange musical textures. As a result our music has layers upon layers of strange choirs, vintage tape samples, guitar parts and keyboard sounds. Vocals are a very important part of what we do and we are trying out different ways of making ourselves sound like anything from magical sea ghosts right through to Russian army choirs.
What is your favourite song you’ve written and recorded so far and why?
There is a song on our yet to be released record called “too long.”. To me the song represents everything I have learned as a producer/musician/songwriter, strangely for us it doesn’t feature vocal harmonies but it is the most creative I have ever been with tape samples, strange vocal ghosts, huge reverbs and a heartbreaking piano and string group ending. Whenever I listen to this song I get a little swell of pride.
You’ve been pretty productive with your releases, how is your music-making process?
Our music making process is all self recorded and each member of the band takes full responsibility for getting their parts sounding exactly as they want them. We spent weeks of writing and no song is ever released unless the whole band is happy. Each member of the band contributes equally and it is a quite painfully democratic process for us sometimes. But when you are a self produced band, you can only blame yourselves if things don’t turn out exactly as you wanted.
Having said all that, we have all been writing songs for a while and we are very quick at putting things together. One of the best things about working with such great musicians is when you all begin to think together and become a hive of creative output. When you hit that point, it is really great to be alive and writing together.
Where have you performed? What are your favorite and least favorite venues?
Our favourite venues are all in Brisbane! We are really spoilt here with The Zoo and The Troubadour. Both of these venues have such awesome staff and are really supportive of musicians, who could ask for better than that?
Our other favourite venue is Pure Pop records in St Kilda. It’s a place where we can get really close and personal with the audience, plus the owner is such a great guy!
We haven’t played any bad venues yet, but we are still pretty new and I’m sure we will have stories of nightmare gigs soon enough!
What are your plans for 2010?
We are heading out to see the rest of the world! We have been invited to LA to play at muse expo, then we head off to play some gigs in Hong Kong. After that we jump on a plane to England where we will do a few weeks of touring. We then arrive back in Australia where we will start touring here to promote the new record “Fear Not the Footsteps of the Departed”. I think our legs are going to get tired with all this running around!
Thanks to Dan James for the interview! You can follow Drawn from Bees on MySpace, and on Twitter.
And watch the new music video “Run Away”, from the new release here.
