Interview: Skybox
Skybox are the result of a simple, yet brilliant recipe consisting of a mixture where old music meet new, quirky lyrics meet intelligent. And kids create music like grownups and grownups create music like kids. It works beautifully – get to know Skybox!
How are you? And how and when did Skybox form?
I’m Tim the guitarist and singer for skybox, and I started the band around 2004 in Tempe, Arizona. We released our first record in 06′ and after a lot of touring and line up changes we have finally released our follow up and are super pumped to have it finished.
What is your musical background?
I grew up in a musical home with my dad being a singer/songwriter and my mom being an all around music lover. I never had a specific musical taste or favorite instrument but as i got older i found myself being drawn towards the guitar as a way to construct my own melodies and eventually songs. My parents had been good friends with a couple before i was born, a musician and his artist wife who became pregnant at the same time as my mother. Coincidentally my mom gave birth the day that her friend was due, and she ended up giving birth on the exact day my mother was originally due to my friend Christian. He and I naturally grew up playing music together though there were some years in between where we would be living in separate towns not able to get together regularly. Eventually my mom remarried, and my new step dad bought me a old acoustic guitar and taught me how to play chords on it. When I was around 11 my step brother would let me bang around on his drums but a year later when i had my new guitar we would both start jamming together. I started getting into heavy metal and punk rock music by the time I was 13 so I gathered a bunch of friends from town and we would jam at my house, eventually starting a band. That band turned into another band, and that turned into something else and eventually my friend christian and I reunited and started playing together again, he on drums and me on guitar. After high school I decided to move to Arizona with my bass player at the time and Christian stayed behind but after a year or so of trying to convince him to move to the dessert he finally gave in and started playing guitar and keys in skybox, after releasing our first record we headed back to the midwest to work on touring and writing what would become morning after cuts.
What inspires you to write your songs, and where does the quirky lyrics come from?
I like lyrics that don’t necessarily couple with the music emotionally, for example writing kinda strange dark stuff with really happy music is one of my favorite things to do…that being said I have definitely reconciled that with a need to be honest sometimes and give something straight forward as it is so people can get a good since of who I am. This particular record most of the lyrics reflected my feelings of coming out of a chaotic situation in my life and into a more stable place, I try to look back and figure out how I got where I am so sometimes it gets a bit ambiguous and strange, but looking back always has many different emotional meanings so I try to bring that out. I try to write lyrics that people can make their own meaning out of, hopefully everyone gets something uniquely different than what the words mean to me.
How would you describe your music?
I’m not really sure the way people name different genre’s different things anymore, i guess it’s pretty much strange pop music. I feel like it has some folk influences in there too even with the electronic stuff.
What’s your biggest musical influence?
This changes so much I couldn’t really name one artist. I love motown because my mom was a big motown lover and I respect the hell out of the musicians from that time period. I love epic rock music like pink floyd and led zeppelin and 80′s pop music like michael jackson, prince, inxs and abba because of my dad. My dad and step dad both liked the beatles, paul simon, the band, and other 60′s stuff as well as old folk tunes. I loved theatrical stuff growing up so I naturally took to the glam scene when I got older, I still love bowie, eno, lou reed, brian ferry, iggy pop, and byrne too…love all that stuff!
..and any musical guilty pleasure(s)?
Maybe some native american music something really fantasy like with flutes and shit, i don’t know maybe its the hippie in me…I also love some heavy metal still
What is your favorite song you’ve written and recorded so far and why?
This old song I recorded called the circus is probably my favorite… I wrote the whole song one night when I woke up from a crazy apocalyptic dream, I couldn’t fall back asleep so I just wrote down the dream and started playing guitar to it and it turned into this really epic orchestral thing. That has never happened again, and I when I listen to that song I feel so detached from it, it’s the one song that I feel like I can listen to as a listener and not as the person who wrote it.
What can you tell us about your second album “Morning After Cuts”?
Recording Morning After Cuts gave us the chance to really create different sounds while in the studio. There were a few songs that we just didn’t have a particular structure for and sort of put it together during the recording process which was totally new for us. We definitely wanted to do something more sincere and straight forward when we recorded the album, which actually was supposed to be just a four song EP. We kept going after the initial four songs because we felt like we had a great opportunity to do something really honest and important.
How do you promote your music?
We try and play as many places as possible to as many people as possible. We also give away free music at our website www.skyboxmusic.com and hope that if people appreciate it that they will tell their friends.
What are your plans for 2010?
Tour Tour Tour!! We are touring all summer hitting some festivals, including Lollapalooza this year too!!
Follow Skybox on MySpace, Last.fm, Twitter and learn something about various kitchen utensils here.
