Every band dreams of making it big one day. Sure, "making it big" might mean different things to different bands, but it's safe to say that no one forms or joins a band to stay anonymous. If you're going to put everything you've got into making music, of course you want people to hear it. So how does a band move from being a local act to a regional one? How hard is it to make the move from regional to national? How do you capitalize on your press buzz? What if your CD needs better distribution? Can you get an opening slot on a hot tour? And what happens when traffic is so bad you can't get to the gig on time?

Boston's Aberdeen City has the answers to the questions above and hopes to make that next step along with some help from a guy named Steve Lillywhite. They released The Freezing Atlantic late last year to very favorable reviews and have been touring ever since. Their show on May 19th at the Black Cat opening for Elefant and Sound Team was their third D.C. gig in the last six months.

I had the pleasure to sit down with singer/bassist Brad Parker, drummer Rob McCaffrey and guitarists Ryan Heller and Chris McLaughlin near the end of a very hectic day. The band had just spent a grueling 13 hours traveling from Boston to D.C. and almost missed their gig. But I'll let them tell that story.

You've already told the story a few times tonight, but lets get it on tape. There was a truck overturned on the Mass Pike?

Ryan: Correct. The Pike was closed in both directions. We got on the road around 10 this morning and by the time we were out of anything resembling Boston, it was 2 o'clock. We had planned it so we'd get out of Boston early and get through New York early, and then it would be smooth sailing, but of course with that happening, it got us into New York around 5 o'clock. On a Friday. On the first weekend that it's nice and people are going away, so that was another bunch of hours stuck in New York. It wasn't good.

Rob: It was almost stop and go all the way from Boston through New York.

Brad: How long did it take? Eight, nine hours?

Rob: To get through New York it was eight and a half or nine hours. For a trip that should take around four.

Chris: It was an emotional day.

Rob: We were stuck in a 15 passenger cage of emotion! (laughs)

So you got here about 20 minutes before you went on stage. How do you switch gears like that and walk on stage and play a great show? You guys literally plugged in and started playing.

Ryan: We played with everyone else's gear. We just brought guitars up there and played.

Rob: Sometimes we need our preparation and other times it's almost better for us to have that distraction before we go on. Like Brad was saying on stage tonight, it was great to have a release after being inside a fucking van for that long.

You just played Boston last night, so I guess today was the opposite end of the spectrum after a hometown gig.

Brad. Yeah, last night was a great show. But we're not used to coming to any town and having people know us and recognize us.

This is your third gig in D.C. in the last six months. From the looks of the crowd tonight, people are starting to react to you guys.

Ryan: The closer together the shows are and the more regularly you play a city, the better. People start to remember you. But people have a short term memory because of all the bands that come through every city, so we definitely wanted to make sure that we were coming to D.C. every few months at least.

You've been on tour most of the year, right?

Brad: Our album came out on an indie last October and we've been touring pretty much since then.

Now your record is about to be re-released through Red Ink Distribution. Is this a label-wide deal or something just pertaining to you guys?

Brad: It's a band thing. It's not even like a re-release, it's just going through different distribution.

But you remixed two of the songs on the record, right?

Brad: Re-recorded and remixed two of the songs, "Another Seven Years" and "God Is Going To Get Sick of Me."

Who did the recording and the mixing? Did you bring somebody new in?

Ryan: The guy who recorded the record in the first place, Nic Hard, was still on as producer and then Steve Lillywhite came in as executive producer. So they did the two songs together.

What was it like working with Steve Lillywhite?

Brad: It was great. He's got really good intuition. He has a very light touch. He doesn't push to hard on things. He lets you do your thing.

He's obviously worked with alot of the bands that have influenced your sound.

Rob: Totally.

Ryan: Looking at his discography, it's pretty intense. He's one of these producers that has a real big picture approach to songs. The producer we were working with we love, he's almost part of the band. So it was great to have someone come in and look at everything from a bit of a distance and making some subtle suggestions that had a big impact on the songs. It was a pleasure to work with someone that has been making records as long as he has. You know his stuff is proven over time. It's hard to say no to the guy but everything he had to say resonated with the band.

Did you guys approach him?

Brad: No, he approached us. It's an honor.

Rob: Yeah, we don't really know what to do about that.

Now that the record has better distribution, you guys are getting on better tours, there are promotional companies working for you and things are really moving forward, do you feel like all the hard work is paying off now or do you feel like it's just the first step and there's a long way to go?

Brad: I'd definitely say the latter. Whatever level the band is at, there is a glass ceiling. There are just different things going on with the band than when we were booking our own shows and playing in Columbus, OH to four people.

Now you just have more people taking a cut of the money.

Brad: Exactly. I feel like we have such a long way to go. I'd love to be playing shows where people are coming and they know of us, rather than just New England and the Northeast.

Do you guys have day jobs?

Brad: Yes and no.

Rob: We're taking a break from our day jobs because we just don't have the time.

Brad: I just quit one of mine

Chris: I record records, that's my day job. I just finished mixing a record on the road, which is not a great idea, but there was huge deadline. I used YouSendIt. That's thing is great. It really saved my ass.

You just won the best local album award in Boston, right?

Ryan: Yeah, we heard about it yesterday in the morning. We played the Best Music Poll concert last night which was the big mini-festival in town. Last night was really just another blur of a night for us. But it's great. It's really flattering.

Rob: We've been in Boston for years, but none of us are really from Boston. We're all transplants from everywhere else and it's really nice when the people involved with the Boston music scene embrace us and say "we really like what you're doing" and it feels really good. We've been there a while and we consider it home at the moment. It's really flattering.

What's the scene like in Boston? Obviously it's not Brooklyn, but it seems like it's pretty healthy.

Brad: There's alot going on and you have a sampling of alot of different styles.

It seems kinda like the D.C. music scene in that there are alot of great bands in town, they just aren't necessarily all signed with labels just yet.

Rob: I think it's one of those towns that it takes a little bit of digging below the surface to see what's really going on. There's a handful of incredible bands that you may not hear about because the thing about Boston is that it's a college town and there's not always enough people in town year 'round to support the number of great bands in town. And that's also a product of having alot of great bands. So you do have to dig a bit to find them.

Brad: Alot of the bands there are regional. There's a weird Boston regionalism where bands don't like leaving Boston.

That leads to my next question. Brooklyn is like a scene that totally feeds itself. Is it harder for a band from a town like Boston to get noticed?

Brad: I don't know if I speak for myself, but I'm really happy that I'm not in a band that's from New York. It comes out in the music at the end but "indie rock band from Brooklyn"...

Rob: It's almost harder to prove yourself because there's either an expectation there. Also New York experienced such an upswing in the early part of this decade that saw rock band after rock band breaking in New York and we have a sort of underdog thing being from Boston. I like bands that are from weird places. I love that The Flaming Lips are from Oklahoma City. That kind of thing is always interesting. I like seeing bands come out of nowhere and I think it's an advantage, but that's me.

Chris: Boston fans are real ball busters too. The people that are college goers are usually in bands and that might be the people that come to your show, so there's alot of criticism out there.

Brad: We play for alot of musicians.

Rob: It's somewhat more difficult to get respect in Boston but it's not as hard when you go to other cities if you can pull it off and play well.

Chris: I think we had an easier time in New York than in Boston. It took us years to sell out shows in Boston, but in New York it was no problem. Even getting shows after a while...At first Boston is easier, but to get to the next level of clubs in Boston, it's harder than doing it in New York. And part of that is the group that owns Mercury Lounge, Bowery Ballroom and Webster Hall. We really worked hard to get our foot in the door at Mercury Lounge and they've been great to us ever since. We were playing the Mercury Lounge at least once a month for a while, and they were just so good to us. They offered us opening slots at the Bowery all of a sudden, they've just been really good to us.

Ryan: TT the Bear's did that in Boston. It's a competitive small room is Boston, but two or three years ago, all the bands that were opening for the national headliners that came through, they're selling out TT's on weekends now. And that was the club that kinda had the foresight to say these seven or eight bands are going to be the next thing in Boston and if you give them enough support shows, the next thing you can do your own show and when you can, you're going to take it there. Because you remember that they did three or four favors for you in the last year. It's good business.

In one of the emails I got from a promotional company that is working on your behalf, their big selling point was that you were Top 10 in searches on an MP3 blog aggregator a few months ago. How do you feel about blogging, MP3 blogs and giving music away for free?

Chris: It's awesome.

Rob: It's the best.

Chris: It's the best thing that's happened to the band right now as far as getting people into the band. They have reach all over the country, really all over the world. They're awesome. It's the only grassroots movement we have right now.

Ryan: I've read your blog a bunch and we did a show in town a few months back and the fact that you wrote about it brought a bunch of kids out and it's a great thing. We put our record out back in October on a really small label and had good resources but limited ones, and one of the things they were trying to do was get in touch with the right blogs and just send them the record. They knew that either these people are going to like the record and write about it or they're not, you can't push them on it. It's not the kind of thing where you send them a check and they write about it, they have to like the album. But it's a shot in the dark and we were lucky enough that a handful of blogs really championed the band and in our early stages of this album, it helped us out alot. It helped raise the profile of the band on a national level where I think a few years ago you would have had to spend the marketing money in the right places to even just those few people to know about you. And also I think the bloggers have the attention of music seekers, and that is the audience that every band wants. Bands want to be discovered. They don't want their music pushed on people. Blogs are one of the main way that people do that these days.

It seems like it's a reaction to the industry not changing with the times.

Rob: When it comes to reviews as far as Aberdeen City, it's like there's no such thing as a bad blog just like there's no such thing as bad press. It's nice to even be recognized by such a tight community.

Chris: I know we are more likely to buy or listen to a record if we read about it on a blog than if we hear a song on commercial radio.

Ryan: The music blog and satellite radio are two of the big things where people are able to discover things on their own about the band but in both cases we felt we were appearing in those places because someone said it was good. No one paid Sirius to play our songs. They just put two singles in heavy rotation before it got even a single add on commercial radio.

Plus going to commercial radio costs alot of money.

Chris: Yeah, it does, but you're not even getting music listeners. You're getting passers-by. Another thing we should mention is internet radio, places like WOXY.

I was going to mention that, I listened to your WOXY Lounge Act earlier today. It's great that you can listen to stuff like that on demand.

Brad: They are another branch of champions for us. We listen to it and like it alot. I've definitely gotten in to alot of bands just listening to WOXY. It's such a weird time with the way music is spread. It's changing right now.

Brad: Yeah.

OK, so last question. What's the goal for the band.

Brad: I thought this was an interview, not a meeting! (laughs)

Ryan: I think if you get too far ahead of yourself you can lose track. Right now our immediate goals are to stay on the road and and figure out how to keep writing on the road.

Brad: But we don't want to write about being on the road.

Ryan: Yeah. We want to make sure this album gets the shot it deserves. We spent alot of time writing these songs and getting them to sound how we want and we want to make sure the people that would like them are going to get a chance to hear them. So alot of that right now is touring.

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If you missed your chance to see Aberdeen City when they came through town, don't fret. They just announced a tour with local products done good Army of Me. There are a few dates up at the Aberdeen City website, and although no D.C. date has been announced yet, it's a safe bet they'll be gracing a local stage very soon. Check out the media section of their website or their MySpace page for some free MP3's.

Photos by Kyle Gustafson