Three Stars: Impossible Hair

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DCist: On your MySpace page, it says that various members of you live in Baltimore, Arlington and Silver Spring. Is Silver Spring the happy medium in terms of places to practice?

Jim: We’re always in the middle and practicing in Silver Spring somewhere.

Roman: This has always been the place to practice.

Jim:This is our fourth place we’ve been living since we started to play. Takoma Park was definitely the best of the bunch. We had a pine rehearsal room. Basically this is a tiny little place.

DCist: Depending on who’s writing the review, people have described you as either a Baltimore band or a D.C. band. Do you feel that you’re one or the other? Do you identify with both?

Sammy: Yes to all of that.

Joe: Well now that Roman’s not there, but they’re both from Baltimore. So it really is in a way.

Jim:But you could say it’s a Virginia band.

Roman: But you’ve got to think about where you play, who you play with, who you know, things like that, which scene you associate yourself with. In that way, we have pretty strong Baltimore roots. But we’re also pretty well established here. So I feel that it works in a sort of dual citizenship in a way. There hasn’t been a case, not that I know of, where it’s worked quite as well or been as legitimate or as effective. I like that about us, I think it’s really unique.

DCist: What do you like about each place?

Roman: I don’t know for me personally that it’s distinguishing one against the other or saying “this is good there, this is good there.” But it’s just nice to be a part of two things at the same time, because I’ve been playing in bands in Baltimore for twelve years. Same with Jim. I think you would agree, it’s hard to establish a presence in D.C. as a Baltimore band and vice versa, but no one ever seems to know why. There’s always been this kind of divide even though they’re so close. Everyone says, “Oh, we can bridge the gap. We can be the group that tries to be a little bit of both.” For some reason it never really works out because you’re not participating in the scene. For all the attempts, it never really worked out, I think this is as well as I’ve seen it work.

DCist: How long have you guys been together?

Joe: JIm, Sam and I have been playing together for about a two and a half years. Roman’s been playing, like a year.

DCist: How did you guys meet up?

Joe: Roman and I went to high school together and I knew Jim through Roman.

Jim:I knew Joe, but I couldn’t stand him because, we worked together, Roman and I and Joe would just show up and he’d do these weird things with my email. He did some hacking things with my email. That’s how I met him. Then when he moved back five years later he asked me to play.

Joe: I matured.

Sam: Or did you? You do that sort of stuff now. Like change your name on email.

Roman: He doesn’t change Jim’s though.

Joe: I don’t email Jim from Jim.

Jim:I was getting emails everyday from myself. He had set up this script that would do that. And we met Sammy at the donut shop. Kind of a fluke.

DCist: The donut shop?

Joe: How did we meet Sammy? It wasn’t the donut shop. It was an ad or something.

Sam: It was an ad in a donut shop.

Jim:Let’s be honest here. It was a donut shop.

Joe: An ad for donuts?

Jim:We went through all these drummers, we had some really strange drummers. We were just trying to get somebody. Just trying people out. It was kind of a mess. And you (motioning at Roman) even played with us on drums for awhile.

Roman: I’d forgotten about that. Well, when you’re not established, it’s difficult to get people to play with you.

Jim:And this was Joe’s first band. And this was weird for me, I was like, “No one to play with?” I’d always had a band, I’d always lived with a band. It was weird having to be putting out ads.

Sam: It was weird, I’d never had any luck with that before. I’d tried that in other cities and to me it’s always very bizarre to play with people you’ve never met before. Like, the whole idea of auditioning or whatever you want to call it. Because growing up it was like, you had some friends and they played music and by laws of nature you ended up being in a band or joining a band.

Jim:Luckily, Sam is from my hometown, which is kind of ironic, because I moved up here from Hampton, Va. Which is kind of military. And that was really the only reason that I wanted him in the band. When I heard he was from Virginia, I said, “it’s got to be him.” I could not stand his drumming, I thought he looked weird. He was tall. He was trying to get a weird mustache or something. He still has. I’m just kidding. But he was from Hampton, and I was like, “That’s perfect! I need that.”

Sam: I thought it was the other way around. I thought you liked my drumming but were like, “Man, he’s from Hampton. That’s horrible. We can’t be around this guy.”

Jim: Anyone from Hampton, and you got out of there, made sense. I’m always telling people that. It’s your hometown, there’s something about it, even if you don’t like it.

DCist: Joe, we’ve already established that you have computer hacking skills, are you the one editing the videos on the MySpace page?

Joe: Some of them. Jim and I. I did the Europe videos. Jim edited the music videos.

Jim:The silly videos with the wigs, you mean?

Joe: Well there were wigs in the other ones. We like wigs, what can I say.

Jim:We’re all pretty computer literate. We’re all graphic designers or programmers. Well, he (motioning at Joe) was a programmer, now he’s a biologist, but Roman and I pretty much do the same type of job and he (motions at Sam) does computer stuff. We all do it. Macs. We’re all Mac people. Although, he (motions at Sam) brought some weird PC on tour.

Sam: I work for a company that rents computers and my boss let me borrow one. So, it’s free. Can’t be choosy.

DCist: You guys have been together two and a half years, just released a debut album and you’ve already toured Europe. How did you work out those logistics? That’s not something you usually see from a band that’s relatively new.

Jim:We went there before our record came out, as well.

Roman: Wasn’t it released officially here before then?

Jim:Well, we had done the lead up and all of that. Even the digital places online still had the old kind of cover. It was still being finished. It wasn’t like six months it was out and then “Oh, let’s go to Europe!”

Roman: But that’s the thing, is like, at the release of an album, you do a tour, to kind of promote it at the release time, because, theoretically, everything happens at this one time. People are writing about you, you’re on tour, your album’s coming out. Well, the only thing that happened different is that instead of touring in the states, we toured Europe and we got press in Europe. So, all that was happening at that time. So, that was really a choice that Joe made in the sense that he was like, “That’s what I want to do.” Instead of touring here in the States, we’ll spend our time and energies and money touring in Europe.

Joe: I had never been there and thought that it would be cool to go there. Everyone says it’s nice.

Jim:I thought it was my idea, but that’s alright.

Joe: It was totally my idea. You’d already been there.

Jim:I’d never been there. But I’d always wanted to go with my band.

Joe: It was Jim’s idea.

Jim:I think you work under the assumption that the tour is going to be a total flop and no one’s going to care anyway. Why not do something where, at least we can take pictures.

Roman: Right, and that’s a good point because I feel like a lot of the promotional worth of a tour, happens after the tour anyway. Because when you’re a small band that no one knows, what are the chances that we’re going to be convincing hordes of people to come check us out through myspace marketing. Not that great. And I know this from experience. You go on a tour, you do your best. You get in front of who you can. You do the best you can. Try and convince people and sell records when you get the opportunity. And then when you get back you use that kind of momentum to further promote the group and do a better tour next time. So, yeah, the idea that this is going to be that kind of tour...that can happen in Europe just as easily as it can here. Hopefully, it has that kind of continued effect though. Maybe that tour will help us for another tour in Europe. We can do that again more successfully.

DCist: Did you have any particular day that was your favorite over there?

Roman: I liked Lisbon. That was my favorite day.

Jim:It’s kind of the same every day in a way. You’re moving, you get there, you’ve got to sound check. It’s a regiment.

Roman: There’s four elements that happen. You’re traveling, you’re playing, you’re in the town and you’re sleeping. On a day when every single one of those was good, it was a better day than a day where sleeping arrangements weren’t as good as a certain night or another.

Jim:But everyday was the promise that it’s somewhere we’d never been and it was beautiful and it looked amazing. But yeah, Lisbon was great. I liked Berlin. Getting to see the town. We had a little bit of time to walk around. And there were a few Spanish ones that were great.

Joe: Granada.

Jim: Granada. There were a few low points, for me.

Roman: But it felt to me a lot like an American tour. The variables were all falling into place in the same way, you just didn’t have a whole lot of control over them.

Jim:You never really knew what it was going to be, is this going to be a real club. And I didn’t want to research, because, I mean, we had an itinerary I could have found out, “Oh, this is a squat, this is actually not a pub.” I personally never knew and didn’t want to. It was totally varied.

DCist: Do you guys speak any of the official languages of the countries you visited?

Roman: Not well enough to have any kind of effect, I don’t think.

Joe: We failed.

Roman: Some failed worse than others.

Jim:I speak three languages fluently. Catalan. I can order coffee and milk and Catalan, French, Spanish. Pretty much any language I can order coffee and milk.

Joe: Jim speaks three languages but they weren’t of any help.

Jim:They weren’t the right languages.

Sam: He knows how to ask how to wash stone...?

Jim:We had a few weird translation problems. I was trying to be, oh yeah, I can do this!

Roman: It’s funny, because you feel like, or at least I feel like, it’s a measure of respect to kind of use the languages as well as you could, even if maybe you weren’t that good at it. To the point where getting back here and going to a Mexican restaurant, or the El Salvadorean restaurant down the street, you’re like, “I would actually like to try and do that. But I’d feel stupid.”

Sam: It’s very weird over there to try to speak Spanish to people and then they come back at you with English and they apologize to you for not speaking English and I’m like, “We’re in your country. I should be apologizing to you for not speaking your language.” I always thought that was funny.

DCist: Do you think that after this tour you feel more in sync with each other as you play?

Roman: I think so definitely, because we hadn’t done a string of dates and that was twenty-four shows. So I think it took the band to a different place. You don’t know if people notice it or what. But I felt it. I felt confident.

DCist: Where did you guys record the album?

Roman: I have a studio that is currently in the basement of this house, but at the time I had a place in Baltimore. It was a warehouse, practice room and we just did it all in there. Mixed it mostly at Jim’s place. But yeah, we did most of it at a home studio.

DCist: It doesn’t sound like a home studio recording.

Roman: Well it’s nice equipment, first of all. It’s analog recording and that makes a big difference to me. I think it shows up really well on the record.

Jim:Basically just get a few pieces of really good equipment, and you’ve got your base. Just get some really good compressors...

Roman: And all of a sudden, your band sounds like your band. I feel like people get a computer setup and they’re like, well, I’ve got this computer setup, now I can make a professional recording and that’s true only to a certain extent, cause I think with computers you need to know how to use them a little bit better. So, we did that at my place.

DCist: Was it a conscious decision to write shorter songs? Depending on who you ask, people will say it’s harder to write a shorter song.

Joe: No, it’s easier. You just stop. People are always weirded out that our songs are short but I feel like Buddy Holly and the Beatles...their songs were always really short and they don’t sound weird to me.

Roman: But really short, a few minutes is different than really short, forty seconds.

Joe: But how many forty second songs do we have on the album?

Roman: Well, none. But what I’ve heard people being freaked out about is the songs in our set that are forty second songs. Some of the new songs are brief.

Joe: We’re trying to get it under five seconds!

DCist: So you’ve been writing songs since the album release?

Roman: Well, the album’s been finished for over a year. It’s like a natural part of any band’s activity that includes writing, putting out a record, touring. It’s all kind of separated but there’s some overlap. It’s always been my experience that, alright, now we’re done with this one, let’s write some other songs.

DCist: Are there any other bands in either area that you feel a sort of affinity with?

Joe: Well, there’s Sammy’s other band, Andalusians. Then, the Face Accidents. Actually, our second practice space, I’d moved in with Zack, so we had half of the practice space and the Fake Accents had the other.