Longwave lead singer Steve Schiltz / photo by Kyle Gustafson
The ups and downs that Longwave have been through in their 10-year career would make a pretty good episode of Behind The Music. They received a huge amount of buzz after opening for The Strokes and The Vines in the early ’00s, two of the biggest bands around at the time. Major label interest soon followed, and the band signed to RCA Records and recorded with producers like Dave Fridmann and John Leckie.
A string of bad luck followed: getting lost in the Sony/BMG merger and having multiple tours canceled for various reasons. As a result, their 2005 album, There’s A Fire, never received the attention it deserved, and the band went on hiatus as a result. Lead singer Steve Schiltz toured as a guitarist for Albert Hammond, Jr. and Teddy Thompson for the next few years before reuniting the band in 2007. They released their fourth album, Secrets Are Sinister, late in 2008 and just finished a stint opening for Bloc Party. We caught up with them at the D.C. show and were impressed with what we saw. Now the band is back on the road, this time opening for Blue October, including tonight’s show at the 9:30 Club. Schiltz took the time over the weekend to answer a few questions for us over email.
1) You went from opening for Bloc Party to opening for Blue October. Hard to think of two audiences that differ more. What kind of adjustments (if any) are you making for this tour?
None, really. So far the Blue October crowds seem to be really into the noisy stuff, which was a bit surprising to discover.
2) You’ve been a band for 10 years or so, and your career has had your fair share of ups and downs. It must have been hard to keep an even keel through that.
It was tough around There’s A Fire for a lot of reasons. We had lost our drummer, and then our bass player. We were under contract to do another record, and we could have used a better perspective. We went right in to record it during a lot of upheaval. The record came out in the middle of a huge corporate merger, and everyone at the company was scared. That said, I still like some things about it. We made it through.
