Interview: Los Angeles Based Rock Band Super OK Talk About Their Debut Album "Departures"
/
“The creative process behind this album was pretty loose and continually evolving. Sometimes one of us would come to the band with a whole composition and parts all figured out, and sometimes one of us would bring a starter riff that everyone developed their parts around.”
Where did the band's name, Super OK, originate and how did the four of you meet and then decide to unite and create music together?
The name "Super OK" came from Benjamin, who has a tendency to express enthusiasm by putting the word "super" in front of other words that don't really benefit from that word preceding them ("Let's meet at 7?" 'Yeah, I can super do that!').
As far as how we all met, well, we think that's a fun story - Benjamin, Davey, and Kat have all known each other for years and our friendships started in Somerville, Massachusetts. Benjamin and Kat had been roommates since 2012, and Ben met Davey in 2014, forming an immediate bro bond over video games and music. In 2015, we banded together temporarily for a Somerville festival called Porchfest - which is basically what it sounds like, bands throughout the town playing on their porches and lawns during an assigned "set time."
None of us realized at the time that we'd become a band, but later that year, Benjamin (who always wanted to move back to LA) and Kat started dating, and Davey started dating his partner (who also wanted to move to LA), we ended up moving to LA around the same time 2018 and found apartments a mile away from each other. That's when we started to wonder if more musical chemistry was there and we could do something with it. We began hanging out and jamming on covers, then Benjamin and Davey both introduced some riffs they'd been working on, and it quickly became a much longer list of all originals we were playing and Super OK was born.
Within a year, we found a drummer and we had been getting songs together and hoping to get into the live music scene in LA when the pandemic hit and yeah, that plan got sidelined for a while. Jamming got put on pause, our drummer left, and with nothing else to do, we hottracked our goal of recording and ended up with a full 13-song album.
After we all got vaccinated and got back to in-person jamming, we started our search for a drummer again, and that's when we found Drew. Kat actually found via the r/losangelesmusicians subreddit - she made a post, Drew's girlfriend Amanda saw it, and sent Drew over to us. On his first audition, we knew he was the drummer for us. We had just released a single that week and he had already listened to it and reached out to congratulate us, made click tracks for the songs we asked him to learn - he was just a total professional, an excellent drummer, and a good friend to have around. We're really grateful we found him.
Congratulations on the completion and release of the band's debut album "Departures"; tell us about your creative process for the album's 13 songs and the headaches (if any) that came with recording it remotely.
Thank you! It was a true labor of love and patience for us. The creative process behind this album was pretty loose and continually evolving. Sometimes one of us would come to the band with a whole composition and parts all figured out, and sometimes one of us would bring a starter riff that everyone developed their parts around.
About half of the songs were written before the pandemic, while the others we had to figure out and feel out from a distance, which was quite the experience. Once the pandemic set in, we had so much creative energy without an outlet, so we decided to record this album as a passion project to get us through the isolation and anxiety we were all dealing with.
Benjamin and Davey taught themselves how to mix tracks so we could make decent demos to communicate our vision to our amazing producer Chris Harvey. At the end of the day - well, the end of the year, literally - we got it together and got it all done by meeting over Zoom, sending stems back and forth, just piecing it together as the pandemic dragged on.
So while there was a strong learning curve and a number of headaches - mostly stemming from version control, creating and saving presets, and the stark difference between how audio sounds in and out of the DAW - the three of us feel that recording this album is really what got us through the pandemic.
Can we expect any music videos to be released from the songs on the album? If so, which one(s)?
Yes! Right now we're in the pre-production phase for shooting a video for "Push," song #6 off of Departures. That video is coming sometime later in 2022, and we're really excited for the story that we're building with director and co-producer JohnMark Triplett.
With the nation opening up post-CV lockdowns, will the band be hitting the road and touring?
We'd love to get out there and play some shows - it's the #1 thing we're working on right now that we want to do next. We're still acquainting ourselves with the LA music scene and trying to figure out exactly how things work, and building the community we want to be a part of.
We've started chatting with promoters and venues, so as soon as we get a show, we'll be shouting about it from the rooftops!
Between Benjamin and Davey, how is it decided who will be lead vocalist on a respective song?
When we first started jamming on covers, the person to bring a song to the table was usually the one who sang since they knew it best and we all love to sing! From there, as Benjamin and Davey were writing more songs, they'd sing what they introduced and work on it with the band to develop the song's direction, backup vocals, and everything that makes a song have that Super OK feel.
Really, all four of us are songwriters at heart - Drew has a whole bunch of songs and Kat has a few she's working on as well. We're already working on a dozen new tunes and you'll hear more from Kat and Drew with this next batch.
We're still celebrating and promoting “Departures”, and at the same time, we're full-speed ahead with our next album's worth of songs and really can't wait to share the next phase of Super OK with the world!