What comes to mind when you hear FilmSpeed? Photography, right? Well, in this case, it’s a trio band titled FilmSpeed. Read their interview below with member Craig where he explains the meaning behind their name and how they love making memories with one another playing music and chatting on their podcast.
Shyanna: How do you feel like your music with the band has evolved over these years? I know you guys had your first album come out in 2013, correct?
Craig:
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I can launch from there. A huge evolution, I mean, that record from, what, seven years ago now? It’s a totally different drummer, we had a different guy in there altogether. And as a three-piece with just three guys in the room, when you change one of those people, it’s already 33% different and chemistry, and getting along with people, learning how to be stuck in a van for hours with a completely new person that already, from then to here, huge differences.
Craig:
And then also a huge thing is that recently we’ve been lucky enough to work with a handful of different producers in different rooms, in different studios and really get the highlights, the other side of our inspirations. Before it was just the three of us with a bunch of really good gear, just doing it ourselves, and experimenting and seeing what we could produce on our own that sounded cool. And now we’re in a good position to get other peoples’ opinions and flex our musical muscles in that way.
Shyanna :
That’s absolutely amazing. So the band member that just joined was Oliver, correct?
Craig:
Yeah, he’s been with us for about three and a half, four years now. He is our drummer.
Shyanna: I know you guys moved to LA. How was that transition for you guys?
Craig:
Crazy. Well, the bases is, I’ve known him since that long. We grew up in the same town. So when it came time to pack up, he was instantly one of the first people that said, “Yes, we need to do this. We need to go shake it up and go make a lot of noise.” So from that, from leaving Detroit and pretty much our entire families, everything, it’s all still there. I’m actually headed back for mid-March, so I’m back home visiting my sister and brother-in-law and nieces and friends in about four weeks. So it’s always good to get back, but yeah, yeah. Oh, it’s one of the best places to be from. But Southern California has just so many more opportunities for us. On any given Tuesday night, I could walk to a bar that has really good live music. And then I said I could Uber to at least a hundred more places. So it keeps us hungry, and active, and in business. So I don’t anticipate moving back unless I wanted to actually buy a house, which is pretty much impossible here in Southern California.
Shyanna:
Do you get to go back often to go visit family and all that, or do you just go when you have time?
Craig:
Yeah, yeah. I make it a point. My sister’s birthday is in October and mine is in November, so we will go out of our way to make sure we see each other around then. And then our Mom’s birthday’s in March, so we’ll always get together mid-March as well. And those are pretty consistent for the last, how long have we been out here? Forever? **Laughs For the last 15 or so years, as long as I lived down here.
Shyanna:
Okay. So I know you guys’ name Filmspeed came from making memories, and photos?
Craig:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s the inspiration.
Shyanna:
So with that being said, what could you say would be your favorite memory from starting until now?
Craig: HOLY MOLY WAS HIS FIRST REACTION**
Yeah, it’s hard to pick one, it’s hard to pick one. Last year, the three of us, with Oliver, he’d only been in the band three years at that point, we stitched together a tour for ourselves up to Vancouver and back down. And that was a crazy, intense, ridiculous amount of fun, trip. For Nick and I have been playing together this long and still not put it down, and to have a guy that we can leave for that amount of time and run a crazy schedule, not only did Oliver perform, but he did it all with a smile on his face. And that, to me, makes us really excited about the future. So if I have to pick one day, it’s that, and then we needed to get back on the road as soon as possible.
Shyanna:
When is that coming up do you think?
Craig:
I don’t know because right now, we spent most of the holidays writing and now that we have all these songs built up, it’s scheduling time with the producer that matches the song that’s excited about that one. So it’s this whole bunch of like politics we have to play and money in the bank we have to save up to work at the good studios, and stuff like that. So we’re really focused on just getting our whole year set up with new music. Because not only are we trying to play the singles game right now, we’re just releasing content all the time, but we really want to do another album because albums are the best. We’re all such huge fans of albums. So touring, as soon as we get all that locked in then maybe like late May something, maybe like early summertime, something like that.
Shyanna:
You’re talking about albums, having said that, I was going to ask you, how does writing songs go for you guys. If one of you guys have an idea, do you just pitch it with each other and you guys go from there, or how do you guys go about that?
Craig:
Yeah, our process, it starts, if you looked at my phone memos right now, you’re going to find thousands on thousands of phone memos, and they range from a five second guitar notes to a full 30 minutes of me just humming while running. There’s just always so much, I don’t know, sound in my head. Luckily enough, I can filter some of them out, boil them down to like a 30-40 second idea, like a real song idea, and then I’ll send it to my guys. And Nick and Oliver will go through 15 some voice memos at the time, and be like, “Hey, we like these ones the best. These are trash.” And from there I’ll just start refining it, listen back to it. How’s the vibe? As soon as it finally materializes itself because I think that’s, for me, that’s how music develops. A lot of people have really great success setting aside like every Thursday at three o’clock. They have their coffee and they sit down with their notebook and they just start writing material, and that is awesome. But it’s not my experience at all. My experience is capturing when there’s something going on up there and you spit it out and you’re pretty sure that you’ve never heard it before, that means it’s yours and you should hang on to it. And if it doesn’t fully develop now, then it just needs a little hammer to it, and you just got to re-listen, yeah. Yeah. So once we get that far, I’ll bring it to the band and then we’ll play it as the three guys in this band do and adapt it to how it fits. Because as far as the band goes, I mean, we’re a live band at the end of the day. If this were like songs for songs’ sake, then I probably would have something like that routine from the piano type writing a song, setting aside time to write out a song. But with this band, it’s more like finding a vibe and making it feel really good to play live, whether it be a celebration or telling someone off, just capturing the energy in music that makes us excited is what it’s all about.
Shyanna:
Most definitely. Do you guys go about the songwriting, like you do music videos? Do you guys enjoy the production of that part also?
Craig:
That’s a great question because that’s exactly where our creativity almost stops, **Laughs because we’re all such huge music fans and nerds about music that maybe our brains just didn’t fully develop on the video side. We have ideas, but no vision for videos at all. We’ve been lucky enough to work with a bunch of great producers and directors, people that do that and have a real good eye for that. But I think that’s one thing that we should just, I don’t know, probably work on, probably sit down and say, “All right. I’m going to write out a video for video’s sake.”
Shyanna:
That’d be cool. Yeah, I get it. From a live stance, it’s more on spot, not performing and doing it at that moment. It’s having to transcribe a whole song into a video. I get it.
Craig:
Right. Yeah, the best we could come up with would be like, “All right, let’s put up some cameras and play it.” We think that’s exciting, it’s not. It’s not the game right now, yeah.
Shyanna:
I’d seen in a recent interview that you did, you used dirty, sexy, and money to describe your guys’ music. Why did you choose those three words?
Craig: LAUGHS LOUDLY**
That was a working title of one of those phone memos too because that was a … I don’t know where I had heard that term or something, but it became one of those gibberish, like (singing), you know, when you’re going through ideas and the way that it fit the attitude of the band. We’re rock and roll, but it’s not like happy pop-rock, it’s a little dirty, and we make sure that we always put a really good groove in it so it’s a bit sexy. And we really, really like hooks and we want people to already kind of be singing it to themselves, and that’s commercialism and that’s money.
Shyanna:
Okay. I’ve also seen that you guys have a podcast. Is that something that you guys do frequently still or?
Craig:
Yeah, I can’t believe it, but we now got onto a schedule. We’re looking at almost every Monday we get together and then within 48 hours Nick has it ready to go and posted everywhere. That’s good. I think we might be turning a corner there. The early episodes were like weeks apart, months apart, random. But now we’ve actually, I mean, I put the pressure on them because I was like, “Guys, it’s on Spotify now. It’s on Stitcher now, it’s on Apple podcasts. You should probably put some effort into it.” So it looks like we’re going to have weekly episodes, which is entertaining for me.
Shyanna:
That’s good. So it comes out on Wednesdays usually? Craig:
Whew, I can’t commit to that. Shyanna:
“I want to listen to you,” “I’m going to tune in one day.” Craig:
Yeah, that’s how, man, it’s on Nick. All right. How about this? You heard it here first. It’s going to be every Wednesday and I will just make sure Nick gets it done.
Shyanna:
Okay, well, is there anything else you’d like to share, or something new that’s coming up that you want people to know about or be waiting for?
Craig:
Oh, the video for Brain Dead. The video for Brain Dead is going to be running soon. It’s being edited and there’s a lot to edit, and it’ll make more sense when it all comes out. But I’m going to tentatively say six weeks from now.
Shyanna:
Did you guys have any input and creativity on that video?
Craig:
We did. This is one that, we’re trying to do it ourselves. And the first round of shooting did not go as planned. So we’re doing a bunch of reshoots, and then we have a great editor in Michigan. He’s a good friend of ours who is already editing like the front half of what we gave them. And now we’ve got to give him a bunch more. So we were kind of in charge of it, but because it’s such an edit heavy thing, he’s basically the director of it. We’re just giving him shots.
Shyanna:
If you guys ever come to Seattle and do a show, I’ll be ready to be in the front row.
Ending the interview Craig told Fever a quick story of when they came to Seattle for a gig.
Craig:
I actually, if you have 45 seconds, here’s a quick one. Last year we were in Seattle. We played Funhouse, [We had a] great time. Directly after that, we had to drive up to Vancouver. The bad part is, we left our merch in Seattle. Coming back from Vancouver, we had to go directly to Portland, but we had to stop in Seattle to get our merch. But we hit it during rush hour. And you can see the venue from the freeway, right? So we exited the freeway and it took us three hours to get inside and get our things inside El Corazon. Laughs** never again.
Want to become a fan of FilmSpeed check out their links below and tune into their podcast on spotify.
