Alli's Articles
INTERVIEWS, REVIEWS, CULTURE PIECES, MUSICAL RAMBLINGS.
With all of this talk about New Paltz outdoor shows coming back, I’ve been taking the past couple of weeks to reflect on the best and most memorable house show experiences, and what the bands that rocked the basement those nights are doing now. One band that comes to mind is Run For The Whales, a Long Island-based Pop Punk band that dominated the Skatehouse lineups last Fall. Active since 2017, the band is made up of Shawn Brennan, Nick Carson, Matt Chiarelli, and Aidan Tweedy. 2018 saw the release of their first full-length album, Home, a catchy and unique west-coast-emo-inspired work that will definitely stand out to you in the crowded, crowded world of DIY scene projects. With the energetic instrumentals, and the distinctive vocals of Brennan and Chiarelli, you’ll just want to keep on listening. Luckily for you, the band released their second album, Better Every Day, on October 23rd. In my first ever interview conducted on Zoom, I talked to the band about their writing processes and their connection to the New Paltz DIY community. How did you guys all meet, and what was the beginning of the band like? Matt: We all went to the same school district on Long Island, so we all knew each other. When we were in high school, the band formed as me, Aidan, and Nick, and we literally formed because the words “Run for the Whales” were spoken, and we were like, “That's too good to not be a bad name, let's start a band.” And then Shawn joined, like, a year into it. Aidan: Once we realized that Matt playing drums and singing at the same time wouldn't work out for every song…*laughs* Nick: We had made attempts at bands before, Matt and Aidan had a handful of different projects, some of which I was a part of, and some of which Shawn was a part of. Me and Shawn were actually in a band together briefly before Run for the Whales. Matt: And I was in a band with Shawn, too! We also all did School of Rock together. Shawn: I was actually friends with Aidan's little brother Connor for like 10 years before joining the band. I used to be a huge theater kid and his little brother was at the time too, so when I actually joined Run for the Whales, I wasn’t even friends with Aidan. Aidan in my eyes was just my friend Connor’s weird older brother. Matt: And that’s how Run for the Whales happened. *laughs* My next question was actually, “Where does the name Run for the Whales come from?” When were those words actually spoken? And in what context? Shawn: I get asked this a lot, and I actually don’t know the answer to that question because it happened before I was in the band. Nick: Same for me, it was just a thing before I joined. Matt: Yeah, I don’t really know, it was just the name before I joined the band. Aidan: Yeah, it was there when I got here. Me: *long confused pause*….So...Do only the RFTW ancestors know?? RFTW: *all start laughing* Shawn: We had a band discussion earlier about how to answer that question because we never really have publicly, and it was either we are all going to say that that it was there before we joined which, I'm the only one that's true for, or we were all just start Sanger Taco Bell order the same time, but we thought that would get too complicated over Zoom. Aidan: I just think we heard it and were like “Yo, that’s a band name right there.” Matt: Yeah, I don’t want to spoil the story, but it was, like, a thing between me and Nick where we were like “we should start a band called Run for the Whales,” it sounds like a band name. Nick: I personally I get asked less of, “How did you come up with the name Run for the Whales?'' and more of “Why did you choose Run for the Whales out of all of the things in the world?” Matt: It’s usually the people over the age of 40 who ask that question. I really like the new music you’re putting out, it’s great! Very excited for the album! Is there anything you wanna say about your upcoming album, like thoughts on it or about the process? Aidan: Well, the entire thing was recorded in my bedroom. So, it's very DIY, I guess, is the best way to put it. Nick: This is probably the most DIY thing we’ve ever done. Like, we’ve done DIY things with friends and stuff, but this was totally like, by ourselves. Aidan: We started doing it in April, so it was like really in the early stages of COVID. You couldn't go and see your friends, so we were the first people we ended up gravitating towards. Nick: Like, hanging out in my backyard outside because no one wants to go inside during a pandemic. We would just have acoustic guitars and be like, “Well, let’s figure out this song.” Matt: At the time, we were going to do a four-song EP but we realized we had so much material that we were like, “Are we about to do another album?” We ended up writing most of the stuff together. Some of it was old songs that I had written but we brought it together and we all worked on them. It would be like, someone would come in with an idea for an instrumental and then someone else would write for vocals. We had some really old songs. Shawn: The second single that we put out, “Wake Up,” was written so long ago that we were going to record it when I used to live in England, so over a year ago. Nick: Yeah, we have a song that me and Matt wrote in 2014 when we were in middle school in our first earlier bands, and we’ve been reworking it ever since then and now it finally got on this album. It’s the last song, but the vocals were only written this year. This song is still always changing, and it sounds a lot different than it did before. Aidan: It got Whale-ified. Matt: It’s a lot of bringing up old stuff, which is cool. I feel like those are the best songs, ones that can stand the test of time because you wrote something so long ago that you’re still proud of. Now we know that these songs are really quality, because we’re not sick of them yet. Shawn: A lot of these songs were actually The Mile Run songs, because Matt used to have his own solo project called The Mile Run. When COVID hit, it dissolved because it was just a kind of side project, so we pretty much took in this EP he had written, and intermingled it with the EP we had written. Now our live setup is going to look different too, because Matt and I are going to be switching off where he sings and plays guitar. We’re all just gonna be jumping around once live shows come back. What’s your favorite single so far for this album? Why? Shawn: For me, personally, “Bob and Fred Save the Day.” All of the lyrics in that song are either direct or paraphrased Bob Ross or Fred Rogers quotes. It’s a very different song than the rest of them in terms of lyrical content. Aidan: We also Bohemian Rhapsody’d the shit out of the vocals. Matt: We did a lot of experimentation with choir-type vocals. It’s definitely one of the most experimental one with vocals, but the lyrics of the song is relatively simple. It’s ironic because Bob Ross and Mister Rogers are about peace and tranquility, but it’s a rather heavy and punk-y song, but I think it goes together really well. Shawn: Yeah, it connects to the general message of the album very well. Nick: I think the first single we put out, “Godspeed, Spiderman” is gonna go down as one of my favorite Run for the Whales songs for a long time. I’m also excited for "Halloween Hangover," because that’s another one that we got some horns and features. Shawn: We got this band Skatune Network, it’s a guy named Jeremy, and what they do is turn any song into a Ska song. They’re crazy big on Youtube. One of my friends Dustin from the band The Weekdays hooked me up with their contact info, and they were like “Yeah, we’ll play horns on this.” Matt: I’m also excited for that song, because it’s also a really old one. It’s a big grower for me, I’ve grown to love it over time. Aidan: I’m excited for our first song, "Refresher." Matt sent us a full song and I wrote lyrics over it, and that became the final product. It’s a real pop-punker, in-your-face type song, and it goes into another song called “Lavender.” That is, right now, my favorite song on the album. I listened to it today and I cried. It’s not even a sad song, it’s just so good. I’m excited to ask you guys this question because I know you are all super passionate about it. How do you feel about the New Paltz music scene? Shawn: It changed me. Nick: Coming from Long Island, there’s a music scene, but it’s not like this. It’s super spread out, there’s only a couple venues, and house shows aren’t a thing. When we came here as little freshmen, Matt and I found out about Nacho House. Everybody we met was always so helpful and supportive. Marissa from Tiny Blue Ghost and Eli and Kenny from Top Nacho, specifically. They got us our first house shows. Aidan: And then Crossroads, with Elijah, later on. Shawn: I have Elijah’s handwriting tattooed on me. Matt: When we went to college, it was just me and Nick here. Aidan goes to Bing, and Shawn went to Cortland. House shows were Nick and I’s thing, and we bonded with a lot of people then. Aidan: It’s definitely something I won’t be forgetting anything soon, especially because I’ve never even gone there. I just would go there on weekends, sleep on Matt and Nick’s tile floor, and play a show. It’s an escape to me, honestly. The only thing I associated with the school was hanging out with friends and playing dope shows. Matt: I went to every single Crossroads show at the old house. I used to do videos for them. It’s just seeing so many insanely talented people, and you walk into a room and everyone wants to be your friend. It’s so non-discriminatory, everyone is so open. It’s one of the most welcoming places you can go nowadays. Skatehouse was lightning in a bottle. We’ll never get that again. Shawn: New Paltz is literally everything to me. When I went to Cortland my first semester, I had an absolutely awful experience there. On a whim, I packed up my entire room, said “Fuck this, I’m never coming back,” and rush-applied to New Paltz. My mental health was unstable at this point, but going to New Paltz was a clean slate. The DIY scene was literally why I went. I was a theatre major, but the scene completely changed my mind about everything I wanted to do with my life. I thought I was gonna do Broadway, but then I found these crusty kids doing punk shows in basements, and I fell head over heels for it. I ended up going to school in England for audio engineering because of that, and over there I would tell people about New Paltz all the time, like it was this magical place. I was in a pretty bad relationship last year, and to deal with shit going on with that, I would drive up to New Paltz from Long Island and go to any show that was happening. I don’t know if I’d be here if I didn’t do that. I cannot say enough things about the DIY scene. It sounds corny, but it literally changed my life. I loved that answer. So much. Literally an Ode to New Paltz. Shawn: I could have a novel at this point! You started talking about this earlier, but what is the main message of this album? Shawn: Go for it, Matt. RFTW: *all laugh* Matt: So, we’re calling this album “Better Every Day,” which is a decision we made before we called the song “Better Every Day.” It was gonna be self-titled for a while, but when you put all of the songs together they work together as a story. We all wrote things together, and a lot of it was coming off of experiences we’ve had with relationships ending, not necessarily romantic but also with friends. There’s a lot of reflection on all of that, but a lot of the stuff I was writing was about mental health and just trying to figure out a way to work on myself. Sometimes you need bad things to happen so you can work on yourself. At the end of the day, even if things aren’t perfect, you can still keep on growing and keep getting better. If the album is a story about getting better, it doesn’t end at the last song. This is how you get started. Aidan: I think it covers accepting that there are things that are wrong and fucked up in your life, and for a lot of those things you can’t do anything to affect the outcome. This album is about relaxing and expanding on that idea. Nick: What I like is that a lot of the content in this album, whoever it was written by, is about relationships with whoever is changing or ending, but when you hear that you often think about breakup songs. A lot of it is much more self-critical and introspective. Aidan: “It’s not you, it’s me.” Nick: Yeah, exactly, it’s about looking inward and getting better. Shawn: None of these songs feel like a breakup song. None of them feel that way. It’s less of a Story So Far kind of vibe where it’s like, “You broke up with me! Fuck you!” and more of a “Ugh! How do I fix my brain?” It’s got good intentions all around. Matt: A lot of the songs are songs that I’ve created for The Mile Run. I’m the drummer for this band, but I wanted to sing and play guitar and be able to present my stuff through my own voice, and being very open about these things that are very personal and heavy to me. I just want people to come up to me like “I don’t know you, but I really felt those songs.” That’s such a special feeling. I’m excited to bring that to our audience. I think that a lot of people are going to feel this way about this album, it seems. Thank you to Run for the Whales for taking the time to talk with me! Listen to “Better Every Day” out now!
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