Band Of Heathens
Band Of Heathens Q&A
By Richard Skanse
May 2008
Under ideal circumstances, any and all interviews with the Band of Heathens would only take place in a single room with all five Heathens present and accounted for. The in-jokes would fly fast and furious, with everyone riffing off of each other's tangents and freely hitching along on each other's trains of thought in the same way that the band's three songwriting frontmen swap verses and guitar solos over a solid but loose-limbed rhythmic bed of harmony laced, soulful roots rock. The end result would be a proper group portrait of the band as true-to-life as their 2006 debut, Live at Momo's , or last year's CD/DVD, Live at Antone's . Seasoned groove guru Ray Wylie Hubbard used this same five-guys-in-a-room method when producing the Heathens' brand new, self-titled studio album, effectively capturing the full organic seep and flow of the band's live show like the proverbial lightning in a bottle. Good thing, too, because anything less would have been a disservice to not only founding band members Gordy Quist, Ed Jurdi, Colin Brooks, Seth Whitney and relative “new guy” John Chipman, but also to all the fans who voted the Heathens “Best New Band” in the 2006-2007 Austin Music Awards.
Now, having acknowledged the way the Band of Heathens should be interviewed, especially in light of them being selected as LoneStarMusic.com's Artist of the Month to mark the occasion of the May 20 release of the aforementioned Hubbard-produced studio album, what follows is unabashed heathenism. Due to the band's understandably busy schedule of late (goes with the territory of being one of the hottest bands in town), we were only able to catch up with two of the five Heathens — singer-songwriter/guitarists Quist and Jurdi, and we had to make due with talking to them one at a time. We talked to Quist via a very shaky cell-phone connection (“Can you hear me now? How bout now? Reception's good here, but the music's really loud …”) minutes after the band finished its set at Larry Joe Taylor's Texas Music Festival, and we connected with Jurdi via a more stable connection during the band's ride back home to Austin. But nobody needs to know that, so let's all just pretend that we did conduct the following interview with the whole band in attendance, albeit with third singer-songwriter/guitarist Brooks, bassist Whitney and drummer Chipman all pleading the Fifth, refreshing their drinks or sneaking off to the little Heathens' room during the portion of the interview presented here. Yeah, it's a stretch, and it's definitely not the Heathens' way, but just play along and we'll all get through this together. . .
Read Richard Skanse's full interview with
some of the Band of Heathens |