Interviews: Kayla, Thomas, and Ryan of Voluntary Hazing talk their debut LP 'Addictive Little Sounds'

Back in July, San Jose-based Voluntary Hazing released their excellent debut album Addictive Little Sounds into the world. Over the course of 11 tracks, the 13-piece band continues to push their blend of ska, pop punk, alt-rock, and emo (along with dashes of disco and country) to new heights with fresh arrangements, quotes from classical compositions, and infectious energy. Along with exploring the relationship we have with our phones (the notifications of which are the album’s namesake), the band also confronts unrequited love, pays tribute to a beloved parent, and deals with self-doubt with heartfelt, sometimes humourous lyrics that are delivered with an incredible amount of emotion. Addictive Little Sounds is available digitally now. Voluntary Hazing will be playing a handful of shows around California this fall.
Punknews editor Em Moore caught up with lead vocalist and guitarist Kayla Renelle, tenor saxophonist Thomas Narveson, and trombonist Ryan Heisinger to talk about their new album, songwriting, dealing with online life, rubber chickens, the best way to eat a saxophone reed, and so much more. Read the interview below!

This interview between Em Moore, Kayla Renelle, Thomas Narveson, and Ryan Heisinger took place on August 28, 2024 over Zoom. This is a transcription of their conversation and has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Your band name is taken from a tradition at San Jose State University where people would play the school’s fight song in the porta potties before the first game of the season. Did you ever participate?

Ryan: Yes.
Kayla: Yeah. [laughs]
Thomas: I actually didn’t. I took the voluntary part of that to heart. In my first year, I said no and no one pressured me. They were just like, “Ok cool!” and moved on. [laughs]
Kayla: It really was a voluntary thing. It was something that marching band people had been doing for literally 30 years and then somebody brought up, “Hey, this is hazing”. The whole debate was, “No, it’s just something band kids do because it’s stupid and band kids be like that sometimes”. [laughs] There are a few members of our band that didn’t do it. I did it.
Ryan: I did it too. Kayla and I are the same age and I don’t remember if we were in the same porta potty but we were in the same line of porta potties.
Thomas: I would say half the people who did it every year were people who had been there multiple years. [laughs] There were people who just kept doing it the first game of every year.

Keeping the tradition alive. Was it a good experience overall?

Ryan: I mean, playing in a porta potty for a trombone player is not easy because you have to aim up or down. It’s too long of an instrument, really. I wouldn’t say that the experience of going into a porta potty with more than one human being is fun - it’s silly and I think that makes it fun. It’s an insane sonic experience to play like that. We knew the song well enough that it would all come together somehow, despite the fact that most of the other musicians were not visible because they were in another porta potty. It was impressive is more the way to describe it. Impressive that it works at all. [laughs]
Kayla: It’s definitely a story you tell your friends and they’re like, “Oh my god, that’s ridiculous!” and you’re like, “Yeah, it was college marching band”. [laughs]

You said that it took 5 years to complete Addictive Little Sounds. How do you feel you’ve grown as people and as a band during that time?

Ryan: Oh my gosh, a lot. [laughs] For frame of reference, COVID wasn’t a thing when we started writing this. I remember working on “Skemsco” in November of 2019. Kayla and our old bassist Leela were sitting at a piano in the recording studio at San Jose State figuring out the chords for that weird little chromatic walk-down thing that happens. Kayla, I think you said that “Neurotic” was the first one that you wrote from this set?
Kayla: For this album, yeah.
Ryan: I was still in my undergrad. Since then I’ve graduated and moved back up to my home in Tahoe, moved back to the Bay, and moved down to LA. I’m going to UCLA as a grad student now. It felt like the whole world happened in between when we started working on it and when it was finished. [laughs] We knew that we wanted to record stuff and Kayla has grand visions of things. It was an interesting experience for me as a producer because I was mostly self-taught. “Skemsco” was the first track I feel like I properly sat down and produced from beginning to end. So going from that being my first experience to then working through every other track on the album was a great learning experience. I now feel a whole lot more comfortable with the process.
Thomas: I feel like one of the big things from the band’s point of view over those 5 years is we’ve really developed our sound in a different way. When we started we were definitely influenced by the third-wave ska sound and as we wrote our songs, it changed. You can hear that in the album. Some of the earlier songs sound distinctly different from the later songs. It’s kinda interesting hearing us think about what kind of music we want to make. You can hear how two of our people who write horn parts - Ryan and our trumpet player Vincent - had different ideas and learned to play in different ways. From the start, you’re coming in from a classical background and you’re trying to write really complicated parts. If you listen to our first EP, Crossroads, our horn charts can be pretty complicated or pretty harmonically interesting and are different than what happens later. Not worse or bad, just different. Then the more modern parts we have written are definitely in a different direction. That’s a fun thing to notice.
Ryan: In relation to that, I specifically wrote “You May Be Entitled to Compensation” with the express purpose of writing something that was a simpler unison horn line because I was doing all of this classical arranging stuff where everyone had a different part. That sounds cool when you record it but then you get to a live setting and you have to figure out how everyone is going to play all of the voices. When you write something where everybody is basically playing the same thing the whole time, that’s more a traditional ska thing. It’s simpler and it’s usually louder and more in-your-face. My goal with that was to do something that was a little more traditional and a little less arranged.
Kayla: I’d say thematically, the album is definitely about your phone and all the weird ways it affects you. All the different ways it impacts how you feel and think in the context of your phone but also how it impacts you outside of that. [To Thomas] Did you just check your phone?
Thomas: I just checked my phone.
[laughter]
Kayla: It started with “Neurotic” which was inspired by this thing that happened to me when I was out with friends. We went on Venmo to pay each other and I saw that this guy I was seeing was out with his ex-girlfriend. I was like, “OH. This sucks. This is weird, why am I finding this out through Venmo??” [laughs] That idea started it and then the pandemic and being home and going through that gave me a lot more ideas. Definitely, in those 5 years a lot of life has happened. The band has grown from just a thing at school to a thing outside of school.

How have you found the transition going from a school environment to a more real-world setting?

Kayla: For me, it’s been a childhood dream come true. A lot has changed in these 5 years, but the thing that hasn’t is that I have these friends that I’m really close with - if anything, I think we’re closer than ever - and we’re doing this crazy thing where we get to go play shows. I always wanted to do that as a little girl. Kelly Clarkson was my hero and I was like, “I’m gonna win American Idol!” [laughs] The fact that I get to be in a band with my friends and we get to go out and people will show up and have fun, it blows my mind. It’s really fun.
Ryan: Everyone has a definition of “making it”. There are people that listen to us that we don’t know personally, that aren’t just friends who we invited to a gig and they came because they felt obligated to go. There are at least 5 people that we’ve never met before who like our music. [laughs] Playing in the school context was fun because we were just hanging out but going out into the world reminds us, like Kayla was saying, that this is real. Everyone dreams of being in a band and going out and playing. It wasn’t until Kayla was saying, “This is my childhood dream” that I sat back and was like, “Oh yeah, I had always thought that being in a band would be cool and now we’re actually doing that, and going out into the world!”A school setting gives you kind of this fall-back thing like, “Ok, there’s always going to be a band room available for us to go rehearse in. There’s a weekly schedule so we’re all going to be there at the same time”. It’s easier to plan but it’s so limiting. We started in 2017 calling ourselves the San Jose State University Ska Ensemble.
Thomas: I named it that, I’ll have you know. [laughs]
Ryan: Thomas was the professor of this totally official unofficial class that would meet every Friday night after marching band rehearsal. For a while, we just called ourselves a San Jose State-affiliated thing which is limiting when you wanna go play at a bar somewhere or you wanna play songs with swears in them. [laughs]
Thomas: I didn’t let that stop me.
[laughter]
Ryan: But I feel like as it becomes its own thing, the floor is pulled out from under you. Now we don’t have a free rehearsal space. We rehearse at Alex’s house. We have to figure out free time when we’re not at our actual jobs. I’m down in LA most of the time so I’m usually bothering people to send me recordings and stuff. There’s less structure but more potential. I feel like we’re just starting to get the ball rolling on realizing that we can, in fact, do whatever we want.
Thomas: When I started the ska ensemble, I had already been playing in bands for 5-7 years already. I’d been in the indie band scene. I was really excited to create a ska group and eventually take it somewhere that wasn’t a school setting, that was my long-term goal. It was harder to do that than I expected. [laughs] I wanted to get all of my classical friends into a dive bar to watch us play a ska set. There are obviously a lot of classical musicians who drink heavily, [laughs] but I wanted to get them playing or listening to music in a different way because I feel like a lot of them don’t listen to anything that isn’t band-related like classical, orchestral things like that. They tend to stay in the university setting and they don’t go out and listen to other music. I was really excited to get them out of their comfort zone. I wanted to tell people, “Hey, there are things other than orchestra and jazz. There’s a lot of contemporary music out there!” My favourite is ska and I knew a bit about it so I was like, “Let’s just do it”.
Transitioning to outside of school is like, “Ok, how are you going to move all of your gear?” A band room has all of its gear but now you need to move the gear to the setting you’re playing in. Someone’s gotta have a drum set, someone’s gotta have all this stuff. The logistics of doing that is definitely a new experience. I think we’ve handled that quite well because our drummer, Alex Quick, is also well-versed in this so he kinda helped us with that transition. We’re all professional musicians, so of course we all figured it out pretty quick.
Kayla: We’re not all professional musicians.
Thomas: We are now! [laughs]
Ryan: Thomas kinda kicked us out of the nest. It’s so easy to huddle in a room in a music building somewhere and not go anywhere. We’ve played some awesome unconventional - according to classical standards - gigs. The last gig we played was an East Bay punk gig in Albany and it kicked ass! It was fast and loose. We played a 30-minute set with way too many people on stage and it was killer. Those sort of gigs and the personalities you meet in the DIY scene is so much fun.
Thomas: That’s what I want!

Speaking of classical music, you have references to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, “Jupiter” from Holst’s Planets, and Glazunov’s Saxophone Concerto. Why did you decide to include nods to these works in particular?

Ryan: It’s the classic prompt in any band or group of friends, “Wouldn’t it be funny if…” and you fill in the blank. Then you do the thing and you’re joking around. What we find very frequently in Voluntary Hazing is we come up with the “Wouldn’t it be funny if we did this thing?” then we do the thing and we’re like, “This works!” So then the question changes to “Wouldn’t it be funny if we took this seriously?”
Thomas: [laughs] That’s exactly true!
Ryan: Anyone can make a joke, the important thing is backing it up with the actual time and effort of making good music out of it. I don’t remember the quote for Glazunov.
Thomas: I wrote that one! [laughs] I was sitting with Vincent and I played it over the song. We were like, “Woah, that kinda works!” Then I changed it a little bit and it worked. It literally was, “It would be funny if Glazunov could work here” so we tweaked it and now it’s the hook for “Phone Tag”. As Ryan was saying, it’s funny in a way that doesn’t detract from the source material or our music. We didn’t shove it in and make it sound awkward just for a laugh. We put it in because it would be funny if you get it but if you don’t, it just sounds like music and I think that’s an important distinction to make. It still sounds good on its own and if you know the quote, you hear it and go, “That’s really funny”.
Ryan: I feel like with Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring”, some people know it. It’s a pretty popular piece of music. It’s in Fantasia. I was the one who wrote in the “Jupiter” quote from Holst’s The Planets. That just kind of worked. I’m not sure I did that on purpose but I realized afterward that it sounded a lot like it so I just leaned into it. But the Glazunov is very funny to basically just us. Alexander Glazunov is not a super well-known composer. The people who listen to Voluntary Hazing are the people who listen to ska and the people who are well-versed in classical saxophone repertoire are basically just Thomas.
Thomas: It’s just me! [laughs]
Ryan: So it’s something that has to work in a “real band” context because there’s like 3 people on earth who are going to recognize it. [laughs]

How would you describe your songwriting process overall?

Kayla: We definitely have a little bit of our own assembly line which is fun. We’ve found a way that works for the number of people in our band. We technically have 13 people and I’d say about 6 people are active in the songwriting and even then, that’s a lot of chefs in the kitchen. Usually, the way it starts is I will come up with some lyrics and a melody and I might have some chords. I started out doing voice notes with a ukulele for stuff I was writing. [laughs] Then I learned a little and would make a rough demo on my computer and send it to the group.
I’m always writing stuff. I’d say about 90% of the stuff dies in the notes on my phone but every once in a while I’ll be like, “Ok, I feel good about this! I’m gonna develop it and send it to the group”. Then the group gets it and some of the guys will be like, “Ok Kayla, these chords are boring or we’ve already done that” so they play with that and adjust it to make it more interesting and put some more music theory behind it than I do. I’m coming from a place where I love pop music and I love pop punk music and I channel that into the song. When they’re done, they send it back to me and then it goes to Ryan or Vince and they work out the horn parts. Sometimes the order changes a little but it usually goes that way. Then we all take a look at it and that’s where the random quotes will come in. That’s where the different ideas show up like, “Wait, let’s do a cappella here! What can we do that’s a little bit funky?” Then it goes from there.
Ryan: It helps so much to have a bunch of people listening to it. Where the most magic happens is when you get at least two of us in a room together. Different things will come up from whoever is there. Alex plays some guitar so he’ll track demo guitar if we’re working on a thing. He plays with a little bit more rock ‘n’ roll style so whenever he plays guitar on a demo, that influences what ends up becoming what the end-product guitar is and stuff like that.
It’s very convenient to be able to bounce ideas off of people. If we say to Kayla, “We wanna fix these chords” and then Kayla’s like, “You went too far”, we’ll go back and fix it. We’ve definitely done that where we’ve been like, “What if we did this chord and it sounds unexpected?” and Kayla’s like, “No, that sucks. That is not at all what I was thinking”. It’s good to have a balance. Kayla’s the realist like, “This is ska pop punk music, we’re not going to go too crazy with it”. A lot of the time Kayla will send something over and say, “Ok, I want it to sound like this” and we end up liking how the demo sounded so it ends up becoming something different than what Kayla wants it to be. [laughs]
Kayla: For “Neurotic”, I came in and I was like, “Ok, this is a pop punk song. I want to be angsty”. Then the band listened to it and they were like, “Nah, we need to make this a little country!” I was like, “What!? Fine.” [laughs]
Ryan: I think it was like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we played this as country?” Then we did. It stuck because it was too good so we kept it country. In terms of the process, most of the ideas start with Kayla and then they usually end up across my desk. She’ll send me a Garageband file and I’ll open it in Logic and listen to whatever she sent. What we ended up doing for "Reciprocate Some" is so close to the demo, but it often changes a lot.
Kayla: With some of the songs it’s a push and pull. Ryan and I go back and forth a lot which I think gives us the best product possible. We’ll be like, “No, I wanna do this! No, I wanna do this!” but we always find a way to make it work which is really fun. I feel like we kinda challenge each other and push each other to do something different.
I think “Sing You To Sleep” is the greatest example. I came in and was like, “I wanna do something like A Day to Remember’s “If It Means a Lot to You’ or ‘21 Questions’ by Waterparks. I love the acoustic into electric sound”. Ryan was like, “Ok, hear me out - Sigur Rós” and that totally changed that build. I was like, “This is so cool! Jon Bellion’s closer on The Human Condition has all these little quotes from everything” and Ryan was like, “Let's do something a little more experimental and take a lyric from each of the songs”. We were so excited about that song and it was both of us going back and forth with totally different influences. It all came together and we were like, “Yes! This is cool!”
Ryan: Every once in a while Kayla will send something over to me and it will keep me up at night. [laughs] The original demo for “Sing You To Sleep” was just a voice memo of guitar and vocals. Then I sat down and immediately recorded a demo of the little choral section.
Kayla: When he sent that over I was like, “Oh my god!”
Ryan: I was like, “What if it built and got really big and had the Sigur Rós thing with a billion drum sets?” Not a 10-minute build or anything, we’re pretty dramatic but we’re not that dramatic. [laughs] It took a while to weave in the quotes from the songs in a way that worked.

“Reciprocate Some” has a lot of Greek mythology in the lyrics. What drew you to Greek mythology?

Kayla: Growing up I was a Percy Jackson nerd. I love Greek mythology and I was like, “Wouldn’t it be cool to add it in?” [laughs] The whole idea behind that song is you’re being really nice to someone and they’re being rude to you so you’re like, “Ok, they might be having a bad day so I’ll keep being nice”. But they keep being rude and you’re like, “Ok, what’s up with this??” It actually came from us saying to another band, “You guys rock!” and them being like, “You guys are not that good”. It was kinda awkward. [laughs] I will never name the other band. It happened digitally, through the phone, and I was like, “Why do I feel weird about this? I shouldn’t care but whatever, here’s an angsty pop-punk song”. I took the idea of Narcissus and wanted to build on it. I was like, “What else can I say?” I was just having fun and being a nerd.

That story is brought into the storyline of the video too.

Kayla: We have committed to this bit about a magical violin that we are almost done with but we’re going to stick with it for a little while longer. “Skemsco” was the first real music video that we did. The big reveal of “Skemsco” that we were really proud of was that everyone thought it was a guitar solo in the bridge but it was actually a violin. We were like, “We should make this about the violin!” That’s where that idea came from. Then it just kind of grew from there, so now we have this whole universe. We have another music video coming soon that’ll show what will happen next with the violin. [laughs] Although each one turns into a side-quest that the violin kind of comes into. Magic violin, that’s how we’re rolling.

In those videos a blue rubber chicken shows up. The chicken also shows up on your social media, on posters, and on merch. What’s the story behind the rubber chicken?

Kayla: Alex just showed up one day with a blue rubber chicken and he put it on his drum set like you would a cowbell or something and he used it. I thought he did it because he was just being funny but he was like, “No, there was a purpose behind it”. I found this out 3 years into doing the chicken thing. At school, we were covering “Bad Guy” by Billie Eilish and he had seen this cover online where they played the song with the chicken. He was like, “If they’re doing that, I want the chicken in our cover!” It just never left and became our whole personality for a while. [laughs]
Thomas: It was funny! It made a funny noise when you squeezed it. [laughs]
Ryan: He would take it to gigs as part of his bag of tricks with the tambourine and cowbells and stuff to set up. We had windchimes at our album release show at the Art Boutiki, he was playing them during “Sing Me To Sleep” to add to the ambiance. To me, I never actually learned the back story of why he started bringing it, it just makes sense that it’s a funny thing to bring as an auxiliary percussion instrument. It doesn’t really have anything to do with ska, it just became the mascot. When Vince went off to grad school, we purchased him a giant rubber chicken as a going-away gift. You squeeze all of the air out of this thing and it will scream for a good 30 seconds and you can’t get it to stop. [laughs] We kept adding to the mythos. We currently have one that lives with our merch that’s a punk chicken. What’s the deal with that one?
Kayla: My aunt gave me that one. It’s become a thing where our family and friends wanna contribute to the lore so people have bought me more chickens. I have a hula skirt chicken and a sparkly one. [brings out a glittery rubber chicken, holds it up to the light like a disco ball] He sparkles and shines. They just became a thing. Alex likes to make random sounds. On “Pretty Boys”, he got out some wrenches and used them as auxiliary percussion.
Ryan: Here’s how the recording process works, there’s a Google Drive folder that I tell everyone to upload everything on and then I sneak on there, steal all the files, plug them into my computer, and music comes out. I will be told that people are doing things but there are things that I won’t find out until I have the joy of pulling up files and finding out what they did and figuring out how on earth I’m going to plug this in. Kayla and Alex had one night where they recorded auxiliary percussion for 5 or 6 different tracks on the album. They sent me the craziest things! For “Sing Me To Sleep” there’s a track where Alex just punched an amp over and over again and they recorded the feedback. They sent me a bunch of gong tracks.
Kayla: Just one! [laughs]
Ryan: For “Pretty Boys”, if you listen to the half-time section of the chorus, there’s something that sounds like the Home Depot hammer jingle and it’s Alex hitting two wrenches together in time. It’s very fun for me because every time someone sends me files it’s basically just a mystery box with what they decided to do. Kayla does a similar thing for background vocals. I’ll get 8 tracks and I’ll plug them in and listen to everything all at once. It’s a very fun experience to hear what everyone has done. It’s a lot more streamlined to work with people in person but I’ve realized the silver lining of being remote is that it can be very fun to hear what people have come up with at their songwriting session.
Kayla: Sometimes you get a chicken. [laughs]

It all comes back to the chicken.

Kayla: The chicken or the egg.
Ryan: It’s the chicken.
[laughter]

Are there any rubber chickens that can squeeze out an egg?

Thomas: The answer is yes. It’s pretty horrifying when you look at it.
Kayla: We’re learning so much today.
[laughter]

One of the main themes of the album is dealing with technology and social media. How do you deal with all of the feelings and anxieties that are brought on by the digital world?

Kayla: I write a song. [laughs] I’d say that’s the most cathartic thing. Once that became the idea for the album, it definitely was like fuel for any little thing that happened to me like, “Wait, could this work?” For a lot of stuff I do kind of extrapolate. It’ll be a little thing and I’m like, “I can make this a big thing for a song, that’ll be more interesting”. The narrator’s not always reliable because “Reciprocate Some” became way more dramatic than it actually was.
For ”Professionally Offended”, I was inspired by the documentary The Social Dilemma and my own experiences - I work in social media. For that song, I was like, “Ok, I’m going to create a character who’s a whistleblower working for a big tech company. She’s going to the government and telling them that these companies are doing something unethical”. This really did happen. There are a lot of people in Silicon Valley who have done that for all the big companies. Google, Facebook, Meta, Twitter - they’ve all had whistleblowers come out and be like, “Hey, the government is not regulating anything and these companies put profits over people”. The step further I took was what if the whistleblower decides that she can make a lot more money manipulating the algorithms because she knows how they work and people aren’t listening to her. Like, “I don’t care anymore. The world has made me cold and broken and I’m doing this thing”. I thought it was a fun thing to write and also it’s a warning / cautionary tale. As someone who works in the business, I feel like people forget that if you’re not paying for something then you are the product. I realize that I’ve just gone on a tangent. [laughs] I get on my soapbox and I write songs about it. Mentally, it’s good to put the phone down and go take a walk. I find I come up with a lot of songs while going for a walk or in the shower or when I’m not actively doing something else. I overthink everything.
Thomas: You, overthinking?
Kayla: [laughs] That helps with writing and storytelling for me. When you’re looking for a reprieve from things, it’s good to just put the phone down and go down the hall or around the block or whatever you’ve gotta do.
Ryan: It’s pretty clear that Kayla provides the driving, overarching visions for things. She’s very good at what she does. Like what she was saying, something will happen to her or she’ll see someone drop an ice cream cone across the street and she’s going to go home and write a song about it. There’s so many ideas and it makes it easy for us when she provides a full, emotional storyline. It makes it really easy as a musician when the lyrics are there and they’re strong. You get to then play with the mood of that.
My favourite lyrical moment on the whole album is the outro for “Three Years”. The whole song is dramatic and over the top and about this missed connection like, “I knew you once and you could have been the perfect person but it’s never gonna happen”. Then in the outro you hear, “Well, I had his number the whole time”. It’s great. I did the horn arrangement on that one and it’s complex and showy and loud. Each chorus gets more and more and the last one is awash with reverb and there’s all these complex, interlocking parts that come together. The outro is guitar-based and when Kayla sings, “Well, I’ve had his number the whole time”, it changes the mood of everything retroactively. It’s fun because it’s such a good storyline, you don’t have everything revealed until the end. It’s very in theme with the silliness of cellphones, like you have someone’s number but it doesn’t feel right to text them. We’re so connected with people and it’s so easy to tell ourselves that we’re not.
Kayla: The band is definitely a symbiotic relationship though. The music would not be what it is without these guys. I studied public relations in school and radio / television / film so I handle the business side of things and the storytelling side of things. Ryan is getting his master’s in music and Vincent is getting his doctorate in music so they completely elevate what I put together with my four chords on my ukulele. It’s a beautiful working thing we’ve got. I’m really thankful that we found each other and we’re doing this.

You have a couple of shows coming up including a show in Fullerton on September 28 and a performance at the Ska 'n P Festival in October. What are you looking forward to the most about these shows?

Kayla: This is our first time playing outside of the Bay Area so we’re like, “Ahh!!” It feels like another step and it’s really exciting because we’ve been getting a lot of support. We got invited to the Ska 'n P Festival. Middagh Goodwin who puts it on, runs the This Is Ska radio show and Facebook page which has a pretty big following across the world. One of our listeners sent him our stuff and he immediately reached out and was like, “Hey, you guys are close by, do you want to be a part of this?” and we were like, “Absolutely!” It meant a lot that somebody shared our music and then he listened to it and wanted to invite us. It was very heartwarming and as we were saying earlier, the fact that people like our music is crazy, it’s really exciting!
For the Fullerton show, we were supposed to play with the other bands - Pinstock and Epic 18 - for different events but stuff fell through. Our schedule didn’t align with Pinstock when they were coming through. When Epic 18 was coming up to the Bay Area from Las Vegas they got stuck in this huge blizzard and weren’t able to play. [laughs] They were messaging me saying, “Hopefully no blizzards this time!” We were like, “It’s September, there shouldn’t be!” [laughs] Just to make these connections online and to go meet these people in person and play with them and reach new people and see that network continue to grow is awesome. To be able to go somewhere to play music and share in their community too is such a blessing and an honour. It’s very exciting.
Ryan: It’s fun to travel. It’s another one of those things that makes you feel like a real band like, “We’re going somewhere to do something”. We’ve done that a little bit. When we played Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco, we piled into David’s family’s van and drove the whole band over the Bay Bridge in the rain. It feels more real when you’re like, “We’re going somewhere to do this”. It’s different for me because that’s the weekend that the quarter at UCLA starts so I’m just going to be driving a little ways away. Me and Vince are actually roommates down there so we’re going to go drive to the gig together. Kayla’s got that hotel rewards card cookin’ and she’s getting us real hotels and not some sketchy place. It makes it feel more real when we have an officially planned trip.
Kayla: I will add, when you’re in a band with 12 other people, it’s a logistical nightmare. It makes zero financial sense. [laughs] We’re doing it because it’s fun and we wanna see how far it can go, but at this point, we cannot be a touring band because it would cost too much. We’re gonna have to take 3 or 4 cars down there. We have a lot of friends in other bands and they all pile into a van together. We’ve had people come from Portland in a mid-sized Subaru but we physically cannot do that. [laughs] I got my special hotel credit card and have been saving up and trying to find how we can save money as much as we can like, “There’s a sale going, ok great! Who’s car is most fuel-efficient?” It’s a lot of planning and logistics. That’s another thing that makes it so fun. We’re going to grow the band, we’re going to go meet people, see places, and play where we can. It’s definitely going to be a special occasion because it’s not practical for us to do a big tour at this point.

Which part of Addictive Little Sounds are you proudest of?

Ryan: We have actual answers but Thomas needs to rep something real quick.
Thomas: I’m just really proud of ”Professionally Offended”. I think it’s a really, really good song. I think Ryan is wrong about his statement earlier about any other lyrics being good, only ”Professionally Offended” has the best lyrics. Specifically, one line where Kayla says, “Tell me what you need trending / Lord knows I can be offended”. I think it’s a fantastically smart line. It’s very current but also you all need to stream the song as much as possible. It is very important to me that you listen to this song on repeat for the next four and a half months.
Ryan: Until January 19.
Thomas: You need to all stream the song until January 19 because I said that it was going to be the most listened to song on our album. I made a bet on that and said I’d eat a reed if it wasn’t. So everyone needs to listen to that song. For me. Please. It’s a good song and also I’m begging you to listen to the song. I’m pleading for you to listen to the song.
Kayla: Thomas did this totally unprompted. We were going to pick up food and were talking like, “The album’s going to be out in a few weeks, this is exciting!” and he was like, “I really, really think that ’Professionally Offended’ is the song”. I mean, I love that song but I don’t know if it’s the song.
Thomas: It’s the song because it’s so current.
Kayla: I didn’t ask him to make a bet, I really didn’t. He was like, “If it’s not the #1 streamed song for us by January 19, I will eat a reed”. I was like, “Do you really wanna do that?” and he was like, “Yeah, I believe in it that much”. When we got back to Alex’s house with the food to eat with the rest of the band, he told them there too! It wasn’t even me saying it, he was that committed. So far, he is on track to eat a reed on January 19.
Thomas: I’m still chilling. How many one-hit wonders or songs that explode start slow? It’s a slow grow. We’ll get there. They’re listening to one song a week right now. They’re gonna get to ”Professionally Offended”. It’s part way down the album, they’ll get there and they’ll be like, “Oh my god, this is the best song I’ve ever heard! I’m gonna stream it non-stop until January 19”. That’s what’s gonna happen! I promise you. That’s what I’m proud of.
Ryan: Other members of the band have been looking up, “Are saxophone reeds edible?” They are, which is good.
[laughter]
Thomas: Currently the plan is to boil it. I’m going to boil it into a soup. It’ll become soft and mushy and I’ll eat it from there. Which, of course, I won’t have to do because everyone is going to stream ”Professionally Offended” all day every day until January 19. It’s really a non-starter, there’s really no reason to consider these things.
Ryan: I think you could boil it until soft and then put it in a food processor and blend it into a sauce and put it over whatever you wanted.
Thomas: Sure, sure. But, again, I don’t need to think about these things.
Ryan: Thomas wanted to be on the interview with the knowledge that he would have a platform to rep his crusade. It is a legitimately great song but the potential of us putting together a video production of Thomas sitting down at a nice table setting and eating a reed is just so good.
Thomas: With ”Professionally Offended” playing in the background.
Ryan: That was something that was very important to us. As for my favourite part of the album, other than ”Professionally Offended”…
[laughter]
Ryan: Which is great, I love that song. That’s one we’ve been playing a lot live. A lot of our songs start as demos and they get recorded before we even play them. “Reciprocate” started as that. We threw that together and it was ready to go so we hit record and it was a complete song. Others, like ”Professionally Offended”, we knew when we started writing it that we’d need to play it live a handful of times to know what the vibe was. We slowly locked that in.
For me, the one I’m the most proud of is “Sing Me To Sleep”. I kinda knew what I wanted out of it but I knew it would take me a while to figure out the details. It took us 2 to 3 years to do that. It just came together in a way that I could not have expected and the payoff gets me every single time. It’s interesting to sit down and listen to something that you’ve made and spent hours and hours pouring over. I’ve listened to these projects millions of times but it tells me that I’ve done something good when I sit down and listen to the album and I still get chills and tear up at the end. I’m just so proud of how everything came together. It came together better than I could have possibly imagined. The final track is just such a good wrap-up of everything.
Kayla: For me, I feel a lot of pride for every song. I had nothing to do with “You May Be Entitled to Compensation”, they did it and I was like, “Yes, I love it!” When we played it live, that was the first time we had people really mosh at our shows and we’re not even a very moshy band. [laughs] That song came to be part of the set to see that reaction, it was awesome!
Thomas: I think I went down there with them. [laughs]
Kayla: With your saxophone! [laughs]
Ryan: Thomas was the only person at the album release show with a wireless mic so he went everywhere. He would just go. It was like, “Where’s Thomas? I can still hear tenor sax but I can’t see him!” It was awesome.
Thomas: I feel like my biggest contribution to the band - besides getting everyone together in one place to make it happen - is the on-stage presence. [laughs] I think I carry a lot of energy there. I moshed with those people.
Kayla: There’s something in everything where I go, “Ok, I’m proud of this lyric I wrote. I’m proud of how some of the guys figured this out. I’m proud of how this came together”. There are some songs where I’m really proud that we figured them out. I’m proud of “Literal Rock Star”. That song I wrote as a tribute to my mom who passed away 2 years ago. I’m really grateful for the space that the band gave me and the support. There’s a lot.
It’s a dream come true to be doing this with them and to be talking with you about my music - this is a dream come true right here, Em, so thank you so much. I think the opus is definitely “Sing Me To Sleep”. I’m the proudest of that one. In a way it makes me laugh when we tell people, “Oh yeah, we’re in this ska band” and then we pull that guy out. People are going to be surprised, hopefully in a good way, when they hear it like, “What are you guys doing?” I think that’s our best work on this album.
Ryan: One of the coolest things we’ve ever done, ever, in any of our lives.
Thomas: [laughs] Thank you for speaking for me, continue.
Ryan: Yeah, of course, I will always speak for you, Thomas. One of the coolest things we’ve ever done is playing “Sing Me To Sleep” live at the album release show. It was Kayla’s vision to play the whole album so we split it in half and put some covers in the middle including “Escape From the City” from Sonic Adventure 2. We did “Sing Me To Sleep” at the very end of the show. There’s this big finish and everyone was playing as loud as possible and then we cut it off. The way we did that cut off on the album was with a push of a button, so live we did the best we possibly could as real humans. We were playing as loud as we possibly could and had this extreme slam cut-off and there was silence in the room. You could hear audible gasps.
Kayla: It was really cool!
Thomas: It was very magical.
Ryan: Then Kayla finished it up by herself. We’ve agreed that we’re not allowed to do that tune live unless we deserve the emotional payoff. That was one of the coolest things we’ve ever done.
Thomas: That was one of the coolest things I’ve ever done as a musician. That was genuinely up there. So thank you for speaking for me, you were right.
Kayla: It was pretty magical. That show in itself was magical. The Art Boutiki is a gem in San Jose, an independently run venue. It’s run by a family and they’ve been there for a while. They’re all about the sound, it has to be absolutely perfect. They have a whole team of sound people and that’s what they’re known for. People really showed up for that show. We headlined and there were like 120 people there. For us, as a growing local band, that was huge. People were excited to be there and like we said earlier, people who we didn’t know personally were there. [laughs] That was super cool.
Thomas: It was 120 people that we pulled from our fans in the local area who came out to see us which I think is an important metric. I think that’s a pretty good set.
Kayla: It was a magical night.

Is there anything that I didn’t ask that you’d like to add?

Ryan: I’m assuming Thomas is going to want to say, “Stream 'Professionally Offended'" again.
Thomas: Everyone already knows and already is, actually. I’m watching the numbers go up right now.
[laughter]