The Flying Eyes Interview: Bearing Witness to the Rock of Ages
Young Baltimore rockers The Flying Eyes offer bag-packed voyage-ready psychedelia amid one of the world’s most potent and vibrant doom scenes. If this makes them stand out, they hardly seem concerned. Their recent collection of two EPs, released as a self-titled full-length through Trip in Time, shows heavy blues American melancholy mixed with smart and urgent rock. They groove well beyond their years.
The story (as seen after the jump) goes that drummer Elias Schutzman, guitarist Adam Bufano and bassist/vocalist Mac Hewitt still considered themselves incomplete until vocalist/guitarist Will Kelly came along. Perhaps it’s that unwillingness to be — like so many others — a trio without a frontman that sets The Flying Eyes apart from their rocking peers. Whatever it is, the energy and vibrancy of their music stands testament to the success of the “getting together” process. When it’s the right people, it just sounds better.
Schutzman took time out recently for a Q&A exchange that’s available for checking out immediately after the jump. Hope you dig and thanks for reading.
Give me the back-story of the band. How did you all get together, when did everything start to take shape, etc. If you were superheroes, this would be the “secret origins” question.
Well, first you should know that me, Mac and Adam have been friends since we were using coloring books. We all went to the same school, the Waldorf School of Baltimore (kind of an alternative place with rainbow walls), from kindergarten to eighth grade and have stayed great friends since then. In the summer before my junior year of high school, my hands felt a calling to play drums and Adam had already picked up the guitar so we began to jam a couple times a month. At some point Mac picked up the bass and a week later he was in the band, so we were basically all learning our instruments while we wrote our first primitive songs. After about three years of playing with a slew of other wonderful musicians and friends we sort of came to a crossroads where everything fell apart and the band would either end or rise from the ashes as a new beast. In short we needed a new singer to carry us. By some stroke of fate this wide-eyed highschooler (who looked like he walked out of the Dazed and Confused movie) stumbled into an “audition practice” and when we started jamming it just clicked. It was eerie really, like a spirit incantation revealing the future. We also made him sing (although he didn’t really want to) and it turns out this kid has the voice of a 40 year old delta blues singer from a lost southern town. Will Kelly has been our singer our singer and guitarist from that point on and it was then we started taking the band seriously. Our sound had already started to evolve from loose hippy rock and with his arrival we plowed ahead into the moody, acid tinged, heavy blues that we play today.
How did reissuing the two EPs come about through Trip in Time? Had you released them before on your own?
Both of these EPs had been self produced and independently released over the last two years. For Bad Blood we did a run of about 450 CDs (which are all gone) and for Winter we printed 1,000 CDs, which we released at our festival last summer. We first got connected with Trip in Time when they asked us to release “Lay With Me” on their Psychedelic Adventures on Planet Earth Vol. 3 compilation. From the very first moment they contacted us I could tell these guys had the best intentions. So last summer I sent them the tracks on our newest EP and they wrote back saying they’d like to do a full-length release for us compiling both of our EPs. Naturally, we had no complaints with that.
The Flying Eyes feel like an anomaly in the Baltimore scene, which seems (at least to an outsider) geared more toward the heavier end of psychedelia and doom. Do you ever find you have trouble fitting in, or does the fact that you’re not so explicitly “metal” allow you a wider breadth of bands to play with?
Well, we consider ourselves a very heavy band. I don’t think it comes across on the album as much, but live we are known to send some people running for the exit. However our heaviness isn’t metal, but rather a warm kind of explosion that’s not only loud but also transient. We don’t play with many metal bands ever but our friends Vincent Black Shadow, who we play with a lot for example, are one of the heaviest bands I know. Sometimes it’s hard for us to fit in because we are too “rock n’ roll” for the hipsters and to “weird” for people who like mainstream rock. We definitely appeal to psychedelic music heads as well as those who love the essence of classic rock or blues and are willing to follow us on a darker, stranger kind of trip.
What are the differences for you guys from Bad Blood to Winter? Were there any changes in the creative process or how the songs came together? Anything you wanted to do differently from one to the other?
Both EPs were created at almost extreme opposites. Bad Blood started before Will was even in the band so a lot of the vocal lines were shaped as he recorded them. Even the songs themselves evolved in the studio because we were almost a new band again. We tracked all the instruments separately and then built up the track piece by piece. In a way it was almost like painting, a shade of organ here, a stroked of backwards guitar there until we could feel the song was finished. For Winter we took a completely different approach. Now that had been playing live for a while and had done our first tour, we were confident in these songs and knew going in what we wanted to do. That didn’t stop us from experimenting of course, but before we laid down a single track the songs were already finished products in our minds. We also really wanted a much more “live” feel that Bad Blood really lacked, so we recorded the drums, bass and Will’s rhythm guitar all at the same time in isolated rooms. Then with a solid rhythm track, we overdubbed all the vocals, Adam’s guitar solos and all the other psychedelic wizardry.
In terms of the writing, with an expansive but straightforward sound, how do elements get added to the mix? Have you ever found yourselves thinking a part or a song simply has too much going on? How much of these songs comes from straight jamming in a rehearsal room?
Our songwriting process is nothing but collaborative. Very rarely does someone bring in a finished song and then teach it to the rest. It usually begins with some interesting riff or chord progression that we jam with for a while and slowly start to expand upon. The sonic quality of the instruments is also very important to us; we spend a lot time defining the guitar effects to produce the right mood and energy. We really are perfectionists when it comes to writing. Sometimes we will spend a whole four hour practice just finishing one song, and later we change it again of course. We never play a song live unless we think it is ready. And yes we are always looking to simplify our music and make sure things aren’t getting cluttered. Our music isn’t at all about complex guitars or insanely tight bass and drum parts. It’s about the audience experience it as an overwhelming whole so they don’t even think about what they individuals are playing.
Will there be a future full-length, and if so, will that be through Trip in Time or someone else? Is there anything you’d want to change about the sound from these two EPs going forward or a particular progression you’d like to see happen in the band?
Every time we release a recording we look back and say, “We could have done that so much better!” but that’s because we’ve heard these tracks a million times and (to our advantage I think) we are extremely self-critical. Also by the time we finished and released both EPs, half the songs were outdated to us because we’ve written new and better ones. We already have enough material for a full-length album so we are waiting for the right time to make it happen. We are actually kind of fed up with producing our own recordings, so we are hoping for our “first real” full-length we’ll have someone on the other side of the glass. We love the Trip in Time label and we are definitely going to work with them in the future but there has been no talk yet about releasing our next record. Right now we really need to find a good US label as well to help us advance our careers because from the business side of things, it’s incredibly hard to do it your self.
How important is it to the band that each song has some unique element to it? The songs on these two EPs, each one has something about it that separates it from the rest. How much of that is on purpose, or is it something you guys don’t really think about?
This is something we struggle with all the time. We want every song to be unique in and of it self but we also have a unified sound to our music that we have to maintain. Sometimes we right a song that is just too much of an oddity for our sound and we throw it out. Sometimes we right a song that just sounds to similar to something we’ve done before and we throw it out. It’s a fine line to tread. This might be why we right songs pretty slowly, but I’m proud of that because we haven’t written a filler song yet. I’d rather put out one album every three years that is amazing, than churn out a record every year that isn’t the best it could be.
How do you relate live performances to the recordings of this material? How different is what happens at a show from what is heard on disc?
Extremely different; our live performance rocks a lot more. I like our recordings so far but we haven’t figure out yet how to make them “rock” the way they do live. Live there’s even more fuzz and much more energy. We also become pretty possessed on stage; we don’t just stand around but we release our bodies to the will of the music. We also try to have our performances be a fluid experience, songs flowing in and out of each other like a continual trance. Talking on stage isn’t our forte.
Is there any touring in the works? You have a couple shows scheduled in the Baltimore area, but are there plans for any weekends out or that kind of thing?
No confirmed plans as of now. There are different places we like to play who are good to us like Richmond, VA (we are playing there on January 14th), Charlotte, NC, Cleveland, OH and sometimes New York. We also love Austin, Texas and have always gotten great audience responses there but that’s a far haul. We’d love to go back there for SXSW to play some parties like we did last year but that tour is very uncertain.
Any other plans or closing words you want to mention?
We do have a 7” single in the works that I hope will be released on Trip in Time but it has to be finished at first. We are really hoping to go overseas to tour in Germany and around Europe to further promote the record. If we do that tour I can die happy…
Tags: Baltimore, Maryland, The Flying Eyes, Trip in Time
