We first connected to The Big Ideas about a year ago. They're a great band and extremely sweet folks, and we're really psyched we could get them a date at the 'Stand - our epic August 28th event with Blue Skies for Black Hearts. You should be here - it's going to be a terrific show, certainly one of our best yet! Matt, Kari, Gabe and Louie from The Big Ideas answered interview questions via email for this post. Thanks dudes!

How long has the band been together in its current form? How did it come together?

Matt: We've all been playing together for about two years now. It was September of 2008 when Kari and Gabe moved to Portland and when Nathan started playing with us more regularly. Louie's cousin Bubba also played with us for a while, but he moved about a year ago, and it's been the five of us since then. It really all came together very naturally and gradually. Louie and I have known each other since college, and a little while ago we started trying to write some songs. Then about three years ago we moved to Portland and started writing and recording and playing a few shows together. Then pretty soon Nathan was playing some horn on some of our songs, and then Kari and Gabe moved out here with their violins, and before long we were just a bigger band. But it's just all of our friends, really. Pretty much everyone we knew after we'd lived here a year had been roped into our band.

How would you describe your sound? What are your key influences?

Matt: I don't think we ever put much deliberate thought into what our "sound" would be. We just started writing songs, and this is what they ended up sounding like. I'd like to list 15 cool bands that we sound like and say that those were our influences, but really, I think we were most influenced by our love of melodies and harmonies, and the fact that we could all sing but weren't exactly virtuosic on our instruments. So, we've tried to write hummable melodies, to write bridges instead of leaving spaces to solo, and to get as many of us singing as we can, and this is how that's turned out so far.

What makes you interested in recording live?

Matt: I think I like the idea of having an hour of our lives stamped onto something that we can go back and listen to. It makes me nervous, though, because I feel like I'm going to make mistakes, and then those will be burned there forever too. And what happens when I screw up a song so bad that I never want to hear that recording again, but then I have to, because it's been recorded?

Gabe: I like the idea of capturing the mood of the crowd during a live show.

Louie: I think our voices blend well live and sound pretty decent, and since we don't have technical virtuosity - since we can't shred, basically - the fact that you could hear a live recording of us and it might actually sound halfway decent would at least be a small testament to the fact that we're ok. If you heard a studio recording of us or whatever, you might think, oh, it took them 600 tries and they got the harmonies really tight. But if we do it live, well, that's something different. This seems like it might be a bad thing to say, though, because what if we end up sounding like shit?

Kari: I feel excited about playing somewhere where people care about the sound and are putting effort into making it sound good. And then we get to hear what it sounded like afterwards.

What's your favorite memory of a live show? Least favorite?

Matt: My favorite live shows are probably accidentally seeing The Flaming Lips in Chicago in 2002 and seeing Bon Iver in the evening at Sasquatch last year. My least favorite memory of a live show is when I didn't go see My Morning Jacket in Atlanta in 2006 because I couldn't afford it.

Louie: We were really into ska in high school. We went and saw Rx Bandits, and we gave them our CD. [Louie was in a band in high school called Fred Savage and the Unbeatables.] We saw them again like a year later, and we saw them outside and the bassist was smoking a cigarette. We were talking to him and we mentioned that we had given them our CD, and he was like, 'Oh, yeah,' and said that their manager loved it and that they always listened to it in the van, and he sang a song or two from it. You don't have to put that, but it was kind of cool.

Kari: Well, for our shows, I liked playing "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" with Cow Paddy Stompers at the Jade Lounge. Because everybody loved it. And my favorite memory of a live show that I saw was when Ben Folds pointed at me and took my request at a show and played "Fred Jones, pt. 2."

Gabe: I think that my favorite show of ours was the one at the Red Carpet in St. Cloud, Minn. because we had just a ton of people there and whatnot, including our families. My favorite memory of a show was probably the first time I saw Robert Randolph when Heiruspecs opened. They're a St. Paul rap group.

What are your favorite live albums?

Louie: The Last Waltz. And I really like Ben Folds Live. I really liked the Blink 182 live one [The Mark, Tom, and Travis Show (The Enema Strikes Back!)] when I was in high school, where they just made fart and dick jokes the whole time, but I haven't heard it in a while and I have a feeling I wouldn't like it as much anymore. Oh, I really like Kicking Television, the Wilco live album.

Gabe: I actually really like the Garth Brooks live album [Double Live], but, uh, you shouldn't write that down. And Robert Randolph's live album [Live at The Wetlands] is really good.

Kari: Gabe likes the Garth Brooks live album? How does he even know that? I can't really think of any live albums that I like except for the Ben Folds one, and that's already been said.

Matt: I don't feel like I listen to enough live albums to give a good answer to this one, except for maybe a half dozen Dylan albums. I do really like Frightened Rabbit's Liver! Lung! FR! and there's some pretty funny live stuff on an iTunes session from the Flaming Lips.

What other projects are you all involved with?

Louie: I'm working on making beats for a high school kid, and Bubba wants me to email him lyrics because he's got all these songs with no words. Oh, and Gabe plays in a bluegrass band called the Cow Paddy Stompers sometimes.

Matt: My side project is called Halvy and the Halvorsons, but right now it's just nothing. I might have to start using it soon, though, if I keep writing songs about baseball, because I think everyone else is getting sick of them.

Louie: Ok, can you help me think of all my side projects? I've got The Altruists, Toledo Vader, Mucho Mucho Freeze, Sobotka Musika, and Rigorous Vigor/Vigorous Rigor. Oh, and The You & Me Band, that's me and Franny, Louie's sister. And Minor Dance Craze, that's me and Bubba's band.

Matt: I guess I'm in the Homemakers with Bubba, kind of. Side projects are really just a way for us to come up with more band names, because once you've picked the Big Ideas, you don't get to make up any more band names.

Kari: I watch "Criminal Minds" and I read about chemistry. That's all I do.

What are you working on lately?

Louie: Writing songs that aren't such a bummer. I'm trying to get back to writing songs that don't mean anything, you know, like about con men and scamps and rogues. Not about things that actually happened to me.

Matt: I've been trying to write lyrics to a song called "Everything Happens" for like four months.

Louie: We're also trying to write and record as many songs as we can by the end of the year, and to try to put out our first rock and roll album in early 2011. It's tentatively titled Macho Head Games. The working title, we'll say.

Kari: That's our title? I don't like it.

 

 

Thanks again to Matt, Kari, Gabe and Louie for participating in our interview. You can find out more about the gang on their Facebook and Myspace page.