The Band of Young Saints (B.O.Y.S.)
Alex Wyshosky, John De La O, Kevin Dawkins, Lou Salvaggio bandofyoungsaints.com
intro by: Craig Berger
February 25th 2016
Alex Wyshosky, John De La O, Kevin Dawkins, Lou Salvaggio bandofyoungsaints.com
intro by: Craig Berger
February 25th 2016
A simple description of the Band of Young Saints (B.O.Y.S.) is elusive. A rare breed, true, of young native Brooklynites whose sound is forged in between the gritty underground of post-grunge urban garage rock and the still persistent (and refreshingly non-cynical) glow of millennial pop power anthems. Or, to quote them, “loud, song-based, sweaty, and pretty, power pop with a groove and distinctive Brooklyn ‘tude.” A humble description, in our opinion, which should continue with “who absolutely crushes it on stage!”
Let’s meet the band whose evolution, long and labored album birth, and dramatic changes in talent are the stuff of documentaries (and spoiler alert: will be soon). Not only did most of them grow up in the same neighborhood of Bay Ridge Brooklyn, but they all share a passion for vinyl records as well as challenging perceptions in balancing artistry along with other increasing life demands such as relationships and careers.
John De La O- guitar, vocals, and keyboards- is an accomplished artist involved in art & music education with young children. Kevin Dawkins- drums- has been a music producer for years working with and producing other bands along with a side passion in web series comedy writing. Lou Salvaggio- bass guitar- does online advertising to support his album collection addiction. Alex Wyshosky- vocals- is a key manager in the children’s design company aden & anais while also managing the band’s social media, promotional and administrative functions.
Let’s meet the band whose evolution, long and labored album birth, and dramatic changes in talent are the stuff of documentaries (and spoiler alert: will be soon). Not only did most of them grow up in the same neighborhood of Bay Ridge Brooklyn, but they all share a passion for vinyl records as well as challenging perceptions in balancing artistry along with other increasing life demands such as relationships and careers.
John De La O- guitar, vocals, and keyboards- is an accomplished artist involved in art & music education with young children. Kevin Dawkins- drums- has been a music producer for years working with and producing other bands along with a side passion in web series comedy writing. Lou Salvaggio- bass guitar- does online advertising to support his album collection addiction. Alex Wyshosky- vocals- is a key manager in the children’s design company aden & anais while also managing the band’s social media, promotional and administrative functions.
NEW ALBUM LAUNCH
Alex: Our recently released album Holy Hoaxes, was a good 4 years in the making and followed some wild changes in the makeup of the band, although I think the finished product still stays true to our particular style and sound.
We are an earnest band. Our overall theme for this album was about maturity. About a statement as a band. Our performances are statements- raw and real. Our music speaks for itself so we let it and avoid distractions and gimmicks. Our greatest strength is on the stage. We are comfortable together, enjoy rocking out together, and I think that shows.
We love our audiences and feed off of their energy and feedback, although sometimes you have to take it with a grain of salt. You often interact with other bands on the circuit who can provide great tips on more technical aspects like acoustics and how to manage shitty equipment.
Our current shows include a mix of songs from the album plus new songs that have evolved since we completed the album. The evolution of a song from concept to completion can be long and not easy to realize. We all have perfectionist personalities that make it hard to accept when it’s ready to let something be and move on. Although, for some songs, it’s important to revisit them from time to time to freshen up lyrics.
Kevin: The main challenge for me was to produce these guys while staying out of the way and allowing them to produce themselves to some extent. They have these ideas for arrangements etc. before we get together and we just talk about them. We openly collaborate about vibe, instrumentation and recording techniques for every song. It’s important to think about each song from different angles and points of view. Beer helps a lot.
Our ideas come together so naturally we don’t really think about it. John would have a song and I'd say "Oh man I'd love to put a mic in the corner of the room to catch that sound.” It is often a volley of ideas, technical and creative. Sometimes my creative side tells my technical side to fuck off. For example, I used two mics on a Jazz Chorus amp that I ran a bass through. You don't do that. But I liked the sound. The amp has 15-inch cones on it. Fuck you I'm running a bass through this shit! If it sounds dumb, oh well. Experimentation is part of my creative process. The challenge with this album was to creatively capture those sparks.
John: I'd say the biggest challenge was keeping a spontaneous live sound in a project that we worked on for about two years. I wanted the overdubs to sound as live and true as possible but also polished. I found playing shows during the making of the album to be helpful because it helped me get to more finished guitar and vocal parts. When you test your songs out live and at practice for two years, by the time recording comes along, your parts have style and are tailor-written to the songs.
Lou: One of the challenges was trying to make an album that sounded new while still retaining a lot of the elements from the music that we were raised on. If you rely too heavily on your influences the album can sound old and stale. If you abandon your influences, the record can sound out of focus. So what has evolved is a tight-rope walk of making sure the album sounded new and original but not unfamiliar.
LIFESTYLE BALANCE
Alex: Well, we all have careers that we are balancing along with the band. Besides the challenge of having to coordinating rehearsals and creating some routine around four people's very different schedules, there are also money challenges that we've gotten some relief on thanks to resource hookups from friends, but it still creates a limitation. Outside of the very small performance take home, we are largely funded out of our own pockets. Although, that DIY spirit, does inspire some of our work and keep us grounded.
Kevin: Most days I have to deal with my fucking bonkers day job, but then I can come home on some nights and weekends and do the shit that I love the most. We're all friends so we hang out together anyway. My social life would normally consist of my leaving work and hanging out with these dudes anyway, so why not put that energy into something really fucking cool? Weekends are the best. Our first block of sessions for a couple of months was always on Saturday or Sunday. During the weekends, my artistic passion and work life balances out to something I can commit fully to.
John: it was definitely a challenge to work around all of our full-time jobs. I can only speak for myself when I say that I just had to keep myself interested, immersed in the album during down times. I found reasons to over-dub and pre-mix with Kevin a lot, listened to rough takes and made noted for final recording sessions to keep myself busy. We still work around insane schedules with each other, but for myself, at least, I view band time as a break from the monotony of daily life, and that always gave the sessions a fun vibe.
Lou: We all work so it's just trying to be as organized as possible. It's easy to feel the creative pull, but at the same time, rock and roll don't pay the bills. It's the same pressure that artists have had since the dawn of time.
ARTISTIC INSPIRATION
Alex: We grew up listening to and inspired by pretty much the same bands: The Replacements, Big Star, Elliot Smith, The Beatles, Nirvana, Johnny Thunders, Ramones, Superchunk, Elvis Costello, Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Pixies, and Death Cab for Cutie to name a few.
In Bay Ridge, there was a thriving music scene we grew up listening to local bands more interested in musicality and experimentation than packing houses on Bleecker Street.
Kevin: Some of our lyrical content is inspired by city talk. Shit that I hear in the street or in bars or whatever. We pulled from the everyday chaos of NYC entangled with themes of love, friendships, and careers.
That chatter became lyrical content for this album and there were specific moments that inspired John and I. I was there when Lou said: "I just remember when Saturday nights used to mean something." That entire phrase became a lyric in a song. It’s a memory that I can revisit every time we perform it. It’s that history and intimacy on stage that sets us apart from other bands. We play like a gang that would kill you for each other.
John: Discussing artistic inspiration is tough because, in the inception of the record, the idea was less organized and more about recording as many of our best and newest tunes as we possibly could. As the band went through changes and I listened to the first batch of songs, I saw the record begin to take shape. We took three tracks off the record because we felt they didn't have the same cohesion as the other ten songs or whatever it was. By then we knew the album had a grandness and a feel, and we could see what worked and what didn't. I started to see threads in the lyrics after the fact, redemption, youth, loss of youth, love, creativity, human relationships, etc.
Lou: Well Christmas Eve was inspired by a particularly difficult break up during a particularly difficult time in my life. Unfortunately, I discovered that the girl I loved was cheating on me. It was a distraction that caused other aspects of my life to slip away. I had felt alone and betrayed in a real big way for the first time ever.
The song “Radio” was a pastoral narrative based on several different experiences I had in high school. I tend to write in a nostalgic but deeply personal vein. Hope that comes through during our performances. I think overall the theme on the album was one of maturity. It was a statement as if to say, "We're who we are and this is what we've learned so far. And this is what we have to say about it.”
Alex: We grew up listening to and inspired by pretty much the same bands: The Replacements, Big Star, Elliot Smith, The Beatles, Nirvana, Johnny Thunders, Ramones, Superchunk, Elvis Costello, Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth, Pixies, and Death Cab for Cutie to name a few.
In Bay Ridge, there was a thriving music scene we grew up listening to local bands more interested in musicality and experimentation than packing houses on Bleecker Street.
Kevin: Some of our lyrical content is inspired by city talk. Shit that I hear in the street or in bars or whatever. We pulled from the everyday chaos of NYC entangled with themes of love, friendships, and careers.
That chatter became lyrical content for this album and there were specific moments that inspired John and I. I was there when Lou said: "I just remember when Saturday nights used to mean something." That entire phrase became a lyric in a song. It’s a memory that I can revisit every time we perform it. It’s that history and intimacy on stage that sets us apart from other bands. We play like a gang that would kill you for each other.
John: Discussing artistic inspiration is tough because, in the inception of the record, the idea was less organized and more about recording as many of our best and newest tunes as we possibly could. As the band went through changes and I listened to the first batch of songs, I saw the record begin to take shape. We took three tracks off the record because we felt they didn't have the same cohesion as the other ten songs or whatever it was. By then we knew the album had a grandness and a feel, and we could see what worked and what didn't. I started to see threads in the lyrics after the fact, redemption, youth, loss of youth, love, creativity, human relationships, etc.
Lou: Well Christmas Eve was inspired by a particularly difficult break up during a particularly difficult time in my life. Unfortunately, I discovered that the girl I loved was cheating on me. It was a distraction that caused other aspects of my life to slip away. I had felt alone and betrayed in a real big way for the first time ever.
The song “Radio” was a pastoral narrative based on several different experiences I had in high school. I tend to write in a nostalgic but deeply personal vein. Hope that comes through during our performances. I think overall the theme on the album was one of maturity. It was a statement as if to say, "We're who we are and this is what we've learned so far. And this is what we have to say about it.”
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BUILDING AN AUDIENCE
Alex: We’ve been fortunate enough to play a large variety of venues from dive bars to Mercury Lounge to Arlene’s Grocery to Knitting Factory and in between. We like finding those smaller intimate arenas where we are close to the audience and the audience that shows up is more engaged and more likely to stick around when bands are changing.
It’s difficult to secure good venues without having to commit body counts at strange times like a Monday night. Other venues can get rough like (the now closed) Trash Bar where the band before us stage dove into the crowd, inciting a fight and subsequently, cleared out the entire venue. Thankfully, through time we’ve developed strong relationships with several select venues that we trust and have become our go-to spots like The Rock Shop.
Social media can be a necessary evil. Although it’s important to have a presence and inform the audience, it can also be misleading and the sense of engagement, inflated. Tumblr was helpful early on for us to build an audience. Organic audience growth is what we prefer. In the future, we’ll be more focused on fresh media content that can drive engagement. We have a documentary in the works that will be great to challenge perceptions of what drives us, who we are, and how we got here.
One reason we prefer to keep bookings and promotional activity in-house is because we don't trust promoters very much. It's a lot of extra work and time but also saves us the butthurt of dealing with promoters and booking agents. In the years, we've learned definitely who to steer clear of. There are lots of shady assholes out there who care more about headcounts than your music. They also often do a shitty job of properly curating the bands playing together in any given night, turning the event into a random selection of styles and sounds with little audience cross-over appeal.
Kevin: Promotion... what a bitch that can be! We're keeping it real man, we're gonna do our best with what we have. We are really fucking DIY to the max. We produce our own content 100%. If people want to help- AWESOME. But, for the most part, we are just like most other bands except we aint shelling out the publicist money at the moment. I hate that idea of having to throw away 8 G’s so someone can tell their friends about me. We are looking to get the social media thing on our side this year and with cool content.
We have tons of documentary footage now of the band, some interviews, show footage, cool covers and the like. My idea of social media is that it's a sick fucking tool and I thank Satan every day for it because I used to produce hip hop and had an artist signed and that was fucking nuts. Before you'd have to hustle to get in front of some twat who was gonna tell you what consumers wanted. It was super lame! NOW we can directly reach consumers and get feedback so quickly. We're down with taking advantage of new tech and we definitely will!
John: We are trying the classic channels of promotion along with occasional, intimate gigs. We have a less is more approach about gigs lately and feel that our social media and web presence are paramount.
Lou: We're promoting via live shows and social media. While you're easily able to reach a wide audience of people it's not to say that they're always the most engaged with your music. I think social media suffers from the same problems that old record stores used to; you kind of get placed in a bin with a label. If someone on social media has a narrow taste for hair metal rock, they still may never be exposed to BOYS because we've been labeled POP on social media. There's nothing more exciting than being introduced to and liking music that wouldn't normally seek out. I think social media still misses that cue a little bit.
WHAT’S NEXT?
Alex: One of our keys to success has been building relationships with our audience and venues. Ideally, we’d like to expand out into mini-tours. Perhaps because there is such an obscene variety of bands to choose from in NYC, audiences outside of the city are usually more into it and appreciative.
We will be pushing the album and laying the foundation for the next one. It's important for us to keep on creating and working together. The album has been such a collaborative process and labor of love, we are confident that those that tune us in will want to hear more.
I’ll be focusing on updating our website and continuing to book venues. This year we hope to launch our documentary and organize some larger events including other artists.
Kevin: We want to tour for sure but need to figure out the logistics. It’s worth it plan ahead. There are lots of moving parts we gotta pay attention to that so we don't get totally fucked on the road.
John: We plan to release a couple of videos and a short documentary about the making of the album in the near future too.
We are in talks about video shoots so music videos will be coming! As a band, we are totally committed to having fun while building our fanbase! We don't do anything we can't have a good time doing. Fuck being serious about music. This should be FUN. We have FUN if nothing else. Like hugging. We are going to even hug more this year.
We all have goals this year. I think I’m gonna break down my drums down even faster after every set. Alex is gonna have a tambourine at ALL times. John is gonna grow a sweet mullet. Lou is definitely gonna adopt an African baby and then make me babysit the kid all the time. I’m cool with that as long as he leaves me money for pizza.
Lou: We're all old now. The future probably holds a bitter breakup followed by a reunion tour.