Interview by Rachel Jablonski
Not one better than the other, there are many different categories in which people fall in regard to musical passions. There are those that have a strong love for sounds, lyrics, and concepts, yet are not able to read music or play a single note. There are others that have a strong zeal for music, can read it, and maybe play an instrument to some extent, but are strictly amateur. There are some that cannot read music, are completely self-taught musicians, and are soulful and creative. There are those that have lived, breathed, studied, and played music both independently and formally much of their lives. And then there are those that are a combination of these things or something in-between. The layers of musical passions and capabilities are what music is about, finding a deep connection to sound on some appropriate level and in some way or form.
Finding themselves branching off of each of these
levels – having influences like Depeche Mode, The Cure, and even
80’s rock bands like Cinderella, much exposure to music and instruments
at early ages, creative and soulful demeanors, some formal training in
various genres – and thus possessing an obvious deep musical connection
is the independent Illinois band called Relenter. A multifaceted group
with a new release called Through the Mirror, the band is a friendly
bunch of Midwesterners whom deserve a thoughtful listen.
Rachel: Congrats, I really think the album is great. Every time I listen it gets better and better. What was your main motivation for the album musically and lyrically?
Chris: Musically, it’s hard to say because we just come up with ideas and then let them evolve naturally. But I think basically it amounted to, we’re influenced by Depeche Mode, The Cure, that kind of stuff and that’s kind of the direction we wanted to go, but with a little more rock and live drums. We wanted to make sure it was current also. Lyrically, it’s just a collection of personal incidents or circumstances and situations and they were generalized. Like “The Finest Thread” is a song about when you’re high strung or on the edge of losing it sort of. Then there are a couple of love songs and a couple of love gone wrong songs. We just made them kind of generic as opposed to making them too specific.
Rob: Chris, of course, wrote all the music and all of the lyrics, so in tracking I was able to do some additional arranging. Just from my standpoint when writing some of the parts, I think first of all it was about just writing something that we enjoyed listening to, at least music that I like to hear. The songs, from where they originated from and where they ended, are quite different and so I think a lot of it just starts with what we enjoyed listening to when we went back and heard it.
Chris: And we do all have classical and jazz backgrounds as well and I think a lot of our stuff stems off from that.
Rachel: You said that the songs evolved, what did they evolve from?
Chris: Well most of them will start off as little keyboard passages, either baselines or little melodies or whatever, and I’ll come up with a lot of ideas but then I have to pick and choose which ones I like most and which ones I can really do something with. Then I see what the moods of those passages feel like and then develop them. We’ll start maybe putting guitar parts over the keyboards or I’ll give a musical passage to Rob and he’ll put some orchestration or piano with it and then Kenny just seems to have a knack for knowing how to drum to the sequencers and what to do drum-wise.
Rob: Yeah so basically he’ll come in with a finished demo and then he’ll hand it off and then we all kind of do our thing. From that point we’ll add our own flavors to it and then it becomes what you just heard.
Rachel: The album is really key-driven. Do you sit at a keyboard until you come up with something or do you hear something in your head, have an idea first?
Chris: Most of it starts on the keyboard, either piano or keyboard. Looking back, it’s kind of fuzzy sometimes because I don’t always remember when or where I came up with the passages, but the moods of them work for me, they seem to fit. A lot of them will start based on a keyboard sound. I like to experiment with changing, I don’t like to use presets too much – they sound kind of generic – so I like to change them and distort them and a lot of times the sound will help dictate or generate the mood for me. The keyboard tone will kind of indicate ok this is going to be something fast or, ya know, I just go off the sound.
Rachel: From reading your bio on your site you guys clearly come from really diverse backgrounds musically and you started young. What drove you to music as a kid and like, Kenny, it’s awesome you have all of these 80’s rock bands as influences like Cinderella and Ratt and stuff. How do those influences reflect on the band?
Kenny: My background on 80’s metal type music…
Rob: Somehow it fits really well because here we have all this retro type stuff going on and here’s this metal drummer coming in and you know, he’s actually more of a finesse player than a thrasher which is good, but he has all these mid-80’s styles and they just fit perfect.
Chris: I guess part of it, at least my perspective on Kenny, I mean Kenny you have a jazz background too right?
Kenny: Yes.
Chris: Kenny, I don’t know quite how to put it, he has a certain preference for the style of music he listens to, but when it comes to playing he plays all sorts of different things. He seems to adapt well to a lot of different styles and actually when Rob and I were looking for a drummer we were pretty impressed by Kenny’s ability to play to the sequencer and he never resisted it, he liked it from the very beginning. A lot of drummers we met with beforehand didn’t want to do that, so…
Rob: Another thing that really helps is that, a lot of drummers that we met with and a lot of drummers out there, they know beats and they know rhythms and they know patterns and they know fills and if you listen to our record and try to focus in on what Kenny is doing he actually learns the song and his drums are actually another instrument. It’s not drums just playing beats; it really is another instrument in the band because he actually plays exactly to what is going on in the music in a lot of his cymbal work and high hat work and stuff like that. He’s able to accent in the right places so it’s a good fit. We are really lucky to have that.
Rachel: So you all just kind of started in music young and stuck with it and this is where you are now?
Rob: More or less.
Chris: Yeah, pretty much. My parents made me take music lessons whether I liked it or not. When I was 5 years old I didn’t so much like it, they just wanted to get me involved in activities and as I got older I got to pick and choose. If I really didn’t like something they didn’t force me to stay in it, but I really liked music so I guess I’m kind of lucky that they pushed me into it at an early age.
Rob: Growing up it was kind of hard for me to get away from it. My mother was a choir director and my father was a high school band director and so it was kind of like 24 hours a day.
Rachel: How did you guys get together since Kenny is from Texas, Rob is from…
Chris: No, Rob is from Texas…
Rob: Go Cowboys.
Chris: …Kenny is from California and Rob makes sure everyone know he’s from Texas. Rob has the handshake from Texas. It’s bolder and stronger than… I don’t know... he crushes everybody’s hand. Rob’s just really proud of being Texan. It was just chance really, I mean we all ended up in the area before we were ever a band so I just had ads all over town, for years actually, looking for the right musicians and I probably, well not probably, I met with over 50 people. A lot of the people I met with were, most of them were not really musicians, they had a passion for music but they really weren’t musicians. And some of them were really good but were just interested in doing a different style than what we wanted to do. It just took awhile to find them.
Rachel: What brought you to Illinois, Kenny?
Kenny: It’s a pretty long story but… [laugh]
Rob: … it involved probably a chick and… no I’m just kidding.
Kenny: [laugh] Yeah, just like everybody else. After I graduated from high school the person that I was with at the time, my girlfriend, she had an aunt that lived here in Illinois and she wanted to help us out a little bit. So we moved ourselves out here and her aunt helped us out for a little bit and needless to say we broke up. She went back and I stayed. And Rob, did you move out here because of a girl too? I’ll let him tell more to you.
Rob: Yeah, but that wasn’t the reason.
Rachel: Riiiiiiiiiiight, the girl wasn’t the reason.
Rob: No, she actually did go back and I stayed just like Kenny, but I was living in Austin at the time and I had some family here and they kept talking about me coming out here and relocating my studio out here and somehow they finally talked me into it. One day I moved out and it’s been five years now. They wanted me to come out for a year and get things going and then relocate back to Texas and I was like ah I can spend twelve months and now it’s been…
Rachel: Don’t tell me that! I don’t want to be in Iowa forever. [laugh]
Rob: [laugh] You’ve only been there for nine months so there’s still time.
Chris: That’s the other thing is Rob has his own recording studio and he led our project in terms of studio work. He recorded it and mixed it and all that good stuff which made it affordable for us to do.
Rachel: Since you have such instrument diversity, how do you pull it off live? What is your live show like?
Rob: It’s unlike anything anyone’s experienced ever.
Chris: [laugh] And not in a good way. Well we play as much live as we possibly can and obviously our songs are so layered and we’re only a three piece so we play to backing tracks. We don’t worry so much while we’re writing songs about how we’re going to perform them. The song comes first, we want a good song. Once it’s done then we worry more about ok how are we going to pull this off live. What we’ll do is I’ll do the vocals and guitar, Kenny obviously will do the drums, and Rob will go through the keyboard passages and pick the most melodic and the most involved parts. A lot of times the piano parts and some bass Rob will play live and then we put some bass and more of the ambient type stuff in the backing tracks and then we play to those. The way we do that is that Kenny wears headphones and follows the backing tracks and we follow Kenny.
Rachel: Is it pretty difficult to pull off? Do you play everything from the album or is there stuff you shy away from?
Chris: We play everything but “Homefront” mainly because the vocals are so layered and it’s just kind of a little slow. If we needed to play a real long set we could put it in there, but we just thought it was better to let that be a studio track and not play it live. We’ve been playing around with stuff acoustically as well and we wouldn’t be opposed to doing that acoustically, but it’s a little to layered to pull it off as it is.
Rachel: I’m not very good with your song titles yet, what is the name of the instrumental…?
Rob: “In the Beginning.”
Rachel: Yeah, do you even play that live?
Chris: We talked about that. We would love to do that with an orchestra someday, but it’s not practical so basically it’s just piano and then minimal keyboards and then a lot of the more dramatic stuff is in the backing tracks. We use that more as a show opener.
Rachel: Right, I can see that.
Chris: And so we’ll just play the piano part or whatever and then after that we’ll go into our set.
Rachel: Ok, so the lyrics It seems so strange, how our world will never change and we all face the consequence above are totally stuck in my head. It’s driving me crazy! I was listening to the album at work today and this song is totally engrained, but I love it!
Chris: That’s “Strange.” Which version is stuck in your head, the acoustic or electric?
Rachel: Uh, I don't know. A combination of both really.
Chris: I’m partial to the acoustic version actually.
Rachel: Those acoustic tracks are really good, but I don’t know, I can’t pick right now. So you have a show coming up this weekend right?
Rob: Yeah it’s our release show and we’re playing with another band you might be familiar with, i:scintilla.
Rachel: Yeah, they’re cool. I interviewed them last year actually. What do you have planned for the show? What’s the scene like there if I can ever make it out to a show?
Chris: Plans for the show… we’re going to play pretty much everything but track 5 and then we’re going to throw in a cover song for fun. We’ve been playing the same set for a little while so we’re going to put a little different twist on a couple of songs, we’re going to do a little bit of acoustic stuff, and that’s about it.
Rob: The scene here, the town is pretty small, it’s about 100,000 between the two cities [Champaign/Urbana], but it’s an extremely vibrant scene. A lot of music here, tons of bands, lots of cool venues. For a small area it’s a really, really lively scene.
Chris: It’s a little more geared toward pop/punk kind of stuff, but it’s really cool because there is really room for anything here. They have all sorts of styles here and all are welcome and all are supported.
Rachel: Well the whole country is like pop/punk right now so I can understand that is a major genre there at the moment. Who’s the girl on the album cover?
Chris: That is Bethany, she’s actually the new bassist of i:scintilla now. She’s a good friend of mine.
Rob: She’s sitting downstairs.
Chris: Yeah she actually is at the moment. So it just kind of worked out. She’s a friend of mine and we had a concept for the cover and she posed for it. She’s a really good musician.
Rachel: What does your band name, Relenter, mean?
Rob: Our band name… it’s actually a very interesting story where that came from. We were deciding on a band name, we’d been together probably 5 or 6 months, and we had decided that we wanted our name to fit some particular criteria, certain syllables, the look, certain number of letters, and so on and so forth. So we opened up the dictionary and started throwing darts…
Chris: When he says it’s interesting… [laugh] Here’s the short version. We just basically picked it out of the dictionary at random and put an “er” on the end.
Rachel: Why did you add on the “er?”
Rob: Relent was a good looking, a good sounding word and flowed well, and we couldn’t “relent” so we just put an “er” on the end to become Relenter. It really doesn’t mean anything.
Chris: It is a made up word, it’s a great question and a really dumb answer.
Rachel: I read on your website that you might be planning to do remixes of this album?
Chris: I did one that I didn’t spend a whole lot of time on. It’s something that we wanted to do, but I think basically it has fallen to the bottom of our priority list. We have so many other things that we need to do and there is not enough time to do everything. So we just found it’s more important to, at this point in time since we have an album, it’s more important to be promoting it than to be remixing our own stuff right now. There are a couple friends of ours who said that they might remix our stuff so I don’t know if they will or not but if they do we’ll put that up there. If not, then it’s probably something we won’t get around to.
Rachel: What do you think is next for you guys? What do you see happening?
Chris: [laugh] That’s a good question. Pretty much I have parallel directions right now. One thing is obviously going to be to promote the album and get out of town shows and to basically just hit the promo pretty hard. I have a PR plan that I am following. We want to send out X number of press kits per month and see if we can get some more out of town shows. At the same time I want to come up with four or five new songs relatively soon that we can start putting in our set. I don’t think we’re about to start a new album just yet until we do a little more promoting, but we do need to get some new songs in our set because the thing about it is the album comes out and it’s new to everybody else but it’s old to the band because we’ve been working on it a long time. So I guess just for our own personal satisfaction we need a couple of new songs in our set so…
Rachel: So just hit it hard, see what happens?
Rob: Yep, sell CDs and just get those things rolling.
Chris: And have fun in the process.
Rachel: Well I see good things in your future; it’s a really cool album.
Chris/Rob: Thank you.
Rachel: That’s all I have. Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Chris: A big thank you, we’re really thrilled that you enjoyed it and thanks for interviewing us.
Rob: I just wanted to say thanks for taking time out to talk with us and thanks for checking out the album.
Rachel: Thank you! Good luck to you guys.