INTRO BY KAT VISTI
INTERVIEW BY CAMI LIBERTY
PHOTO COURTESY OF MODERN ME
A fresh new twist on indie rock music is what you'll get when you listen to San Diego band Modern Me. The band consists of members Adam Lamah, Phoenyx Jones, Adam O'Nan, Michael Paez, and Shawn Kreitz. The band morphs together different elements from The Killers, Young The Giant , and Joywave. Their music relates to current issues that millennials face in love, family life, and finding themselves through the spiritual and cultural complexities of life. A year after their breakthrough single "Waters", Modern Me is back with a brand new single entitled "Dead to Me." In a recent interview with the bands we sat down to learn more about the single and their music.
In January you released your new single Dead to Me. After the success of releasing your single Waters in 2016, were you more nervous or excited to release Dead to Me?
ALL: "We [were] so very excited! This track has been brewing for about 8 months now and so much planning and thought has gone into the release. We are pushing our baby into the wild, so yes we [were] a bit anxious."
Can you tell us a little about the inspiration / process behind creating Dead to Me?
ADAM: “The song was initially about a girl that I had met on Huntington beach. It somehow morphed and became about the majority of my past relationships. Questioning if the time I spent with these women was just a waste of time, if my heart ended up taking more of a blow than the memories were actually worth.”
Do you find that you have the same process when creating music or does it change often?
ALL: "Adam Lamah usually has about 100 voice memos on his phone that we end up dissecting and really diving into. The melodies change a bit when we are all in the room together but it’s really quite funny to see how these songs start and how they end up."
You also released a video for Dead to Me. Can you tell us a little about the story behind the video?
ADAM: “I’ve imagined disrupting the date of an ex-girlfriend and I thought let’s try to capture that and see what happens. Initially for this video we wanted to shoot gorilla style. Setting up all of our instruments in the front yards of band members past relationships, without any forewarning and playing Dead To Me until they walked out and said something so we could capture genuine responses. We thought we’d just play it safe and sit in beamers and rot in motel rooms together instead.”
How would you describe your music style in three words?
ALL: "Super. Hot. Fire."
If you could collaborate with anybody, who would it be and why?
ALL: "Rostam Batmanglij. He is a musical genius who has created some solid gold. He definitely would challenge us as musicians."
Is there anything else that we can expect from you in the near future?
ALL: "We have some more songs on their way out of the womb."