featured interview:

The Billionaires

(April 2008)

 

Some of you will probably think me an idiot for this, but: did you know Martha’s Vineyard is an island?  I’ve asked around, and I’m not the only West Coaster who was unaware of this fact.  I was first tipped off to this possibility in The Billionaires opening track “The End of Summer Song”.  Laura Jordan, usual keyboardist, sometimes singer has the lines “Tim I just got back.  Joe just picked me up.  I took a bunch of pills on the boat so I wouldn’t get anxious.”  Boat?  Why would she be on boat?  After a quick Wikipedia search, I found that the Vineyard is not only an island, it’s one of the few places in the United States with a possessive apostrophe in its name.  I love facts!

 

Having secured a lot of ‘did you know?’s about their hometown, I spent last Tuesday evening in The Billionaires' downtown rehearsal space, chatting up the entire band: Joe Keefe, singer, guitarist, keyboardist; Tim Laursen, singer, guitarist, one drum drummer; Jordan, mentioned above; Farley Glavin, bassist, singer; and Sebastian Keefe, drummer, singer.  This is how their live show goes.  There’s a lot of switching around.  It seems everyone gets a turn at everything, though that’s not quite accurate.  I asked them about this communist way of playing live.

 

“That happened because of our recording process” Sebastian answered.  He was referring to the fact that the band first recorded the album before playing live much.  Tim continued, “Because we did things differently, when it came time for us to play live, the switching came out of necessity.  We had this great album that we’re so proud of, and now we had to figure out how to replicate that sound on stage.”

 

“Everyone worked so hard,” Laura went on, “everyone had a part in making the album sound so clean, so we wanted to make sure we could do it again.”  It seems the only thing missing is Laura on guitar.  “I’m so bad.  I’m trying, but I’m lacking in it.”

 

Joe added that although he could play bass, Farley was too good at it to move him.  And he’s thought about doing drums, but that would just be too complicated to switch Sebastian around.

 

It’s clear everyone in the band is considerate of each other’s feelings, something that can only come from years of being together.  Not necessarily as a band, but as a group of friends.  The boys in the band are all from working class families, a dying breed on Martha’s Vineyard (seeing as how housing prices are up 96% from the rest of the nation; thanks, Wikipedia!), and Laura is from Toronto.  After meeting the boys in LA, she went back to Martha’s Vineyard with them during the summer they started to lay down a few tracks for the album.  “The environment was so specific” said Laura, “those feelings from the end of the summer, where we drank a lot, there were a lot of parties, there’s something very sexual in the air.”

 

Speaking of drinking, I asked about their favorite drinks.  Laura answered that she drinks anything.  Tim: “Red wine, cheap beer, like PBR.”  Sebastian said Jack & Coke, Farley’s answer (one of the few I got from him) was a concise “Maker’s Mark on the rocks” and Joe’s is “Two Buck Chuck.”  So now, when you listen to their track “Pass The Bottle” you can imagine what kind of bottle it is.

 

I decided to follow that up with another reference to a song: “Eighties Movies”. I asked what everyone’s favorite John Hughes movie is, which was met by universal laughter.  See, in that song, there’s the line “I was raised on these movie, and John Hughes speakin’ to me.”  But Tim explained that was the only line in the album they were asked to change.  “Originally, that line had to do with ‘Revenge of the Nerds’.  It was—”

 

“No, you can’t say it!” Laura cut in.  “It’s a secret.”

 

“Alright.  But it was about nudity in movies and how a lot of kids are too young when they see naked women on the big screen.”  Tim finished.

 

“I mean, we try to have the lyrics make sense, but sometimes it’s just when things work together.” Joe added.

 

This band has had, due to luck and hard work, an amazing run of things working together.  We started discussing how the band was officially on its path to a record when they were at a dinner party in 2007 with their now manager Todd Phillips, and they started singing “Eighties Movies”.  A label was born. “We’re the first band on the label,” Laura called out, to which Farley questioned, “Wait, it was right there on the spot?”  Apparently so.  But the band goes back further than that.  Some demos had been recorded in the summer of 2006, just to see where they could go.  Pieces would be recorded here and there, with Tim being the driving force behind getting things done.  “Sometimes,” Tim recalled, “I’d be the only one recording in this studio/bar thing we were in, and everyone else was out, so I’d just grab whoever was at the bar and they would sing.”

 

“Yeah,” Joe added, “there are some tracks with twelve voices on them.”  “There were definitely a lot of people who worked on those songs,” Sebastian remembered.  “Well,” Laura said, “it was summertime and there were lots of parties, as always.”

 

An interesting thing that they tried during this period of great creativity was the concept of no rules.  “We’d be playing and you couldn’t say no, that was the only rule.  So that meant we went in a new direction every night.  I think that’s what has made this such an eclectic album.  Some nights, we’d do just keyboard stuff, or it’d be all drums.”

 

All this led to Really Real Forever, an album that perfectly captures a sense of summer and the concept of fleeting youth.  There are sad slow songs, fast songs with clapping, ones that make you reflect on your own teenagedom, and others that make you thankful that’s all behind you.  This album comes from the band members’ harsh winters and the celebration that the summer sun brings with it.  These aren’t just kids who summered on Martha’s Vineyard.  But their name comes from the people who do.

 

Stardom has yet to hit The Billionaires.  The boys work as carpenters, which was also something they did back on the vineyard (a great quip from Joe: “Back in the summer of ‘05, me and another guy had a carpentry business called ‘Construction & Construction’), and Laura’s an actress.  But with all their practicing, a stage show that makes the crowd buzz and text their friends, and a strong appetite to survive, they are not long for the small stages of Silverlake.

 

— Amber Henson

www.myspace.com/billionairesband