A good pop song makes you want to listen to it all the time. The same goes with a good pop band, but the Blind Eyes, perhaps St. Louis' best, know that a brief musical rest only makes the audience crave the hook more. So after a short break -- spent recording their first EP as a foursome and, ya know, having a baby -- they're back this Saturday with Via Dove (also featuring a new member), Yankee Racers and The Educated Guess at The Firebird for The Blind Eyes' first show since August, with new material to try out and to give away a free download recording of "Armor," the first single off their forthcoming, as-of-yet untitled EP, to all attendees.
The Blind Eyes -- "Armor"
We talked with guitarist and vocalist Seth Porter about the recording and writing dynamic as a foursome now, the upcoming EP and why the band hasn't been playing every weekend, all the time, everywhere in St. Louis lately.
Brian Heffernan: About this time last year, you added a second guitarist, Andy White, to the band line up, and this is the first recording you've made since then. So, how did Andy fit into the songwriting process and the general dynamic in the studio?
Seth Porter: You know, most of the stuff we recorded was written after he was in the band. He didn't want to join the band just to be a hired gun. He wanted to be involved in the process. And honestly, when he first joined, the first few months was more getting him up to speed on everything up to that point. And then we went straight into our New Year's gig we do every year, which involved learning a bunch of cover songs. So it wasn't until the first of this year that we really got around to doing more writing. Every song happens a little differently, but just having a second guitar player affects the finished product.
In the past you've written both the lead and rhythm parts for the guitar, how did that work out with Andy?
I would say that before there were some songs that had two parts, but also, a lot of that happened in the studio. Certainly our live show didn't feature a lot of lead guitar. I think the songs were written in a way that three people, for the most part, could make sense out of them on stage. And the ones that couldn't be made sense of on stage showed up on the record but never got played because they didn't really work. I think that having Andy kind of opened up the full back catalogue of stuff -- stuff that had pretty much been left out of the live performances. As far as the new stuff, some of them he straight up co-wrote and will be accredited accordingly.
