WARRIORS OF THE LIGHT:

GETTING TRIBAL WITH SARASOTA’S SONS OF HIPPIES

BY MICHAEL HAMAD

3/10/2009

Katherine Kelly - Guitars, effects, keyboards, vocals

Jonas Canales - Drums, synthesizer, vocals

Tom Klimchuck - Producer [plays bass on the album]

HOW THEY GOT STARTED:

KK:  It’s coming on a year, actually, in April, and he was really into like, “Let’s jam,” you know, “I get this vibe from you, we should really get together,” and I didn’t have time at all, and I was trying to promote my band [Nous Rapport], and all of a sudden when my band collapsed I had this sort-of small catalogue of solo material that I was really digging, and I was like, “I guess this is what I’m going to do now.”  So I contacted him… I was in Boston at the time… the day I was thinking about it I thought, “I guess I’ll write to this guy Jonas,” and I checked my Myspace and there was this huge letter that he had written to me the same day, and it was so cool… so I thought, “this is a sign.”  We started playing at my mom’s house for maybe a month-and-a-half?  We played my material.

JC:  Prior to that, though, there was an interesting point that I was recording with Third Society and at the first day we were recording, at the end of the day, I was looking for something to do and she was playing at Pastimes, her solo project.  I went to see her and I just dug it so much, I was like “Dude, it’s amazing,” because for some reason when you played for Nous Rapport your vocals were like “ding” [high-pitched sound] and I’m like, “Dude, I dig that, I need those vocals,” you know what I’m saying?  And that’s why I was always offering, “let’s jam.”  I went to see her with her solo project and I was like, “that’s it, I dig it.”  So then I sent the letter, and I went to see her again, right, at St. Pete? [Yeah]  So I went to see two of her shows and I’m like “Dude,” I was creating so many drum beats for the songs already, so then we decided, “Let’s do it.”

KK:  So then we got together doing my material… It was always a little funny putting drums to my stuff with the exception of maybe a few songs, probably because they’re totally just folk songs, you know?  They maybe were able to be developed?  He went out and bought a MicroKorg synthesizer, and the first day we wrote “Suntan,” which was the first song I’d ever written with someone else, and it was like, “What?”  All of a sudden it was a band, and it was so cool because from then on it was like... The last solo song I wrote was “Cautionary Tale,’ which is the bonus track [on Warriors of the Light], and that’s why we included it because it’s sort of like the missing link.

JC:  That’s the very first song, you know what I mean?  This album is actually… it shows… it’s the story of our evolution up to this point because the songs are all in order, like they’ll go …

KK:  There’s like two halves, there’s two eras… “Suntan,” “Get Down,” “Given,” and “Don’t Forget,” the ones we had on our initial demo, and then the other four are newer.

JC:   So it represents chapters.

KK:  It’s not in chronological order but it’s all there.

RECORDING THE ALBUM “WARRIORS OF THE LIGHT”:

KK:  We recorded it in North Port with our friend Tom Klimchuck who was the guitarist in a band called Propane.  They’re a hardcore band from New York.  I met him through Nous Rapport.  He’s just a kind, amazing, generous soul who basically said… he did our demo, hastily did our demo in maybe three days, and he went on tour with his band, and when he came back we were like, “We want you to do our album and we want to pay you this time,” and all that stuff, and we gave him peanuts [and bananas], and to his credit he didn’t care.  We recorded the drum tracks in one weekend in December, the first week in December.  He did most of them Saturday.

JC:  No click track.  We decided to keep it as natural as we can to preserve the energy and the artistic intention.

KK:  Basically, Tom built Jonas a drum room.  It was so cool.  It’s his garage, but it’s very professional, his microphones are state of the art.  He is transitioning from being a touring musician to being a producer.  We were his guinea pigs.  Anyway, we took the drums out and little by little over the next two full months (two full months it took, ‘cause we’re so… we can’t do music full-time yet, so we just squoze it in…sometimes more [than a couple of nights a week], sometimes less]

JC:  Lots of late nights, you know?  Little sleep.

KK:  So then I went back and I played guitar live to his tracks, but obviously we scrapped it all, and then I overdubbed my guitars.  We ran the live send through three amps at one time that were all in one room being mic’ed: the rotating speaker, my Epiphone, and his Marshall JCM 800, which is why the sound is so full because there’s three amplifiers going.  And he obviously automates them to hear different ones at each time.  So we did that and he put the bass down, and little by little each track we completed, obviously then vocals and some really unique instruments.

JC:  Just having somebody that has twenty-plus years of experience in music and has traveled the world many times, played in front of so many people and knows music, his knowledge… it’s amazing.  His ears, they’re dead-on.  He can hear… the guy’s amazing.  So having that…

KK:   But it was also at the same time very laid-back and so comfortable and relaxed.

JC:  The other thing of course having this amazing project that we’re both so proud of.  It’s the first time… it’s a very unique and fresh experience for both of us.  We love this project so much that being able to have that and do that…

KK:  But let’s just point out: what [Jonas] sings, he writes, and what I sing, I write.  I don’t write lyrics for him and he doesn’t write lyrics for me.

JC:  It’s collaboration, a total collaboration in everything.  We’re so lucky to have this energy going on, and we cultivated that energy, and we’re so lucky to have that.  That’s all it is.  It’s about energy, it’s about what it feels like.  There is this trance we enter every time we play that things flow for you.  Many times, 90% of the time, she thinks something and I play that, and she says, “That’s exactly what I wanted.”  Now, we don’t even say that anymore because it’s so normal.

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE SONS OF HIPPIES:

KK:  So people were like, “So, are you a jam band?”  Sometimes.  And other people were like, “Man, your band name is stupid.”  And we’re like, “We don’t care.”  It’s completely full of meaning, but what it really should convey is an attitude, not a musical style.  It’s a carry-over of maybe things that people were interested in that should be universals yet seemingly aren’t anymore, like kinship, peace, awesome music, being together.  That’s what the band name means.  It doesn’t necessarily resonate like that with people, but the people who get it totally get it, and that’s all that matters.  We do put some psychedelic things…

JC:  There’s a vibe.

KK:  It’s not like fucking Donovan or Jimi Hendrix… and what I hope is…  that word “hippie” doesn’t exist much anymore with people, yet hippies are EVERYWHERE.  Our name is telling people it’s cool to be this way, to maybe call yourself that within this re-interpretive context of carrying over those ideas and concepts, but the fashion is different, the sounds are different, but the ideology is completely the same.

JC:  We’ve been through so many generations in rock and roll after that, and we carry all of that in our skin too.  There’s all the punk, the weird new-wave synth stuff… because we’re hippies in essence and state of mind instead of being just a poseur. 

BALANCING THE POLITICAL AND THE ABSTRACT:

KK:  For me, I’m lucky because it’s always abstract.  It’s always wordplay based on the way the syllables sound within the context of the notes in the song.  I never really quite plan out a song… people say, “Oh, maybe this song is about this, maybe this song is about that.”  I guess my vocabulary has always been kind of aggressive, and I like those words, and by nature they’re political in many ways… [In “Spaceship Ride”] I wasn’t sure whether to print “See Bright Red” in the notes as “See” or “Sea” to begin with because that would be something else entirely.  But I’m into that because what it does is it allows someone… it gives somebody complete freedom to judge and to understand the song as they understand the words that I’m saying, which basically have every meaning but totally, absolutely none at all.  The intention is always abstract and often intentional.

JC:   We play with [abstract and intentional] a lot.  Even in a song you might have abstract words and a phrase that’s meaningful.

KK:  Like “Given” [from the album]… Jonas named that song, and I was leaning more

towards “Give-in” in the beginning.  I really loved that, because we sort of know what the song is really about but it ended up being the other way.  It could have gone either way.

JC:  We like to play like that.

PLAYING LIVE VERSUS STUDIO RECORDING:

KK:  It went through a cycle.  We had to rehearse for months.  We had to write these songs and rehearse for six to eight months before we were even comfortable playing live.  I like to record, obviously.  Playing out is awesome.  Unfortunately, we live in a state where it’s difficult to do that. 

            I play through two amplifiers, so, there’s a lot of effect going on…one of them is an Epiphone, real vintage sounding, and another one’s a Portovox (?) like an old-school sixties Leslie speaker that rotates… it actually has two built-in switches, low and a high speed, it’s so cool.  So, the guitar sound is pretty big live, but it certainly isn’t bass, but you’re not missing much.  This record is so produced, and it’s so layered and augmented, that basically when we listen back to it we realized we have to get a bass player, but we want to.

JC: I guess this project is a challenge because we play so many instruments and we do so much stuff at once, which makes us always evolve.

KK:  It’s like you’re being constantly pushed to master, and it’s getting easier and easier, but at first… with Nous Rapport it was so easy to perform.  My role was like super narrow… I was in charge of guitar antics and performance and singing and barre chords.  I still can’t look at the audience very much.  It’s so bizarre because I’m so sick-scared that if I break the concentration that things will go to hell.  There are loops going, there’s a synthesizer going, there are complicated rhythms and harmonies, but it’s cool.

            We do all [the electronics] live too.  I have a keyboard to my left but I don’t play while I play guitar.  The keyboards you hear I’ll play either before or after, but (Jonas) plays synthesizer while he’s playing drums.

JC:  Like I said, it’s always a challenge because there are two different worlds going on, and we’re working both sides of our brains, and it’s so amazing to exploit that.  I have a micro-synthesizer and the drums of course and the vocals, so it’s cool to experiment.

ON THE SARASOTA MUSIC SCENE:

KK:  It used to mean so much.  I can tell you that, because I’ve been playing here since I was 14 years old.  I was in a band called the Doses, and we were actually, I don’t know, I played shows that I never will with this band.  Maybe it was a novelty, but the music was excellent.  I mean, we were total disciples of the Pixies.  The Sarasota music scene back then, which was awhile ago, was rockin’.  It was so awesome.  We had the most original bands here, and they were all full of integrity: Simon Said, Half-Inch Holiday, Blanket, Kelly Green (which was sort of older), and Topeo.  I don’t think it’s reverse nostalgia, or nostalgia period.  I just remember feeling… the music was really heavy and really brilliant, and everybody involved was … there was a community.  There were so many places to play.  We played at the State Theater in St. Pete, all over Florida.  We played at Barbarella’s in Orlando.  We played at Rosie’s Lounge in Miami when we were fourteen.  It was so cool.

KK:  I have no idea [what happened], because I left here for eight years.  I moved to Boston.

Is it important for you to be a part of a local music scene?

KK:  No, but we embrace it.

What’s the responsibility of the local musician to the local music scene and vice versa?

KK:  Do anything you can for it.

JC:  Create a community, help each other, not be assholes to each other.  There’s no competition whatsoever.

KK:  I don’t think we have to leave [Sarasota] for good though, to be honest with you.  I really don’t.  I’m not saying that I don’t want to.  I’ll do whatever it takes, but I moved back here because I feel comfortable here.  I didn’t produce … I lived in Boston for eight years.  I produced music for two years.  It was so difficult to even exist.  So when I came back here I was like… ahhh..

            There seems to be this mini-burgeoning collective of maybe three to five bands.  Harper Sublette, Villanova Junction, Meteoreyes [Shannon Fortner], This is an Adventure, Completely From Mountains, Cats in the Basement, Jesus Chrysler Supercar, and there’s a lot more I could mention, and it’s really weird stuff.

JC:  We’ve got Skiffle.

KK:  Skiffle, hell yeah.  Skiffle is a six-foot-one fireman with a handlebar mustache like John Ringling, and he plays experimental bass with snare drums attached to his bass cabinet. 

JC:  And he also plays Game Boys.

KK:  He plays Game Boys.  Noise music, you know?  He’s getting people together.  He’s a personality, and he totally cares.

MAKING MUSIC, MAKING A LIFE:

JC:  It’s everything all together.  It’s life… it’s making a difference in writing another piece of rock and roll history and being able to do something for the music, do something for the people, for the world… and also going for major venues and just doing it.

KK:  It starts with being able to pay for your life with your music.  That’s where it starts.  And it’s not extravagant, it’s just like, “Okay, I can send my rent home and my car payment or whatever…” and if that happens, then the possibilities that open up as far as creativity and inspiration are going to quadruple.