Thursday, October 11, 2012

INTERVIEW: Grouplove

Grouplove brought the love to St. Louis on Monday, Oct. 8 at the Pageant in Delmar Loop. The band is touring this fall to promote their debut album “Never Trust a Happy Song.” The album found success with songs such as “Colours” and “Tongue Tied.” Grouplove, which consists of members Ryan Rabin, Hannah Hooper, Christian Zucconi, Sean Gadd and Andrew Wessen, met in 2008 while attending an artist’s community in Greece.
A Q&A with Sean Gadd, Grouplove bassist
Everyone in the band comes from a different background and from different places. Do you feel this diversity helps?
For us, absolutely. Things work differently for different people, but for us, we come from London, California and New York, and we all bring different influences to our music. Even though we have different influences and very different upbringings there is something that is really special with us where we connect when it comes to music and sense of humor and being together. In our case, the differences make us more interested in each other.
Does it ever get chaotic at times? 
It gets chaotic in a good way. We bounce off of each other. We don’t fight too much and because we haven’t known each other all of our lives and haven’t fallen into bad habits with each other, from early on we learned how to discuss things. We were all so excited about doing something new and being around each other. It’s very natural with us. We are honest with each other early on and we don’t let things brew.
Can you describe how the band came together?

Hannah Hooper, vocalist, performs with Andrew Wessen, guitarist at the Grouplove concert Oct. 8. PHOTO BY SEAN FUNICIK
It is a story that we talk about a lot, because we met in Greece. We were all there on our own separate journeys and Hannah and Christian, who are a couple, they had recently met and fell for each other in New York City and wanted to get out. So they decided to go to Greece. Hannah had been invited to this artist’s residency, which is kind of insane. These few American guys, one of whom is our guitarist’s brother, had some land and wanted to do something special with it in Greece where they invite artists, painters and performers to go there and create so they can have a nice environment with this land. I was there because my friend from London, who is also Greek, ran into these guys and got invited and he invited me. Ryan and Andrew are old time friends from Los Angeles and they were there for pretty much the same reasons. That’s the short story.
So the album is basically self-produced. Did you do that intentionally, and is that something you want to continue doing?
Yeah, absolutely. Ryan, the drummer, produced it from his home studio in downtown Los Angeles. We like to do everything in house right now, it’s working for us. When you’re in a band you always have to keep an open mind, who knows what is going to happen in the future? But right now we are really happy with Ryan. He does the producing and Hannah does all of the artwork. She designs everything from our album covers to our T-shirts and has a big role when it comes to our set design.

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