Today we had the pleasure of sitting down with Jonny from Maycomb to talk about their upcoming release Little Ease. Read the interview below!
PPD:
Hey, would you like to introduce yourself and state your role in the band?
Jonny:
Hi, I’m Jonny and I play the guitar and do some singing in Maycomb
PPD:
So Jonny, Maycomb have announced a new EP, would you like to tell us a bit about the release?
Jonny:
Yeah, we have a new EP called Little Ease coming out on October 3rd, and we’re all really excited about it. We had a really quiet year last year – I broke my hand, which completely sucked, and a couple of the other guys had some personal issues to attend to – so we felt like we had lost a lot of momentum as a band. When we talked about what we were going to do this year, we quickly decided that putting out an EP would be a great way to get some new music out, quickly and cheaply, and hopefully help to catch up on some of that lost momentum. So far that’s exactly what’s happening and we couldn’t be happier.
PPD:
Glad to see you boys moving again! Why did maycomb decided to release the EP on Vinyl as an early release and not CD?
Jonny:
The last thing we released was our debut full-length in 2012, and we knew that if we were going to do an EP next then it had to have significance. We didn’t want it to be cheap or lazy, and very early on in the process we started talking about how it might be nice to release on vinyl. We all collect vinyl and it’s a medium that can’t really be replicated digitally – not only does it sound better, but there’s something undoubtedly special about owning your favourite music on vinyl. We thought it might be a nice thing for fans of our band to own, and when we started talking with the record labels Wolf Town DIY and Struggletown, who deal almost exclusively with vinyl, it was kind of a perfect storm so we ran with it. That said, there’s going to be a digital release on October 17th, through our friends Speaking Tongues, and that’s going to be through iTunes, Spotify and all the usual digital outlets.
PPD:
Will we be seeing any exclusive Little Ease merch?
Jonathan Ward
We were extremely lucky to have a very talented illustrator called Si Moody design the Little Ease artwork, and he did so in a way that would allow us to use different assets from the artwork for various merch designs going forward. It’s nice to have everything tie-in together, and we actually put a shirt on sale which featured part of the artwork long before we even announced the EP. It was cool to give people a little taste of the new aesthetic approach for the EP without them knowing, and we were really happy with the response.
At the moment we’re running a limited pre-order bundle that includes the EP on frosted clear 10″ vinyl, a fabric patch, and a linocut print designed by our friend Steven Hill. Our last couple of releases came bundled with an exclusive shirt, so we wanted to try something a little bit different this time. We’re running fairly low on the bundles, but you can pick one up at www.maycomb.bigcartel.com if we’ve any left.
PPD:
Great news! Looking forward to that!
So tell us how you have progressed from your last album ‘I Opened My Heart To Caustic Things’ to your new EP Little Ease.
Jonny:
I think that when we were writing for the album we had a very clear vision of what we were writing for. We knew we wanted to release a full-length, and everything we wrote was with that in mind. In contrast to that, when we started writing for what would become Little Ease, we didn’t really have an idea of what we were going to do with the songs we were working on – we just kind of ran with it. I’d say that it was a much more organic writing process and the songs kind of reflect that; song structures are much less rigid, we tried out some different guitar sounds, and we pushed ourselves a little further creatively than we have in the past. Tonally, it’s probably a lot darker than anything we’ve done before but it’s definitely still Maycomb.
When we went in to record it, we were somewhat less prepared than we have been when we’ve recorded before, but this gave us so much more room to experiment and play around with ideas, and I’d argue that the songs are much better for it.
PPD:
Where was Little Ease recorded?
Jonny:
Our drummer Jimmy Taylor built a studio last year with our friend Chris, and around December we started to demo some of the more finished tracks we had written. We spent a weekend in Jimmy’s studio, Studio B, demoing a new song with him at the helm as producer to see how it worked out. We were really happy with the results and felt confident that Jimmy would be able to do a great job on the EP. This allowed us to keep costs down, while maintaining full creative control of the recording and we love how it came out. Jim nailed it.
PPD:
You have recently released an online stream for the track ‘Hell’ taken from Little Ease, tell us a little bit about this track.
Jonny:
Hell is probably my favourite song from the EP. The way we tend to write starts with me recording a guitar part or a riff, then everyone experiments with adding their parts from there, and it quickly becomes apparent if the song is going to work or not. With Hell I remember Simon, our lead vocalist and bass player, sending me over a really rough version of his opening vocals over the guitar phrase I’d written and I knew it was going to work instantly. I was really excited about it and thought that the lyrics, “Well, you brought this on yourself. Have you had enough of Hell?” would make the perfect opener for whatever we released next. We wrote the rest of it with that in mind, and I feel it came out great.
It doesn’t really have a verse and it doesn’t really have a chorus – it’s strange, and we gave up trying to work out the structure a long time ago. We just learnt to play it as it is. We recently shot a music video for the song too, so hopefully that’ll be out soon.
PPD:
Can you give us anymore information on the music video?
Jonny:
We shot the video with the guys from Born, which is a design agency based in Stourbridge. They’d hired out a RED camera, which is a disgustingly expensive piece of kit, for a project they we were working on, and suggested that while they had it they come over and shoot a video with us. We are the world’s worst actors so we felt like anything narrative based would have been disastrous and so we ended up filming with a green screen. This meant that we could shoot a performance based video, but could do something much more visually visceral. It plays with colour and light, and ties into the themes contained within Hell. I can’t wait for people to see it.
Not only did the guys at Born do an incredible job, but about 10 minutes before the shoot, we all paid a visit to TCM Barbershop and all got cool haircuts so we look like total heartthrobs.
PPD:
Smashing!
What have you got planned tour/gig wise?
Jonny:
We’re looking at playing as many shows as possible in support of the new release. We have a few one off shows over the next month – a release show at Scruffy Murphy’s in Birmingham on the 27th September that every single person on earth should come to – and then we’re going to be announcing a run of dates in December, shortly. We’re looking at heading back up to Scotland on that run which is long overdue.
PPD:
Excellent, How did the tour with Calls Landing go?
Jonny:
It was great thanks. They’re great guys and we got to play a few cities that we haven’t had the chance to play in a while, so that was cool. The Pop Punk Days very own Lee Jarratt was kindly filling in on guitar for one of the shows, and that was great having him along with us. We’ll hopefully be playing some more shows with Calls Landing before too long.
PPD:
Final question
If you could choose, what band would you like to tour with and what festival would you like to be on?
Jonathan Ward
Well, the fact that my favourite band in the whole wide world, The Hold Steady, are still active means I’d pretty much kill to play with them, but then I know that all of us absolutely love Foo Fighters so let’s go on tour with the dang Foo Fighters.
As for festivals, I’ve a soft spot for Slam Dunk as that’s always a ridiculously fun weekend, but after going to Reading Festival for the first time this year, I can’t imagine how cool it would be to play that. Fuck it – let’s play Groezrock!
You can pre order Maycomb’s new EP here
Facebook: www.facebook.com/maycomb
Bandcamp: http://maycomb.bandcamp.com/