Shiny Toy Guns >> recently rolled through the desert again for a show in Tucson at The Rock. It had been about 4 years that the original STG formula disbanded before reuniting for this album and tour. So I took the opportunity to chatter with Jeremy Dawson and Carah Faye from the band and talk about their tour, the new album they just dropped and how they got the original band back together.
MARC: Jeremy, Carah, nice to see you again.
JEREMY: Marc! What's going on?
MARC: You’re probably wondering why I have you here today.
CARAH: We’re going to do an interview right?
MARC: I do have a few questions for you but first I want to take you to a Way Back Wednesday. [shows them this throwback pic and this throwback pic]
JEREMY: Wow, look at Carah. Is that '06?
CARAH: Wow, that was the old hair. That's like '07.
MARC: Don't worry, I’ll autograph it and send it to you.
CARAH: Do it.
MARC: How is the tour going so far?
CARAH: Good, we're really excited. Tonight should be interesting.
MARC: Yeah, you're starting the 2nd leg of tour tonight. How long has it been since your last show?
JEREMY: 3 weeks.
MARC: ..and you’re playing Tucson instead of Phoenix on this tour, I noticed the other stops are smaller towns well. Is that the intent?
JEREMY: Yeah, they’re called B-markets.
CARAH: From a radio perspective they’re B.
JEREMY: that’s right
MARC: It’s pretty awesome to have you return to form. What have you been doing since the We Are Pilots era?
CARAH: We did some shuffling around for a few years. It took a while for things to get to how they are today. You know, our hearts and our minds. When they finished Season Of Poison they came to terms with wanting things the way they were in that they had started writing - that was going to be for either something new or for Shiny Toy Guns. They came to me and were like ‘either you come back to Shiny Toy Guns or Shiny Toy Guns is going to take a break,' and at that point it had been enough time where this is going to be something I’m going to go full steam with, then when I heard the songs and I heard their hearts it made sense. I was in Sweden when they had begun writing after Season Of Poison, it took us a long time to put this album together because we wanted it to be right. It was important to us that if we were going to put things back together that we do it from the ground up.
MARC: Perfection takes time. I didn’t think anything could top We Are Pilots but III certainly rivals it at least.
CARAH: We’re definitely proud of it. It’s the summation of where we are and that’s what you need to be as artists. You can’t plan anything other than the present.
MARC: What about you Jeremy? You were doing some side projects too right?
JEREMY: Chad and I had all kinds of ideas. Shiny Toy Guns broke apart due to a number of things and doing Shiny Toy Guns without her is just not Shiny Toy Guns. So we had to fix all those things and mend all those things. Then we ate and then we rested.
MARC: Last time we spoke you guys were doing the We Are Pilots tour, that was like a 2 year tour.
CARAH: The end of a long run, that was after the 3rd version came out, we had been touring almost 5 years.
JEREMY: Yeah, heavily for 5 on.
MARC: That was in the midst of the MySpace era which served to help you and other bands similarly. What kind of innovations in technology or platforms has helped you to get to this point in 2013?
CARAH: Well, social media is still everything, it was MySpace for us and now it’s just a different platform and different name. It’s the same thing - interacting with your fans, the people who are buying the records and reacting to what you’re creating and everything you can do to be one with them.
JEREMY: Platforms change over and over again and as long as you’re doing something with some platform.
MARC: Which ones are most important to you?
CARAH: Right now Vine is everything for me personally. It’s a new thing where you make 9 seconds in a loop. It’s like the newspapers in the Harry Potter movies. That’s what it feels like. But I think for the band, Instagram and Facebook.
JEREMY: Twitter.
MARC: Have you seen the new MySpace?
CARAH: We have. We got to go to their headquarters and got the whole run through and I’m really interested to see how it plays out.
MARC: I like the layout. I always thought MySpace was the the best to go to for music. What do you think is the best today?
CARAH: For music yeah but maybe not for interaction. If you want to hear something, absolutely.
MARC: Are you experimenting with any new equipment, software and such?
JEREMY: I just recently started using only UAD for processing which is unbelievable.
CARAH: I’d say we aren’t super fresh because we finished the record and stepped away for a minute.
JEREMY: Whatever sounds cool we’ll use it. It’s what you do with it. You could take the worst plugin in the world. I love hearing a song and marveling on how good it sounds and finding out it was made with the thing that everyone says not to ever use. It’s because the guy using it has an idea in his a brain and manipulated that crappy thing to make something cool.
MARC: Speaking of manipulating things into something cool.The Le Disko remix album was titties, are you planning on doing a remix to III perhaps?
JEREMY: Maybe.
CARAH: Personally, I’d like to do a remix album and an acoustic.
JEREMY: Acoustic would be cool, we’ve never done it before.
CARAH: It’s something we all love and it’s also really big right now and it’s something that can be really fun - only the number ones though.
JEREMY: HAHAHA
CARAH: We’ve never had a number one.
MARC: I still want the album.
CARAH: You can have it!
marc
