Editor’s Note: This is the raw draft of the interview published by New Noise Magazine. This draft has not been seen by an editor. There will be errors.
There are three things that should immediately spring to mind when thinking of Fort Collins, Colorado: The Blasting Room, Surfside 7, and Elway. Elway, or the band formerly known as 10-4 Eleanor, have taken their small town roots and have grown into a healthy body of excellence. After six years of growth in Colorado, a place that holds the band’s namesake as sacred as Jesus Christ himself, Elway have packed their bags and sailed the seas to the concrete ocean of Chicago. We join Guitarist/Singer Tim Brown just days after recording the follow up to their 2011 debut, Delusions to talk about the move to Chicago, recording with Matt Allison and their new album: Leavetaking.
You’ve moved the week of recording from the snowy mountain town of Fort Collins, Colorado to the third largest city in the states. The name of the album, Leavetaking alludes to moving on. How much about it is leaving Colorado?
Leavetaking does in part refer to my moving to Chicago and the experiences that lead up to my doing so, but the overall theme of the album is not so solipsistic. The album is about parting ways with the past, and the sort of ups and downs that that entails. Of course the lyrics reflect my personal experiences to a certain extent, but in writing them I tried to focus on the emotions and thoughts that frame situations like my own rather than the unambiguous minutia about my life that may or may not be relatable.
What do you hope to gain by living in Chicago vs. Colorado?
I lived in Colorado for most of my life and I spent the last six years in Fort Collins. It’s a small college town. I graduated college and started touring a lot of the time. It seemed every time I was back in town more of my friends would have moved away. I just sort of receded into this pattern of drinking a ton to pass the time between tours. I don’t want to make it sound like I was at some rock bottom and I needed to get my shit together because that’s nowhere near the case. I still drink all the time; I just do it in a locale that is still exotic to me. I won’t hit rock bottom for years! I don’t resent the times I spent in Fort Collins, but after a certain point I felt like I needed to move on, you know? I moved to Chicago because I love this city and had the good fortune to meet a ton of great people here over the years. It’s always felt like a second home to me, and I’m currently quite happily exploring what it feels like to have it as my first. I suppose I am hoping to gain good times and meet different folks in a different part of the world. Same reason why we forgo financial security to tour with a punk band.
You guys seemed to benefit from being one of the few punk bands in the small Fort Collins scene. Will you miss the Big Fish/Tiny Pond aspect of the musical scene in Fort Collins?
Because the town is so small, the music scene in Fort Collins has a real ebb and flow to it. The only music that is constantly popular and successful in that town is jam/newgrass/dubstep or whatever is the college genre du jour. DIY punk and indie bands are a constant as well, but being able to consistently play great shows is tricky there. Our band is a byproduct of a high water mark for the DIY scene in Fort Collins. When we started playing in 2007, it seemed like there were tons of house show spots and everybody was really enthusiastic. We cut our teeth playing basement shows and Surfside 7 at a time when there was a lot of enthusiasm for what we were doing. Over the years, that feeling came and went and shows got worse and better and worse and better in infinite succession. The truly great thing about Fort Collins is that it is an easy place to have your home base. It wasn’t until we started touring really consistently that we started to garner momentum as a whole. Our friends in Fort Collins have always been very supportive. I don’t know that we were ever big fish in a tiny pond there though. There is no real punk ‘scene’ to be on top of. We built a scene playing alongside our friends in indie bands and alt-country bands to whoever in the narrow demographic of ‘music-savvy drinkers’ would listen. It was a great way to start out.
With a new start there is an excitement of the life you can create in a new city. How did that excitement show itself in Atlas Studios?
The prioritizing and task-management that any move requires was something of a stress factor during our time recording at Atlas. Joe and I were frenetically searching for jobs during the day before our sessions would start. We ate microwaved spaghetti and shitty white bread because we were broke and had to be a little spendthrift. The upside was that it was incredibly liberating to know that after we finished the record we could crawl out of the windowless sound cave at Atlas and get to know a new city. I certainly hope that the urgency comes across on the record.
Many of your favorite records have been recorded by Matt Allison at Atlas Studios. Is there something magical in the air of that room? Is there a residual vibe from the previous artists that have shared that room with you?
Before we ever came to Atlas, the thought of doing a record there was extremely intoxicating. The stuff that has come out of there is almost universally awesome. When we started our first record [Delusions] there, there was a serious excitement that we got just from knowing all the amazing bands that have worked there. There isn’t anything magical about the room that makes for a good record. It’s the fact that Matt has such a good ear for recording and mixing bands like ours. This coupled with the fact that Matt and Justin Yates had become such good amigos was the motivation for us to record Leavetaking there. The thing about Matt is that he’s just a good dude, a good conversationalist, and a hardworking producer. It isn’t like he just breezes through any recording session and, using his infallibly tasteful recording prowess, makes great records. The fact that we can collaborate and even disagree about the direction of an album and Matt can be very responsive is a big part of why he is so good at what he does.
The band has accomplished many great things since Delusions came out in 2011. You have toured the world and played some pretty big deal support slots on some rather large bills. How has the last few years factored into the new record? Are there expectations you fear to meet?
It is still incredible to us that Delusions was so well-received and that we were privileged enough to take our band so many amazing places. All we can ask for with the new record is the opportunity to keep doing what we love. With that said, the new record is not a rehashing of the type of songs that were popular on Delusions. We very consciously tried to push ourselves to write something that feels different to us. The bulk of the stuff on this record is still four-chord punk, but the songs are advisedly less anthemic than our last go around. I think at some point in the past two years we became a little weary of the songs we would play every night. This record is sort of the logical progression from that wariness in that we tried to trim some of the fat that we feel bogged down our songs while trying a couple new tricks. We are certainly excited about the record. We think it sounds better than our last record and we can only hope that our fans are similarly stoked.
Catch Elway nationwide on the RED SCARE ACROSS AMERICA tour with Masked Intruder and Sam Russo.
