Neu Sleepies

After their recent show at Death By Audio in Brooklyn, we caught up with Thomas, Josh and Max of Sleepies on a stoop in Williamsburg to talk a little bit about how they got started, what kind of music they’re influenced by, the fact that Max is still learning how to play the drums…

Tell us a bit about how you got started.
Josh: We all met freshman year of college actually. Thomas and Max lived across the hall from each other and I was friends with a girl that Thomas, had a crush on Thomas and then I met them. Actually I met you for the first time with Rachel.
Max: Yeah, the girl who booked the show tonight. Then we had a couple aborted band attempts, like we did some bad dance band thing and never played a show. They used to play a lot.
Josh: We played with another drummer and then he left and Max, Max this is the first band he has ever played drums in. We, our drummer moved to dc and we asked max to play and that band fell apart. We started this in what? 2007?
Max: Yeah November 2007.
Josh: Yeah, and Thomas and I have lived together for 6 years now so…
Thomas: I’m his live in wife.

So what kind of things influenced you to cohese as this trio?
Thomas: Well, I don’t know, we were doing this other band and like Josh said they guy who was playing drums left and then max was going to take his place and we would keep doing that band and it mostly just turned into this thing.
Max: It was mostly about the being friends thing as you said I couldn’t really play drums and they just said he do you want to be in a band we need a drummer.
Josh: Yeah, like throughout all of it it’s been kinda an excuse to hang out and get drunk and play music. As we have been playing more we have noticed more things that annoy us with bands in NY and we kind of have been like…
Max: Don’t do that.
Josh: Yeah exactly. This band has been sort of an example of what we don’t like, we are trying to do exactly the opposite.
Max: We all like similar stuff, I think our tastes started out a lot more, maybe divergent.
Josh: Well we were younger…
Max: And its all kind of converged. There is a bunch of stuff we all like that we use as a point of reference, but we have really different sensibilities too. Thomas is into the kind of weirder like post punk-y stuff…
Thomas: I thought you were going to bring up Van Morrison.
Josh: Thomas is really into Van Morrison.
Max: Josh is on a post garage kick right now…
Josh: Yeah I’m on a garage kick recently. We all meet in the middle really well. Max likes like Young Jeezy. I’m not making a joke, Max brings the pop sensibilities.
Max: I suppose.
Josh: [As Max] No check out the new lady gaga song. Its great!
Max: Or the new Springsteen album.
Josh: Yeah he’s really into Springsteen.
Max: Now they will take me seriously.
Josh: He talked us into putting a saxophone on one of our songs recently…
Max: And it worked!
Josh: And it did work.

So you really didn’t play drums until you started doing it for the band?
Max: I mean I’ve been in bands in high school where I played guitar and sing but the best part of band practice was always when the drummer would go to the bathroom and I would like sidle behind the drum kit and bang on shit.
Josh: Sadly that hasn’t worked for me. I still don’t know how to play.
Max: I have always been a nervous person so I have the tendency to rhythmically tap on things anyway.
Josh: He has gotten really good though. If there is one thing that has happened, we have been playing for nearly 2 ½ years now and we have all gotten so much better at our instruments and its kind of fun to not be terrible at playing any more. It makes it a lot easier.
Max: We write things that we can’t play and then figure out how to play them.

Do you feel overwhelmed being in the NYC scene? There are so many bands, so many people playing…
Josh: Yeah, a lot actually. It’s….
Max: It’s really hard to play good shows here.
Josh: There are a lot of good bands, there definitely are but we don’t fit on a lot surprisingly, which is funny because you’d think that a punk band would be ubiquitous but there is just always something to do so there are a lot of shows where people just don’t show up. Tonight was good; it was one of our more well attended shows. Our first couple shows we just emailed venues and got placed on the worst shows, with singer songwriters, really misogynistic hardcore bands. It’s really easy to get shows, it’s just hard to get good ones.
Max: We have managed to play some really great shows here though. Our second show, when we were terrible was with the measure and cheap girls and like all these huge punknews.org bands now. They were all really nice guys and we were like we don’t know what we are doing, thanks for putting us on.
Josh: We fucked up a lot.
Max: Yeah.

Yeah but you handle it charmingly…
Josh: That’s our plan, if we fuck up a lot at least we do it charmingly.

If you could put together your all time favorite lineup, any artist, living / dead, formed / unformed, who would it be?
Josh: I should this band out every fucking time, but every interview we have done, all two of them before this one, I need to say that my favorite band to play with has been Leg Sweeper from Dallas, they are the funnest guys in the world and they instantly got what we were about and we got them and being stuck in a car with them for a week was really fun, if not a little terrifying.
Max: It was love at first sight. Not barring the space-time continuum?

Anything, I mean anything.
Josh: Max is going to name a bunch of San Francisco bands. I would like to play with Hickey.
Max: That would have been amazing. Hickey would have been totally perfect. I could say a bunch of ridiculous bands that wouldn’t fit, like I would like to play with the E Street band, which is not unheard of, Bruce Springsteen is a huge Gaslight Anthem fan it turns out.
Josh: Who would you like to play with Thomas? He has the best taste I think.
Max: At least the most discriminating.
Thomas: I don’t know I mean, I really like The Urinals, but I would like to play with them because I would get to watch them play.
Josh: I feel that way about The Wipers too.
Max: Yeah or like Bikini Kill.
Thomas: On the other hand I feel like I would be just too terrified to play with them.
Max: We would play really poorly at this show.

What are you up to in the next period of time?
Josh: We record with Ben Greenberg, who plays in the band Pigmy Shrews has this studio in the basement of a church that couldn’t afford to keep doing school there so they rent it out as studio space. Its called Python Patrol because of the Boy Scout troop that used to meet down there, there is a banner and everything. He is a genius and makes everything so comfortable and knows so much more about music than we do.
Max: He has perfect pitch. Make sure that gets in there.
Josh: Yeah, we were recording with him and he was like, guys I think you should change that E. We were like, oh yeah? How did you know, do you have perfect pitch? He just looked at us deadpan and was like, Of course.
Max: But yeah we are going to go out the West Coast and tour California in January because my folks are still out there and we can borrow a pickup truck which would be nice.
Josh: We should go to Sebastopol.
Max: Yeah and try to go to Sebastopol.
Thomas: And pick some apples…
Josh: Can we pick apples there?
Max: Yeah of course, they fall right off the tree.
Josh: What’s the point if you are just picking them off the ground?
Max: You don’t understand farming Josh. We are going to try to do a 7” at some point if we can get anyone to put it out. Nick the drummer from Mr. Dream offered to record us in the next couple months; we are going to do a couple songs with him. We have one finished new song that we played tonight and one where we finished the music to on Monday and we are going to work that out, trying to put it together. Eventually going to record another LP ya know in a years time.
Josh: I want to make our version of End Of The Century.
Max: But good right?
Josh: Yeah but good. I want Bill Sechler and the Ceiling of Noise.
Max / Thomas: The Ceiling of Noise.
Max: Fuck the wall of sound nonsense.