Seven Questions with Tent Revival

If you happened to be in Charleston this weekend for the CD release show of The Working Title, you would have witnessed how tight the Charleston music scene runs together.  Not only did the bill feature three of Charleston’s best acts, but Joel Hamilton brought some great musicians together to build his band.  Saturday night the guitarist of The Working Title was Joel’s roommate Owen Beverly.  For their new Southern Gothic experimenl be tht, the boys of I Nine have teamed up with Owen to form Tent Revival.

If you watched the video we got of Steven Fiore recently you learned that he has moved back to Charleston from Boston.  Fiore and Tim Brantley round out the bill this Thursday night at New Brookland Tavern.

What genre of music do you consider your work to be?

<Owen> Rock n’ Roll

Where did the idea for forming Tent Revival come from?

<Owen>Brian, Bryan and Matt asked me if I wanted to be in a band with

them and I initially declined. However they baited me with free food

and a free place to stay which eventually won me over.  Benji and I

have always run in the same pack so it was more like a merger than

anything. They are all good players also and nice people.

Is there a common theme that runs behind the songs in Tent Revival?

<Owen> Happiness and glee, I mean sarcasm. I mean stuff about people

and places and rising and falling, neutral stuff, emo stuff, social

commentary but mostly BS.

Everyone in Tent Revival has had some experience with Major

Labels. What exactly happened with you concerning labels and the music

industry?

<Brian> Bryan, Matt, and I were in a band by the name of I Nine for a

while that was on J Records. It was a cool experience, and also a very

eye opening one. Long story short with that is : label spends money

having us make an album, label acts excited about the album (while we

might or might not be), label starts promoting the album, uh ho! oops.

CEO gets fired. New CEO doesn’t like album, or us, we get dropped. Of

course there is a lot more to the story, but we should hold off for

another time.

I know Owen and Benji have had run ins with the labels as well. I won’t

speak on their behalf, but I’m sure that they’d have some

real….uhm…nice things to say as well. 🙂

Do you have any music business advice for younger bands in

South Carolina that are just getting started out?

<Brian> I remember reading all kinds of things online years ago trying

to figure out how to get things going, what connections I could make,

who we could get in with. All that stuff is good. Being connected is

definitely good. But, You need to spend time developing your “brand”

of music whatever that is. That in the end is the most important

thing. Any band that is even mildly successful has a vibe, tunes that

go with that vibe on some level, and a plan of how to reach those

people (fans) that get what they do. If you have your stuff together,

work hard on getting people out to shows, and try to extrapolate that

to different markets, you will succeed and will get noticed.

Describe a normal day off and describe a normal show day for

you and the band.

<Matt> A typical day when there’s no gig that night usually starts

with some form of caffeine. We each have our respective things we do

to pay the rent. They aren’t usually jobs per se. More like odd jobs.

The day usually encompasses trying to make enough to get to the next

gig day.

A typical gig day is different. It starts the same (with coffee)

but most of that day is spent driving, burning CD’s, and making last

minute calls to get butts in the seat that night. Because this project

is fairly new we are just working to get the word out that we exist

and trying to get people turned on to this thing. We are pretty

psyched about it so that makes the self promotion all the easier. Then

that night we play the gig.

What are some bands you are currently listening to?

<Matt> Umm… the cookie monster has a killer rendition of a Jay Z song

on youtube. So there’s that. This is always a fun question because we

get to say well we all are listening to something different, which is

usually true. I still like My Morning Jacket’s last record a lot and

that pays a visit to my car’s cd player quite a bit. We’ve been

listening to a lot of early nineties stuff too lately. Nirvana seems to

get played quite a bit. Oh yeah and we are all listening to The Secret

on repeat.