Interview with A Great Big Pile Of Leaves

On the November 12th date of A Great Big Pile Of Leaves tour with Motion City Soundtrack, Say Anything, and Saves the Day, the band agreed to do an interview with us (myself and my photographer, Andrea). The band is definitely full of very talented people and the band has a bright future ahead.

Who are you and what do you play in the band?

My name’s Tyler, and I play drums in A Great Big Pile of Leaves

I know that this is your first real tour. What do you think about being on tour with bands such as Say Anything, Motion City Soundtrack…

It’s been crazy. I’ve been friends with Jesse from Motion City for a few years now, and he heard the record and got us on tour, and we thought it was a big joke when it happened. He sent me an email one night – I remember it so clearly – he sent me an email and said “do you think you guys would be able to do the tour” like what do you mean be able to do the tour like of course we will do the tour. So a month later he called me up and said we got on it and it’s just been crazy. I grew up on Saves The Day and all these bands and being able to play with them every night has been amazing.

I know you guys have been releasing most of your albums for free. What is your motivation for doing this? Are you just trying to get the word out for the band?

Yeah, that’s mostly it. We kinda said it very early in our career that we just wanted to make as many fans as possible as quick as possible and we were able to afford recording equipment, so we kept our budget so it wasn’t like we needed to get all the money back. So we decided we could either make a few bucks off the friends we had or we could push our music and turn it on to as many people as possible.

You guys have a very…interesting band name, artwork, song titles. Is it mostly just you guys are having fun with it or…

Yeah, definitely. We take our band seriously, but not really ourselves. So we kinda throw that in to it. We do that for fun. And the band name is a throwback to childhood, it’s very nostalgic, so we kind of play with that in all regards of our band, like graphic design, just everything.

I know you said you listened to Saves The Day when you were growing up. What other influences do you get in your music or just to play music?

I don’t know, we don’t really…well, I don’t know, it’s more self-conscious, we don’t really think of anything like let’s try to sound like this, or like, sometimes we do, but it won’t be very often. I’ve been listening to this band Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, they are amazing. The guy from Death Cab For Cutie just produced their new record, stuff like that, Band Of Horses.

If you guys had to create a genre for yourself, like, make a name for your style, I know you guys have jazzy influences, some indie influences, if you could just make up a name for it, what would you call it?

I don’t know, that’s probably the hardest question I’ve ever gotten. *chuckles*  I don’t know, let’s come back to that one, I’ll keep thinking about it.

*editor’s note* You can still respond if you want Tyler.

Are there any b-sides for the record or any other tracks you plan on releasing?

We’ve released everything we’ve ever recorded, except for one song, and that is an alternate version of the song from the new record, “Break Back Breakfast” so I’m not sure if we will ever release it, we may do a b-sides or remix record at one point and we may just throw it on there, but yeah, we’ve released everything we’ve ever written. Whether that’s good or bad I don’t know.

Due to being on this tour, are you guys getting any label recognition? Any offers?

We got a booking agent, we kinda assembled a crew. Jesse from Motion City Soundtrack is now our manager. Just a bunch of stuff, trying to line up lawyers. But yeah, hopefully after the tour we’ll be looking at some stuff.

If you could pick any one of the bands on the tour to cover one of your songs, who would it be and which song?

We actually might be doing that in real life soon. I don’t know if I should trick you by saying the wrong band…or…I’ll just put out a lot of mights. We might be doing a cover of one of the bands songs and they might do a cover of one of our songs and we may release two singles or something on a vinyl or something. It may happen in January.

Is there any question that you’ve always been wanted to be asked that you’ve never been asked before? We’ve gotten some very interesting answers from that one.

Probably the question you just asked, I don’t know, these questions are super hard, you guys are good. I think I need to come back to that one too.

So did you think of the genre thing yet?

No, you guys are good, we usually get asked about the band name, the artwork, whatever they think of.

Thank you for the interview.

Of course.

Please check out A Great Big Pile Of Leaves on future tours and be sure to download their records for free on their website, http://agreatbigpileofleaves.com/