Interview With The Sun And The Sea

The Graduate released one of my favorite albums of 2010, as well as some great b-side EPs in 2011, so when they broke up in July of 2011, I was heartbroken. However, all members but vocalist Corey Warning decided to keep making music as The Sun and The Sea, adding vocalist Chris Rhein to fill that void. Max Sauer took some time to answer some questions from us at MuzikDizcovery, such as how they decided as Chris Rhein to be their vocalist, the basis and themes for the Nightfalls EP, where the band sees The Sun And The Sea in comparison to The Graduate, physical copies, a new music video, and much more which you can read below.

Most of you guys used to be in The Graduate, but when did The Sun And The Sea officially begin?

Actually, probably before The Graduate even ended. Jared, Matt, Tim, and myself just kept on writing music. In December, we released some instrumental tracks just to let people know that we weren’t done writing music and being a band in some form or another. Then in early fall, we added our good friend Chris Rhein to join the group as a vocalist and ever since then we’ve just been working on music. We recorded two months ago and put the EP out right away with him. It’s been pretty well received so far.

Those instrumental demos, were those demos of tracks from Nightfalls EP?

Actually, no, none of them ended up on the EP. We’ll probably work on them some time down the road, but for this newest EP we decided to write all new material. We probably got antsy and wanted to write new music anyways, so that’s what we decided to do.

How did you decide on Chris Rhein to be your vocalist?

Well, we’ve known him for a while and we have really similar music taste, and he’s a great musician and a great singer, but honestly, most importantly, because he’s just an awesome guy. He’s really gelled well with us. He has a great personality, real positive, and he’s awesome to work with. He actually went with The Graduate in one of our last tours and sold merch for us, so that’s how we became closer with him. He was actually in a couple bands in our area, and we used to play shows together, so we’ve known him for quite some time now.

The Nightfalls EP, that’s been out for a week or two now. How’s the fan reaction been?

It’s actually been a lot better than I thought it would be. It’s been almost all positive things. We were kind of initially thinking that we’d get a lot of bad feedback because The Graduate had a lot of loyal fans, so you’d have to expect that people wouldn’t like it not because of what it is, but because it’s not The Graduate, but we actually have gotten a lot of great responses and we feel like we’re just beginning. We’re like slowly starting a new group and we are going to record again but we got a lot of things ahead of us. We’re probably going to make a music video very song in a month or so, and we’re very excited for that.

Give us a little detail on the creation and maybe the themes of the record.

The whole attitude of the record is that we didn’t play by any rules. When we were writing the songs, we weren’t trying to make every song a hit or ever worry about having a big chorus or a normal tradition structure, we wanted more of a very laid back and free flowing album with no rules to it. A lot of the songs aren’t traditionally structured, they aren’t verse-chorus-verse-chorus-verse-chorus. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it was fun not to have to worry about that for this release, and not really care about it as long as we were happy with it. It really made the process so much fun. There was no stress writing this. It was like, so what? If people hate it, they’re going to hate it, and if they love it, awesome. Let’s just enjoy this. And I had a great time writing this.

Compared to The Graduate, where do you see The Sun and The Sea from a musical perspective? Do you see it as an extension of The Graduate, or something totally different?

It definitely has similarities, because to be honest, it’s four musicians from The Graduate forming a new band. So there are going to be similarities, but with this new group, what we want to do is be able to go off in a different direction and be able to go in a more progressive writing style and not have to worry about sounding one particular way or rules. I’m excited to see where it goes after this. Right now, this first release is really ambient and atmospheric, and we love that sort of thing, so I’m sure we’ll continue incorporating that, but as for our next release will go, I’m not sure. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.

Is there any plan for a vinyl or other physical copy of the EP?

Yeah, we talked about it. We will definitely have CDs. We don’t have any news on that yet, but in a month or so we’ll know. As for vinyl, we’d love to, but we’ll probably have to discuss that a little bit more. There will definitely be CDs within the next couple months. Why have the hassle of printing CDs, why not just put it online right away and see what people think about it first. Because we didn’t know. We didn’t know if it would get hate or love, but it’s been very well received, so we’ll definitely be printing some CDs.

Have you been in any contact with any labels or do you feel you will be going independent for a while?

We’re definitely going to take our time. People have talked to us, but we’re not going to rush into anything because we just want to take some time to see what we are and find out what we want to do before we rush out and sign, if we sign, we don’t know yet, it’s all up in the air. After being in a full time band for so long, it’s kind of nice having a little break and not having to really worry about all the business things right now. It’s having fun and being serious at the same time. It’s a new outlook for us.

Are there any upcoming tours that you are planning?

We don’t have any tours planned at the moment, but we will be doing a lot of shows in the Midwest this summer. There’s a good chance that we’ll be playing a couple shows on the east coast late summer and early fall, but we don’t have any plans at the moment. We do have some different ideas coming up, and we’ll be revealing some of those in time.

Any other plans that are coming up for the rest of the summer?

In a month from now, we’ll be doing a music video for the song “Can’t Keep Breaking Your Heart”. We’ll be doing a video for that probably in Chicago. We’ll be playing a lot of shows, probably trying out some new things, and we’ll see.

Any final things you have to say?

Check us out on Facebook. Our site is facebook.com/thesunandthesea, and there has the links for the album on iTunes and Bandcamp and all that good stuff, and our twitter is @sunandthesea, and thanks for having us.

I'd like to thank the band again for taking time to answer questions from us here at MuzikDizcovery. The band has already released one great EP this year in Nightfalls, and we're all looking forward to hear what the band has next. As Max said above, you can check out their Facebook and follow them on Twitter, and make sure to stream and purchase the EP on their Bandcamp page.