Catching Up With... It's Elephant's

It's been a big year for It's Elephant's. The band released its first full-length, Little Trouble In Chinatown, in April (for free) and recording has already commenced on a follow-up. Somehow, between various local shows-- including performances at Atlantis, Corndogorama, Grant Park Summer Shade Festival and a session with HaveYouHeard.net-- the band had time to create a very special Halloween gift for their fans, which involved a trip to a Civil War cemetary that's reportedly oozing with paranormal activity.

Paste recently talked with the band-- vocalist Brent Jay, vocalist/percussionist Garrett Range, vocalist/keyboardist Matt Compton and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist David Fountain-- about touring, the benefits of free music and where the guys came up with that baffling name.

Paste: How did you evolve into the setup you have now?
Jay: Garrett and I have known each other for, I don’t know, eight or 10 years now, playing music together. David and I went to high school together so and Matt…
Range: We met Matt through another friend of ours that we knew musically, so it’s kind of all like just one big musical heritage.
Jay: It just happened that the band that we met Matt through asked us to be the backing band for some of his songs and we hit it off really well with Matt, but Garrett was really disenchanted with playing music…
Range: Garrett didn’t like Matt’s sandals. (Laughter)
Jay: Matt wore flip-flops, and Garrett was completely against it so he wouldn’t play with him. (Laughs) Garrett’s shallow…
Range: No, I’m not shallow. I can’t think of how anyone could play drums wearing flip-flops.
Compton: I didn’t play drums wearing flip flops. I just wore them to social gatherings.
Range: What I would like for you to know is he saved all of his lunch money for a year to buy his first drum set.
Compton: First of all, you got it wrong, it was three years. But it is true.

Paste: What grade were you?
Compton: (Deadpan) I was a senior. (Everybody laughs) I was a freshman in college, and, gah, it was hard. No, actually I was in sixth grade. And I just showed up one day with all of these wads of one dollar bills and bought my first drum set.
Fountain: Completely emaciated from not eating.
Compton: I think my parents thought I was selling drugs because I always had these one dollar bills.

Paste: So what is It’s Elephants?
Jay: Me, Garrett and Matt were a band for six months at this point and we were throwing every dumb name we could out there, such as “How It Sounds From The Bottom.” What was another one? “Scarred Seality.” (Laughter) “Gee”...
Range: "Gee"—G-E-E.
Compton: Spelled G-A-Y… (Laughter)
Range: It’s still a great name for a band. Well, Brent just said it one day, “What about 'It’s Elephants'?”
Jay: No, no, no, no. You said, out of the blue, the dumbest name we had come up with yet, and I was like, “Dude, that’s like calling the band 'It’s Elephants'.” And then we all just kind of stopped and looked at each other, and were like, "Well, there it is." 

Paste: So, tell me-- why give your music away?
Fountain: I think that if people become fans of a band because of their music, the thing that makes the most sense is to try to get the music to the most number of people possible. As opposed to just putting them in a store, instead of "Oh, give us $10 and then you can have the privilege of listening to our music," it just kind of makes more sense to get the songs out there.
Compton: We try to make it easy to download, too. We have it on our MySpace, so if you want it, it’s there.

Paste:: You have a new 7" release. Is that something where you’re planning on touring [in support of it]?
Jay: We just want to be smart with touring. We don’t really have a lot of money to just get in a van and go. It’s also disheartening when you do that and you’re playing to like five people a night when you could just be sitting at home telling five people a night on your computer about your band.
Compton: We’ve all been in this long enough to know you don’t just get in a van and leave.
Jay: I mean, we’ve gone out of town a couple times as a band, and we plan on going out of town often, but we’re going to do a weekend warrior kind of thing for a while and actually build up a demand first.
Range: I think all of us, we don’t have that youthful abandonment anymore.
Dave: I kind of feel like we all read On the Road, but we all read it a long time ago. (Laughter)
Range: I actually read that when I was touring, and I was like, “This is awesome!” I don’t even think Jack Kerouac was doing that shit when he was 27, was he?

Paste: Tell me more about the release itself.
Range: It should be done in mid-November. Whenever it comes out, we’ll have a show for it.
Jay: I have nodes on my vocal chords right now, so that kind of has pushed everything back unexpectedly.
Range: We should actually call the record Brent and His Nodes.

It’s Elephant’s will be playing Nov. 10 at Lenny’s with Sleeping in the Aviary and Brightblack Morning Light, and on Nov. 28 at the Drunken Unicorn with Thunderbolt 5 and Jucifer.