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Publication: Salt Lake Tribune
Date: July 20, 2006
Title: Alt-pop band stops by home -- Meg & Dia: Local group learns from others as it embarks with the Warped Tour around the country; Meg & Dia gains slot on Warped Tour
Author: Dan Nailen
Original URL: http://www.sltrib.com/themix/ci_4076266
When Salt Lake-based alt-pop band Meg & Dia gathered at a coffee shop last month, the quintet was excited to embark on its first national tour, a slot on the Vans Warped Tour MySpace Stage that would take it cross-country for several months.
The group, led by songwriter/guitarist Meg Frampton, 21, and her 19-year-old lead vocalist and sister Dia, has a debut album, "Something Real," due in stores Aug. 8. And while the band - rounded out by Draper native and drummer Nick Price and Cali-based guitarist Kenji Chan and bassist Andy Grosse - had done some low-level touring, it was nothing like the trip about to start in Maryland.
Now a month into the tour and about to stop at home for the first time, Meg & Dia are still excited, but for a different reason than, say, riding on a tour bus for the first time.
"I'm so glad to get back to Salt Lake so I can switch out my clothes!" Meg said in an interview last week from Sacramento. "I've been wearing the same thing for a month."
Meg and her bandmates will have some downtime in Salt Lake before playing Saturday at the Utah State Fairpark at one of the biggest concerts of the summer. The mix of punk and emo bands and extreme-sports exhibitions is always an entertaining mish-mosh despite sweltering temperatures. Often referred to as "punk-rock summer camp" by the bands involved, Warped has been a blast for Meg & Dia so far.
"It's crazy," Meg said. "Usually we get up at 7 or 8. Then all the production buses come in, and all the band buses. We unload and put up a tent, and then we set up our merch table and our equipment at the MySpace tent, and then we're there all day."
And there's nowhere they'd rather be.
A duo becomes a band: The heart of Meg & Dia is the Korean-American sister duo who grew up in St. George for most of their childhood. When they were kids, Meg got a karaoke machine and Dia got an acoustic guitar from their parents one Christmas, but both girls soon realized their affinity for the other's gift. Meg started playing guitar and writing songs while Dia began singing and performing in public at county fairs and retirement centers.
They formed their first band when Meg was in eighth grade and continued to join or start various groups through high school. The family eventually moved to Las Vegas when Meg and Dia were performing as an acoustic duo, and the sisters decided to take a break from working together. Meg was about to head to college in California when she had a chance to join some friends from St. George in Salt Lake City instead. Dia decided to finish high school via a distance-learning program and joined her sister in the spring of 2005.
"We still wanted to do music together," Dia said.
After a couple of acoustic shows together, Meg got into a fortuitous fender-bender just as she and Dia were deciding they wanted a bigger sound. The mechanic who fixed Meg's bumper turned out to be drummer Nick Price, and after he bought a copy of Meg & Dia's self-produced demo CD, Price knew he wanted in.
"It was just good," said Price, a veteran of several local bands. "I could tell there was something there, for sure."
Chan, who met Dia in Las Vegas when one of his California bands played there, soon got a call when Meg and Dia decided a second guitar player was needed to beef up the band's sound. He dropped everything and moved into Price's Draper basement.
"My dad always told me, 'You're not in a real band unless you're in a band with a female lead singer,' " Chan recalled.
The band's demo made its way into the hands of some label folks and Meg & Dia signed to Doghouse Records, home to some of alt-rock's hottest up-and-coming acts, like Say Anything, Limbeck and Koufax.
To hear the sisters tell it, their parents never assumed anything less than record deals and national tours would follow when the girls expressed an interest in music.
"It's kind of like they expected it to happen," Meg said of her parents, noting that her dad was a DJ back in his 20s and her mother was an amateur singer. "Ever since we were younger, they've really encouraged us to do music. They actually told us to skip college and focus on music. They've been really supportive."
Back to the future: The Warped Tour runs through mid-August, just after "Something Real" hits store shelves, so Meg & Dia will be looking to latch onto another tour to help promote the album. In the meantime, MySpace.com has highlighted the group as a "featured artist" several times, and the Warped Tour Web site has a short feature on it and the MySpace Stage.
Meg said the MySpace exposure has helped the band find fans in far-flung places, but at most stops on the tour, only a handful of people know the group's music before it plays one of its two or three daily sets.
Not that the band minds being relatively unknown. The musicians have made friends with members of other Warped bands like Motion City Soundtrack and Gym Class Heroes, and their all-access passes allow members of Meg & Dia to watch bigger bands closely in hopes of learning tricks of the touring trade.
"I just go onstage and watch bands up close and personal and watch what they do, how they perform," Meg said. "We play on the MySpace Stage every day, and it's very cramped and the stage is ridiculously tiny. When we were allowed to play on a bigger stage, a huge amphitheater-size stage, the extra space really freaked us out.
"I was like, 'Wow, I can move two feet to the left and two feet to the right instead of standing in place.' We actually had a really bad show because we didn't know how to utilize the space. When I watch other bands now, I'm always watching how they walk around onstage and interact with the audience."
Sounds like there's a little learnin' going on at summer camp this year. |
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