Publication: Drew Sandholm
Date: April 28, 2007
Title: Drew Sandholm Reports: Meg & Dia Interview
Author: Drew Sandholm
Original URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCBghG3Gex0
Drew: Hi, everyone. I'm Drew Sandholm. I'm so happy to be here a very lovely, very talented band just out of Salt Lake City, it's Meg & Dia. And I suppose this goes without saying, but perhaps you guys could just start by just introducing yourselves and then talk about what you do in the band.
Meg: Okay, well, I'm Nick, and uh... no, just kidding. I'm Meg and I play guitar.
Dia: I'm Dia and I sing.
Nick: I'm Nick and I play drums.
Drew: Okay, great, so with that set, maybe you guys could talk about the way in which you came to be, that is, how Meg & Dia formed, aside from the obvious.
Dia: We formed, Meg and I started playing acoustically when we were younger, and we had gone through various bands, as well as Nick [Nick had gone through various bands too], but the final band before this band wasn't a band but was an acoustic set and we just called it Meg and Dia 'cause it's just us two, and then we were just gonna kinda give up on trying to find a band because there had been so many problems in the past. And then one day Meg wrecked her car in a grocery store parking lot and took it to a mechanic which happened to be Nick, at Price Auto, which... his last name's Price, so you can imagine. But anyways, so he's just like looking at her bumper and trying to fix the car and then we started talking about music and he said he played drums, and Utah, I mean Draper, Utah, is pretty small, so he kinda had heard about us, and we'd actually heard about him from a friend but didn't really realize it was him, but we made him buy a CD that we had in our trunk and we ended up contacting him that night and went to a practice space and played through songs and he was awesome. So we started to form a band again, and finally got some friends to join in on guitar and bass player [...]. Anyways, it essentially started with us three, I guess.
Drew: Let's talk about some of your influences, because that's something that I find interesting in any band interview. You guys just don't draw from other bands but from something else, so I'm hoping maybe you can speak to something like that, Meg?
Meg: Yeah, well, actually... we draw inspiration from literature, like classic literature, so for example, "Monster" on our album is our first single and it's written after a book called "Easte of Eden" by John Steinbeck, just basically the concept of his monster which is a malfunctioning human being because he didn't receive enough emotion as a child and, you know, didn't turn into a normal human being.
[Dia has a grin on her face as if she is trying to hold in laughing at Meg, which occurs quite often in video interviews.]
Drew: That was way off, because I heard "Monster" and I definitely thought it was all about R.L. Stine's "Goosebumps" series.
Meg: Really? You know, I was thinking, that was my second inspiration. That's about second verse. And then "Indiana" is about a book called "Indiana" by George Sand, which everybody should read. "Tell Mary" is about a book called "Mary". Umm...
Nick: "Rebecca"...
Meg: "Rebecca"... a book called "Rebecca", and Alfred Hitchcock actually redid a movie... it's an older one, but you should check that out as well. So in the future I think that we will be doing a lot of writing from books as well, but I think that we'll take more actual real-life experiences for the next records.
Drew: Alright, so let's talk about not only, let's talk about the record, but the fact that you guys have not really been in the studio at all, you've really been on the road for an insane amount of time just tour after tour, stop after stop. How crazy has that been?
Nick: It really doesn't seem like... everyone's like, "Man, you guys tour like crazy." It doesn't seem like we tour... I mean, we tour a lot, but like compared to all the other bands out there, it just seems like we're doing the norm, you know?
Meg: It seems like we tour like crazy to me. We had two days off between our last tour and this tour. And then I think a week from the tour before that and the next tour, and we get maybe three weeks off before we're gone for a whole summer... we're doing the Warped Tour.
Dia: [Correction] Two weeks.
Meg: Basically, I don't even... we don't even live in an apartment anymore because there was no need. All our stuff's in a storage shed. I'm excited to actually move into an apartment and have a home for a couple months.
Drew: Sure. So when that happens, it must be after the Warped Tour 'cause you're gonna do Warped Tour again this year, and then maybe you'll start getting back into the studio for a follow-up album?
Dia: Yeah, we're thinking about going into the studio in early January, like next year.
Drew: Oh, well great. Alright, that will be something to look forward to. Well, last year, actually, you were at the MySpace tent... maybe we can talk about that, that was a pretty funny story I'd read once, about how you guys got into being in that area.
Meg: Well, a friend of ours was trying to get more...
Dia: [Correction] Not even a friend, just some random person...
Meg: ...but more flow of people.
Drew: Random stranger off the street?
Meg: Yeah, he was trying to get more people to come to our space... our MySpace. And Tom noticed that we had way too many people, well, it was people had to go to our MySpace to get into their homepage for some reason, like tons of people had to do that, and so Tom was gonna delete our MySpace page [...], so he has his own record label, as everybody knows, and he has been a fan of Doghouse bands for a really long time and he wrote me personally actually and said, "This is Tom from MySpace and I like your band. Maybe you could be interested in working with what we do." and I said, "Okay."
Drew: [...] I would think that if I got a message from Tom I would think something's up...
Meg: Which is exactly what I thought. That's what I thought. I was like, Tom from MySpace... nope, that's not him, so I went delete, like immediately. I'm like, this is some kind of joke [...], every single person on MySpace got this message, and he's just trying to make me feel cool. Delete. And then my manager at one of our California shows calls me and is like, "Hey, you know Tom from MySpace?" I'm like, "No. Yeah, okay who's Tom..." you know? And he was like, "Oh, well he wants to come to one of your shows," and I was like, "Oops." So then I had to go through his assistant .
Nick: What's her name again?
Meg: Her name's Bitch McCock [I think].
[All laughing]
Meg: No, actually, her real name... it's probably like Big McCooky or something.
Nick: Bick Knock.
Meg: BIck Knock, haha.
Nick: But it's spelled... so weird, and Meg was like, "I got this message from Bitch McCock. What is this?" and I was like... oh man, it was so funny.
Meg: Yeah... so and we just kind of... I've been MySpacing Tom, and you can't just directly click on his name and send him a message... he has to write to you, so I had his one mail in my inbox for the longest time and that's the only reason, so that I could keep replying to him [...]. It was between us and one other band and he just chose us to sing in the tent. [Background noise] Sounds like there's angels outside or something.
[...]
Drew: So are you guys gonna be in the MySpace tent this year again, or...
Meg and Dia: No!
Meg: Volcom stage!
Drew: The Volcom stage. Alright, cool...
Meg: It's exciting to be on a real stage, you know?
Nick: We won't have to set up the stage.
Meg: We won't have to hand out MySpace bags.
Nick: Or shoelaces, haha.
Meg: We... just be our own band.
Drew: Well, that'll be pretty fun. A lot of people are looking forward to that, because you'll be on the entire tour, right?
Nick: Yep.
Drew: Okay, great. Let's talk about the tour. Do you get to see a lot? Because I would think it would be pretty sweet to go from Chicago to St. Paul to wherever you go, down to Denver, over to St. Louis.
Meg: Oh, yeah. Actually, on the way here I was like, whoa Minneapolis, it looks like Sim City, you know, like all the buildings [...]. It does! It looks like a Nintendo game on the horizon of it.
Nick: It's hard because we sleep most of the time, like we drive through the day, and like most of us sleep except for the driver which is, on this tour, is our new tour manager Mo... he's like doing all the driving, so we're good, 'cause it has been me in the past, but now Mo's taking over the driving and I can just sleep.
Drew: What's your favorite city to play, because you guys have been over to tons of stops all over the nation, so...
Meg: I love Seattle and New York, haha.
Nick: And California...
Dia: Yeah, and LA...
Nick: Actually, anywhere in California is so good.
Dia: Chicago!
Nick: Yeah, it's pretty crazy to think that some of the stages we've played on some of our favorite bands have played on 'em, you know. Even this tour, we're playing with Saves The Day and Say Anything, those are like some of our favorite bands, and we're like... what, we're playing with these bands, that's crazy. So it's cool.
Drew: [Closes] |
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