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Publication: Shout!
Date: April 2007
Title: Meg and Dia: A Masterpiece in the Making
Author: Ashley Apathetic
Original URL: http://www.a-pathetic.net/zine/archives/179
Meg and Dia Frampton were encouraged from a very young age to make music. Little did Mom and Dad know that their ironic Christmas gifts of a guitar for Dia and a karaoke machine for Meg (Dia now sings, and Meg plays the guitar) would lead their daughters to playing a dirt floored tent at "punk rock summer camp," MTV recognition, and features in the best small music webzines (heehee).
Currently on tour supporting their first album Something Real with Anberlin, Bayside, and Jonezetta, Meg and Dia were more than happy to sit down and talk to Shout! about where they've come from, what's yet to come, and the difficulties of bridging the gap between acoustic sound and bonafide band.
S!: This past year has been huge for you all. What has being the "official MySpace band" on this past summer's Warped Tour done for you?
Dia: Warped tour last year was definitely the hardest tour we've ever done, we were really lucky to get it the way we got it. Some guy, who was a fan of ours (we don't know him personally), messaged us and said 'hey, I really like you guys' music, and I wanna send some traffic your way,' and we were like 'hey, that's nice of you, cool.' Then all of a sudden, we start getting like hate mail from people saying 'I can't even get onto my page without adding you guys!' We were like 'what is going on?!' And we found out that he'd set up some kind of virus, I guess, so that it would do that, and it got a ton of attention from the people that run MySpace.
Dia: They were going to shut down our page, but instead, they said 'there's a spot in the MySpace tent, would ya'll like to do it?' So we said said yeah! Ever since then, it definitely got us a lot of attention because it was connected with MySpace. They put us on the front page for five or six days, which gave us a lot of attention just from the web, which was huge. Then we got to play the whole Warped tour, but we had to set up the stage and we played in a dirt tent. We didn't even play a stage, but it was worth it. But it's neat to see, like we're doing Warped tour again this year, and we actually get a stage, so we've worked our way up and we've actually progressed over the year. The record came out the last three days of Warped tour, which I was so mad about because the whole tour we were selling EPs! But it was doing steady, then ever since MTV's discover download thing, sales jumped...not a lot, but a bit, and that's been really helpful. But our album's been kinda smooth sailing. It's not doing amazing, but I'm not disappointed whatsoever. I'm just grateful to have an album out and be touring on it, and that's what's cool. I also like hands-on, like going to play a show, seeing kids come up after and buy the album one by one.
S!: Literature seems to inspire a lot of your lyrics, which can get quite intellectual at times. Do you ever worry that less well-read people aren't getting what you wanted to convey from a song?
Meg: No. I think that there are specific instances in the songs where if you've read what the song was referring to, you're obviously gonna understand it a little better and know in more detail what I'm talking about. But universally, the topics that I wrote about are some kind of feelings or emotions that are universal to everybody, not just people that are familiar with the literature, but everybody that's alive. So even if you haven't read it, you're still gonna understand that it's about love or death, or wrecking your car or whatever the song's about.
S!: What made you take the leap from acoustic duo to full fledged band?
D: We've had a band since, I think I was in eighth or ninth grade when we first started our band, but it wasn't serious. We'd been doing a lot of stuff, and we started our first kind of serious band at 14 and Meg was 16, which was really nice, because all of the other members were 26 and 22 years old so they had a lot of experience and had been in tons of bands, so that helped. But with this band, we got really serious. I think it was actually a person that made us want to get serious, because it was just Meg and I playing acoustically, like 'wow, we're not sure what to do with this.' It was getting kind of sketchy. Money was tight, and you can't just sit there and gamble your time away when all of your friends are doing well in college. But we just ran into Nick, our drummer now, when we were in Salt Lake, and he was just such an amazing drummer...I just said 'this is the foundation of our band.' So it really was our drummer that made the band happen. We just started jamming with him and all three of us clicked and had really great chemistry. That's when we said 'hey, this is a good band.' We have an amazing drummer, drummers are really hard to find, and we added members...our friend started playing bass, and we were a four piece for a while. That's when we said 'hey, let's try to do something with this,' and contacted some old friends who contacted a manager.
S!: Did you find it difficult to work with new people after having worked together just the two of you for so long?
M: It's hard even right now! When you have just an acoustic guitar and a vocal, there's basically two things you need to pay attention to: melody line, basic chord structure. When you bring in a rhythm section, the drums, and you have a bass, and then you have another guitar, there's a whole bunch of different elements that you need to bring together. Just recently I'm figuring out that there's so much technical stuff involved in making a band sound good. Vocals are like the highs, bass and the drums are the lows, and guitars are the mids, and you have to arrange them all so that it comes out sounding full and emotional like you want it to sound. So now, when I'm writing newer stuff, I have to keep in mind like, the drums. The drums, of themselves, sometimes make a song. I don't know, like Hot Hot Heat, or dance songs, where the drums basically ARE the song. The drums are so important, and I never even realized that before. So now I focus on drums, then you get in the guitar, and the guitars have to go with the vocals, and then the guitars have to go with each other, and the bass line has to be something interesting. When you bring in different elements, it's completely different than acoustic, sound wise, and also when you're performing. To have a full band back you up is a completely different experience.
S!: What's next, and when can we expect a follow up to Something Real?
D: We have, obviously, this tour...and we have Warped tour, the whole two months confirmed. Our album, we're gonna start writing in late winter. It seems so far away but...
M: That doesn't seem far away at all! That's like, so soon to write a record. Like, I don't even know how to make it different from this one. When you're a writer, you have to be aware of everything, and you have to learn to listen more, you have to learn to listen better, you have to learn to innovate different kinds of rhythms and melodies and techniques into your music to make it better than what you used to write. So it's kind of a lot of pressure to throw that much at a musician or a songwriter in such a short amount of time...
S!: You'll do it, I have faith. |
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