Welcome to BuzzMusic and thanks for joining us! This past summer you released your self-titled album, how did you find the process of creating, recording, and releasing that album? Was it how you imagined it would be?
Creating the songs for the record happened really organically. Each time we got together in our early rehearsals, one of us would bring an idea to the table and the rest of us would flesh it out. Then, we just gigged. A LOT. And took what worked and what didn’t and refined those cuts by gigging them all over the place. Once we started getting asked for CDs at each show, we knew that we needed to get a record out. The recording was kind of a different story. Initially, we’d booked time with an engineer that we really dug (Ethan Wilson), but after a couple of attempts stymied by technical snafus, we ended up DIYing the entire thing. We recorded the vocals and different instruments in a variety of places from Corban University, NW School of Music, band member's houses, and even a storage space. It’s not how we imagined it would be at all, but we are so stoked on how the record came out.
When you toured the west coast of North America, which was your favorite show to play, and why? The West Coast tour was a cover-to-cover blast, but our favorite dates were the California shows. In San Diego, we played this little club called City Pub, and it was just a vibe the entire night. The owner was super cool, the club was sweaty and packed, and it seemed like everyone picked up what we were putting down. Sacramento had a fun rotation of patrons visiting and talking with us between sets, most of whom want to get us drinks or take shots with us. They were down to party and it felt good playing to a room of people who we excited about our tour and enjoying our set. Our last show of the tour was a house show in San Jose, which ruled. There’s actually some footage from that show at the end of the Appreciate video. How did the collaboration with Santiam Brewing come about? Are you interested in pursuing other similar collaborations? We decided a while ago that we really wanted to do a collaboration with a brewery. We reached out to several local breweries and we ultimately decided to go with Santiam Brewing because they hadn't ever done something like this before and were just as excited as we were. We got to be super involved in the whole process, from selecting the type of beer we wanted to make, to tasting the malts going in, to brewing the beer, and then finally releasing it. It was a very hands-on and rewarding experience, and definitely something we would love to do again. The sentence “our band has a beer” is still one of our favorite sentences. Santiam Brewing was amazing to work with and we would jump on the opportunity to work with them again, but we would also be interested in other collaborative enterprises in the future. You recently released a music video for "Appreciate", did you enjoy the process of filming and making that video? Do you plan on releasing any more? The Appreciate video was shot on our phones throughout the course of the tour and is really just an anthology from the tour. So, yeah, the process of filming it was fun because we were out on tour just doing the thing. We did release a second video for Neckwrecker as a sort of b-side to Appreciate, and we have a few more videos in the pipeline for 2020. What can listeners expect to be next for you in the coming new year? The plan for 2020 is to record another full-length album, do some smaller tours, and start getting more heavily involved in the festival circuit. If there’s somewhere you want to see us play, you can contact our manager, Katy, at contact@theferenjis.com.