KDUP Rock The Bluff Interview: Verb8im

I’m a little curious how you guys met and how the band formed together?

Lucas: This is a good story. I can tell the part about me and Aiden meeting. Me and Aiden went to the same high school together, and so we started getting involved in music…it was a little while ago… like the sophomore year of high school. We started playing music together, and it was very just like, back and forth, me and him. Then we ended up getting a band together just with some other kids, and that was super fun, but it eventually kind of like fizzled out. And then we got into another band called Wasted Saturday, and that was kind of our moment of like “Oh, we should keep doing this, and we should keep progressing”… Then we both came to Eugene. Whoever wants to tell that story…

Aidan: Me and Lucas come down to Eugene…It was just pretty known that we wanted to do music. We had so much fun in high school, and it really peaked, like, our little high school band…I don’t want to say little – it was awesome – but got really awesome right towards the end of our senior year. So right before we were about to graduate, and we were so high on the adrenaline rush of playing live. So we came down and we were like “Let’s do it.” Then I looked at him, and I was like, ‘Whatever we don’t find, I’ll play. We’ll make it work. Let’s do it. So I ended up rushing Greek life and Tripp ended up being in my punch class, and I heard through some of the older guys that he played drums. It was a really awkward conversation of me walkin up to him like “Hey, I heard you play drums.”

Tripp: Literally, exactly what he said. I don’t want to be that guy that says ‘verbatim’ every time…

Aidan: But I said that verbatim, whatever that means. But I went up to him, and he sat behind a kit, and I was like “Wow, he just humbled me and everything I’ve done in 10 years of playing the drums”, I was like “For sure, you can do it.” And I don’t know if anyone else can relate to this, but when you’re in the big lecture halls, you kind of sit in the same seat throughout the term, and it’s just like habit. And my same seat happened to be next to his same seat.

Will:  And I saw him looking at guitars one day, and I was like “Oh, do you play guitar?” And he was like “Yeah, I played bass, mainly bass and drums.” And I was like “Oh, sweet. I also play guitar.” And he’s like “Oh, I’m starting to band. Send me videos of you playing.” And so I sent him a clip of me playing “Sick Love” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers in 10th grade with my band from high school. And he was like “Yeah.”  And so then we met and practiced, and it was history from there. 

Tripp: That’s your favorite Chili Peppers…

Aidan: That is my favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers Song.

For someone who had never heard of verbatim, how would you describe the band to someone to try to introduce them?

 Lucas: A lot of things. It is a wide variety of, I would even say, different genres of music. We can go from playing pretty calm, more relaxed things, to really amping it up and, getting more into the punk side of things. For me, personally, I try to go for, like, the… kind of like this skate punk, Australian punk music. But everyone else has their own, their own stuff. 

Tripp: And honestly, now that I’m thinking about it…My dad and my sister; they love that heavy metal, Dream Theater – we saw them just as a family the other day when they came to Portland. But I really feel like seeing Verb8tim is more than just like a show, and it’s kind of an experience. Because if you haven’t heard us before, you don’t really know what’s going to happen. And I think that’s just due to our ability to kind of think of something on the fly and come up with change. I mean, this is a little different, because we’re rehearsing. We know exactly what’s going to happen next, but it’s still one of those things where it’s like, we just love the energy of waiting and building up and then creating these huge moments and dynamics and energy and just playing to the people from our hearts.

Aidan: People always ask, it’s like a weird question to say because we’re so different in so many ways. And I always answer with just saying “Oh, we play energy” and they’re like “Huh?” We do a lot of everything, but it’s always kind of at 110% so even if we’re playing, like, some sappy love song, it doesn’t look like we’re playing a sappy love song. And I think that’s what makes it pretty fun.

I know that you guys are typically used to playing house parties and stuff like that… How does it feel to be playing in one of my favorite venues in the city, and also opening up for Still Woozy in a couple months? 

Will: Yeah, it’s pretty surreal. Coming here to Oregon [from New York City], I didn’t really know much about the music scene here. I heard from these two [Lucas and Aidan] I heard about the Crystal Ballroom like “This would be so cool if we played here.” And so I was kind of like “Oh yeah, okay,” until we actually got the thing and I was like “Oh my God. We’re playing at the Crystal Ballroom.” And I couldn’t believe it, and I’m still, like, in shock a little bit. 

Aidan: Coolest moment ever. One of the first times me and Lucas hung out when we were like 15.. We came and saw The Dandy Warhols, a super awesome Portland band, play at the Crystal Ballroom. So it’s pretty crazy to, like, be here playing this stuff after surely so …and The Chats, shout out The Chats. But The Dandy Warhols, Portland band at the Crystal Ballroom was just an awesome thing. Now I get to play where they stood.

Tripp: And, I mean, to be here in less than two years of being a band… I think it was exactly almost one year ago that we sat down and we’re like “All right, where do we want to take this band?…the Crystal Ballroom would be a pretty cool place to start.” And I mean, one calendar year later, we’re here. We still have a year and a half left together directly as students. What can we make happen now? It’s incredible. 

What would you say your favorite song is to perform if you have one?

Lucas and Aidan – “Drag” 

Lucas: “Drag”…I love playing “Colorblind”. We have a bunch of new songs that we’re working on thatI love playing also. But I think my number one is going to be “Drag”. 

Will: Mine is colorblind, for sure. The energy and the dynamics that it has – it goes from putting you in a trance to,like, rocking your socks off. And I love playing that.

Tripp: I think my favorite song to play is “Hungover”, especially now that I’ve upgraded my kit to one extra floor tom. It makes the song so much more fun to play because it’s so groove-oriented on the toms, and I can really dance around with the melody in there. And kind of just… I feel like an octopus at times, honestly. I really do, and it’s so fun. It’s so fun to play. 

Aidan: I said it earlier, but it’s gotta be “Drag”…something about it. It’s simple but, but not. And it’s a consistent level of… it starts with just a guitar, and there’s a count and it drops. And then for the rest of the song, we’re all just at 112% volume -whatever you want to call it. And every time we play it I think, personally, that’s when I get the most riled up, because I think it’s a really awesome one to get going with. 

What do you think a fan favorite is?

Lucas and Aidan: “Color blind…”

Tripp: It’s gotta be “Think of Me” statistically speaking…

Aidan:   Our first song we ever dropped is a song called “Think of Me”. It’s probably our most streamed song. And that one is not as high energy until, like, the very, very end, and it’s a longer song. But every time we play that chorus, at least in Eugene, it’s recognized. 

I’m sure there might be a couple things, but if there’s anything that you could change about the music industry, what would you say that would be? 

Tripp: Equal representation for artists. It’s such a crazy thing to be able to see so many people trying in the music scene, and to see so many people succeed, but have it really reap no benefits. And it’s such an interesting dynamic nowadays where it’s very do-it-yourself, and a lot of big supporting companies will be supportive of that, I mean record labels that are looking for the people that are already doing it themselves. And then to be able to support that from there in less of the sense where maybe in the 70s, 80s it was, it was more of “We’ll help you do it yourselves,” rather than “We want to see that foundation first.” But I do also think that that kind of is able to spark and weed out the people who are really willing to put in that extra effort to make themselves stand out, and the people who are like “This is casual. I’m just happy to be here,” but that that fine line is definitely something that needs to be clarified. 

Aidan: I’m just gonna get a quick one: less auto tune, more-overdrive. 

Will: I think that there’s definitely an air of  making the wrong people popular, especially thanks to social media. And that may be controversial, I don’t know. But I think that there are people who don’t represent music in the sense that people who really want it and who really deserve it do, and who actually push themselves. And so I feel like due to social media and due to money and greed and power, they want the thing that makes the most clicks. They don’t want the thing that is actually pure for the artist and for the musician.

I‘m sure there’s probably not some cut-and-dried formula to it, but how would you describe your guys’ creative process?

Lucas: It really just varies. It’s all around the place. Sometimes,I’ll come up with a chord progression and put lyrics over it, and then we just start adding. You put bass, you put a lead line, you put a solo, we have drums…it’s honestly very random. But it is, especially this last like several months, it’s been hard for us to get music going and get it out. We’ve been put on kind of like a hiatus due to…it’s honestly weather. Winter term really sucks playing shows. So we’ve just been trying to get it all out. It’s a huge process that can be complicated, but it can also be very simple. 

Tripp: And I was thinking about these songs -and we just did three days in the studio and got eight songs completed, which is, feels really good – but something that I was thinking about is that we haven’t played any of these songs live. Whereas our last EP, Ask Again Later, we knew how these songs would react publicly at shows, and we were like “Alright, these are going to be awesome. We’re going to track them….people are going to love it,” because it’s the same energy, and we try to bring that intensity, but we don’t really know what’s going to happen. And I really think that this next album is more representative of what we’re capable of as musicians, and what we want to have our music represent, sonically and lyrically. 

How do you try to strike a balance between building on what you know works, but also still trying to evolve or change things up?

Tripp: Our personal influences.

Aidan: I would say why people come to see Verb8tim is the energy. So I like to think of what we just recorded, as just a more matured version of us, and it’s more complex and it’s more experimental, and there’s a lot more going on. But at the end of the day, like every single track brings some sort of energy. So no matter what we record, it could be jazz, but it might be the most rocking jazz you ever heard. So that kind of energy moving forward is, I think, what we all kind of strive for. 

Tripp: I also like to think that listening to the album, you can kind of tell who wrote the song. 

Will: And I think that with this album, especially, is we, since we did it without playing any of the songs live, we did it for ourselves. We didn’t do it for the audience. We didn’t pick and choose. We sat down and we were like “These are the songs that we want to do because we like them” and if the audience doesn’t like them, that’s their opinion. But we’re just gonna do the 100% best thing we can do to get an album that we really love, and that’s what we did. 

Who would you say are your guys’s biggest influences on the band, whether that’s historical or maybe even more recent artists that you’ve been obsessed with, one by one? 

Lucas: Number one, I would say The Chats. Number two, The Strokes and number three, Skegss. Those would be my three.

Will: Number one for me, Red Hot Chili Peppers. Number two, Radiohead and number three, The Strokes.

Tripp: Number one’s gotta be the Foo Fighters. Number two, Dave Matthews Band, and honestly, my number three has been St. Vincent. She’s awesome.

Aidan: I’d say my number one songwriting band has got to be Sublime, they’re just awesome. Number two, probably Operation Ivy, some more punk stuff. And then number three…let’s do The Samples. 

Do you guys have any other hobbies that you think contribute to your creative process?

Will: I like to cook a lot, and I feel like that’s a creative outlet for me, other than music.

Tripp: I feel like there’s a metaphor there. He

can cook in the kitchen, he could cook on the guitar. I mean, honestly,

other than drums, most of the time, we’re students. So I feel like there’s an escape in our music where we’ll go and we’ll spend so many hours being in class, doing homework and studying on things. And it’s like when we come to music, there’s our expression of that, the music being our hobby, aside from the main bulk of our physical activity, of what we’re there really in Eugene to do in the first place. How can we make the music representative of our true emotions? 

Aidan: I don’t know if this is really a hobby, but something I think really contributes to the music is just us being like, the bestest of friends. These are like the three closest people that I have in Eugene, being away from home. And so it’s like, everything we do together….So if it’s going outside and sitting by the river all day and we’re sitting there just chopping it up, or if we’re studying together…one of us is with another one. And so I think that just we’re always on the same page with a lot of stuff. So it definitely helps that creative process and helps us be a band more than just a couple guys playing music together. 

Lucas: I second Aiden’s statement, but I also think for me being outdoors. I love snowboarding. I love being in the mountains. I love surfing, like anything outdoors,  I love it. I think that does contribute a lot to at least my lyric writing process. I think that that’s a big thing for me.

I’m kind of curious what you like to cook? 

Will: My main signature dish is risotto. [affirming response from other members] I love salmon, pasta. I’m a little bit Italian, so I like to take from that background…anything breakfast, or I love breakfast. It’s controversial, but I like barbecue sauce on eggs…[widespread disapproval]. 

Is there a song that you guys have written that you would say for whatever reason was difficult to write? 

Lucas: The whole album we just recorded, was very difficult to write lyrically.

Tripp: I mean, that’s one of the things is  you can be as good a musician as you want to be, but how good are you at putting pen to paper and actually having something to say about what you’ve just created. So, you know, we dug ourselves into a hole, but when it got to crunch time, we were able to kind of snap into it and really get into a flow of having a lot of fun and realizing  what we’re saying is exactly what we want to say, and it doesn’t need to be as hard as we’re making it. 

Is there a song that you had difficulty writing that the fan response was kind of on the opposite end, and you were a little bit maybe surprised about how well received it was?

Aidan: I would say the one that I didn’t think was going to do so well…”Bedroom Ballad”. It was our first super experimental, like, 6/8 kind of… I won’t say straightforward…

Tripp: I will take the blame for that as well. Will and I sat on the floor in my room last year like “Let’s write some weird songs. Let’s do something crazy.” 

Aidan: But that was probably, like, it was the scariest, because it was so different. But once we saw that reception of “Oh, we can kind of push outside of what we’re comfortable with, and it can be received real.” I think that’s spoken a lot into what we just did. 

Do you think you can pinpoint one song, or maybe like a point in time where you really felt like the band was getting cohesion and finding its footing?

Lucas: I think it was from the start. I think our chemistry from the start was insane. First practice, “There weren’t even any awkward feelings. It wasn’t like, like “Oh, who is this dude? Is he good? Is he not?” It was like instant mesh. We just went with it, and it’s gone better every day. 

Aidan: I remember pulling the strings…because obviously I found these two guys…but I remember the first practice and being like “All right, like, I found these guys,” and obviously I have my best buddy from high school. And I hope that it just rolls over smoothly. And as soon as we kind of sat down together…I don’t want to get corny with it, but it just, it wasn’t even a thought.

Tripp: And I think the first song that we played together was “Time Bomb”. Because Aiden and Lucas, “Time Bomb” is one of those songs where it’s like “Yo, we’ve had this song for years.” And I mean, this really just has so much personal and emotional value to it. And we want to bring this down to you guys and see what you think. And I think we were able to really click on that and the structure and the feel that we’ve been able to create to it. And I mean, it’s one of those songs that we play live, and we just love how it feels, and it gets us warm and it gets us loose. It really sets the tone for the rest of the show. That’s kind of our homing factor, “Time Bomb”.

Are there any artists or maybe albums that came out more recently that you’ve been really inspired by?

Tripp: St. Vincent’s most recent album. I’ve pulled so much inspiration, even just thinking about that with the artists that she played with, and the structure of the songs, lyrically, melodically, everything.

Lucas: I think for me, most recently, like, as a change, it’d be Smashing Pumpkins.

Aidan: I don’t know if this is a super big influence, but I’ve just been really into beabadoobee recently. It’s kind of just awesome all the time, like on my bike ride to class. She’s just got a lot to say and I love it.

Will: This is not recent at all, but I just got OK, Computer by Radiohead on vinyl, and I listened to it, and it was just like…life… It was also a special edition, it was like the very first press

release…especially the song Paranoid Android, was very influential for me, just because it’s… I can’t even describe it. 

My final question, I’m just a little bit curious about the fit coordination?

Tripp: One of my close friends actually made this. He was an art student at Oregon. He just graduated last year… I love wearing it at shows. It’s simple, and it has a message, and I still don’t know what that message is…

Will: We were actually talking about this yesterday, like if we wanted to coordinate outfits. And I think that it’s not us to do that. I mean, maybe in certain circumstances, like for a music video or something. But I think that we all have our own individual, unique styles, and so for us to just be able to represent that is the truest version of ourselves. 

Aidan: I don’t know. I was pretty set on wearing shorts that are a little too small.

We may not be on the bluff, but I have one more question: Are you guys gonna rock it tonight?

Lucas: Oh, we’re gonna rock it. Have no doubt about that. 

Will: We’re about to rock the bluff. 

Tripp: I mean, like Will said, I’m wearing socks, but at the end of the set I might not be. We might rock the socks off. 

Aidan: It’s what we do best.