Wednesday 11 December 2013

The YoungFellas Q&A

Your name:
I’m Andrew Galloway and I’m the lead singer/rhythm guitarist, chief songwriter and booking agent/promo rep for the band.

Where are you from?
We hail from Lacombe, Alberta, Canada, and that’s where we are currently based. I moved back to Alberta from Toronto in the summer of 2012 and immediately got together with some musician friends (and my little brother) to start up the band. 

Name of band:
We are The YoungFellas, we got the name after playing a few shows in bars full of old timers who kept calling us “a bunch of youngfellas” and it just kind of stuck.

Who else is in your band?
The band is myself (lead singer, songwriter and rhythm guitar), my younger brother Jordan Galloway on bass and backing vocals (also occasionally passes off the bass to play saxophone and/or keyboards). There’s Dalton Case, lead guitarist and backing vocals, who is the other half of the creative core of the band. Many songs start with the two of us jamming and are then passed to me to pen some lyrics, but some our best songs (Buzzin, Line it Up, Hey Angel) were entirely collaborative. Finally there’s Dane Blacquiere on drums, who manages to keep a rock solid beat mixed with a groovy swing that is the root of our unique style.

How would you describe yourselves?
We’re a bit of an amalgamation of southern rock, grunge, funk and punk but mostly we’re a straight up rock n’ roll band. Our live shows are always a party and we love to keep our fans moving. Our style is in a strange kind of middle ground between danceable rock n’ roll and heavier punk or grunge, so we see a lot of crazy dance moves out there as people figure out how to mosh and two-step at the time!
Most of our songs are high energy with catchy riffs and melodies, coupled with lyrics that can make you want to slow down and take another listen. We like to mix up the stories in our songs. One minute you could be caught up in the tale  of a vagabond moonshiner whose about to bootleg his last bottle (Buzzin), the next you could be reflecting on your own broken adolescent promises with the melancholy nostalgia in a song like “End of The Line”. 

Who are your main influences musically?
You can definitely hear some heavy classic influences from Led Zeppelin, The Beatles, Tom Petty and Neil Young mixed in with a lot of Pearl Jam, Soundgarden even a bit of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. We love any band that doesn’t limit themselves to just one style or sound, one of the most important things for our band is exploring and pushing the limits of what we can do as a group.

What do you hope to achieve in music?
As long as people are listening to and liking our music, we’re happy. We all have the rock star dreams and we’ll do everything we can to be as successful as we can be, but at the end of the day it’s just about doing what you love. That being said we would love to start playing bigger venues and add to the already stellar list of bands that we’ve played with!

What has been the highlight of your career so far, and why?
Our career highlight is actually very recent, granted the band’s existence is fairly recent we came together for our first jam in August of 2012. We just won the Rock 104.5 Star Search competition, beating out eight other qualifying bands from all over Alberta. This means that in the next month we will be getting our debut single professionally recorded and mastered free of charge by award winning producer Mark Troyer at Evergreen Sound. We will also be featured on FM radio and we’ll be opening up for the Rock 104.5 Birthday Bash headliner! 
The headliners from past years have included some big name Canadian bands including April Wine, Loverboy & Trooper.

And what’s the moment you want to forget?
Actually we’ve been incredibly fortunate so far, the worst we’ve had have been some bad sound nights, small and relatively uninterested crowds and a few low-balled gigs. And hundreds of broken guitar strings.

If you had to pick just one of your songs to represent your music, what would it be and why?
That would definitely be our song Buzzin. At its core it’s a rip-roaring southern rock song that is both a party tune and a cautionary tale about the dangers of excess. What truly makes the song unique is the way that it blends so many different styles and rhythms seamlessly into one track. 

Where can we listen to it?
It will be posted here on our reverbnation page, after we finish up recording our EP at Evergreen Sound. It will also be put on rotation at Rock 104.5 throughout central Alberta before the end of 2013.





Where can we find out more about your music?
https://www.facebook.com/theyoungfellas
https://twitter.com/theyoungfellas @theyoungfellas
http://www.reverbnation.com/theyoungfellas

Anything else you’d like to say about your band/music that I forgot to ask?
That pretty well covers the bands story up to now. We’re all very excited and extremely optimistic for the future. We’re all as close as brothers, which means we fight and bicker from time to time but we always manage to come together in the end. We know that there will be rough roads, possibly even a few dead ends ahead of us…and to that we say BRING IT ON!

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