A Conversation With Colony House on the release of their new record, Leave What’s Lost Behind…
MWN: Hello! Thanks for taking the time to hop on a call and talk about the new album. How are you guys?
Colony House: Doing great!
MWN: I got a couple questions for you guys, mostly about your newly released album. Congratulations by the way!
Colony House: Thank you so much!
MWN: What is the inspiration behind the album?
Colony House: Well, I’ll try to be brief because there is a ton of different angles. I kind of answer it different every time. But, a huge inspiration, as most albums are for people, it is a personal look into the things I was specifically going through and thinking a lot about at that time, which was a lot of insecurity and changes in the band’s life and different people we’ve worked with moving away. A lot of changes, which leaves you asking a lot of questions. One of the key factors in inspiration is dealing with that uncertainty. There was also a narrative that ties into the album that was loosely inspired by my great grandfather’s life, who I didn’t know, but I have this box of letters that he used to write my great grandma. He had a tough life and he had to deal with alcohol. He was just troubled but he was a sweet man and you can see his heart in these letters. I tied this between us even though we lived different lives. I felt we had a common ground and I wanted to talk about it. What was he afraid of? What made him feel uncertain and what made him feel like he wasn’t worthy of someone’s love? Anyways. I could go on but there is a lot of stuff to unpack there.
MWN: I read on a recent interview on the Rabbit House that you guys experienced difficulty in creating this album. What was the process and how did you overcome this difficulty?
Colony House: The difficulty was the beginning. We toured a lot between now and our last album, but we haven’t set aside a lot of time to focus on writing. When we started to, we were going song by song. We were with a major label at that time and we would send a song in and ask them what they thought of it. When you send a song to a major label, at least in our experience, there is a ton of people there who have an opinion. If your song goes to the ringer and maybe someone who works in the pop industry more they would say “It’s not pop enough.” If your song goes to the someone who works more in the rock world the would way “It’s not rock and roll enough”, and then it goes to someone who think’s it’s great. It’s less us being “What are we doing? What are we supposed to be writing?” That lead to a lot of the uncertainty that I mentioned earlier. Finally, we got out of that deal through a series of a lot of things happening and that was the process of overcoming all of those questions and all of the doubt. We spent about a year really focusing on writing, demo-ing, recording. There was eventually a breakthrough that happened when we decided to scrap away our old ideas and decided to start completely fresh and see what happens with just the band’s opinions and what we want to convey. When that shift happened from “I wonder if people are going to think if this is cool” to thinking from internally saying “what do we really want to say next? What do we want to communicate to the people listening?” That’s what things started clicking. That’s the lead up to the recording process, but we needed two to three weeks to shake off the dust to remember how the studio works, and then we just had a ton of fun and kinda dug in and that’s when it all started spilling out and we got super creative and inspired.
MWN: What would you say is more successful in your newly released album, “Leave What’s Lost Behind,” compared to your previous two album releases?
Colony House: I think we’re always learning. When I listen back on albums I turn out to be critical because it was a younger, more naive version of yourself, but there’s always something to learn from that. I think what w’ve done more successfully is just to tap into that freedom of not trying to create something for a certain pocket of whatever the industry or radio or listener. We’re just becoming more transparent in the things we’re saying and even the things we’re recording. Being more bold and taking more risks. I think that is a huge part in becoming a better artist, letting yourself have the freedom to explore. That might be dangerous because that might turn someone off and have someone in the past bite you. As you grow up you become a little more conflicted in the things you really feel passionate about communicating and I feel we really took a stand in communicating clearly and being an open book to our listeners, which we’ve always try to be but we just get better with practice.
MWN: So you guys have two singles in your album: “Looking for some light” and “Original Material”. How did you decide on the choice of these two being the singles?
Colony House: We knew “Looking for some light” was going to be the first song we release just because we thought it said what we wanted to come out of the gate saying. It’s really universal and it casted a wide net and says we want this to be for everyone. It’s not something we felt that was going to crush on radio or crush on the charts or anything. It’s an invitation of what we want to do. “Original Material”, on the other hand, is more in line with things that we’ve done in the past. It has a more pop sensibility to it and it’s a little catchier, and we’d thought it was fun to juxtapose “Looking for some light”, which is this epic cinematic landscape song, with a fun snappy sing-along song. It shows the polarizing sides of the album.
MWN: I noticed there are three songs titled “Runaway,” Parts 1 though 3. Could you explain the choice of lining up these songs the way they are in the album?
The song started out as a song, which then was broken up into three songs. I originally sounded way different, and I really loved it. I thought it was awesome. My brother, who plays drums for us, He couldn’t wrap his head around it. He kept challenging it. For me, the narrative ties the album together. I worked with the producer for a day rearranging it. We were working with a really talented pianist and we thought “Maybe there is a totally different way to work this up.” We changed the key and all these things about it and started recording it in sections because it was a conversation that goes back and forth between these two people. We then thought maybe by breaking it up it will help the album flow properly and help remind people that this was a part of a journey. It actually ended up being really fun because we did something different on each one to explore the progression of the conversation. It starts there and it flows into this beautiful meaningful conversation and the song opens up. It establishes half disagreement in the studio and the other half of being experimental on these songs.
MWN: Is there a song that is favored over others in this album? Whether to perform live or to just listen to?
Colony House: I don’t really have a favorite. When we start touring we’ll start seeing the things that come alive, and I’ll start leaning towards which song resonates more. I’m very proud of the song “Why Even Try” just because it was a struggle to write and took a long time. I feel like I never gave in and I wrestled it down and finished it. I felt like it was a battle and I won the battle.
MWN: Who (Or What) are your biggest inspiration for your music?
Colony House: I would say at this point my family and my friends are the people that seem to always walk through life with me so it’s hard to count them out. We hear a lot of amazing stories from our fans, the people who listen to our music, they inspire us like crazy. Their stories and how they respond to the music and the things they say about our music. They help guide us when we’re recording. The largest inspirations are from the people that have been on the journey with us all these years. Musically, it’s all over the map. It would take too long to answer. We all listen to different music. I’ve always kinda leaned into older and wiser souls in myself trying to take something from them, whether it’s Tom Waits, or Johnny Cash, or Scott Weiland, to just sing songs and tell stories. Some of our favorite bands The National, or The box rebellion, or Massive bands like You Too or Coldplay or Kings of Leon. There’s something for us in all of these places. Of course, my dad is a huge inspiration for us because he got us started playing music.
MWN: That actually ties into my next question: Do you listen to any other indie-rock artists?
Colony House: Yea, we’re very fortunate to call a lot of them our friends. We’re always hanging out with our friends whether it’s COIN, or Judah, Flyboys, we toured with all of these guys. We think they’re incredible. One of our favorite bands is another band we’ve toured with called Ivan & Alyosha in Seattle. Sea Diver is another band out of Seattle. The list goes on. We’re always trying to listen to what other people are doing.
MWN: Aspirations or Goals for the Band?
Colony House: Yea is the short answer: We have huge goals for ourselves. We try to dream as huge as possible because if you don’t dream it, theres a chance it won’t happen. We’re really really trying to focus on being grateful for where we’re at and for even getting to do this and call it a Job. We figured if we can’t be grateful for what we have, we can’t be grateful for what we have in the future. So we will always have huge dreams and huge goals, and of course, we want this album to grow huge and explode, but we’re also very grateful for what has already been done and how people have responded. We’re going on Tour! That’s going to be a huge goal for us to check off. Tour’s always the best because we get to sing the songs we’ve been working on for so long.
MWN: Well, thank you so much for your time! Don’t forget to stream the new album! Guys, I wish you all the best. Thanks for your time.
Colony House: Yeah, thanks for having us!
By: Kelly Liu | Exclusively for @Music, Why Not!
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