PipemanRadio Interviews Frogg

0:04 Hey, you love done to censure? Wow? Crazy you why become America. It's time for the Adventures of pipe Man on W four c HY dot com. Wis pom Beats is number one Internet radio station. Here's your host, the pipe Man. This is the pipe Man here on the Adventures pipe Man W four c Y Radio. And I'm here with our next guest.

0:58 Who man, what killer musicians? You're gonna have to check out? So let's welcome to the show Frog. How are you hey? This is sky Moon Clark from Frog. And this is Will Brown from Frog. The guy who hits things. Nice. I like the guy who hits things. I used to hit things, but I was never very good at it, except if it wasn't the drums. So see it's the only thing I'm good at hitting is drums. See there you go. I played for like nine years and I got handed to drummers man because I wasn't any good. The coordination you have to have to play drums is absolutely amazing. I think I had a weird little bonus at the very beginning where I had a surgery on both my legs as a kid, and I started lessons with cats on both of them. So it's just rudiments on the pad, no questions. You know, like, wow, that's pretty wild. And I was like, okay, time for your footwork, and I went there, there's footwork right there.

2:01 You go. So tell our listeners, both of you a little bit about Frog what you're all about. Yeah, and I don't mean from a genre standpoint, I mean as artists and how you would describe your music and your musicianship. Yeah. Sure, Frog is a technical metal band. I know we said not to talk about genres, but for like me personally, I like a lot of different types of metal subgenres. There's a lot of them. Yeah, in particular, like progressive metal, technical death metal, melodic death metal. Those are kind of my guilty pleasure sweet spots. So our band is kind of an amalgamation of all of those. Plus our drummer has a lot of world instruments that he puts on our songs, so it's a little experimental in that sense. And yeah, if you like Proggy Tuchy metal, and you know it's not necessarily I would say, I don't.

2:54 We don't really write music with the ambition of being technical. We just I think we just practice a lot and our expression kind of comes out in the technical way, if that makes sense. I don't know. Technical isn't really a We show up with a chart and like apologize to each other, like I'm sorry, I'm making you play this ridiculous part. Yeah. I come from like a jazz fusion and progressive rock sort of background and decided to just sort of learn every percussion instrument in the world. So there's a lot of there's a little bit of salsa stuff I managed to insinuate into this thing, but I'm increasingly always trying to get like Indian classical music in there. Play tabla, play sitar, play all these other things and just make it weirder.

3:40 I guess I like the way you put that because listen, when I was younger and I was playing stuff, my dad would go, oh, you're terrible, because because I was just experimenting, trying to see what sounds I can make, and he didn't get that. So I totally when there's uniqueness to the music, especially in metals nowadays, because nowadays in metal, it seems like a lot of these bands are just using this like algebraic equation formula to make their music. And I like the way, like even listening to your music how it kind of takes me into a journey, but sometimes like I'm going in a different direction and then another direction and I love that.

4:26 Yeah, the single we just put out, when we wrote this song, well, here's a funny story. When we wrote the song, we said, let's write a catchy, poppy song like three minutes, like our featured artist m Ray, who was a feature on the song, is going to sing and play piano slash key tar. It'll be super super listenable and catchy. And one winter past and we had like an almost seven minute song we were trying to shorten down. It just kind of came out that way. So we kind of wrote with an intention and it kind of changed. But uh, yeah, you know, the originality thing is like that resonates a lot with me. Like, I mean, I love technical death metal, but the genre is very uh there's a lot of bands that they're my favorite bands. Don't get me wrong. I could maybe mix them up if I was like at a live show and not paying attention. But yeah, I think that having something modern but also original because a lot of modern metal today is very like all the production tricks are kind of like industry standards, and it feels like it's very formatted. I guess, so that's like there's something that's nice and listenable, you know, like there's all this hyper pop metal and a lot of catchy TikTok esque music, if you will, and that shit's cool, but uh, it's uh, it's something we try to like avoid doing. You know, we like our songs to be kind of unique. I would say, I think at the at the very heart of every sort of genre trope, there's a really simple question that lets you write in a right angle turn anywhere you want to. Like, for this one

5:56 in particular, I kind of just thought about these fast, triplet feel things that metal drummers do, and I kind of went like, hey, I kind of started as a jazz guy way back in the day, why does no metal drummer swing? And then I went, oh, the answer to that is because every metal song would sound bad if there was swing happening in the drum part. And I went, Okay, well, let's put together a song where it is not a stupid idea for the metal drummer to swing. And I hope we've succeeded at that. Well. I can tell you that, you know, I was watching the video for wake Up, and man, it's one of those videos that I could watch the whole video.

6:40 And what I mean by that is there's so many songs nowadays that you know, you watch like and you're like thirty seconds in and you just know that it's going to be all the same for the rest of the song, whereas I wanted to wait and see what was going to happen next during this song. That's great. I love hearing that we wrote the song being like, I like music to kind of be an experience when I'm an active listener. Like there's two different types of listeners that I am passive, like maybe I'm gaming or working or doing something and I want to just have something in my ears. But then there's that curiosity gets the best of me active listener, and when I'm an active listener, I love for music to kind of be an experience. Yeah, the song's pretty weird. Has like that tapping intro.

7:23 It has like a chick shredding the key tar and then singing has me screaming. There's like a guitar section that has like we call like the salsa kind of groove. Guitar section will actually played a. I've played five things at the same time, Yeah, Marimbola, Congo's bongos, Timbalez and the kit. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like five different percussion instruments, clean acoustic guitars, real Steinway piano in the studio and well and then I just stret a electric lead solo over that and it comes out of this like very faceless inspired chug riff too, So it's like we're throwing a lot of curveballs, faceless inspired for you. I was like, yeah, isn't basically this riff with a different progression on the Mars Volta record. Okay, let's do a last thing that was kind of just oh man. Yeah. I mean when we talk about that passive or active listening, I have some weird glitch in my brain where I can't do passive listening. I have trouble talking to people in a coffee shop if there's music in the background. I end up writing things that have these weird sort of curveballs thrown in because I have a lot of trouble dealing with anything that isn't a curveball. Every like fifteen seconds and there it is. I've turned it. I've turned it into a feature and not a bug. I suppose, Well, there you go. I listen. I'm all about turning it into a positive because listen, some of the best artistry, no matter what it is, music or painting or whatever

8:54 art it is, does not come from something that just is straight up one way and you know, doesn't have twists and turns and doesn't have weirdness to it. Like some of the best artistry just is totally abstract. Yeah, well, the once we put out a record, the track list is going to have weirdness to it. I don't know that we have two songs that are describable in the same way. Yeah, we've been working, so I will. And I used to jam back when I was a teenager on the side. We used to play like the Fortress record by Protest the Hero that was like big, a big record when we were you know, sixteen, fifteen, seventeen, whenever those years were. So we would just get together and I would like play lead guitar and he would kind of just drum and it was like, hey, you're good enough to play this whole record front to back. You want to get together and like jam. It was kind of just like how we met each other. Because we're from the same town.

9:48 I ended up going to college up in Boston at Berkeley College of Music, and Will actually ended up going a year later, and we both we wrote some Frog material then, but he had his own band, I had my own bands, and we didn't really work on Frog actively until well until this past like year and a half, I would say, And we're kind of reviving some masterpiece as we wrote ten years nine years ago, and we're masterpiece offying some stuff that eighteen year old us thought was a masterpiece. Yeah, we're yeah, it's getting changed. We're brushing it off, you know, dusting it off the shelf, giving it a facelift if you will. But I don't know, Like for me, our track list is there's some really weird songs, Like we have a straight up just metalcore song on the album, because we have a full length that we're planning to release in the summer, and we have another single coming out December and probably another music video coming out in the spring, so we have like a bunch of singles leading into this full length, and the full length has like like very different songs.

10:48 You get prog metal, you get straight up metalcore, you get dark techie death Prog medal, you get really weird Will solo composition metal which is uh has a lot of orchestration in an instrumentation and some sitar solo. You know. I think live Will is gonna play like a sitar solo. If we can manage to move that giantas thing to the gig and you can do a little sitar solo before we start a song, I think that'd be pretty cool. The problem is it has me playing sitar and tabla at the same time. One of them will be a back track. Yeah, you have to choose what you you know, can't have it all, or maybe you can teach me tabla. You know what I love about this too, is so for me the passive listening would be like one of your albums, because I do like multiple genres of metal, and you know, you get in every few minutes, you may get in a different mood. So it's kind of like instead of listening to the same song over and over again, because then I might get antium like, uh, okay, I'm gonna listen to something else, whereas you got songs like yours that they're all different. It's like it's like having a playlist instead of an album. Yeah, we kind of talked about the album and you're like, we don't really think we need to do like a concept album, or we don't think the songs will need to sound the same. You know, there's obviously like a fluency that's nice for having like one person like engineer the whole thing to kind of make it

12:18 feel like a full, kind of tight knit thing. But you know, we're very deep into these subgenres and the reason that the songs are different is it's not like we're being weird or different out of like, you know, contrarian for the sake of being contrarian, if you will. It's more that just these are all the influences that we love. It's the music we love to play on like a very at a very high level. You know, Will plays this fusiony jazz prog stuff very well, and I dive headfirst into tech death and metal core and prague. So it's kind of just like what we like and what we're feeling. You know. It's not really written with the intent of let's have a concept album that is very uniform, and I just think that logistical thing of we wouldn't probably be playing if we have to think like, okay, if we're putting a full length record, would we be able to play this thing in track order live? And we're using tunings that would make like guitar switches take longer on stage. You know, it's to make a concept record out of it. Would be to create that expectation.

13:20 We go like, well, we're probably going to be intersplicing it with things from the first EP just to make the minimum amount of guitar switches on stage, to be like good neighbors to other people we're playing with. Yeah, yeah, just those like venue logistics things, not our first rodeo exactly. You know, well totally. And you know, it's funny going back to what your guys were saying about when the masterpieces when you were like seventeen eighteen, and what you're doing to them now. I think a lot of people they don't think about or realize, you know, especially you know, you have the old school, always hardcore fans that they never want you to change. I used to be one of those people, but when I was younger. But it's like, as an artist, you look back at that stuff and you're like, oh my god, I sucked, you know, in so many words, because like you didn't perfect the craft yet, you were you were still like learning it and you're always learning it. So as you evolve as a good musician that cares, Yeah, you're always going to want to, you know, look back on stuff and go, man, I should have done it this way, and I should I could do this to make it better and so forth. That's why it's all about the live show. I really believe that every song is a living document, and the official version is not the version that's on the record. The official version is whatever is the most recent, best played live version. Yeah, that's a good point because it's so true. Like so many bands I've seen like a million times they played the same song and it does sound different as the years

14:54 go by and they're you know, becoming better at their craft. Yeah, I mean, it's there's something like very raw about being like seventeen or eighteen and designing write like a ten minute tech death prog metal song. There's like parts I wouldn't. It's weird. You know, when you when your skill set is less refined, you kind of do these brute decisions that are harder to replicate once you have refined the craft, Like one of the songs we were doing an arrangement treatment. Actually we're doing a little songwriting session before this call. We're not really changing the first like two minutes of the song because it's just like, I don't know, there's something very like charming about being young and ignorant, and I wouldn't write an intro like that song has, but it's very it comes right out of the gate really strong, so it's as cool intro. I think we're going to keep it. But yeah, it's a good point. As you get better at your craft, you kind of start to do little things that change the songs, you know, whether it's technique or straight up arranging it differently. I was always told that, like, oh, by the time you hit thirty years going to want to like play pocket and you know, slow it down and forget all this weird tech stuff. And I'm about to hit thirty in a few months and I've only gotten weirder. I think that's forever. I think it's just an exponential curve. See, I'm with you. It's kind of like when people say to me, I used to like metal. I'm like, if you used to like metal, you never really liked metal. If you used to like

16:25 metal, then you haven't been listening to the new metal that you're going to like. That's it just came out, Yeah, exactly. It does blow my mind how many people you know, like they haven't listened to a new metal band in like twenty years or more. And it's like, you know, even if the old stuff is good, why wouldn't you want to listen to new stuff? Why would you want to be stuck? Yeah, I mean it's it's funny because my my like Guilty Pleasure band is like children of Vote them and they're kind of they're kind of old school. Their sound has been kind kind of linear, but I actually like their music a lot still today. I'm kind of like torn on this topic if I'm mean, like brutally honest, because like there's some old records I love, and then some don't age too well, but some age really well and it makes you think, Wow, they actually had like that guitar tone in like two thousand and three. That's pretty rad. You know, it's just engineered right and it's written right. But there's definitely like an evolution to metal, you know, and I think there's I think there's a lot of benefits to things evolving in this way, but there's a lot of drawbacks, Like I don't really like TikTok guitar players. They're also so like how many of them are actually good in person in a live setting, and how many have stage presence when it's not in the comfort of their home editing in front of a camera. You know, I love going to show a live show and like having it be a show, not like a guitar neck in somebody's face with a strap up to their chest. You know, to me, that's just not it's not

17:55 that much of a fun thing. So like Will and I have been shedding this stuff of like let's put on a freaking show and like play this really technical metal that we love, but let's also play it just like the record. So we practice at a studio of our in years, and we're like, we're very perfectionists of our crafts. We probably won't play live shows this year, but we're hoping to start next year early next year. If you know a song so well that you can start improvising in a way that's just making decisions because you know what everybody else's parts are, then that's when you're ready to like attempt to do a backflip on stage while hitting that sweep arpeggio or whatever is attempt not to decapitate someone with your large headstock with eight tuning pegs on it, or oh yeah, headless guitars. Yeah, that's that's for this reason. Yeah, it's because people started flailing around like the Dyllinger escape plan and then like one too many heads rolled. I don't think anybody has anybody been decapitated by a guitar. No, not yet, I feel like that, not yet, but it might be coming. So you never know, somebody's going to listen to this, you know what, somebody's gonna listen to this and try to make that happen. That. I think that's the world we live in. Somebody's home, only on the stage. Yeah, guys, don't try it out, but I remember, Okay, So I remember Chris Holmes of Wasp used to run into his Marshall stacks and try

19:26 and knock them over while he was playing his guitar and probably did a couple of times. Sounds right, It sounds on brand, honestly, right. So, but yeah, doing a backflip that's pretty impressive. I gotta say, No, backflips at our shows. Will's just pulling words out of his hat. I do not maybe like, uh maybe sling my guitar around me if I have my wireless on the strap, but uh yeah, no, he's one of these necrophagious lead guitar while screaming guys. So's he's anchored to the center stage. Yeah, it's good. I mean there's a lot of like instrumental parts where I can definitely move stage left right and head bang and do whatever. I mean, it's crazy at that music video as a band.

20:11 Actually, when we were talking about filming Wake Up, we were like, we need to practice this song every day for like a few months leading up to this, and we need to look in the mirror and like it needs to be legit. Because it was a performance video, we didn't really have the budget to be like a story script and have like actors and stuff like that or like real direction to like put that together enough time. So it was like we're just gonna play this prog song for six and a half minutes in a room. My fingy's better be on the right frets, you know. That was also like we need to be going hard, like we need to play the way we would if we were playing live, and that needs to like come through, not in like a fake way because the parts are technical. I don't want to just be like headbanging out of control when I should be screaming or like doing a sweep our peggio or whatever it might be. Right needed to be like if we were plug in, it would have sounded acceptable. And I think we literally all pulled that off. It'so a lot of practice, but definitely it was definitely a killer video. And I mean, yeah, I also have to hats off to people that can sing and play an instrument no matter what the instrument is, at the same time, because again, the coordination, it's kind of like rubbing your tummy and your head at the same time kind of thing. Yeah, you know.

21:34 For for me, this stems back to my other that other topic of my Guilty Pleasure band being Children of bout Him. When I was a teenager is when I started practicing, you know, uh, playing like heavy metal guitar and screaming and also figuring out what the hell screaming was, you know that was you know, I don't think my mom liked that too much, but uh, it's it's definitely like a skill set that's kind of different. It's not the same as like like drummers have like independence in their limbs. It's kind of similar to that, uh in a way, but uh, it's its own thing, you know. And every song is a little different. Like there's rough spots to like sing and play, is how to describe it. There's some that are just like I could do it on a whim now, but there's always like sections where I kind of have to play at half speed and like mouth out the words before I start screaming to understand when I need to breathe. A lot of it's about, you know, I want to breathe around my guitar playing, but then I also have to breathe for the screams that need to happen, and it's not die you know.

22:34 Yeah, so it's kind of this weird thing where you kind of got to tell you it's more about learning when to breathe for me nowadays than it is to like coordinate uh, you know, scream and playing, because I mean to make sure I have the breath I need for everything. He's downplaying his ability to do this. One of the big draws to seeing us do this particular song live. Is that tapping at the beginning, he can just have a conversation, Yeah, while we're while we're rehearsing that, like yelling names of cities. Yeah, that's what I like, Hello Detroit, Brooklyn, Miami, Rome, Like just good practice. Hey, that's good practice. Okay, Yeah, well I kind of tease Will when we practice the song, this particular song, because I can speak and do the tapping like at the same time or head bang, which yeah, we gotta have. We gotta have a running thing of like you vividly describe your breakfast every time we play that. No, I don't know that. And you know, the city thing that's important to practice because do you know how many times in the past few months that I was at festivals doing coverage and the band said the wrong festival name. Yeah, can't be me, catch me. Yeah, I've always I've always told people like, okay, just don't name the place you're in ever. Ever. Yeah, that's actually kind of a smart idea because just be like, hey, what's up, and then and then play your song. Well, it's like on the South we are, well I'm

24:06 in South Florida right now, and when people play in West Palm Beach and say Fort Laurerdale. The whole crowd is not happy, and that's you know, that's not I don't think I'm ever gonna be doing that. I'm like so aintal retentive about being like on point of my logistics. I think, well, can I be like being playing in the meadowlands and saying hello New York? Yeah again, I don't think I'll make this mistake. And if I do, well, fuck me. I can apologize all I do the tapping, Like, since I got all the conversation, there you go. So let's tell everybody how they can reach out to you guys on socials on the web. Check out the new video all your music, merch all that good stuff. Sure, our socials are pretty simple. We're frog band on almost everything Frog with two g's followed by the word band. That's our Instagram, that's our Facebook, that's our Twitter. Our YouTube is a frog official.

25:08 We got frog official dot bandcamp dot com. I think the single is actually available for free in full dot wave quality, So you can download this song for free on band camp frog Official Baby, And we have a link tree if you know what that is. Linktr dot ee slash Frog band has everything, our discord, all of our socials, what have you, And yeah, you can listen to wake Up, our newest single on all streaming platforms, I'm pretty sure. And we have another single coming out December. Dandelion is the name. Release date is being finalized in the coming weeks, so keep an eye out for that if you like them more darker and less progressive metal vibe. But yeah, you can watch the video on our official YouTube channel. Love it. Any final words you want to leave our listeners with that we haven't covered, no, just keep it metal. To listen to anything that you like, you know, and if you check out Frog, we appreciate you. We're a very small band. We haven't We've been kind of a social media hermit, so all the comments, likes and shares and stuff are really really cool because we don't really we haven't really been pushing that needle too much, so it's always fun. Well, I can't wait for even more music and can't wait until you're live too, because I think you guys will be bad ass doing a live show. Thank you being on the Adventures of pipe Man. Yeah, thanks pipe Man for having us.

26:37 Thank you for listening to the Adventures of Pipe Man on W for CUI Radio