For a somewhat embarrassing reason, The Grey Area, TJ and Jason, graciously agreed to answer some questions outside before their show at Red Palace; after a short stop for red bull of course.
On the steps of the United House of Prayer, they talked about playing SXSW, west coast vs. east, their future, the DC music scene, and more.
Me: How was the west coast different from playing on the east coast?
Jason: It was different in a couple of ways. One of which is that we were working with a record label. So that was exciting, just to learn a little about the business; working with a label, figuring out how labels put together shows, how they work with brand partners and other partners to make events happen, and help bands get their music out, which is really cool. Every time you play a new city you learn about that cities music scene, about the vibe in that city, about other musicians you can work with. One of the greatest things about being at SXSW was just meeting so many musicians, seeing the talent around you, what people are doing musically; pushing boundaries, trying out different ideas. Some bands are huge, some bands are tiny, some bands are complicated, and some are simple. Being around all that creativity is really cool.
Me: So the good outweighs the bad?
Jason: There is no bad; laughs
Me: I wasn’t expecting that.
Jason: There is no bad to being on tour
TJ: No not at all, even when things are going like oh my god I can’t believe this is happening, you’re still laughing. Everybody else is probably panicking but being on tour shows you what you are made of, shows you a lot of stuff. You learn about the whole concept of music and playing shows. You just learn so much on tour.
Me: So there is no one place you wouldn’t absolutely go?
TJ: Umm certain places in the south for obvious reasons. Laughs
Jason: I mean, I don’t know if I’d go to Iran right now.
TJ: I’m not knocking down the door to play in Syria anytime soon neither so there’s that.
Jason: I mean I have a buddy who plays in Syria, but I’d want to go with him.
Me: I was going to say, if they requested you would you go?
TJ: The prime minister would have to pick me up from the airport to get me to go.
Jason: It’s a little complicated for me, I don’t know if they’d let me in.
TJ: He wouldn’t be able to get in, me they’d be like you can come be quiet
Jason: The only way I’m getting in is if I’ve got some sort of diplomatic immunity.
Me: So there’s no shallowness in the west coast, cause that’s usually what I hear?
TJ: Here’s the thing when you’re playing on that kind of level when you’re on tour, you can’t really focus on that kind of thing.
Jason: Everybody we met was amazing, we met some amazing people out there. We made some great contacts we made some great friends. And people love music out there, that’s the thing. We showed up at Hard Rock Café in Los Angeles, not really knowing anybody and we just got up on stage and did our thing. And everyone who came up afterwards said that was awesome. People just love music. And the same in Austin and the same in Phoenix. When you are around people who love music, I mean, music is a great unifier; it brings people together regardless if you’ve got this religion or that religion, this philosophy or that philosophy. Music just brings people together.
Me: There’s only the two of you, have you ever thought about a third or fourth?
Jason: When we first started we had a couple of bass players that we experimented with. And we thought about adding different parts and different pieces. We just stuck with what worked, this two person thing worked. We don’t feel like anything is missing, if it’s not broke don’t fix it.
Me: Maroon 5 used to be Kara’s Flowers and they had a completely different sound than they have now. As you said, you are not opposed to evolving, if your sound goes into the Maroon 5 area…*laughs*
Jason: I don’t know if we’ll ever become a Maroon 5.
TJ: Let’s not push us in that direction.
Me: If it happens…
TJ: If it happens, it is what it is. God bless Adam Levine, but.
Jason: I think the Grey Area has a signature. I don’t think that signature is ever going to change. But as a person, as a musician you’re always evolving, and you’re always writing new songs and trying different ideas. And you know, the best example is The Stones. The Stones, their albums they made in the 70’s don’t sound anything like the albums they made in the 60’s, and they don’t sound anything like the albums in the 90’s. But they’re still The Stones and the signature is still there. So if we can have a career like that, we’ll be very lucky.
Me: So the way that your sound goes, do you just jam? Do you think of things, where one of you thinks of something and then the other thinks of something, and you put it together?
TJ: Yes. Yes. Yep, you got it.
*laughs
TJ: It’s always a mix of things. It’s always focusing on anything not taking away from the song, taking away from the music. It’s the arrangement, things that make sense to build a good song. I mean, it’s a fluid concept. It’s not like one magical thing, like one song “Sugar,” we were in one world, and it just, *snaps, you know what I mean, happens. A lot stuff, [Jason] had lyrics for a lot of things for years, and were able to just build right into it. It changes.
Jason: Building a song is kind of like raising a baby, you know. Like the idea for it comes out, but it doesn’t become a person over night. You got to let it grow. You got to nurture it, you’ve got to give it room to breathe, teach it some things. So, you know, an idea comes for a song. I had an idea for a song on a plane, when I was flying to Brazil. And I didn’t have a guitar with me, so I just hummed out the melody, and I sort of wrote out where I thought the melody could go on a piece of paper. And then I just let it sit for two weeks, I didn’t touch it. And I came back, and I thought if I still liked it, and I tried it out on the guitar, and I played around with it. Then I took it to [TJ], and then it changed some more. Ultimately it became a song that is on the album, the second song on the album. It’s very organic, you let it develop, let it take on a life of its own. And I think the best songs come that way.
Me: So you’ve never just wrote a song in like five minutes?
Jason: I have, a couple. There’s a song that I wrote with my last band that we still play called “All Good Americans Take Off Their Shows.” It’s about airport security. I wrote that on the subway in New York, it took me about three minutes to write. It just came all out. But that’s rare, at least for me.
Me: [TJ] already pretty much talked about this. The general question I usually ask everybody is, finish this sentence “without music I?”
TJ: Would be in jail. I mean that’s a tough one. I don’t really see a lot of positives, I see it either being me being stagnant and not having a life, or doing something negatively creative with my time. Because like I said, I’ve been playing since I was so young. I’ve always played, I couldn’t imagine filling all that time with something else. I really couldn’t.
Jason: Ugh, without music, I’d be lost.
Me: That’s it. So you wouldn’t be like an engineer or a cop?
TJ: No, no.
Jason: No, I’m not good at that stuff. No, I’d be lost. I mean music I think has given me direction in my life, and it’s ugh. I don’t know what I’d do without it. But you know, I think everyone can say that. If you look at every single culture in the entire world, throughout history there has always been music. There’s a reason, cause music expresses things that language doesn’t give us the full opportunity to do. And that’s the reason I think music exists; cause we all have things inside us that we need to get out. Whether its dancing, or singing, or playing an instrument, music gives us that outlook. I think we’d all be lost.
TJ: I agree.
Me: So since you didn’t really know each other before, the friendship that you have now does it sometimes create personality clashes when you are writing music?
TJ: Oh yeah. Well not writing music. We do stuff to annoy each other. Here’s the thing, your best relationships in life should challenge each other. He pushes me to do things that are good for me, that I may not want to do. And vice versa. So it’s kind of like one of those things where it’s always positive, always pushing to a positive place where maybe you should do this or maybe do that. Those type of things happen, but they help you they build you to be a better person, musician or whatever. Yeah that stuff happens, but I look at it as a building thing. If my friends aren’t pushing me to be better, are they really my friends?
Me: Going back to Adam Levine, and The Voice, and shows like that, would you ever go that route? I’m sure you’re having an amazing time doing what you are doing now, but..
Jason: I don’t know what that means. What do you mean by that?
Me: Would you go on something like The Voice, or X Factor, or something like that?
TJ: No. I’m not trying to hate on that because it does do a lot of great things for a lot of people, in my opinion a small percentage. But it’s one of those things where I couldn’t imagine not doing what we’re doing now. I couldn’t. I mean to be able to tour and play shows and do things on your own terms. And struggle when you know you are putting your passion and energy into it, and not be on a producer’s producers dime. I just couldn’t imagine not doing what we’re doing. I mean touring and going to SXSW and just playing some of the shows, and having some of the magical nights we’ve had. I couldn’t imagine not doing that.
Jason: We don’t need [name withheld] to tell us whether we are good or not, we just don’t.
Me: If you stay where you are now…
TJ: I’m not trying to be arrogant, I don’t see us staying where we are now. I see us, I see this being a point in the adventure where. Like Miles Davis has something interesting, I was watching an interview from the 80’s with him, and he talked about everything he did before is just something on the timeline. Because he was always thinking ahead. He was thinking in 60’s when I was doing whatever, that was great then, but you remove me two decades I want to be doing something else. Progressively something else. So I always think this is just a point in a journey leading to something else. I always think that.
Jason: What he said.
*laughs
Me: Personally, there are artists that I like, where as a fan I want them to stay where they are. Cause once you get to a certain level you can’t see them at a small place like Red Palace anymore. Like Adele, she out of nowhere just…
TJ: ..Boom. Right, right, right.
Jason: Listen as a band, the reason you are making music is cause you want people to hear it. The more people who hear it the better. The more audiences you’re playing in the better. So, you know, if you’re gonna do music it doesn’t make sense to stay static. Unless, you don’t have any higher aspirations for getting your music beyond a certain demographic. If you are a very genre or niche kind of music and you only want to be popular in that one area, than that makes sense. I think our music has an appeal to a large group of people, and people seem to like it. So why not try to get as many people’s hands and play as many shows as you can and see where it goes. Who knows.
Me: How did the Inspector Gadget sample come about?
Jason: Well I wrote that song actually in New York, and I tried it out for an earlier band I was in. And then I brought it down here. This project is very predicated on rhythm, and shifting tempos , and moving in and out of things. And I was looking for a way to make that song go somewhere and then eventual wind up back in the same place. And, ugh, the riff, even though I’d come up with the riff without thinking about Inspector Gadget, it just kind of seemed to blend once I started really playing it over and over again. So, you know, like anything else we do, we kind of improvised it initially. We recorded it, and we listened to it back, and we thought what we could do about it and how we could make it work. You know, eventually it just became part of the song like we always do.
Me: When you have a song and you’ve done everything with it, when do you know when you’re done?
TJ: You’re never done. Cause, I mean, live shows a lot of things happen based on emotion, based on the crowd. I mean there’s stuff that we’ve both thrown in there at certain shows, where we were just feeling something at the time. Things change you know, there’s a lot of songs we don’t play the same. It’s just one of those things, and to me that’s a good thing because I’m constantly measuring in my head. I’m always thinking about just, just different ideas that come in at different times, about playing this rhythm a certain way or doing this. Or just messing with him, just to see what he does, you know what I mean. But all that stuff’s important cause you’re always tryna be better than what you were. You know what I mean. That’s important too. It’s all about improving and doing things better, and the consistency of putting on great shows.
Jason: Yeah. I think the structure of most songs are complete, but there’s wiggle room within all of them. And, ugh, some songs we work out over the course of a show. Like we have a song now that were working on, that we’re actually working on live. We’ve been playing it live for the past two or three months, but it’s not finished. The words change each time I sing them, the way we arrange the song changes each time I sing it. It’s based around a very, ugh, consistent and catchy hook, but it’s different every time. The best time we’ve played it so far was in Vegas, so that’s the one that’s the time that’s in my mind, and where I think the song will ultimately end up going when we record it, but it’s still not set in stone. And I always tell people that before we play it; this song is not finished, we did that at Strathmore. This song is not finished, we are still kind of working on it, but this is what we have so far. I think it’s cool, I think it’s cool as a fan. You know, I’ve seen a band a year earlier, and be like, I remember when they were just working on that song. Like they played it for us before it was even finished, and then it comes out on the album next year. And you’re like, oh that’s cool, that’s how it ended up.
Me: That’s cool, cause if you’ve been to several of your shows you would have heard like three different versions. That’s really cool. Have you ever considered putting each version on an EP? Like later on, have a special extra thing.
Jason: Yeah, we haven’t recorded all our shows which is a shame cause we’ve done a lot of cool stuff that we’ve not had on film. They will live in people’s memories. And in your words.
*laughs
Me: So most people consider you a DC band, what do you think about the DMV music scene?
TJ: It’s changing, it’s improving.
Jason: That’s true.
TJ: From since I’ve been playing here actively, I’ve seen it just grow. To the amount of different kind of bands and genres playing, just to the overall reception of the city. Like, I mean, look at H street you know. It’s kind of building up to have more venues and open some things up. I think DC is starting to wake up. Younger people are moving here, that helps. More artists are moving here. I mean, it’s changing, it’s good. I think it’s good to be a part of it, when you can be consciously aware from year to year that things are improving for an artist, cause that’s the kind of incentive for anyone with a creative mind; that you know you are moving with a progressive movement.
Jason: Ugh, what was the question?
*laughs
Me: What do you think of the DMV music scene?
Jason: Umm, it’s interesting. It’s diverse, that’s the first thing that struck me when I moved here. There are singers, songwriters, and blues, and jazz, and indie rock. And there’s dance, and theatre, there’s a lot. Umm, there’s actually, what I find the most interesting is there’s this network of people that are really starting to step up and make it easier for musicians and artist to do their thing. And that’s really encouraging, cause you know as many musicians as you have, you need the venues, you need the event organizers, you need the media. You need people like that to promote it and help get the awareness out, and make it things that people want to come to. I mean tonight in DC alone, there’s like fifty shows. And some of them are huge things, like this Water Street Project in Georgetown, and some are small shows at Velvet Lounge or Wonderland Ballroom. And in between shows like ours. But, you know, just that there are that many things going on in DC in one night, that’s encouraging. I just want to make sure that there’s an audience going out to support these things. It’s a process, but it’s definitely getting better.
Me: Do you consider yourselves a DMV band?
Jason: Well we always tell people we are based in DC. And we are, we have great support here from both the media and some of the venues, and our fans most importantly. That said, we do have a presence in New York. We have a presence in LA now. And our music is being heard in other places, in Arizona, Colorado, so hopefully one day we can say we’re a national band that started out in DC. We’re always going to have a special place for DC in our hearts.
Me: You have to come back, when you’re all big and famous and stuff.
Jason: We’re already famous.
*laughs
Me: Well yeah, you are.
*laughs
Jason: We’re just not big.
Keep up with The Grey Area on their progression to becoming big, here. You can all get there music here or on itunes.
On the steps of the United House of Prayer, they talked about playing SXSW, west coast vs. east, their future, the DC music scene, and more.
Me: How was the west coast different from playing on the east coast?
Jason: It was different in a couple of ways. One of which is that we were working with a record label. So that was exciting, just to learn a little about the business; working with a label, figuring out how labels put together shows, how they work with brand partners and other partners to make events happen, and help bands get their music out, which is really cool. Every time you play a new city you learn about that cities music scene, about the vibe in that city, about other musicians you can work with. One of the greatest things about being at SXSW was just meeting so many musicians, seeing the talent around you, what people are doing musically; pushing boundaries, trying out different ideas. Some bands are huge, some bands are tiny, some bands are complicated, and some are simple. Being around all that creativity is really cool.
Me: So the good outweighs the bad?
Jason: There is no bad; laughs
Me: I wasn’t expecting that.
Jason: There is no bad to being on tour
TJ: No not at all, even when things are going like oh my god I can’t believe this is happening, you’re still laughing. Everybody else is probably panicking but being on tour shows you what you are made of, shows you a lot of stuff. You learn about the whole concept of music and playing shows. You just learn so much on tour.
Me: So there is no one place you wouldn’t absolutely go?
TJ: Umm certain places in the south for obvious reasons. Laughs
Jason: I mean, I don’t know if I’d go to Iran right now.
TJ: I’m not knocking down the door to play in Syria anytime soon neither so there’s that.
Jason: I mean I have a buddy who plays in Syria, but I’d want to go with him.
Me: I was going to say, if they requested you would you go?
TJ: The prime minister would have to pick me up from the airport to get me to go.
Jason: It’s a little complicated for me, I don’t know if they’d let me in.
TJ: He wouldn’t be able to get in, me they’d be like you can come be quiet
Jason: The only way I’m getting in is if I’ve got some sort of diplomatic immunity.
Me: So there’s no shallowness in the west coast, cause that’s usually what I hear?
TJ: Here’s the thing when you’re playing on that kind of level when you’re on tour, you can’t really focus on that kind of thing.
Jason: Everybody we met was amazing, we met some amazing people out there. We made some great contacts we made some great friends. And people love music out there, that’s the thing. We showed up at Hard Rock Café in Los Angeles, not really knowing anybody and we just got up on stage and did our thing. And everyone who came up afterwards said that was awesome. People just love music. And the same in Austin and the same in Phoenix. When you are around people who love music, I mean, music is a great unifier; it brings people together regardless if you’ve got this religion or that religion, this philosophy or that philosophy. Music just brings people together.
Me: There’s only the two of you, have you ever thought about a third or fourth?
Jason: When we first started we had a couple of bass players that we experimented with. And we thought about adding different parts and different pieces. We just stuck with what worked, this two person thing worked. We don’t feel like anything is missing, if it’s not broke don’t fix it.
Me: Maroon 5 used to be Kara’s Flowers and they had a completely different sound than they have now. As you said, you are not opposed to evolving, if your sound goes into the Maroon 5 area…*laughs*
Jason: I don’t know if we’ll ever become a Maroon 5.
TJ: Let’s not push us in that direction.
Me: If it happens…
TJ: If it happens, it is what it is. God bless Adam Levine, but.
Jason: I think the Grey Area has a signature. I don’t think that signature is ever going to change. But as a person, as a musician you’re always evolving, and you’re always writing new songs and trying different ideas. And you know, the best example is The Stones. The Stones, their albums they made in the 70’s don’t sound anything like the albums they made in the 60’s, and they don’t sound anything like the albums in the 90’s. But they’re still The Stones and the signature is still there. So if we can have a career like that, we’ll be very lucky.
Me: So the way that your sound goes, do you just jam? Do you think of things, where one of you thinks of something and then the other thinks of something, and you put it together?
TJ: Yes. Yes. Yep, you got it.
*laughs
TJ: It’s always a mix of things. It’s always focusing on anything not taking away from the song, taking away from the music. It’s the arrangement, things that make sense to build a good song. I mean, it’s a fluid concept. It’s not like one magical thing, like one song “Sugar,” we were in one world, and it just, *snaps, you know what I mean, happens. A lot stuff, [Jason] had lyrics for a lot of things for years, and were able to just build right into it. It changes.
Jason: Building a song is kind of like raising a baby, you know. Like the idea for it comes out, but it doesn’t become a person over night. You got to let it grow. You got to nurture it, you’ve got to give it room to breathe, teach it some things. So, you know, an idea comes for a song. I had an idea for a song on a plane, when I was flying to Brazil. And I didn’t have a guitar with me, so I just hummed out the melody, and I sort of wrote out where I thought the melody could go on a piece of paper. And then I just let it sit for two weeks, I didn’t touch it. And I came back, and I thought if I still liked it, and I tried it out on the guitar, and I played around with it. Then I took it to [TJ], and then it changed some more. Ultimately it became a song that is on the album, the second song on the album. It’s very organic, you let it develop, let it take on a life of its own. And I think the best songs come that way.
Me: So you’ve never just wrote a song in like five minutes?
Jason: I have, a couple. There’s a song that I wrote with my last band that we still play called “All Good Americans Take Off Their Shows.” It’s about airport security. I wrote that on the subway in New York, it took me about three minutes to write. It just came all out. But that’s rare, at least for me.
Me: [TJ] already pretty much talked about this. The general question I usually ask everybody is, finish this sentence “without music I?”
TJ: Would be in jail. I mean that’s a tough one. I don’t really see a lot of positives, I see it either being me being stagnant and not having a life, or doing something negatively creative with my time. Because like I said, I’ve been playing since I was so young. I’ve always played, I couldn’t imagine filling all that time with something else. I really couldn’t.
Jason: Ugh, without music, I’d be lost.
Me: That’s it. So you wouldn’t be like an engineer or a cop?
TJ: No, no.
Jason: No, I’m not good at that stuff. No, I’d be lost. I mean music I think has given me direction in my life, and it’s ugh. I don’t know what I’d do without it. But you know, I think everyone can say that. If you look at every single culture in the entire world, throughout history there has always been music. There’s a reason, cause music expresses things that language doesn’t give us the full opportunity to do. And that’s the reason I think music exists; cause we all have things inside us that we need to get out. Whether its dancing, or singing, or playing an instrument, music gives us that outlook. I think we’d all be lost.
TJ: I agree.
Me: So since you didn’t really know each other before, the friendship that you have now does it sometimes create personality clashes when you are writing music?
TJ: Oh yeah. Well not writing music. We do stuff to annoy each other. Here’s the thing, your best relationships in life should challenge each other. He pushes me to do things that are good for me, that I may not want to do. And vice versa. So it’s kind of like one of those things where it’s always positive, always pushing to a positive place where maybe you should do this or maybe do that. Those type of things happen, but they help you they build you to be a better person, musician or whatever. Yeah that stuff happens, but I look at it as a building thing. If my friends aren’t pushing me to be better, are they really my friends?
Me: Going back to Adam Levine, and The Voice, and shows like that, would you ever go that route? I’m sure you’re having an amazing time doing what you are doing now, but..
Jason: I don’t know what that means. What do you mean by that?
Me: Would you go on something like The Voice, or X Factor, or something like that?
TJ: No. I’m not trying to hate on that because it does do a lot of great things for a lot of people, in my opinion a small percentage. But it’s one of those things where I couldn’t imagine not doing what we’re doing now. I couldn’t. I mean to be able to tour and play shows and do things on your own terms. And struggle when you know you are putting your passion and energy into it, and not be on a producer’s producers dime. I just couldn’t imagine not doing what we’re doing. I mean touring and going to SXSW and just playing some of the shows, and having some of the magical nights we’ve had. I couldn’t imagine not doing that.
Jason: We don’t need [name withheld] to tell us whether we are good or not, we just don’t.
Me: If you stay where you are now…
TJ: I’m not trying to be arrogant, I don’t see us staying where we are now. I see us, I see this being a point in the adventure where. Like Miles Davis has something interesting, I was watching an interview from the 80’s with him, and he talked about everything he did before is just something on the timeline. Because he was always thinking ahead. He was thinking in 60’s when I was doing whatever, that was great then, but you remove me two decades I want to be doing something else. Progressively something else. So I always think this is just a point in a journey leading to something else. I always think that.
Jason: What he said.
*laughs
Me: Personally, there are artists that I like, where as a fan I want them to stay where they are. Cause once you get to a certain level you can’t see them at a small place like Red Palace anymore. Like Adele, she out of nowhere just…
TJ: ..Boom. Right, right, right.
Jason: Listen as a band, the reason you are making music is cause you want people to hear it. The more people who hear it the better. The more audiences you’re playing in the better. So, you know, if you’re gonna do music it doesn’t make sense to stay static. Unless, you don’t have any higher aspirations for getting your music beyond a certain demographic. If you are a very genre or niche kind of music and you only want to be popular in that one area, than that makes sense. I think our music has an appeal to a large group of people, and people seem to like it. So why not try to get as many people’s hands and play as many shows as you can and see where it goes. Who knows.
Me: How did the Inspector Gadget sample come about?
Jason: Well I wrote that song actually in New York, and I tried it out for an earlier band I was in. And then I brought it down here. This project is very predicated on rhythm, and shifting tempos , and moving in and out of things. And I was looking for a way to make that song go somewhere and then eventual wind up back in the same place. And, ugh, the riff, even though I’d come up with the riff without thinking about Inspector Gadget, it just kind of seemed to blend once I started really playing it over and over again. So, you know, like anything else we do, we kind of improvised it initially. We recorded it, and we listened to it back, and we thought what we could do about it and how we could make it work. You know, eventually it just became part of the song like we always do.
Me: When you have a song and you’ve done everything with it, when do you know when you’re done?
TJ: You’re never done. Cause, I mean, live shows a lot of things happen based on emotion, based on the crowd. I mean there’s stuff that we’ve both thrown in there at certain shows, where we were just feeling something at the time. Things change you know, there’s a lot of songs we don’t play the same. It’s just one of those things, and to me that’s a good thing because I’m constantly measuring in my head. I’m always thinking about just, just different ideas that come in at different times, about playing this rhythm a certain way or doing this. Or just messing with him, just to see what he does, you know what I mean. But all that stuff’s important cause you’re always tryna be better than what you were. You know what I mean. That’s important too. It’s all about improving and doing things better, and the consistency of putting on great shows.
Jason: Yeah. I think the structure of most songs are complete, but there’s wiggle room within all of them. And, ugh, some songs we work out over the course of a show. Like we have a song now that were working on, that we’re actually working on live. We’ve been playing it live for the past two or three months, but it’s not finished. The words change each time I sing them, the way we arrange the song changes each time I sing it. It’s based around a very, ugh, consistent and catchy hook, but it’s different every time. The best time we’ve played it so far was in Vegas, so that’s the one that’s the time that’s in my mind, and where I think the song will ultimately end up going when we record it, but it’s still not set in stone. And I always tell people that before we play it; this song is not finished, we did that at Strathmore. This song is not finished, we are still kind of working on it, but this is what we have so far. I think it’s cool, I think it’s cool as a fan. You know, I’ve seen a band a year earlier, and be like, I remember when they were just working on that song. Like they played it for us before it was even finished, and then it comes out on the album next year. And you’re like, oh that’s cool, that’s how it ended up.
Me: That’s cool, cause if you’ve been to several of your shows you would have heard like three different versions. That’s really cool. Have you ever considered putting each version on an EP? Like later on, have a special extra thing.
Jason: Yeah, we haven’t recorded all our shows which is a shame cause we’ve done a lot of cool stuff that we’ve not had on film. They will live in people’s memories. And in your words.
*laughs
Me: So most people consider you a DC band, what do you think about the DMV music scene?
TJ: It’s changing, it’s improving.
Jason: That’s true.
TJ: From since I’ve been playing here actively, I’ve seen it just grow. To the amount of different kind of bands and genres playing, just to the overall reception of the city. Like, I mean, look at H street you know. It’s kind of building up to have more venues and open some things up. I think DC is starting to wake up. Younger people are moving here, that helps. More artists are moving here. I mean, it’s changing, it’s good. I think it’s good to be a part of it, when you can be consciously aware from year to year that things are improving for an artist, cause that’s the kind of incentive for anyone with a creative mind; that you know you are moving with a progressive movement.
Jason: Ugh, what was the question?
*laughs
Me: What do you think of the DMV music scene?
Jason: Umm, it’s interesting. It’s diverse, that’s the first thing that struck me when I moved here. There are singers, songwriters, and blues, and jazz, and indie rock. And there’s dance, and theatre, there’s a lot. Umm, there’s actually, what I find the most interesting is there’s this network of people that are really starting to step up and make it easier for musicians and artist to do their thing. And that’s really encouraging, cause you know as many musicians as you have, you need the venues, you need the event organizers, you need the media. You need people like that to promote it and help get the awareness out, and make it things that people want to come to. I mean tonight in DC alone, there’s like fifty shows. And some of them are huge things, like this Water Street Project in Georgetown, and some are small shows at Velvet Lounge or Wonderland Ballroom. And in between shows like ours. But, you know, just that there are that many things going on in DC in one night, that’s encouraging. I just want to make sure that there’s an audience going out to support these things. It’s a process, but it’s definitely getting better.
Me: Do you consider yourselves a DMV band?
Jason: Well we always tell people we are based in DC. And we are, we have great support here from both the media and some of the venues, and our fans most importantly. That said, we do have a presence in New York. We have a presence in LA now. And our music is being heard in other places, in Arizona, Colorado, so hopefully one day we can say we’re a national band that started out in DC. We’re always going to have a special place for DC in our hearts.
Me: You have to come back, when you’re all big and famous and stuff.
Jason: We’re already famous.
*laughs
Me: Well yeah, you are.
*laughs
Jason: We’re just not big.
Keep up with The Grey Area on their progression to becoming big, here. You can all get there music here or on itunes.
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