Fresh from a canceled photo shoot and literally lost in the June gloomy underbelly of West LA, the boys that spawned Amazing Baby are seemingly enthusiastic to finally hop out of the late model Chrysler SUV. (Apparently there was a mix up as far as a meeting destination for this interview). And they’ve still got the rest of the day ahead of them, which includes more press, pictures, and video stuff. Pretty much, all of this has come quite quickly for the members of Amazing Baby, having just formed a little over a year and a half ago. Last year they were just bunking it with ashtrays and cockroaches, but now according to them, things have just slightly upgraded.
URB: So what’s going on guys, tell me where you guys reppin’?
North East New York almost, Brooklyn pretty much.
URB: Seems you guys have been pretty busy lately, what do you guys have that lies ahead?
Rob: We don’t have much spare time.
Will: I occasionally like to go to bars.
Rob: Record shopping
Matt: I went to the sauna last night. That was quite enjoyable. I worked up a pretty nice sweat.
Simon: Semi-liquid foods. soups, queso
Will: Well, in New York in general, my life is just pretty much put up between socializing and the working on the band really. I don’t think I do anything else. I wish I had some more hobbies. I like working on art projects unfortunately or fortunately i’m only near or surrounded by the band.
URB: You guys seemingly have a lot already under your belts. It has basically gone from The Infinite Fucking Cross (an EP) to Rewild being only together for under two years. That process is usually a lot longer. How did the album come about?
Will: The reason to do an album is I guess you wanna have enough music and you usually need to have enough interest to do an album and both of those just happened sort of quickly with us. I think it’s because we started the band as a recording project. So within the band’s first three months of existence we had three or four songs on the internet making the rounds and that gave us the opportunity for us to keep recording and to play more shows pushing the momentum forward to getting an album out there and because of that, the album recording processes took like an entire year.
Simon: We just started recording an album, playing live came second, as things happened, we were forced to play live, okay not really more like asked, but an album was basically in the works the minute we thought of it, we started this band.
Will: There were aspects or tracks but not like whole complete tracks, they’re like small tracks on an album track that were recorded during the first band practice ever, during the band meeting. So it’s pretty much gone to demo to recording the entire album the whole time.
URB: Right now seems like a rough time to be on a major label, especially with the Internet, the blogs and the whole downloading thing. Was there ever any interest to sign to a major or was it just stay strictly indie?
Simon: I think probably realistically. I think our aspirations are to eventually make enough money to where we don’t even have to use a label, where we could do it all ourselves. I think right now it’s a terrible time to be on a major label. During the whole process we were shopping around, we definitely went to the majors and were very close to signing with a couple and a lot of them at the end of 2008 more than half of the people we were talking to were getting fired or they had to drop five bands or they were saying “We’re not allowed to sign any new bands,” a lot of these things are happening with a lot of the major labels, but we came across really great independent labels and I think we got really lucky and we signed to a great label.
Will: Being on an indie label, I really think the record we made is creatively justified and complete and wonderful, but I do wonder had we signed to a major would we still be shopping the album or having to rework things due to because the label had a personal opinions about it.
URB: After listening to the album, there seems to be no distinct sound, hate to sound cliche but it’s like a blending of different genres. But this one just ended up sounding good.
Simon: It was basically kind of ton of different shit on the record. People take our music in very different ways. Instead of having one main influence a lot of bands sounding like another band I think we kind of put in everything that we’ve really listened to. We put it into the producing process; we put it into the recording process. I think the atmosphere was eclectic, I enjoy eclectic records and I really hope the fans enjoy it too.
URB: Were there any particular influences for you guys? Now what did you guys listen to growing up, or currently on rotation?
Rob: McCartney II, side 2
Simon: ZZ Top, Eliminator
Rob: I just got an autographed copy of that for two dollars
Simon: Well fuck you I met Billy Gibbons
Rob: Yeah, well you don’t have beards autographed do you? Yeah actually I don’t really like to listen to it, I just like to look at their beards.
URB: Amazing Baby. How did you come up with that name?
Simon: We started thinking of band names when we started the project, sending emails back and fourth, ’cause we were at work. We didn’t want to do names ’cause we wanted to come up with band names. It ended up being like 200 to 300 suggestions between us. Supreme Being was one, Headdress was one, Invisible Palace was one, The Narwhal was one. Most of them ended up being song titles. Then we had this section where we said amazing then we put baby, but it was more of the way it was put together and sounded. But it’s also sort of unclassifiable, like you hear the name Amazing Baby, you’re not gonna immediately think of an indie rock band, or a DJ or a it could just be anything. My goddaughter was just born too, and it was just like Amazing Baby.
URB: Where do you see the band in five years?
Will: Definitely touring the world and recording more music. We’re going to be recording a lot of songs between this album and our next and whether or not it’s for the next album or not we’re really not sure yet. We’re definitely project oriented, so even if its small limited releases or like small stuff that we’ll sell on tour or just have one single or stuff like that. We mainly do a lot of stuff to mainly support the album; so you know I think we’re just gonna keep busy.
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