The Dance Party
By Dave Schwartz
Photo by Michelle Musikantow
The Dance Party have been kicking up and down the East
Coast since 2005. In a few short years, they’ve gone from playing
dance-punk in warehouses to landing a record deal. On September 28th
they will release, “Touch" and in anticipation of the release, I called
guitarist Kevin Bayly to get his impressions on the new record and all
things Dance Party. It went something like this…
Hi, this is Dave Schwartz. I’m calling from DaBelly.com and I’m looking
for Kevin. We’re scheduled for an interview.
KB: Yeah, absolutely man, what’s up?
DB: Did I get you at a good time?
KB: No, things are cool. I’m just hanging out. Trying
to find a clean shirt actually!
DB: It’s the plague of every band-- the much coveted
clean shirt! Hey, you’ve got a new record coming out on September 28th
called “Touch,” what can you tell me about it?
KB: We’re really stoked about it. It sounds amazing
and we’re all really proud of it. We spent a lot of time working on it
in Los Angeles. We endured some hardships, endured some hard partying.
We wrote like 50 songs for the record and narrowed it down to like 12 or
13 and we stand behind them. I think it’s an awesome party hard, arena
rock record.
DB: Wow, you wrote 50 to yield 13? Sounds like you’re
going to have a lot of B-sides.
KB: Yeah, there has already been healthy debate within
the band over what would make the record or not. I mean we all have our
favorites and not everyone likes the same songs. But you know what?
This is a really great problem to have.
DB: Before we go much further I should ask you to
forgive some of the questions that I may have today. If they seem a
little off-base or flat-out wrong, it’s because there really isn’t an
awful lot written about The Dance Party. In my research, I struggled to
find accurate details and in fact many of the sources that I reviewed
had conflicting information.
KB: It’s OK. We understand. We really don’t have a
Google friendly name either. If you Google "The Dance Party," the first
option won’t be our band.
DB: It’s all cool. We did manage to find some
details. For instance, you worked with producer Warren Huart on this
record. How did that work out? What kind of producer is Huart?
KB: He pretty old school. Actually we worked
with three producers on this record, but Huart did the majority of the
album. Like I said, he’s real old school. He’s known for large organic
sounds and for what we were trying to accomplish which was big guitars,
big arena drums-- he was perfect. He worked hard to capture our real
performance as the sounds we really use. We tracked everything live as
a band. Our drummer is really awesome and plays with a click track all
the time, so we were like dead on. Then we got to go back in and get
weird with guitar tones and start building those tracks. We did a bunch
of things that were really outside-the-box with him, but we still
managed to capture our performance and sound.
We also worked with Luke Walker. We did a couple of
songs with him. Walker is definitely more computers and digital
oriented. We had a few songs that we thought would benefit from that
approach.
And finally we did a song with our buddy Julian Burnetta.
He briefly played bass in our band and is a well-regarded producer and
songwriter. We just went to his house one weekend, partied and tracked
the song. The song is called “Hush” and is bad-ass. It made the record
and we’re all stoked on that one. The weekend was great. It was like
this giant bro-down and party at his pool and Malibu beach house.
DB: You mentioned working on getting those big arena
sounds in the studio. Do you have any fears of recreating your studio
sound live?
KB: Everything on the record is us. If there is a
part, we played it. Sometimes it can be difficult to articulate your
sound live but we’ve worked hard with the arrangements to make sure our
sound is right. Mick (Coogan - vocals) did 99 percent of all the vocals
in the studio. He has an amazing voice. Sometimes he sounds like a 15
year old kid and I don’t know anyone that can do that live, but we’ve
worked hard and know that we will sound good live. We’ve always had
compliments about our live performance. Some people have said that we
sounded better live than on our past records. This time, I think our
record sounds as good as we do live.
DB: OK, time for one of my embarrassing questions: One
source said five, another source said four and your band photo showed
three, how many people are in The Dance Party?
KB: OK, that’s a fair question. There has been a
rotating cast of characters. It’s been Mick and I for a long time.
Other good friends have come and gone. Sometimes it’s hard to find
people that want to be in a band full time. I mean there are hardships,
you know, like living in a hotel room for a year at a time. Right now
there are four of us: Mick, myself, David Kuehl (bass) and Jon Jester
(drums), we call him moose. The photo is misleading, it depends on who
is where when the photo is taken. We’re working on clearing a lot of
this up. So there are four of us right now. We just lost our keyboard
player and we’re all rolling with that.
DB: I understand. Changing band members can often be
more impact than the fans understand.
KB: We went through eight bass players last year.
DB: Ouch! Well, I’m sure you’ll have better luck!
You’ve already mentioned that you spent a year working on the record.
How much of that time was actually spent in the studio itself?
KB: All said and done, it was like nine months. We
were in and out several times and there was a stretch there of two
months where we didn’t have a day off. But like I said, we demoed 50
songs for the record. So it was pretty much from the day we got to L.A.
until last May.
DB: I caught your video for “Sasha Don‘t Sleep,”
that’s a slick video.
KB: I have to give it up to the director, James Toth.
He really shoe-stringed it, cut some corners and got some real cool
people to work on it for us. Without their talents we really couldn’t
have pulled it off.
DB: And finally, the tour, what are your tour plans?
KB: September 2nd we start in Boston. We’ll be out on
the road for a month and then we come back to D.C. We’ll go all the way
out to L.A. and then return here on the 28th for our record release.
It’s a solo tour in preparation of the release. We’ll have further
plans beyond that but nothing that I can announce yet. This is just a
building awareness tour. It will be a van and a trailer, selling
t-shirts at the show.
I want to thank Kevin Bayly for taking time away from finding a clean
shirt to talk with me. Make sure you catch them on the road this
month. As their name implies, The Dance Party are a real party live.
You won’t be disappointed. In the meantime, check out their new single
on YouTube-- “Sasha Don’t Sleep”
And catch The Dance Party on MySpace…