By Morgan Lawrence, News Correspondent
Alternative rock band Sleeper Agent’s latest single, “Get Burned,” was voted among MTVU’s Required Listening For Spring, and Rolling Stone called the group a band to watch following the release of their first full-length album, Celebrasion, in 2011. After a tour with Circa Survive, another with Cage the Elephant and Manchester Orchestra, and a stint on the Weezer Cruise, a music festival aboard a cruise ship, alongside acts like Wavves and Dinosaur Jr., the group from Bowling Green, Ky., is set for a string of dates opening for singer-songwriter Ben Kweller. Their Saturday show at afterHOURS kicked off this 12-week tour, and the band – singer Alex Kandel, guitarist Josh Martin, bassist Lee Williams, keyboardist Scott Gardner, singer-guitarist Tony Smith and drummer Justin Wilson – took some time before their set to talk to The News about life on the road, the recording process and what lies ahead.
Huntington News: You guys did the Weezer Cruise, what was that like?
Alex Kandel: Oh my God.
Lee Williams: Insane.
Scott Gardner: It was ridiculous … we hijacked this one smoker’s lounge and just kind of made it our area. But we more so hung out with just the other bands.
LW: Yeah. Wavves, Yuck, I talked to some of the guys from The Antlers for a long time. … Scott and I were on the boat for 30 seconds, going up the stairs and immediately we saw [comic] Doug Benson and were like “Oh my God.” and had a conversation with him.
Tony Smith: We spent a lot of time with a lot of people on the boat, too.
AK: Yeah, I never had to pay for a drink.
SG: It’s kind of a weird juxtaposition … because you still have to go through Carnival [Cruise Lines] to make the experience happen. So it’s the juxtaposition of all of these amazing bands – like Weezer, Dinosaur Jr., Wavves – I don’t know, just people that you listen to and look up to, and then you still have the [expletive] fact that you’re paying $8 for every drink.
TS: It was “enter through the gift shop.”
SG: It was a vacation. It was the only thing we had booked in January, pretty much, besides some home shows.
AK: And that’s good, because we had so much recovery time. We needed it.
HN: How’s the rest of touring been?
SG: Well this is the first day of what’s going to be 12 weeks.
AK: Yeah. So right now we’re really chipper.
AK: Things are good now. [Give it] a few weeks and someone will have a stab wound. [Laughs]
LW: That’s not what I meant. But last year, about a year ago now, we did our first tour and in that year’s time we did something like 110, 115 shows. Which puts you at doing a show every third day, which to me was awesome. We weren’t home very often, which has pros and cons.
AK: Like rent. That’s a con.
HN: Do you ever really get a feel for the places you go, or is it more like, get in, play a show, leave?
SG: Our first night in Boston, we played at [Café 939] with Company of Thieves … it was the night that the Bruins won –
LW: The Stanley Cup, so it was last year. We were the opening band for the show, so we were done early. And the way that it’s set up, Café 939 is … on this side of a hallway and on the other side is a bar, and then up and down the street are just a ton of bars. So … [the Bruins] maybe block a shot or score a goal, and the bar next to us would go “Woo!” and then you would hear that sound just –
AK: Echo. Well, you could hear the stadium, so it would start there and just billow down the street.
LW: It was crazy. It was a cool experience for sure.
AK: This is our third time here and we’ve spent [time] in a lot of cities. After a while you start to understand the personality. Usually the first time you’re there you’ll miss a lot, but then the second time you’ll catch something.
SG: It’s more seeing the countryside and seeing how the landscape changes than it is seeing different cities.
AK: I can’t wait until we can start to spot different breeds of cows.
TS: You can’t wait for that?
AK: I’m just saying. It’s going to happen eventually.
LW: It’s on its way I’m sure. I mean it’s weird to be from this tiny town in Kentucky –
AK: It’s not that tiny.
LW: No, I’m just saying that being from this kind of out of the way place, and then coming to places like Boston and New York, I find myself being familiar with, like, ‘That’s a good exit to take, that’s a bad exit to take.’ I just never thought I would be there, that I would have any kind of understanding of what it means to drive into Boston and know your way around. I’m getting there.
HN: Speaking of driving, what do you listen to in the van?
AK: A lot of stand-up, but a lot of music. Whether it’s old stuff that Scott digs up that no one’s ever heard of or new stuff that no one’s ever heard of.
LW: Stand-up comedy. We’re all out of stand-up comedy. We have no albums on any of our computers or iPods that we haven’t heard. So podcasts have been the thing lately.
HN: Whose stand-up?
LW: Louis C.K., Patton Oswalt.
AK: Doug Benson.
LW: Aziz Ansari.
SG: Donald Glover.
LW: Daniel Tosh, Bill Hicks is a huge one. Jim Gaffigan.
AK: Keep in mind, these are pretty much every special that these people have done. I could probably recite [‘Louis C.K. Live in Houston’]. I could probably recite that whole thing.
SG: You get sick of music eventually. And you’re around the same five or six other people all the time, so you have the same experiences. It’s kind of nice to hear somebody else talk.
TS: Songs give places weird déjà vu sometimes.
LW: It also gets to the point where it’s like, all right, I’ve listened to indie bands, experimental bands, classic rock bands. I’ve listened to folk, I’ve listened to country, I’ve listened to hip-hop. You just get to the point where you’re like ‘I don’t want to hear any of that. I just don’t want to hear it.’
HN: Are you guys working on anything right now or are you strictly in tour mode?
AK: Oh no, we still write a lot. So we’re going to have a lot to work with whenever we sit down to record the next record.
LW: I can’t wait to get back [into the studio]. But it’s also like you really want to get every bit out of the album that you have. You want to make sure that it runs its full possible course. Tony writes constantly and I think we all want, by the time that we’re really thinking about the next record, to sit down with 30 or 40 songs.
AK: How many songs would you say we have now? New songs?
TS: Just by myself? I’d say 20-ish.
HN: What is that process like when you’ve got these song ideas and you want to kind of come together, flesh them out and record them eventually?
TS: I don’t think we’ve ever really thought about it that much.
LW: Yeah, it’s always spontaneous.
TS: Yeah, I can come up with the root of the song and Justin comes up with a drum part … there’s never really been a song where we’re just like ‘[expletive] that, it’s gross. I hate that.’
LW: The six of us might flesh out five different songs, and at the end of the week … we’ll jumble it all together and have one. That’s the point of going into the studio with 40 songs, you know? If you have 40, however many, just a ton, you whittle down ideas to the best and what you like the most and then clean up the mess.
SG: We also can be weirdly obsessive about recording stuff. I have a lot of stuff, a lot of ideas that we probably just did that one practice and then have never touched again, but it’s on my computer. And that can be helpful too, because you can just share with everybody else and then you get a chance to listen to it and sort of reflect on it.
LW: Yeah, that’s the neat thing, is that we might record a demo on Scott’s Garage Band, and then six months later be flipping through those files and find one that we forgot about.
TS: It’s kind of like putting a $5 bill in a winter coat, and in the spring finding it again.
HN: So nothing goes to waste.
TS: I wouldn’t say so.
