A few days ago I had the opportunity to chat with Antonia Freybe-Smith from one of my favourite local bands Jets Overhead. Read below to see how we delve in to their sounds, writing music, and their new album, “No Nations”.
How did Jets Overhead become Jets Overhead?
Oh jeez. Most of the band members had been in a previous incarnation called the Special Guests, and they’d been together since high school basically, and then they sort of changed a bit, and got a new member, and then I joined and formed Jets Overhead, I guess, about, 5 years ago. And that’s pretty much it; we just sort of kept the dream alive and started playing music together and our sounds kind of changed and we changed the name to Jets Overhead, and yeah.
How would you describe your sound?
Well, I had this quoted back to me when we were in Toronto last week, and said I had said this and I was like “Aw, sweet, I said that? That’s awesome.” I might have to re-quote myself here. Apparently I said “We’re like soft, heavy road-trip music.” and I thought it was awesome I said that, and I think we are kid of like that. It’s sort of heavy, but not in your face, and a lot of our friends end up listening to our album on road trips, we found out the last while, and we like that.
When in the studio, when writing your music, where do you usually find your inspiration?
That’s a good question. Well, with our last record, the one that’s come out this year, “No Nations”, it was really cool, actually. I mean, we all had day jobs and stuff – most of us do anyway – and we’re all pretty busy. We wrote the album together, as a band. We just sort of meet together in the evenings, in the Winter, we’d meet in the evenings in our basement jam space, and we would just start jamming. We’d be like “Hey, how’s it going?” and wouldn’t really talk to each other that much; we’d just plug in, turn our amps on, and just play. And we’d just jam for a few hours and these songs just kind of came out of that, but I think we all agree, when we were looking at the material, that there was a lot of similar themes in the songs and just a lot of things going on in the world and in our own lives and we’d just go down in the basement and it would come out that way. Themes about, like, “What the hell is life about?” and “What’s going on with the state of the world?” and, we’re helpless, but we aren’t, and that type of thing. That was a big inspiration to us, even though we didn’t sit down and be like, “We want to write songs about this and this”, it was just kind of an unspoken thing that just kind of happened; sort of therapeutic. So it was pretty organic the way the theme sort of presents itself after a long, long session of sort of jamming away.
What do you like to listen to? Your favourite?
Well, Adam, my other band mate, he’s also my husband, I think I really irritate him because I am just obsessively listening to jazz and classical music, and kind, of folk music. Over the last few years, much to my frustration, I can’t listen to any music vaguely in the genre of music we’re making; and there’s a lot of great music out there right now, indie rock, atmospheric rock, just incredible stuff out there now that I just can’t really put that on and chill out, I don’t know what it is. It’s like I need to listen to music that has nothing to do with the type of music we make or the the same sort of music our peers are making in the community. I don’t know, maybe it’s just work for me now, unfortunately, but I’m just crazy listening to a lot of jazz and a lot of world music and just, like Cuban music. I’ll irritate Adam, because he’ll put on, like, Sweet Foxes and I’ll just turn it off. So, hopefully he’ll get over that soon.
When you’re not recording or touring, what do you get up to in your off time?
The last couple of years, we’ve been, sort of, making the record in our off-time, because that was taking up a lot of time, but Adam would play with a few other friends and other types of bands, like fun cover bands, so that kind of takes up our time, and it’s a pretty sweet way to pay the bills, just with our friends, and in cover bands. We work for our band. Like, we released our album on our own label called MicroGroove so our, sort of, philosophy was that all our members work for our label. We’re really like to have a lot of great people our team now. We’ve hired some publicists and stuff like that. So most of the stuff that involves releasing an album, we did ourselves, and that takes up a lot of our time; it’s a job, basically. We can’t really, in this day and age, you don’t really have a huge team behind you, it’s like a record deal, where a lot a bands are doing it themselves, and it’s a lot of day-to-day work, applying for grants, and trying to get shows, publicity, interviews, so it’s great to do it for yourself, because you have this control and you’re really involved, but it’s a lot of work.
Talking about your new album, “No Nations”, what was the concept behind the cover artwork?
It was done by–the cover of the album, it’s actually a little sculpture done by a really talented local artist. He’s really neat, he does all sorts of neat things. He also shot a video for us, when we were in China in May, it’s the video for the title track, “No Nations”. Yeah, he’s super creative and he built that little sculpture and then photographed it on a black background. We had a bunch of different stuff, and when we saw that, we just fell in love with it and thought it was beautiful and interesting and eye-catching and somehow felt like it, kind of, abstractly said it all. It’s an interesting abstract concept and we all agreed, like, “Sweet, album cover!” and we all agreed immediately and that was great.
How does your previous album, “Bridges”, compare with “No Nations”? How have the sounds changed?
I think it’s changed quite a bit, I think it’s a but more sonically satisfying, that’s what I would say. We wrote a lot of songs for “No Nations”, and some of them were just snippets, and some were full songs and we had a lot of – we just, sort of, spewed out a lot of material for that album, and I think it’s just quite a much more soothing, but much more heavy sound. I think it’s a bit more realized, and a bit more of what we were going for before, but we took our sweet time this time, and I think you can kind of tell on there. We weren’t trying to be anything or be anybody, we just really made the conscious decision to just — we weren’t trying to get a radio hit, we weren’t trying be the coolest kids on the block, and just decided to forget all of that crap; let’s just take our time and write a sweet record that we liked, and that we would want to listen to. And you can sort of feel that on there. We were just so chill. And on the last one, I love “Bridges”, but we were just a bit more trying to meet goals, and we were under pressure, and had a short period of time and with this one we just took our sweet time and tried to make something that just sings. A lot of people don’t have that luxury, or they can’t get there that fast, they still feel a lot of pressure.
What does the future of Jets Overhead look like?
Well, hopefully, it looks like a lot of touring and playing a lot of shows, and we just want to, basically, get out there and play as many shows as we want at this point and that’s the best part about it, and we love it. And meeting people and other bands in the music community and stuff like that. And that’s the greatest part of it, in a way. Just doing as much as we can this album cycle and just hopefully, as Adam said, “Keep the dream alive,” and, well, we actually recorded enough songs for another record, so actually another handful of songs that we want to release. We’re not sure how we’ll do it, if we’ll do another album or put a few of them online or whatever. We’ve got another handful of songs, and some of my favourites are even held back. So, we’re just going to keep doing it as long as we can and as long as we’re still getting the same thing out of it, and feeling artistically satisfied, and we’ll definitely keep it for a while for sure. That’s what we hope to do anyways.
