The Bravery Bio

RFD Interview with The Bravery

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school, where they played anykind of music they could get there hands on--from punk
to country to jazz to metal. In the early '00s they moved to NYC,where they discovered
the Electroclash scene in full swing. They loved the sound of electronic music made in
the basement on piece-of-shit equipment. It sounded new and different, and they
wondered if they could take that sound … and add it toa live band, creating a fusion of
rock and electronic music. Sam had an iMac, John had a keyboard, and they both had
guitars. They figured, what else would we need?

A band. So they looked for a singer, but couldn't find one. So Sam thought, well, why don't I try writing some songs, and I
could sing them. Only problem was, he couldn't sing a note. But they didn't let that get in the way. He plugged in the
guitar and wrote a song called "Tyrant," about the girl who lived next door. It was a rock song, but John took it and
remixed into a dance song. One night they played it at a house party. The girls danced. The girls demanded they play it
over and over again. They realized they were on the right path.

They needed some other guys for the band, so they put an ad in the paper. Michael answered. He was a jazz-cat, a
Django Reinhardt devotee; this was new music for him, and he loved it. They asked the other bands they knew about
drummers. They said, well there's a guy who's amazing, but he just moved here from Boston last week so no one's got
him yet. This was Anthony. They grabbed him; he didn't know any better.

They booked a show, opening for a friend's band at tiny Stinger Club in Brooklyn. The show was in a week and they
needed a bass player. So Michael enlisted his best friend, also named Michael. Only problem was, new Michael had
never played a bass before. But he practiced constantly for the week, pretty much without sleeping, and played the show.
They rocked.

The group hung out in John's apartment in Chinatown, writing and recording songs. They went about it in a weird way;
they made rock'n'roll the way DJs make electronic music. A DJ takes samples into the computer, chops 'em up, edits
them, manipulates the sounds, until, voila: You have a song. This is what the Bravery did, except instead of using
samples, they made all the sounds themselves. Sam would write the basic song on guitar, the group would record it like a
rock track, and then remix it beyond recognition. Result: something new and bold.

Lyrically, Sam writes from a strange perpective--call it that of a "hopeful misanthrope." You get the impression he hates
every person he has ever met; and sometimes he is overcome with the frustration of this. But at the last minute he
refuses to give up, and you leave the song with a sense of optimism, of innocent hope. You listen to him battling his
fears, his sense of negativity, and winning out in the end. As a reflection of this, they named their band The Bravery.

Eventually, they had enough songs for a whole album, so the band made a website and put the album online. They also
put it on another odd site they discovered, called Myspace. (Remember, this is 2003.) They burned CDs of their music
and handed them out all around town. They would stand outside of Tower Records all day handing out burned CDs.
They'd play anywhere they could get a gig; the basement of Lit, TT the Bears and Middle East in Boston, etc. They would
hang out all day putting up fliers, or handing out CDs outside of other shows.

Soon, the band saw that people had started coming to the shows. Then other people started playing their album. Zane
Lowe at Radio One in the U.K. downloaded songs off the band's website and started playing them on the air. Soon,
Aaron Axelsen at Live 105 in San Francisco and Paul Driscoll at WFNX in Boston did the same. They booked a residency
at Arlene's Grocery in New York, every Thursday night for a month. Then a LOT of people started coming to the shows.
Including record label people.

Island Records released The Bravery in 2005. For the next 18 months the band toured the world basically non-stop,
enjoying much success and two international hit songs--"An Honest Mistake" and "Unconditional." The time passed
quickly.

THE SUN AND THE MOON

After touring for all this time, The Bravery were better musicians, better singers, a better band. They wanted to make an
album that would reflect their growth as musicians. So they recruited producer Brendan O'Brien, well known for bringing
out the best performance in a group (see: Rage Against the Machine, Neil Young etc.). The band wanted to try new
textures and sounds, so they moved to Brendan's Atlanta studio and grabbed any instrument they could get their hands
on, and choked it until something good came out. That included antique pump organs ("Believe"), Mellotrons ("Time
Won't Let Me Go"), a string quartet ("The Ocean"), and a host of Pet Sounds-worthy vocal arrangements ("This is Not the
End," "Above and Below").

Despite this newfound creativity and sense of musical exploration, the band also wanted to keep the energy that came
with recording in the basement in New York. To that end, the band split its time between Atlanta and NYC. The resulting
album is a hybrid of the two experiments – with a fair amount recorded in the back of tour buses as well.

This time out, they explore the same subjects of overcoming fear and negativity, but to a far greater extent, getting into
territory that could be described as spiritual. Life and death, good and evil, hope and desperation--the extremes. And so
came the album's title: The Sun and the Moon.

(Courtesy of TheBravery.com)

The

Bravery

Bio

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