Roswell launch their debut EP, No One Lives Here Anymore, this Friday, October 10, at YaYa’s, and Saturday, October 11, (all-ages) at YMCA HQ with special guests, Inventions and Lowlight. Vocalist/guitarist, Katt Nelson, have us the lowdown.
Who are Roswell? Give us a quick history of the band.
We started just over a year ago now, so we’re still pretty young. I was really itching to play pop punk and wanted to find the right kind of people who liked the genre and were really easy to get along with. I already knew Paul (Bovenklerk, guitar) from a brief project we were involved in a few years back and he found me again while I was busking one day, which was around the same time I was putting Roswell together so naturally we got talking about that. We met Jake (Street, bass) through our first drummer Nick as they’d already played together before.
Why that name?
At the time, I was just interested in alien conspiracy theories and thought it sounded neat.
What’s your sound? Who are your key influences?
I think we draw a lot of influence from bands like The Wonder Years and Set Your Goals.
Tell us about No One Lives Here Any More.
I wrote most of the songs from this EP before there was even a band. At the time, I’d recently left another band I’d been in for such a long time and I wanted to use that time to write songs for me and use old parts of songs that never got to see the light of day. Lyrically, the songs all follow the same theme of leaving something old behind and creating something new, like how you need to pull down a building to build a new one, and in that way destruction becomes a form a construction. That’s why we chose the use the lyric, ‘No one lives here anymore’ as the title. That’s the old being left behind.
Where did you record and who with? How did it go?
We recorded drums with Adam Round from Electric City and everything else we tracked with Jay Huxtable from Oracle Sound. It was good working with Jay cause we were all on the same page of what sound we wanted. It’s good recording with someone who enjoys the genre.
What’s the songwriting process like for you guys?
It’s hard to say if there’s a particular system or process as each song started off a different way. Sometimes you start with a chord progression or other times you start with a melody and you have an idea in your mind what it can go with so you try and hum it out. Honestly, the only thing consistent in our songwriting is that most of it starts while I’m driving on the freeway. I don’t have working speakers in my car so I don’t have much better to do that hum potential melodies and come up with lyrics, and hope it sounds as good audibly as it did in my head when I finally get home to try it out on my guitar.
What’s up next?
We’re all hoping to make it over east in 2015 and play some shows. There’s a few new songs we’ve been working on for whatever gets released next, which is pretty exciting too.
