Verona: Best Friends Making Music at Bard

Just off of the Taconic State Parkway, among flora and film students, lies the picturesque town of Red Hook, New York, and the even picturesque-er Bard College campus. Bard is swarming with artistry of all kinds– creative writing, painting, and any other medium imaginable– but music plays one of the most significant roles in campus culture. Bard’s Conservatory program allows for classical musicians from all over the globe to play in upstate New York, but the buzz does not end there. With alumni like Donald Fagen of Steely Dan and members of Beastie Boys, student bands at Bard have been innovative and successful for decades. Today, Bard student bands have “SMOG”, Bard’s live music venue, as a convenient and quirky option for gigs. I had the pleasure of speaking to one longstanding and loveable band in particular: Verona. 

Stream the song “Medicine” below:

The 5-person ensemble welcomed me at two of the members’ apartment in Tivoli, a cozy spot with high ceilings and ornamental rugs. We sat in a circle on the bedroom floor and enjoyed playing with slime throughout the evening. The band’s personalities ranged vibrantly but it was clear they were best friends. I had caught them at a unique time: right as the second semester of their junior years started, a turning page of a time as a band. Lead vocalist Briege Riley had just arrived home from a semester abroad and the crew was reunited at last. 

So first off, how would you describe your music style as a band?

Gus: I feel like it’s indie folk rock.

Briege: It’s weirdly folky. Sometimes. But Time Machine wouldn’t be folk at all. 

Reid: Yeah, we’ve definitely come from folk.

Sam: We get a little grungy. I’d say we’re rock.

Sonny: It’s a pretty nice combo because I think all of us come from different influences, like I know Briege and Gus fuel the folky side of it and then Reid and I are more of like, heavier rock, like 90s kind of style. And then… [laughter]

Briege: Who knows what Sam holds!

Reid: The jack of all trades!

What music groups or artists inspire you guys?

Briege: I feel like we were all inspired by Smashing Pumpkins. Fugazi sometimes, right? Like with some of our songs.

Sam: I like Fugazi. I think Gus has some very obvious Elliott Smith influences.

Reid: Yeah, we do have the biggest Elliott Smith fan in the world. 

Briege: I’m really inspired by Mazzy Star, and like The Cranberries and The Sundays, like that whole genre, but it’s cool to have other influences in that as well. 

Reid: I mean, me and Sonny like a little bit more alt rock. Like we grew up listening to a lot of grunge and a lot of 90s rock, and that’s how we kind of bonded in high school. Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden.

Gus: I think for me as a guitar player, I also get a lot of like recent or more recent indie stuff like Steve Lacy or Mac DeMarco. 

So, while there’s not a solidified genre of the band, would you like to go in a different direction at some point? Is there something radical you want to do?

Briege: I honestly think, yeah, we were just talking about that. I’m doing a class this semester about composing with field recordings, and so it’s a lot of found sound and it’s super experimental. And I know Gus and Sam make a lot of songs like that too. I think we were literally saying we want to like, try a lot different from Time Machine.

Reid: Yeah, Time Machine was like an infant stage of the band. It also was turned, not necessarily in a bad way, but it sort of turned into a much more pop-y song than it was originally intended. 

Gus: I feel like we are very much in the realm of like, guitar-driven rock band. I feel like it’d be cool to either take it way faster and way harder or like the opposite and like, strip it way down and do something like that. 

Briege: I would like to do both! 

All: Yeah.

Briege: And, like I know Sonny’s doing synth lessons and like maybe adding some synth or adding different kinds of instruments.

Reid: We also want to get more into self-recording. 

Are you looking to release an album or an EP soon?

Gus: Hopefully

Reid: Hopefully an EP, soon. It’s definitely in the future.

And you’re all on the same page about the foreseeable future? 

All: Yes.

Reid: For me, and I’m pretty certain for all of us, we need this band to survive. Like I need to be making music.

Gus: Yeah I don’t know where we’ll all go after school but

Briege: Probably New York. 

Reid:  I’m the only one who actually lives on the West Coast, I’m from LA, and I’ve kind of made my decision that I’m going to be moving to New York City after college, so I think all of us being on the East Coast would help our chances of staying together. 

That’s awesome. So I guess that would make it, ideally speaking, that from the first month to the last month of your college careers, you were a band. Which is so cool!

Sam: Oh, wow, yeah I guess so!

Briege: Aww wait!

Reid: We’ve been so faithful!

What are your strengths as a student band that make you able to see a future and work so well together? What did you do right? 

Sonny: Haha, often I feel like we find ourselves saying why are we doing all this shit wrong! [laughter]

Briege: I think, honestly the first thing is that we’re all best friends. So compatibility as friends. 

Reid: That was like before we made the band, we were friends, and then we found out we all played. 

Briege: For me personally, obviously music is very vulnerable, and I think on hard nights or hard times, it always comes back to the fact that we just really care about each other as people, and I don’t think we are going to let each other go. Like when couples are like, we don’t let each other go to sleep without making up after an argument, that’s kind of like us if we have a shitty night. 

That’s a great rule of thumb. Correct me if I’m wrong, but did the name of the band change?

Sam and Reid: Oatmeal!

Gus: It was Oatmeal for a while.

Yay I did my research! Why was it oatmeal and why did you change it? What is Verona?

Reid: When we first started, we had our first practice in [his] house upstate, and we were like, guys let’s form a band. We were talking a lot about inside jokes for the name, and there was some weird inside joke about the Kline oatmeal. How it’s like, the only good dining hall food to have at breakfast.

Briege: I think I said it because we were talking about something that all of our friends do together, eat dorm breakfast. 

Reid: We had a lot of other really graphic names too, but those were horrible.

Sonny: Really, really horrible.

Can you list?

Gus: I think we had Pregnant on Purpose driving back from a gig…

Briege: I was laughing so hard that I made them all be quiet for 20 minutes because I almost peed my pants from laughing. 

Reid: Yeah haha! I think until last semester we were just so insecure about it. Like people would ask, “What’s your band name?” And we’d be like oh yeah…uhh…

Sam: I think we didn’t really like it and we just didn’t really know what kind of music we wanted to make. 

Reid: We were Dead End for one show. But it really didn’t stick. And it was so bad.

Gus: Yeah people were constantly like, oh Oatmeal. And we’d be like no, it’s a Dead End, and we just didn’t have the energy. So we went back to Oatmeal. 

Reid: We were about to release Time Machine. We were like, okay, we’re releasing on Spotify, and we need an executive decision. Are we really about to release our name as Oatmeal because after that there’s no changing back unless we start a whole new project. So Verona is Sonny’s street. We just really liked the name.

Sonny: Yeah. And there’s a Red Hook in Brooklyn and a Red Hook here. 

Woah! So you live in both Red Hooks now?

Sonny: I live in Tivoli, but yeah.

We can just say you live in Red Hook.

Reid: Yeah [laughter] you’ll just live in Red Hook now.

Verona is a pretty name. Isn’t there a song that has that word in it?

Sam: You’re probably thinking of My Sharona. [laughter]

I probably am, yeah. Nevermind. So to finish off the interview, what would you say is your favorite memory as a band? Maybe you have a favorite gig?

Reid: I think my favorite memory, I know it was kind of a stressful time for us and like we didn’t get the end result we wanted, but at the time when we were recording those songs, that was so fun.

[All: Yeah]

Briege: Yeah, that was really bonding.

Reid: We’d like get up early, go get like coffee, donuts

Gus: Bagels

Sonny: Pizza

Sam: We were getting a little bit, like, almost delusional. We were in a manic episode, it was crazy. 

Gus: But I think our best gig was probably 42.

Sonny: Yeah definitely 42 was my favorite.

Briege: That was our last night as a band before I went to study abroad. It was a really fun house party and we played inside, we sounded pretty good. 

Reid: It was supposed to be outdoors but it was rainy so we were all packed inside. It was so much fun. And it was like our farewell show.

Briege: We never play covers, but we did Linger which was super fun. 

Verona is:

Briege Riley- Age 21, Written Arts Major, lead vocalist and songwriter

Reid (Hennessy) Grossman- Age 21, Music Major, Drum Player

Sam Benjamin- Age 20, Anthropology major, Bass player

Gus Hildebrand- Age 20 Music major, Guitar player

Sonny Taylor – Age 21, Guitar player, Music Major