Sarah Lawrence’s House Band Moves Out

The House Band started as a fixture of Sarah Lawrence College Music Festivals, but within the past year has played as far as Swarthmore. With graduation on the horizon for many of its members, The House Band may have to take up residence on the road. Despite its impending eviction, The House Band’s style stays true to its roots. Its sound—a collaborative blend of event-based covers and musical improvisation—was formed and perfected in the Barbara Walters Campus Center lobby and the MacCraken dance studio. The House Band has been able to experiment with its music through the passion and antics of its Sarah Lawrence audience. From harmonizing with sledgehammers to tearing up a bass for a group of shrieking co-eds, The House Band has grown and gotten funky with its peers.

As their time on campus comes to a close, The House Band is in need of a new crowd to play off of. While Julian and Josiah may have a verse or two written from the heart, there’s always a space for musical interaction between performer and audience member in each show they play.

Does your music fall within a certain genre? Or does it fit a certain environment or setting?

Shawn: No. No and no. The setting is Sarah Lawrence.

Julian: Well I mean, no, we’ve played other settings.

Laya: We played in Philadelphia!

Julian: We have a group of people that just come from everywhere, which is what Sarah Lawrence is. What we play—whether its covers or originals—is very much a collective thing, and we don’t let any genre or grouping stop us from playing what we need to play.

Shawn: The band started as a backing band for the festival. It was just the house band. So we have always been a whatever gig we get we’ll play whatever kind of band, you know what I mean? When we do have the opportunity to do self-directed shows, it still is often pretty widely varied in terms of style.

Josiah: We wrote a set of songs that were specifically for Philadelphia. As we were piecing together large parts of those songs we were pulling from jazz because we were studying modal. Shawn was adapting, Jackson was adding extensions, Laya was adding extensions that I didn’t know how to add. We had rock and folk and jazz all mixed in.

Well, can you in more detail walk me through the song creation process? I know improvisation is a big part of performing. Do you improvise an entire song or is it more of a segment you’ve blocked out?

Josiah: Usually the latter, for this band. Often it’s songs I’ve written a long time ago, and we bring them in. If we’re playing a jazz show we’re looking for songs that are jazz songs. If Julian wants to put together a rock show for Halloween, I’ll give him all the Halloween rock songs I’ve written.

Julian: It’s just whoever wrote them—whether it’s me or Josiah bringing them in—they enter another place that is not how any of us would envision them. They appear a certain way in my head when I bring them, but then it’s just like, that version is pushed out because everyone is coming together in a way that I could not perceive and that’s why I work with other people. I like that process a lot more, bringing a song that you already have finished and done. All that it needs now is other people’s magic, and you just keep working on that until it gets to a great place. That’s usually the best way for me to work because I thrive off of other people’s collaboration, and everyone brings out the best of each other in this group.

Jackson: I really like how much improvisation you have me do in your originals, like ‘Sweet Smile’. Like, that whole show I could just jam on the melodica the whole time just adding whatever I want.

Josiah: Sometimes the songs are super simple. Like ‘Sweet Smile’, we have four chords playing the whole time. But every so often there’s some detail that we have to nail. As we’ve gotten better, we’ve been able to worry about the details more. And both in terms of preparing songs beforehand and then also when we start to improvise on a song in the middle of a set, we can be more conscious about dynamics and about these meticulous details.

So improvisation does change depending on your environment, yes?

Josiah: Oh absolutely, yeah. What kind of show we’re doing and what we’re feeling. I mean the lyrics obviously change the most, but also what the instrumentation is affects how we’re going to move through an improv set.

Shawn: I think a lot of it comes down to how formal the show is. If we’re doing something where there’s a bill and a set list and we’ve rehearsed it, then we probably are not messing around too much. But if we’re often sitting around and playing music together on the steps, then yeah, a lot of it may be made up on the spot.

Jackson: I wanna talk about that show where someone brought the hood of her car over to Marshall Field, and we just took sledgehammers and we were slamming into the hood of the car. I remember I had my melodica, and someone was slamming into it and I would just play a bunch of random notes. And I remember everyone was just improvising.

Julian: The thing that we all subconsciously realize is that improvisation does not just apply to music. It applies to actions and thoughts and feelings. The way that our shows go is there’s always one moment that happens that none of us are prepared for. We just go in that direction. We take that direction. Improvisation is part of House Band, but also it’s more fun for us to find something that wasn’t really planned for.

Some of the improv thus far has been because you’re responding to a crowd that you
know?

Josiah: I feel like so much of House Band stuff has been enabled by the fact that we have a regular community here—we have regular holidays here. We’re making references year to year with our shows. It’ll be interesting to see how the House Band has to evolve when we’re all of a sudden working for crowds that we don’t know as intimately. You know what you’re speaking to when you say something here.

Julian: I was excited when we first heard about playing in Swarthmore. I thought the experience we were going to get was a room filled with a couple people. What we ended up getting was a real Sarah Lawrence takeover because there was no one from Swarthmore in sight, other than two of the sound people. We were just playing for the other band. But in that moment as well—didn’t plan for it, stuff happens—we just realized that we were playing to our friends again and we gave one hell of a show.

Why music as your art form of choice? Why do you keep coming back to it? Is it just out of habit, or is it because it speaks to you in some way?

Jackson: I think performing in itself is very addictive. After performances too there’s kind of a rush. There’s kind of like a high almost after performances, I would say, and it’s a good feeling. And it’s definitely part of just chasing that feeling.

Julian: I first got involved by just listening. I have a dad who is a major music fan. He’s not a musician. He is a writer though. So he wrote a couple poems and took stock sounds from the internet and did spoken word over that music. What fascinated me was that this person who has no musical experience is very infatuated and connected to the music. And that inspired me to then take up the piano. Later down the line I was asked to play a show and I got my first real taste of what it was like to perform live. I keep coming back to it because every reaction from every crowd is different, but it’s all fulfilling. Having art as your voice—as an outlet to connect with other people—is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever experienced. And I’m lucky to experience it with a beautiful group of people who want to make every show better than the last one.

Laya: For me—we’re talking about how we feel high after playing—the first time I felt that was when I was a kid. Me and my brother would be listening and we would start singing or we’d pick up the badminton and pretend we were playing. So that’s when I started to love it. And there was this whole cultural aspect of it, because our families would get together and then we would sing. My brother started learning the piano, and then sometimes I would sing, or I also started learning
the piano. So that connection there made me want to continuously do it. When I moved to America, it was that sense of trying to find a connection again. My way of connecting with other people was playing with them. It’s just a very simple aspect of connecting with people that I care about or want to know more about.

Instagram: @thehousebandband