The New Post-Rock Project of Video Days
On the verge of releasing their second album, the band Video Days has matured as artists and as a collective. Tim Ro (vocal/guitar) recalls the early days of the project and how it has evolved into the current band with Emma DeLaRosa (vocal/bass), Jacob Cormier (guitar), and Sam Dvorin (drums). From a lo-fi experiment on his Tascam 8-track to a regular act in Allston basements, Tim Ro has grown Video Days into something completely different. Their new album “How I Learned to Play Guitar” is a climactic testament to the time the band spent tailoring their sound. The new post-rock project introduces striking vocals and mind-bending distortion that set it apart from anything the musicians have made before.
We sat down with Video Days to talk more about the upcoming release.
Why did you decide to use the name Video Days for this particular project?
Tim: It was my freshman year, 2018 or 2019, and all of my friends were just hanging out. And someone put on “Video Days,” which is just like a 90s skate video. While that was on, my friends and I just kind of decided to start a band. And we were like, “What should we call it?” We looked at the TV, and we thought we should call it Video Days.
Tim, what was your vision for Video Days? How do you all separate this band from other projects you are all involved in?
Tim: When I first started, this was before I knew what I was doing in terms of mixing and recording. And that made me really hesitant to actually make music because I thought I didn’t really know anything. But I wanted to try. Obviously everything was very lo-fi and terribly mixed, but I decided to maybe use that as a unique characteristic instead of looking down on it. That’s when I decided to maybe try making lo-fi music. That was the first vision.
Sam: I’d say that the vision now, at least for me, I see this band more focused on playing. And the album we are working on right now is sort of post-rock. It’s all played live, and it’s a lot more hi-fi than the original stuff, so the sound of the band came together more on that. In Video Days, I play the drums, while in other projects, I don’t. The drum beats for each project are very different. I feel like a lot of these songs have good beats, like the ones on the album.
Emma: For me, I think I’ve enjoyed seeing the progression of Video Days. Just how much the sound has matured and how it’s all melded together to have this kind of cohesive identity. I’m really excited for the album to come out because it doesn’t really sound like anything else that’s out on Video Days. It also just comes from us playing together for so long and getting to know each other as musicians. In all the bands I used to play in, I would play bass. Now, Video Days is the only band I play bass in, partly because one of them doesn’t exist anymore. I like the beat in Video Days. There are movements in the music that I find very interesting.
Jacob: It’s very different for me because a lot of the acts that I’m involved in are typically emo-oriented or post-hardcore. So when I joined Video Days, it was like a whole new approach to how to play the guitar. I had no idea how to fit into that sound. Sam and Tim were very much helpful to point me in a direction to play the instrument entirely different. So it’s been pretty cool to learn the instrument in a new way and to approach it with a new mindset. I’m excited for the new album because it kind of shows the time that we took together to figure that out.
Especially on your song “songs,” the vocals blend in with the instrumentals. Are you more concerned with the content of your lyrics or how the vocals sound along with the rest of the mix?
Tim: Personally, I don’t think of myself as a lyricist first. When I’m writing songs by myself, I’m thinking of the harmony and the overall sound, and I try to think less about the lyrics. That’s just me.
Sam: We were recording the album. I had never really heard what Tim was saying because we were practicing in a room where you can’t really hear the vocals. We are into the first song, and I think, ‘Woah, these are cool vocals.’ The second song is sort of the same thing. By the third song, I thought, ‘Oh, it’s the same thing again’… He used the same melody for the vocals on every song.
Emma: He thinks really hard about the one melody.
Sam: And it was three notes!
Tim: It works! I like simple melodies.
Emma: I put a lot of meaning into the lyrics that I write. They’re all super personal. Me and Tim are kind of on opposite ends of the spectrum with that. Every song that I write lyrics for means a lot to me.How I Learned to Play Guitar
Let’s talk more about your upcoming album. What is it called, and when does it come out? How is it different from your past projects?
Tim: The album is called “How I Learned to Play Guitar.” We are on schedule to release in late May right now. In terms of the sound and genre, like Sam said, it’s more post-rock. There are elements of slowcore, shoegaze, noise rock, you know, the usual. We didn’t plan on post-rock, but it happened very naturally with the songs. I like to think that as we’re becoming better musicians, we are kind of opening up to more expansive ideas and things we haven’t done before. It’s exciting.
Sam: When we started off, one of the things that I wanted was that we would let each idea dictate the form, not the other way around, because I feel like we’ve been doing a lot of very standard forms. If you have an idea that needs a different form, give it that form. Half of the songs on the album are like verse, verse, chorus, but then there are two or three longer songs that are different.
Jacob: Can I tell the story behind the album’s name? So we were layering acoustic guitar on “garden.” Tim wanted me to do the intro rhythm, and I was asking how he wanted me to play it, and it’s just two chords. And I said, ‘So wait, you want me to strum it like this?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, c’mon man. That’s like how I learned guitar 101.’ And then that joke became a thing for 20 minutes. When there was a discussion of what the album should be named, it became ‘How I learned to play guitar.’ At least, that’s how I remember it.
You said you all recorded the album in one weekend. Paint me a picture of how that went. Why did you guys decide to record on a farm?
Tim: It’s a studio. They book bands to record regularly. It’s Called Holy Fang Studios. It was three whole days, and we also slept there for three days.
Jacob: It was like wake up, eat whatever we had bought from the grocery store, which was like cooked eggs, a frozen pizza right from the toaster oven, then you would just like play all day and eat very minimally. We were just living off of…What are those peanut butter and jelly things?
Sam: Uncrustables
Jacob: Yeah, and we would just record all day. At some points, we would try to do something that we could usually do without fail most of the time, and we just kept making errors. We would just have to walk away, go to bed, and try again the next day. So there was some frustration in that. We didn’t finish it all in that weekend. We had to go back one more time to tidy up some loose ends, but it was really fun.
Sam: It definitely showed me a lot of places I need to improve. I feel like it took a long way to get to where we were, but in the moment, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, there’s so far to go.’ It really makes you realize how all these records we look up to, just what it took to get there. This is a sort of semi-overdrawn example. When you hear that “Loveless” took two years, you’re like, ‘What? two years?’ But I also feel like if we had more time, the album could have been better. We could have spent a weekend on one song. It made me want to practice more.
Jacob: It was a very cool experience to be on the farm. We would take breaks during the day and be able to spend time with the animals on the farm, too. Yeah, and shooting beer cans in the back with Red Rider BB guns. It was nice to have that environment to work in.
Was there any reason you decided to play the songs live at venues in Boston before releasing them? Was this a part of the process of tailoring these songs?
Tim: I think it’s very important. I think by playing a song live, you just learn a lot about the song that you may not have known if you were just to record it. The song always evolves into something much more cohesive once you’ve played it.
Emma: Yeah, a lot of these songs are written over a long period of time. Was like “Split” the first song you wrote for the album? And that was like a while ago. But then other songs are like two weeks before we went to record.
What do you hope comes from this new album, whether it be more streams, a learning experience, or just having people listen to it?
Emma: For me, I’m just excited for it to come out because it’s a testament to how we’ve grown in the past few years because we’ve been playing together solidly for a year and a half. I am glad to just show how far we’ve come.
Sam: Yeah, I think it’s a really good album. I think it’s one of the longest projects I’ve ever done, which is cool. It’s always nice to be able to have something to look back on because we don’t record every show we play. We don’t have a recording of every band practice, but this is sort of a monolith to that. And it’s good to know that it exists, and if you want to sit down and listen to that, you can.
Tim: The band has kind of been under the radar over the last two years with social media and also with the release. I see this album as kind of like a journal between the four of us as a band for the last two years and what we’ve been doing. People have been asking for new material, and this is where we are.
Jacob: It’s certainly the hardest I’ve ever worked on something as a musician, for sure. At least for playing guitar, it’s the most time I’ve ever put into something, and the most emotion I’ve put into anything I’ve ever worked on. I’m very proud of it, and I’m excited to show people.
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