April 12, 2014: Rock Revolt Magazine, Crash Midnight for rockrevoltmagazine.com
Have you ever thought how a late night car accident can give birth to a rock band? Well, I have the answer and it is called Crash Midnight! Three guys, -Shaun Soho, Bo and Alex Donaldson-, Bo’s car and the streets of Boston, Massachusetts were enough for Crash Midnight to be baptized with this unique name and burst into music scene without hitting the breaks!
The amazing vocals and the vintage sound combined with punk and blues characteristics were able to make Crash Midnight a band worth mentioning. Pretty soon they became the talk of the town with their debut album Lost in the City releasing just this past November. The songs, one after another, are paving the road to their own success, with the song “Welcome to Boston”, a hymn to their hometown, not only being featured at The New England Patriot’s Gillette Stadium for the past two seasons, but also being used as the theme song for the TV show “The 617-Zone” on NESN.
As far as it concerns the band, work never ends. They are writing new stuff all the time and preparing their summer tour across the U.S. Until the final dates are on, let’s turn the volume up in our car, drive safely and name Crash Midnight as Indie Band Of The Week!
Who is the “maker” of Crash Midnight and how did you all meet and form the group?
SOHO: As far as the “maker” of Crash Midnight goes, I guess you’d have to lay that one on Bo and his infamous car crash.
BO: Shaun, Alex, and myself had been working on this project for about two weeks before I totaled my car.
ALEX: I’d just moved up to Boston from Ohio at 18 years old, and within two weeks, Bo’s destroying his car and naming our new band after it.
SOHO: Bo and I had been playing in a bunch of different bands here in Boston and were looking for something that really embodied our favorite bands growing up. We went after something more bluesy with a lot of punk elements.
BO: Mixed with wanton destruction and moving violations.
What are your musical influences and how do you think you differ from other rock bands worldwide?
BO: We all have pretty similar classic punk and rock n’ roll influences. Each of us probably leans a little more one way or another. I lean towards the punk side with The Clash, New York Dolls, and Iggy Pop. Alex, leans a little more towards classic blues music and Shaun has kind of a mix of all that along with a heavy dose of 70’s rock bands.
ALEX: It really makes song writing interesting because we push and pull each other during the writing process until every new song sounds like us.
SOHO: Yeah, when any of us come in with a new song, it gets mangled, pulled apart, and put back together by the other guys and that’s become the sound of this band.
Your debut album Lost in the City was released a few months ago and has already made quite a buzz. Tell us about it.
SOHO: Lost in the City is the sound of this band coming up in Boston, cutting its teeth at the clubs in the scene here in this city. It really chronicles the band from the first song we ever really wrote together (151) to one of our most recent ones like (Take It).
ALEX: I love it because these songs take me back to the time we were all living together in this tiny two bedroom apartment in Kenmore Square. The songs on this album are all stories that went on in and around that place.
BO: It makes playing this material live a pretty cool experience. We’re up there literally playing the story of this band coming together every night for our audiences.
Your song “151”, which is also the first single from the album, is currently at #66 on the Active Rock Charts and has been steadily moving up. First of all, what does “151” stand for?
SOHO: “151” stands for the root cause of most of the other songs on the album.
BO: Well, it started out about “Bacardi 151,” but then we found a cheaper version called “Roberto 151” bottled right down the street so there’s no brand loyalty there anymore.
ALEX: We’d grab a bottle of this and mix it with Dr. Pepper, call it “jet fuel” and it’d take care of the whole band that night for $16.99 or something.
SOHO: Yeah I guess you could say it stands for “problem drinking.”
Back when you were writing the song, did you expect it to be welcomed as well as it has?
SOHO: We saw a lot of quick success right at the beginning. We caught on with fans pretty fast, but unfortunately we also caught the attention of a handful of people that were bent on taking advantage of what we were doing.
BO: We went through a number of individuals that tried to attach themselves to this band and get their hands in our pockets with completely empty promises of what we’d get in return.
ALEX: That’s pretty much what “Diamond Boulevard” is all about.
SOHO: We’re very lucky that we’ve had so many fans support us and stay with us through all the shit. That’s the accomplishment that still makes me stop and think up to today. We’ve got fans that have stuck with us for nearly a decade.
Based in Boston, MA, you have achieved a lot the past few years, like your song “Welcome to Boston” being featured at The New England Patriot’s Gillette Stadium for the past two seasons, by the Boston Bruins, and Boston College Football. How does that make you feel?
SOHO: Boston’s a tough town. A lot of outlets here are really resistant to supporting the local scene artists, but the Patriots, Bruins, and BC have been incredible to us. The first time I heard our song at Gillette Stadium was an amazing experience.
BO: You always want to have the support of your hometown and there’s so much going on in this city between, the sports, the colleges, politics, and everything that it’s real easy to get lost in the shuffle. Seeing our stuff rise above that clamor is a big accomplishment for us.
Having the support of your hometown, does it make you feel more self-confident?
SOHO: It’s funny, this town and this local scene has always been a rough road for us. You have to understand that we were the only band coming out of here with this sound when we first started. It was a completely different scene here in the 2000’s than back when guys like Aerosmith or J Geils were roaming these streets.
BO: It was a lot of college rock and indie sound coffee house stuff.
ALEX: That, or the complete opposite cookie-monster vocal heavy stuff.
SOHO: So there just wasn’t another band doing this and it made it really hard to get booked on decent bills. The fans were there. They came to all the parties and started steadily building at the shows, but when you get booked with an acoustic Dave Mathews dorm room hero guy and an abrasive screaming band on your bill from some half-assed promoter, your fans kind of don’t love going out to the shows.
BO: It got to the point where we would be like “just let us put the bill together for the night guys, and we’ll sell your place out,” but so many of these guys had egos where they’d rather have the place empty and be in control than to just let us blow the place up for a night.
ALEX: It got really frustrating and we had to get out on the road to really appreciate what it’s like when you can build momentum in more supportive markets.
SOHO: Boston has started catching on, but they’re definitely late to the party. That’s not to say there weren’t some great people in this scene – guys at The Middle East, we wouldn’t have gotten signed without them recommending us to A&R guys – or Michael Marrotta at Vanyaland and way back when he was with WFNX and The Boston Phoenix. There were some great people here too, but there was a lot of opposition that we had to fight through.
What is your biggest dream?
ALEX: Playing the music that we wanted to make is the biggest dream I think we’ve ever had as a band.
SOHO: Yeah, you hear so many stories of bands that had to make compromises to get signed or get notoriety. We’re very fortunate that we had fans latch onto this band from day one and allow us to keep making the music we thought was cool vs. what anyone in the business wanted us to do.
Last year’s summer and fall tours were a big success. What are your future tour plans?
SOHO: We’re actually in the middle of working that out right now. I can tell you that you’ll definitely see us touring the US this summer, but we have a few offers we’re looking into right now to figure out which is going to be the best tour for us.
BO: We should have that all squared away pretty soon though.
ALEX: And we’ll announce it first on CRASHMIDNIGHT.COM!
Although your debut album was just released, do you have any ideas about the next one, or is too soon? Are you currently writing any new songs?
SOHO: We actually get this question quite a bit and we already have 2-3 albums of material ready to go. We’re always writing as things happen to us in the band or whatever situations we get ourselves into, they seem to always make it into the new material.
BO: What’s cool is that it’s not just B-sides or stuff that wasn’t good enough to make it on “Lost in the City.” We have a couple huge songs like “Whiskey Rose” and “Suicide Tattoo” that we’ve played live for years and were big fan favorites that we intentionally left off this album so we’d have them for album two.
ALEX: And some of the songs that didn’t make this first album are slamming! Some of them required more production than we had the ability to work into this album, whether it was additional instrumentation or whatever, so it made sense to hold off and do them the right way on album two.
SOHO: We’re really looking forward to recording the second album because it’s still coming from some of the stuff we wrote back in the early days of the band combined with some newer material, but the sound is the same – straight ahead rock n’ roll.
You are a pure rock band, but in your free time, what other genres of music do you enjoy listening?
SOHO: Shit, I listen to a ton of stuff. I kind of go through kicks of something. I was listening to a lot of Warren Zevon and Leonard Cohen lately, but sometimes I’ll throw on early blues records or actually on a recent road trip I was listening to early jazz. I feel like you can take something away from just about everything.
BO: Yeah I tend to experiment listening to a lot more modern stuff. Some of the cool new recording techniques or synth sounds, but I love The Knife, The Wire, M83, or some kickass Phil Collins.
ALEX: I’m always checking out what’s on top 40 or whatever the latest stuff is out there. That being said, I love me some Steve Winwood and Go West.
Where do you see yourselves in –let’s say- ten years from today?
SOHO: I see this band expanding our sound and really going back to a lot of the stuff the Stones or Aerosmith were able to do to keep relevant and expand their fan base over the years. To be able to keep doing this 10 years from now would be real cool.
BO: Rehab?
ALEX: Checking Bo into rehab.
SOHO: Or recommending him to the one you like the best, Alex?
ALEX: Exactly.
Demetrios Ioannou 