The Willowz Interview

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I N T E R V I E W
June 2004
The Willowz

The Willowz Interview!

RCN: who are the willowz and where are you from?
The Willowz: the willowz are a 3 piece from Anaheim, CA . . . the OC. richie james (19 years of age) plays geeeetar and sings lead vocals for the group, jessica reynoza(19 years of age) plays the bass guitar and sings backup vocals , and alex willow(17 years of age) plays lead drums.

RCN: What inspires you musically and lyrically?
The Willowz: what inspires our sound is our enormous record collections...the band collectively has over 25,000 records. we have a where house out in Garden Grove that we keep all our music at and we go and sleep over night for days at a time just listening to everything until we cant handle it anymore then we lock ourselves up in the studio for days and just write whats came to us we already have 5 new albums ready to go. All my lyrics come from dreams and self actualization.

RCN: what makes you different from other bands . . . what do you bring to the table?
The Willowz:We bring great music to the table. what makes it different than other music is the fact that we don't let a style chain us down... so you just get good music. we don't get caught up in making a certain type of music...just whatever sounds good, but its definitely rock punk soul oriented, and our live show iS exciting something that rarely happens in music today.

RCN: How did you get the name "the Willowz"?
The Willowz: Jessica had a dream where a weeping willow said it would bring her to musical enlightenment if she named her band after him(the willow tree)...whose name was Willowz.

RCN: How long have you all been playing music?
The Willowz:Jessica started playing bass when we started the band but she had studied classical guitar before for years. Alex has been playing percussion since he was a little boy . . . we were at his house the other day and his father was showing us a video of alex when he was 2 playing the pots and pans with wooden spoons and keeping serious time. I myself have been focused on playing guitar for 2 years I had been practicing guitar for like 6 years but I just wandered with it I wasn't sure what I wanted to do until I met alex and JessicThe Willowz:

RCN: how did you get on the old punk label posh boy?
The Willowz:i knew of a house in whittier that had been abandoned because of a brush fire and there was just a bunch of old drunk punks living in it, the original drummer of the Blasters was actually living there too. Anyways, we started practicing there and it happened to be that Robbie fields parents were living next door and he was visiting them, heard us, came over and loved us.so we recorded some demos in this whittier garage and released it as a 7 inch. The first 2 songs I had ever written.

RCN: you play with or are affiliated with a lot of old punk bands do you consider the Willowz a punk band?
The Willowz:i don't know.we either get paired up with old punk bands at venues or new dance hip bands and we don't really fit in with either but I think of that as a good thing. What I hate about music today is the strict genre distinctions. How some people wont listen to a type of music because of what music section it is placed in at the record store . . . it results in a lot of stale old repetitive opinions of what's good and what's bad in music and there is never a progression. It's like if everyone reads the same books you get no new fresh ideas and everyone ends up thinking the same . . . and that is BORING.

RCN: what about your Dionysus full length how did you come across that label?
The Willowz: we played a show in silverlake and the owner of the label saw us and liked us so we gave him the demos from the whittier garage and he said he would love to release it as a full length. so after a year of dealing with major label hounds and big wig producers and learning to play together as a band we decided to release the demos we had originally done a year before on Dionysus records.

RCN: what is the orange county music scene like nowadays for a young band?
The Willowz:whats an orange county music scene?

RCN: how did the "eternal sunshine of the spotless mind" soundtrack come about?
The Willowz: the music director of the film had heard about us through Meg White of the White Stripes...so they contacted us and asked us if we would be interested in scoring the film, but we werent able to because of our grueling tour schedule, so they got Jon Brion to do it and they used 2 of our songs in the movie(the scene where Kirsten Dunst is dancing in her underwear on a bed) However, on the soundtrack only one of the songs in the movie is on it and the other is a song entitled "I Wonder" which we just made a video for with the director of the movie ,Michel Gondry.That video is going to be on the new Buddyhead dvd...

RCN: when is the single on XL records coming out?
The Willowz: this summer. Its going to come with a dvd of the "I wonder" video too! we are going to the Uk in september to tour for it. Then we are planning on doing another single with them after that with new material.

RCN: What is next up for the Willowz?
The Willowz: well the band as a whole have been accepted to attend Julliard in the fall to study classical music. so we will study, tour, write more music, record, and tour more. richie james FOLLIN, listen to the willowz music!!!! thewillowz.com or mp3.com/thewillowz

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