Today, The Alternative Tone is super stoked to bring to you an exclusive free download from Surrogate, a wonderful indie rock band from California. The song is titled "Can't Go Home" and is taken from the band's excellent "Diamonds And Pearls EP". Download the track here and let us know what you think. Whilst you're listening to that, read our interview with Daniel Taylor of the band below and learn about the band's upcoming album, touring plans and secret hip-hop past.
Who is Surrogate and how did you get together?
Surrogate is 4 dudes from Chico, CA: Chris Keene, Michael Lee, Daniel Martin and Daniel Taylor. We've all know each other for awhile, by virtue of being in previous bands together, or our previous bands playing shows together, but mainly just from hanging out in the tight-knit music scene of a smallish college town. Surrogate has been around since 2007 and the current line-up, minus the recent retirement of our drummer Jordan, has been set for a few years now.
Where did your name come from?
There's really no special story to the name Surrogate. It was just a concept that stood out at a time when a project needed a name. We've talked about trying to come up with some really cool story about one of us being the product of a surrogate pregnancy or having a child through a surrogate or something spicy like that, but we haven't gotten that creative yet.
What are you up to at the moment?
At this moment I'm actually at our little studio here in Chico, CA listening to Daniel Martin track some drums for one of the last songs we need to record for our new record.
It's been quite some time since your last release. What have you been up to?
In the two years since we put out the EP we've all been pretty caught up in regular lives; our day jobs, our families, our other musical projects. For me personally I'm actually just now finishing up my last year of Law school here in Chico. Other guys in the band are married, have full time, grown up jobs; our drummer Jordan became a dad for the second time last year so he figured it was time to take a break from music for awhile to focus on his family and his career.
But in the meantime, we've slowly been putting together songs for the new record, until we finally decided it was time to get our shit together and set a deadline to force ourselves to hammer down and finish it up.
What details can you confirm about your full length, Post-Heroic out April 5th of this year?
Well, one way or another its coming out April 5th because we've got the release show booked - at our homefield venue, LaSalles here in Chico - and bought plane tickets for our friend Joe to come out from Portland to play drums for us at the show, so its definitely going down.
The album itself isn't anything too crazy, as far as people who are familiar with our older stuff will definitely recognize Surrogate as Surrogate. But their are some new twists. The major one is that the four of us all split up handling the drum duties, each of us taking a couple songs as they needed to be tracked. It just ended up being easier than asking someone else to come in and track the songs as we already knew what we wanted them to sound like.
As far as the name goes, the title of the record is also the name of one of the songs that I got to play drums on. It's a pretty aggressive sounding track for Surrogate but its also insanely catchy and melodic. The "post heroic" idea was something that Chris dug on a news segment he was listening to about warfare in the modern, drone/computer age; the idea that increasingly battles are being fought with technology not by men against men. The concept resonated with some of the lyrical themes he was working with both on that song and on the record.
Is there any continuous themes with the album? Lyrical or musical?
Musically, we're still pretty much squarely within the confines of the sound we've been exploring on the previous three releases; melodic, guitar driven rock with a bit of a shoegaze vibe, some keys here and there, some relatively dramatic orchestration here and there when the urge strikes. This record seems to be shaping up a little bit more on the raw, ballsy side overall; not a lot of fluffy stuff. Even the mellow songs have a kind of rougher edge to them than maybe previous records did. Lyrically, Chris is pretty cryptic about where he's coming from. But there's a lot self-reflection, some self-effacing humor and a fair amount of cultural critiquing and observation. But nothing too existentially deep, we're definitely not trying to blow anyone's minds. That being said, we're OK with people being challenged by some of the stuff we might be talking about in the songs, insofar as they might not be polite dinner conversation subjects.
How has the band developed since the Diamonds And Pearls EP?
Diamonds and Pearls was sort of a transitional EP for the band in that it was the first record we put out on our own, and it was the first record where the whole band contributed to entire recording process. With this record, I think we've settled into our new lot in life, using what we have to make the best album we can make without the luxury of financial backing or being able to dedicate ourselves to it full time.At the same time though, we've also played live a lot less than we ever have before, which has kind of helped make studio time more creative, more productive in that we aren't constantly worried about learning any songs or rehearsing for shows.
How was the process behind that EP? What would you do differently looking back?
That EP was actually a pretty awesome process; we took our time with the songs and let them be whatever they were gonna be. Some of them were pretty obvious from the first time we played through them, but others took some time to come together, and we weren't in any hurry because there was no deadline other than our own.
Looking back, however, I do wish we would have done more outreach to get our music in front of people who might like it. We flew under the radar for the most part, on the blogs and in the music press, and I guess we still kinda do. But we're getting better at rooting out avenues for us to get our music in front of people, doing stuff like this interview. And being unattached to any label does make it easier because if we feel like giving away our music for free on a blog, the only people we affect are ourselves so we can weigh whether or not its worth it and act. In highlight, we could've done more to take advantage of that freedom. And there were lots of small things, like getting all of our albums on the same Amazon and iTunes pages, and getting our new record on Pandora that took a little more time to figure out than maybe they would've otherwise, but this time around the learning curve seems far less steep.
What are your touring plans for the year?
Touring is pretty tough for us at this point. One of the guys is getting married this summer and I'm taking the California bar exam. A couple of the guys have mortgages, car payments and that kind of stuff and the full time jobs to pay for them, jobs that might not be cool with taking a month or two off to hit the road. We get people asking us online when we're going to come to Texas or Ohio or wherever and we desperately want to, but we just have to wait for the right situation when it makes sense and won't mean that we come back to eviction notices or repossessed cars.
Who would be your ideal touring buddies?
We've actually been lucky with the relatively few out of town runs we've done, they've always been with amazing bands. We went on a tour a few years back with our friends in the band Emery and they were way too generous in how they treated us, being that we hadn't even put out a record yet and brought nothing to the show other than ourselves. On that same tour the other band was a band we had never heard of at the time, Ruth, who ended up becoming some of our best friends, and who have been kind enough to get us shows up and down the Pacific Northwest whenever we've needed them.
We would definitely love to tour with larger, established bands who have an audience that would be receptive to our music, someone like Death Cab or David Bazan or The Flaming Lips. But not having a label to buy us on to a tour, or a manager who browbeats another of his clients to take us on tour, the odds of us getting on a tour like that are basically nil. So we're not holding our breaths.
What bands influence you guys?
We all have our own influences, but as a band we tend to unite behind bands like Pedro the Lion, The Flaming Lips, Mew, Nada Surf; similar guitar-y melodic indie rock bands. We also all like bands who we sound nothing like, like Refused and mewithoutYou.
If Surrogate was a rapper, who would it be?
There's actually a recording on the internet somewhere of Chris, Daniel Martin and our old guitar player Chris Armstrong rapping under stage names. They're way better rappers than you would think looking at them. If someone dug around they could probably find it and hear it for themselves. On the whole, if we were a rapper, I think we would probably be someone like Why?, some cynical emo rapper. That definitely suits our overall personality.
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