by Paige Ardill
2018-10-16
Your website states that Future Generations is a “by-product of over 7 years of creating and performing music,” both as friends and as colleagues. Can I ask, how did you all meet and where did Future Generations begin?
Some of us have been together since freshman year of college. We all met at Fordham University in our freshman dorm, myself, Mike, and Eric met in one of the practice rooms of that building and we all just started making music together for fun and putting it online. Later on I met Devon, the bass player, in line for a school dance. Dylan we met almost three years ago off Craigslist. We needed a new drummer, we had been using one of our buddies but he went off and started his own project, so we needed somebody to come in full time and be apart of what we are doing, and we’re lucky enough that we found Dylan.
When it comes to the creation of music, what is your songwriting process like from inspiration to production?
Usually the two people who start out songwriting are me and Mike. We start out with sounds, whether they’re synths or dumb beats, and we usually build around that. I work in Logic and I do a lot of my songwriting there, usually with the music and melody first and moving on to lyrics afterwards. As far as inspirations go, it’s hard to really pinpoint anything; anything ranging from hip-hop to punk rock to singer-songwriter stuff, we’ve all had a wide variety of influences throughout our life, and they’ll all peak their heads every once in a while.
What kind of music do you listen to around the house? Does everyone have different tastes?
Around the house, we’re always showing each other new music that we’ve found. I’m more of the one who is on the discovery front so I always try and find the newest, best thing to show everybody, but everybody else usually plays older stuff. A lot of indie rock, but occasionally hip-hop and R&B as well. Frank Ocean was a big one last year, White Reaper was huge for us last year as well. Sylvan Esso, Hippo Campus, Phoenix, those were all what we were listening to during the creation of the record.
How do you think the friendship that you have built Future Generations upon positively impacts you both in terms of creation and just day to day life?
It’s really impacted me positively, personally. I have a group of best friends I can call at any moment. I’m around them a lot of the time, and I can really just be myself around this group of guys I really admire and respect, and that translates into the creation part of it, I trust them to be great musicians and forward thinkers and really put their best foot forward in every way. It’s something I don’t take for granted, and I think I’m very lucky.
If you could go on tour with any band or musician, dead or alive, who would it be and why?
That’s a great question… I’m gonna say if we could go on tour with Muse, that would be awesome. We had this crazy experience last year at Firefly. We got to see them play, and they just blew our minds. They bring this type of energy that we try to bring on stage; it’s very loud, very in your face, but it’s also heartfelt and genuine which is what we strive for. Either Phoenix or Muse.
Your previous album self-titled Future Generations did quite well, the song ‘Stars’ reaching over 10 million streams on Spotify. How did you react finding that out and what makes that song so special?
That song has really put us where we are today and we’re very thankful for it. It’s been around for a while, actually, and when we released it with our album it has already been written and recorded for maybe three years. We’ve had the song around, and we always knew it was a strong song and we always liked it, it was nice to finally get that recognition from other people. It kind of validated what we’re doing and gave us permission to keep pursuing this and keep getting better.
Was it the song you thought was going to attract commercial success?
Yeah, we kind of knew it would be when I first wrote the initial hook and song, I sent it over to Mike through Facebook and he said, ‘This is great, it’s gonna be great’, we just had that feeling, you know? It came together so easily, it’s hard not to.
What differentiates Landscape from Future Generations both in terms of growth as well as style?
Individually, we’ve grown and matured, we look at songwriting in a different way. It’s more of a way to voice our current situation as opposed to something that’s loud and fun and poppy. We have grown in terms of learning how to be musicians and write songs, and I think it’s pretty well reflected in the new album Landscape, and I hope everybody else sees that. We’re pretty proud of the growth we’ve made really stretching ourselves to do something new and exciting we can be proud of.
Do you have a favorite song from the album?
My personal favorite is ‘Incomplete’, the last song on the album, but it changes day to day. All of them have a special place in my heart.
Does that differ from your favorite song to play live?
Yeah, my favorite song to play live is ‘Landscape’, it’s just so fast and loud and energetic and for me, personally, I have a lot of fun up on stage.