Q&A with Juice’s Ben Stevens and Christian Rose

WRBB’s Caitlyn Furler caught up with Juice members Ben Stevens and Christian Rose to talk about their college days, return to Boston and the end of their tour. Be sure to check them out at Brighton Music Hall on April 12th!

You guys are coming to Boston next week, are you excited to play Brighton, does that feel like a hometown show for you guys?

Ben: That is sort of the ribbon on the gift that this tour was to us. It’s gonna be the last show, we’re really looking forward to it. It’s very much a homecoming for us. We haven’t been even on the East Coast in months and so to come home to where we went to school, spent four very formative years of our lives there and celebrate with all our friends that we’ve missed very dearly, in that way it’s gonna be really exciting.

Christian: Also, a fun little factoid is that the very last show we played as students in college was at Brighton Music Hall, and we sold it out. I think a lot of the band members would tell you how special that was. We had played there a number of times over, at college, those venues specifically. Super super special to us. And I can imagine going back there is gonna be pretty emotional.

I know you guys got together through Boston College. What was your experience coming up like through the Boston indie scene, did you find that it was a good catalyst for you guys starting out?

Ben: I definitely think that going to BC in particular gave us a unique opportunity to stand out amongst the crowd of musicians in the Boston scene because you have Berklee, which is sort of a giant for churning out really talented musicians and bands and songwriters and things like that. But BC didn’t really have a lot of that though. It gave us sort of a leg up and a chip on our shoulder but also, our sound is sort of different from like that typical Boston sound that you often hear about, so, I think that was also a unique opportunity for us to stand out as well. But, we definitely made a lot of friends. There’s an endless reservoir of talented people there. So, we were able to learn from other people and sort of forge our own path in that way. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Christian: Yeah networking with the other bands in the scene and learning, like Ben said, sort of what it was like to be a band and seeing, even though we think that our sound is a little bit different from some of the other groups in the scene – obviously every band thinks like that – but watching some of these bigger bands come out and grow and start to succeed and tour nationally sort of gave us some direction and gave us an idea that we could maybe do it ourselves… Coming up in Boston I think was a part of our identity by the end of it.

How do you guys go about songwriting as a group?

Ben: I think that this is like the most fun thing to answer because it really just depends completely on the situation and the person and where the source of inspiration comes from. Like sometimes we’ll just all be chilling in a basement batting around ideas. Like Miles maybe starts to groove on something or someone is fiddling around on their guitar or fiddle. Then a random jam will spurn and then like, ‘Sugar’ will happen. And then that’s when we like just get into an absolute zone and everyone’s grooving on a hundred percent. … Random shit from anywhere can just inspire you and spark the flame.

Christian: Sometimes it comes from the music. Sometimes it comes from life experience, sometimes it comes from a line of lyrics that one person wrote down and it just explodes into a whole song. It really comes from everywhere, everyone. I don’t think there’s a song on, you know, that we’ve released that hasn’t been sort of through that process of exploding.

Ben: The comet!

Christian: It really does come from everywhere. People ask us, like, ‘oh you’re not answering the question’ or whatever. But, no really, because there’s no one point that songwriting comes from. And there’s all these answers that you can say.

Ben: Embrace that fact!

Christian: It’s everywhere, it’s experiencing emotion and togetherness as friendship and…

Ben: Loneliness.

Christian: Yeah, loneliness. It’s all the things that you feel as a member of a band, as a human, as a person through experiences.

Do you guys feel like you take a lot from your college days in your songwriting?

Christian: Yes and no. I think that, inherently, you kind of have to.

Ben: Yeah, like, whether you like it or not.

Christian: We experienced four years of school together. That was the majority of our growth, of the time that we grew as band, we were students at school. But I think there was a point when we started touring when we realized that the world is so much bigger than BC and it might’ve happened as soon as we started touring. Like the world is so big and there’s so much to experience, there’s so much more to it. It’s such a specific culture – at any college you go to – but for us at BC there was such a specific culture that we felt like was a big part of our identity and…

Ben: Whether we knew it or not.

Christian: I think the acknowledgement of that meant that we could no longer feel like that was… that being, you know, ‘guys from BC’ was the band. I think now we just want to be people who experienced that, it will always inform our writing and our personalities, but it’s not who we are. I mean, it’s a certain part of who we are but we’re just people who are experiencing the world and experiencing each other.

So, what’s the plans for you guys coming up after this tour?

Ben: So, after this tour. We’ve been in and out of the studio over the past few months, cooking up some bangers. So, we’re really excited to share that with everybody. Again, it’s like a new sort of phase of the Juice musical discography. And the new phase of our lives that we want to share with everybody. So that’s exciting. We got some videos coming out. A bunch of college shows. And another summer tour coming up as well in late June.

Caitlyn: Thanks so much guys for talking to me. Enjoy the rest of your tour until you come to Boston next week!

Listen to Juice: