Conan O'Brien Illustration by Aaron Z. Lee 2010

No doubt you’ve heard the controversy about Jay Leno bumping Conan out of the way so he can return to the Tonight Show. I am not pleased with this at all. I have never liked Leno. I am a big Conan fan and feel that his humor and show has so much more to offer than his contemporaries. Every character on the show is priceless. The writing is always top notch and what I really like about Conan is that he really seems authentic onstage. When faced with with the smarm of old timers like Letterman and Leno and the hammed up antics of Kimmel, Fallon, and Ferguson, Conan is the obvious choice for late night supremacy. It seems like after next week’s shows that Conan might be replaced on the tonight show, but not forgotten. This guy Mike Mitchell started a facebook group that has been making some serious waves and no doubt shows us that Conan, wherever he lands, be it NBC, FOX, or the moon he’ll be alright.

The Stills – I’m With You

10 Questions with Steve Schiltz of Longwave
By: Aaron Z. Lee

I was planning to see NYC indie rock band Longwave at the Mohawk in Buffalo, but in true crappy Central New York weather tradition the show was postponed to the spring due to a huge lake effect storm, but I still got a chance catch up with Longwave’s modest frontman Steve Schiltz and discuss a few things including their current tour and electrifying new album that was #3 on my best of 2008 list.

1.Your new album sounds great. Do you think that RCA is kicking themselves for dropping you?

I don’t know. Probably not yet. give us time.

2. There are a lot of songs about being lonely or reaching out to friends on Secrets Are Sinister. I know you guys wrote the album while you were unsigned, did it feel like the end of the road?

Sure, a little bit. The record deal didn’t really have a lot to with it, though. If the band wasn’t going to make a new record it wouldn’t have been because of RCA dropping us, it would have been because we were tired of it. We always thought we could get another record deal somehow. We just had to see if we still WANTED to do it.

3. There’s a noticeably more aggressive sound to this record, with you guys even incorporating some guitar solos into the songs, how did this come about?

There were always guitar solos here and there, and most of the time they were me. Shannon would always say I should do more. I went out on tour for a while with some other bands and I got into playing my guitar more, so I was ready to do it. I wanted the guitars to be important on this record. I had a lot of ideas about what I wanted to do with the sounds, especially with the distortion and fuzz sounds.

4. On There’s a Fire, you and Shannon Ferguson wrote the bass parts and assigned the keyboard parts to new members. Is that how it worked out on Secrets are Sinister?

The record was mostly made by Shannon, Jason, and I. So it was kind of like you are saying, except Morgan did join the band towards the end of the recording. Paul and Jeff, who toured with us on there’s a fire, also played on a song or two. We used some recordings we had done at that time, and they had done a good job, so why not?

5. You guys did most of the work on this album yourselves, how does that compare to the past records you’ve worked on?

We have always been very involved. Shannon and I especially. And every record has had some kind of home/demo recording end up making it to the end. This time we just did MORE of it. It is not the first time we have done it, Shannon recorded our first indie record, “Endsongs”. And we had our friend Pete min mix it. Pete recorded some of THIS record too.

6. Does touring with a new album after so much uncertainty feel like a victory?

YES!

7. How have the crowds been reacting to the new songs in general?

So far so good. I write 12 or 13 song set lists, and people generally shout out a few they want to hear. If we know them, we play them. If we do an encore, we generally end at about 16 or 17 songs. So that is nice. I still write the set lists kinda short in case it feels like the show is going badly…

8. You’re originally from the Rochester, NY area, is there anything about that area that inspired you to go into the music business?

Our drummer Jason is also from Rochester! And I am IN Rochester for the holidays right now! I only knew that I couldn’t stay in Rochester and play music the way I wanted. The guys I wanted to meet just weren’t there. There were people, like Tony Gross at GFI, John Nau who still repairs my amps, the house of guitars guys, and guys in exploding boy, officer friendly, and the dizzy monk guys, who I learned so much from. It was just that after a few years I knew I needed to go to New York. Ironically, Dave Fridmann is from close by. Dave is amazing. There are great people in/near Rochester, I suppose learning from them made me want to keep going. that meant going to New York.

9. Your new album is being released by the Original Signal indie label, how did you guys get hooked up with them?

Our A&R guy now worked on “there’s a fire” at a different company. People shuffle around, and he wound up at this label and they seemed like they really wanted to do it, and wanted to work hard, so here we are!

10. You guys have toured extensively in the past with lots of bands including Spoon, The Strokes, Kasabian and the National. Since it’s the holiday season, do you guys have any great holiday or snow related memories from touring?

Not GREAT memories!! Hmm……I remember rushing to Boston in the snow once to play some NEMO festival or something. I was still booking the band, this was around the time of our first record. Before RCA. Anyhow I booked this show and someone had given me the hard sell, it was big deal, label people there, lots of BS, etc etc. We wound up in a snow storm, and thought we were surely going to miss it. Our drummer Jeremy got behind the wheel and Shannon guided him through all kinds of tricky traffic maneuvers. We somehow made record time! We pulled up 10 minutes before our set time, and the band before us was just playing their last song! We had made it! We loaded our gear down the stairs in the freezing cold, into the middle east downstairs. We parked the van, started setting up the amps, we couldn’t believe how lucky we were. We were awesome! Then we looked out into the crowd. There was no one there. I think that sums up something for us.

Thanks for doing this interview and hopefully I’ll get to see you guys in Buffalo next year!

Thanks for writing about us, Aaron! Come and say hi at the show.