Interview with Stokeswood

Get Stoked!

Interview by Sarah Locke



     Stokeswood is an Atlanta-based five piece who are currently making waves in the Southeast.  Since their 2004 inception, the “low-endie” rock quintet has undergone several changes along the way, affecting lineup and sound, but never affecting popularity and charisma. 
     One of the greatest things about Stokeswood is that they’re consistently inconsistent- unpredictable and fun that is. 
     On stage,  they travel to various musical regions- acoustic, soul, electronic, and rock, just to name a few.  Sometimes they’re dressed as Christmas characters at a soy hot-dog themed event, and sometimes they’re not, although truth be told, I’m sure most Stokeswood fans out there would prefer the former of the two.
     They recently played Atlanta’s CounterPoint festival, an event that guitarist Mark Godwin said was amazing (no-brainer there), and are currently gearing up to play Suwannee’s Aura Arts & Music Festival in the middle of February.
     Below you can find my conversation with Godwin covering their self-contrived genre, their most recent album, 2011’s In the Field of Vibrations, of course, what the hell the soy hot-dog event was really all about, and some other slightly random topics as well. Enjoy.


Describe “Low-Endie Rock” for me please.
Well we started off playing fairly stereotypical indie rock, like singer-songwriter stuff and  a lot of acoustic material, and we kind of ventured into this whole love of bass, so now we’ve got several instruments on stage that are creating a bunch of weird bass sounds. We came up with the term, Endie as a play on indie and it’s just basically describing our music as having a lot of bass in it for a rock and roll band, and its very dance beat related.


I know Adam and yourself founded the band back in 2004, and like most bands, you’ve had some changes with the lineup along the way, but your most recent was the addition of keyboardist Michael Roman. How’s that addition?
He’s a super talented musician, and he’s got great on-stage energy, and we’ve just now recently starting demoing out our next album which will be the first one with him on keys, so it’s always good to have some new ideas on the table. Things are going really good.

And Megg Serrano still does backing vocals for the band, or no?
No she doesn’t, it just didn’t really work out for her and us on the road, but she’s still a really good friend and most likely will sing some vocals on the next album, she just won’t be touring with us.

In what ways did the writing process differ for In the Field of Vibrations, than your first studio album, Carassia?
Carassia is a made up planet and the word is actually a misunderstood lyric. In one of the songs, I believe “Half Empty,” Adam says “Like her, I see a different kind of glass,” and Reid our former keyboardist was like, “Man I like the song, but what is like Carassia?” So Carassia was kind of a song that Adam and I had been playing for a couple of years that we just wrote for the duo sort of thing, and then we finally got to the point where we wanted to record a full length album, so we went into the studio, it was probably like six to eight months after we started forming the rest of the band around us, so all of those songs had already been played and formatted, so we just went in and recorded them and everybody added their parts and they changed a little bit in the studio but not too far off from the original visions. Then with the second album, In the Field, we pretty much just went into the studio. Our bass player, Justin, produced the first record and during the production of the second record, he ended up joining the band, so we pretty much just went over to this place, just sat there and wrote the songs in the studio.

Now I know that it wasn’t until after the release of Carassia that you guys fully embraced and took on more of the electronic dance sound, and it was during this time that u were performing the band’s new material under the name Neckbeard. What on earth?
Man, I have no idea where we came across the term…

Surely you were discovered and found out? Did you just book out of town, at random venues or something?
It was really only a couple shows. We played a few shows under that name testing out the electronic stuff, but it was so well received, so we just automatically started throwing it into the normal Stokeswood shows.

I know you guys really enjoy the Miami market and have played all sorts of venues, but what’s your favorite spot to play when there?
Hands down The Stage. They treat us well, the fans are really into it, and it’s a good cross of like an intimate show but with really big sound.

What about in Atlanta?
We try and hit all of them, but I’ve always been a fan of Star Bar. It’s really small but it’s easy to pack out and it’s also fun. We’ve been playing The Earl more recently and I like that as well.

So I read you guys decided that instead of just going straight into the studio to record a third album, you plan to release new music in other various ways. Why are you choosing to take this route? Why do you think it’s more beneficial?
We haven’t actually begun to iron that out yet but that is still something that we’re very interested in doing. We just don’t want to be pigeonholed into releasing an album every two years, and you have to realize at this point in the music industry as a whole, record sales and selling music isn’t really something that’s going to bring home consistent money, so we’ve been really just giving away our music for the past year via these download cards at shows and stuff like that.

I know you guys are fans of themed or concept shows. What’s the weirdest, most out there theme or concept you’ve ever come up with?
There’s an indie rock festival called Corn-Dog-O-Rama in July, and we went head to head with it one year. It was an all day festival kind of thing but it was just at one venue with a bunch of bands and we called our show the Soy- Dog-O-Rama and gave out free soy dogs to everyone that came in. The full title of the event was Soy-Dog-O-Rama Christmas in July, and we decorated the entire venue like it was Christmas.  I wore an Abominable Snowman suit which was almost unbearable in July.  We had elves on stage and Adam was the guy from a Christmas Story in the pink bunny suit. That was probably the most outlandish.

What’s next for Stokeswood?
We’re looking forward to touring a lot more in 2013. We averaged 12 to 14 days a month on the road this past year, and I think we’re going to increase that to like 20 a month, and branch out West but in the down time, were writing our next album and were not putting a deadline on it like we have with the last couple of albums; We’re going to see how long it takes to do it and we might release a couple songs along the way but that’s really what we’re looking forward to next. This last record, we had this date that we had to have it done and released by, and we feel like it got rushed in the end and kind of stunted the creative process. Not that we’re not satisfied with the finished product, it’s just that we’re definitely not going to even think about a release date until the entire album is finished, mastered, and ready for production.

Will you continue to use Justin as your producer or are you going to try an outside source?
We’re currently using his expertise to get these really good demos down, but were definitely looking to work with an outside producer to  get a different opinion on our music instead of keeping it all in house.

Alright, well we’ll be looking forward to that and in the mean time, we’ll catch you at Aura in February. Thanks, Mark!