Hughes and I have been lying low for a minute on the live performance front, but now we're getting back out there with our new project, Goodbye Bikini Island. You might recognize that as the title of our most recent Hosey release, and I guess I should explain...
If you've ever spent any time around musicians who have been playing together for a long time, you know that we develop a looney sense of humor and make a lot of inside jokes. One thing Hughes and I do is make up overly elaborate back stories for songs. Sometimes we concoct an elaborate explanation for just a riff or write an essay explaining a sample choice. This gets really fun when we "sample" ourselves playing an instrument and get to make up fake bands as the source of the sample. Bands complete with their own origin and break up stories, their own sound, their own poorly titled autobiographies, etc. You get the picture.
While recording an album with a working title of How to Photograph an Atomic Bomb we ended up putting together a lot of tracks that were based around sampling our own original music. We initially intended to attribute these samples to a fake band named Goodbye Bikini Island, who was supposed to be a 90s college band from our hometown. We ended up liking the name of this fake band so much that we decided to name the album after them. And that's the story of how Goodbye Bikini Island the album got its name.
We released the album and as the months passed something interesting happened. We kept writing more and more songs in the style of what we imagined Goodbye Bikini Island would have sounded like. It started to move on from just riff ideas to entire songs with bridges and everything. Now, we find ourselves with enough material to play shows, so we figured, "what the hell?"
We thought we were making up a fake band and it turns out we were writing the bio for a whole new project.