Q+A: Alone in India

While Alone in India may never be a household name, the stellar arrangement and impressive lyricism demonstrated on their premier demo raises the question:  Why not?  Its members, currently pursuing degrees at UMSL and STLCOP, show a love of music that transcends the need for money or fame – though I’m sure they wouldn’t mind, thank you very much.  ELEVEN recently got a chance to interview band leader Ben Venker.

Alone in India - Bullets

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Not really.  We spent a lot of time coming up with names and changing things around.  Our friend Kevin [Stephenson] actually came up with Alone in India iteration, and it just stuck.

Eric, Brett and I are brothers, and Kirt goes to pharmacy school with them.

Eric and I started messing around together a few years ago.  I moved to New York in 2005 and was there for two years, but we would collaborate informally online and whenever I was back in town.  I moved back to St. Louis in 2008, got a space at Utopia Studios, and just kept writing as much as I could.  ”Bullets and Innocence” were mostly written while I was in New York, but everything else on the demo was written since I’ve been back.  Eric’s been great about pushing to get songs out.  I’m a perfectionist when it comes to music, but we’re not audio engineers, so it can be hard to make things translate on the recordings.  At the same time it’s easy to lose perspective after working on a song or recording for ages. You can lose the immediacy and roughness that made the initial idea great. Eric came up with Halloween as a deadline for a demo, and that really pushed me to just kinda decide on versions that were good enough.  Once that was done, we started sending it to friends and got a lot of encouragement, which was really the impetus for getting a live set together.  Eric had sent Kirt some of our stuff before and he liked it, so we asked him to join up.  We still needed a bass player and didn’t really have any avenues for that besides Craigslist or something.  We talked to Brett about learning the bass, and he’s really stepped up to the plate on that for us.

Well, now that there’s a band, the roles are more defined.  Eric and I played everything on the demo ourselves, just because we didn’t have a group together, but Eric’s primary instrument is piano/keyboards and mine is guitar.  In the current lineup, I play guitar, Eric’s on keys, Kirt on drums and Brett on bass.

All of us are full time students, so that keeps us pretty busy.  I TA Intro to Microeconomics at UMSL and tutor in the Econ lab as well, Eric and Brett climb, and Kirt’s into biking.

I think we’re influenced by everything we listen to, but we take different things from different artists.  Bands like the Beatles or Dylan are probably what I’m looking toward personally.  Not in terms of sounding like them, but they consistently put out quality records and changed their sound throughout their careers.  That combination of accessibility and originality is rare, and it’s the reason why their work has stayed relevant.  Their knowledge of different musical styles was wide and deep, and as an artist I’m interested in the process that caliber of artist went through to get that power.

On a more sonic level, some bands that we like are Radiohead, Aesop Rock, Dirty Projectors, TV on the Radio, Andrew Bird…too many to name really.  Anything that hits you when hear it will end up influencing you, no matter who it is, and whether you want it to or not.

That’s tough.  Maybe The Band?  Watching those guys on the Last Waltz and seeing how tight they all are together…they started playing together when they were like fifteen years old and their chemistry was insane.

I think we have a pretty diverse range of songs on the demo, and there haven’t been a lot of comparisons as far as the sound of the band as a whole, but different people have said specific songs sound like anything from Bob Dylan to TV on the Radio.  As long as we don’t sound like we’re trying to rip someone else off, I think any comparison to a band we like is flattering.  People have said that if they had to describe our sound to someone, they wouldn’t know what to say.  When people ask me what kind of music we play, I usually say pop music, which to me is just means good music.

Well the next release will likely be an “official” album.  We called this one a “demo” mostly because it’s our first effort, and the group has doubled in size since then, so I’m not sure we’ve established much of anything yet.  The dynamics will definitely change and that’s really exciting.  There’s tons of sounds and styles that we want to explore and make our own so I hope the most consistent thing people can expect from us is exciting, quality work.

“Keep That to Yourself” and “Mercy.”  That’s two, but both those songs are very personal and one was written in about fifteen minutes, the other took about 2 months.  They’re kind of emotional opposites, and I think I wanted to prove to myself that I could write a more positive, major key song without it sounding forced.  It helped a lot to have something good to write about.

Probably 60s, 70s, 00s, 80s, 90s.

Favorite song of the new millennium, so far, for Eric and I, is “You and Whose Army” by Radiohead. I went through about a 2 year period where I had to hear that song at least once a day. I still freak out about it.

Favorite new artist of the new millennium…probably Arcade Fire. I know everyone loves them now – and they should, but Funeral blew me away when it came out. I couldn’t remember the last time I heard a record where I loved every song on it from start to finish, and the band sounded like they were having so much fun.  It got me excited about rock n’ roll again.  Also, I love the new Dirty Projectors record.

We’re playing at Felix’s in Dogtown on Feb. 4th. You can get details about the show (and download the whole demo for free!!) at http://www.aloneinindia.com if you want to check us out first.  The show is a benefit for ALIVEstl, a hotline and help center for domestic violence victims, so come hear some good music and support a great cause.

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