While we’re usually quite obviously of the punk persuasion here at Punks in Vegas, we listen to a lot of different types of music. And in Vegas, it’s pretty hard to find someone that doesn’t love local electro-dance duo Kid Meets Cougar.
Kid Meets Cougar has been noticeably and sadly absent from the scene for a while now. The duo took a break in October 2010 to revamp their already-impressive stage performance and write new material, but they’re back this Friday, Feb. 24 with the release of their new EP Sierra Papa Tango and the debut of their new high-tech live show. The band’s live performances have always made excellent use of video backgrounds and lighting, but word is their new show will utilize Kinect technology to project videos onto their bodies, and we’re sure they have a few other tricks up their sleeves.
Our very own Tom Monahan recently sat down with Brett Bolton and Courtney Carroll to talk about what it’s like dating your bandmate, juggling other bands, and how a 6-month break turned into nearly a year and a half.
You guys have been in an impressive list of well-loved Vegas bands. Can you talk about some of those?
Brett: Since high school, I’ve been in a bunch of bands. The two main ones were Red Light School District and Junior Anti-Sex League, which was the second incarnation, once we all broke up from Red Light.
Courtney: I was in a bunch of bands in high school too. Some metal bands.
Brett: You should say some of their names.
Courtney: One of them was called Smurfette’s Whorehouse. [laughs] We later changed the name to Grimorium Verum, and then to Venus Diablo.
Brett: Weren’t you in a band called The Pullouts?
Courtney: Yeah! My dad would come to all of our shows, but he hated it when anyone would ask the name of the band his daughter was in. I was in Thee Swank Bastards for a while, and The Clydesdale, and then Love Pentagon. There are more in there, I’m sure.
You guys are still in a few other bands right?
Brett: I am. We’re just not playing right now. We’re called Bee Movie the Band. I love that music. Right now we’re working on a full-length and decided not to worry about shows, like Kid Meets Cougar did while we were working on Sierra Papa Tango. But it’s going to take a little bit longer because Brian Cantrell actually wanted to go into a legit studio and do it. It costs a lot of money, but it sounds really good. I laid down all the drum tracks for that already.
Courtney: And I’m in Dusty Sunshine and The Clydesdale still.
Is it hard to find a balance between multiple projects?
Courtney: For Brett it is. He’s like “why don’t you practice Kid Meets Cougar as much as Dusty Sunshine?” [laughs] It’s pretty good because usually one of the bands is kind of taking a little break. The Clydesdale hasn’t really been doing much lately. I think we’re kind of starting to get back into doing stuff, but we’ll see. Every once in a while if I have a bunch of shows in the same week though, it’s hectic. But I like it. I’ve always had a bunch of bands. I just like hanging out with people and playing music.
How did you two meet?
Courtney: I was in Love Pentagon when Brett was in Junior Anti-Sex League, and we ended up playing a show together, for the Love Pentagon CD release party at The Box Office. Marites, the keyboard player for Love Pentagon, knew Brett and his friends.
Brett: She was a fan and friend of Junior Anti-Sex League and she’s the one that got us the show with Love Pentagon. She wanted all of us to go bowling to get to know each other, so it was a big party for the show.
Courtney: That’s where I met Brett!
Brett: She asked me to the bar! I had just turned 21. Actually, I overheard her talking about her birthday, which is July 20th, and it’s my birthday too, so we got to talking and eventually started working on stuff together. When we first started dating, that’s when I was building my first little garage studio. I was really into recording back when the second version of Junior Anti-Sex League started and I was recording all of our stuff and making my own songs. And when I met Courtney she wanted to jam too and we just starting tinkering around and learning how to play other instruments in my garage.
Do you find it difficult dating and being in a band together? Or does it make things easier?
Brett: I think it helps.
Courtney: If we weren’t in a band together, I don’t think we would ever hang out because Brett would just be in the studio every day. He needs somebody like me to play music with.
Brett: I like making things and tinkering in the studio, and if my girlfriend isn’t in the same band as me, it feels like I’m not paying attention. But this is for the both of us.
Courtney: Instead of going to the movies, we just work on songs together.
Is it easier to be honest with each other about the music?
Brett: Definitely. I think that might be one of the best traits that Courtney has. I’ll work for forever on a song and be really into an idea and she’s very honest when I bring it to her.
Courtney: I don’t ever want to tell him I don’t like something, because he works so hard, but eventually he’ll tell me he’s glad I told him because it ended up better.
Brett: I can always rework things, so it’s good that she’s so blunt about it. It makes it better.
Brett, what made you get into recording?
Brett: I always wanted to do it, but I thought it was this far-off thing that I’d never learn how to do. I had a 4-track cassette thing for a while and it was easy and I could make little songs, but then I got a pretty powerful MacBook and starting doing everything myself. I started building my arsenal of gear.
What’s your songwriting process like?
Brett: Mainly it starts with a bass line and a drum beat, or some weird sound. Then I’ll record it, or speak it into my phone and listen to it later. Then I’ll go into my computer and try to flesh it out and have fun. Eventually, it just builds. We add guitar, bass and keyboard parts, and whatever I think sounds good.
Recently, for songwriting, I switched over from Logic to Live. Ableton Live is really awesome for composition, because you can take a bunch of different pieces of songs and then put them all in this thing called Clip View. You can sit there and basically audition different bass lines with different guitar parts and flip it around, or transpose parts so that way you can build these weird structures that you haven’t done before. That’s what we did for Sierra Papa Tango. Usually Courtney tells me what she doesn’t like, and she’ll come up with ideas and add her vibe to it with drum parts and stuff.
Courtney: On the first album [For Breakfast], we wrote songs more by jamming together, but this one was more like Brett made a bunch of songs and then I helped fix them up later.
Brett: Which is cool, it’s just how it worked out. Especially when she’s in 3 other bands. [laughs]
Do you ever find yourself having to simplify your songs?
Brett: Instrument wise? Like there’s too much crap going on? Yeah. Actually, I think Sierra Papa Tango almost has too much stuff. [laughs] You keep having ideas and adding more and more effects. I think for the next stuff we’re going to do, it might be more toned down and open. But, it’s all learning.
You’re a two-person band, so I figure you guys have to use the samples. Is that difficult for your live show?
Brett: It kind of all stemmed from the loop petal. We figured we’re a two person band, we’re going to have this loop petal. I’ll do all the guitar parts live, and we’ll just loop it and play on top of that. Ok, we’ve got too many parts. Let’s add a second loop petal. This isn’t working. This isn’t syncing together.
Courtney: Yeah, they would eventually get off time from each other, even if we started them at exactly the same time.
Brett: It was a nightmare. So we started using drum pads. We’d just have the samples that I recorded on my computer and trigger them from the drum pads. That’s what we did for a long time. And that was just all audio. We had an all-audio live set for like 6 months to a year before we started using the videos.
Your live show with the video screens is a pretty big part of what you do. How did the video come into play?
Brett: I hate talking in between songs. We both do.
Courtney: I clam up at shows and don’t want to talk.
Brett: So back before we had the videos, I sampled a bunch of KISS banter from The Very Best of Paul Stanley’s On Stage Banter in between songs. It would be like “how you guys doing tonight?” when you hit the pad. So we did that for a while. But I thought videos would be so cool. So we added a computer that was strictly for video. And we had the projector behind us.
You guys have had a series of really great music videos from local directors.
Brett: Yeah, for For Breakfast, we had official videos for “Sasquatch con Bazooka,” “Hey Hey” and “It’s All in Your Head.” It worked out really well. I’d known Jeremy Chloe [director of their “Sasquatch con Bazooka” video] since high school. Once we decided we wanted to do visuals with our live shows, we wanted to do the music videos too and have them play behind us. So I was trying to find all these directors to do stuff for us, and luckily we got Jeremy on board. That’s also when we ran into Mike Thompson, who did the video for “Hey Hey.” And the video for “It’s All in Your Head” came when Joel Schoenbach had an idea about an eagle. [laughs]
This show that you have coming up on Friday, Feb. 24 will be your first show in almost a year and a half. Why such a long break?
Brett: We had a bunch of new ideas.
Courtney: And we really needed to revamp our whole setup because it was falling apart all the time.
Brett: We used to have this giant thing that we called “the media cart.” We got it from Lowe’s and we put a bunch of Plexiglass all around it, and spray painted the inside and it lit up. But all the wiring was really crappy and it was falling apart and there were technical difficulties all the time. And I had the idea to start projecting videos onto our bodies, and also simplify our set so it’s not falling apart all the time. So we decided to stop playing shows. We did the Kickstarter campaign in August 2010 to help us make the necessary changes and we played our last show in October 2010.
Courtney: We were not planning on taking this long of a break. It just took a lot longer than we thought it was going to. It was supposed to be Summer of 2011 that we would be playing again.
Brett: Yeah, it was supposed to just be a 6 month break, but it became a year and a half because we just had more ideas. Originally, I wasn’t going to completely redo everything like we’ve done now. I wasn’t even thinking about the Kinect motion sensing stuff back then. That’s what has taken the longest, is getting all of that to work with video masking.
Courtney: We couldn’t find any programs that already existed, so Brett and Lucas Bang were trying to make a program so the Kinect could read us and project videos back onto our bodies. Nothing like that existed.
Brett: We spent about 4 months trying to make our own software to do that.
Did it work eventually?
Brett: When the Kinect technology first came out, we were on a bunch of forums and hacker groups doing research and we were getting pretty close. We got to the point where we could track skeletons, but then this guy came out with this thing for Burning Man that tracks people in a scene and can actually see your silhouettes. It was exactly what we needed. So I was able to put a few different programs together to patch it in with our other software and make the audio and video line up with each other. It took a long time. But it’s working.
Are there any other musicians that have strong influence on your music?
Brett: One of my favorite bands recently, or I guess it’s not really a band because it’s just one guy, but it’s Bibio. That’s definitely been an influence on all the new stuff I’ve been doing. I just really like how he doesn’t think everything has to sound super pristine. Everyone wants the newest gear so they can get the highest quality possible, and he just goes around with tape recorders and gets these sounds that have really cool feelings to them. We’re also fans of RATATAT and stuff like that. And they have a crazy live show that makes ours look like child’s play. But they’re not doing it all by themselves, so they can suck it. [laughs] We love RATATAT.
What are your plans for 2012?
Brett: We have the debut show on Feb. 24, and we’ve got the Neon Reverb show March 24 with Yacht and VHS OR BETA. Then we also have a show March 2 in Phoenix, AZ. It’s an after-hours warehouse party.
Courtney: They’re calling it an electronics festival, but I think it’s only one day.
Brett: They contacted us and were really excited about having us play, and I think it’s going to be perfect. There isn’t that much electronic stuff in Vegas. Especially weird electronic stuff.
Courtney: It will be nice to test our new live show on the road too.
Can you tour with your new setup? Would you want to?
Brett: I would love to tour.
Courtney: Our whole setup can fit in my station wagon. And we could fit an extra person in there to help us out. Setting up our screen kind of takes a while.
Brett: The hardest part is once everything is set and the projections are lined up, making sure that the computers are working and talking to each other. But we’re working out the bugs and it’s going to be pretty streamlined, so we’re getting there. I’d love to tour. That’s what I’m hoping for. I’d like to get out of Vegas a little bit. I’m down for anywhere.
Kid Meets Cougar’s new EP Sierra Papa Tango comes out this Friday, Feb. 24. You can pre-order it now from their bandcamp page, or pick it up at the EP release party and debut of their new live show this Friday, Feb. 24 at the Winchester Cultural Center. They’re playing with Hungry Cloud, Twin Brother and Totescity.
Interview by Tom Monahan
Transcribed by Ashleigh Thompson
Kid Meets Cougar photo by Emily Matview
Find out more about Kid Meets Cougar: facebook.com/kidmeetscougar
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