Jenny Sorto

If you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting Moontower, we’ve got you covered!

The three-piece indie-electronic group made up of Devan Welsh, Jacob Culver and Tom Carpenter, are a band on the rise. Centering their music production around a live experience, Moontower blends their energetic beats with powerful songwriting that touches upon the dynamics of relationships, self-reflection and being in (and out of) love.

Right ahead of their latest creative endeavor — producing their debut album — the Moontower boys joined us on Zoom to talk about their early connections to music, remaining true to themselves and their hopes for the future.

Bad Wreck: Growing up, for each of you guys, was there an album or song that had an effect on you and kind of still influences you to this day?

Tom: That’s a great question.

Devan: I think for me, it’s “One Tree Hill” off of The Joshua Tree. It just is a song that sounds very good when it’s turned up loud, which I feel like is what we strive to do. And besides that it’s just a very dynamic song and grows and gets to a very massive point. And also my parents, the year that [The] Joshua Tree came out was the year of their marriage, so I think it also just means a lot to my parents as well. So, it’s just a universally loved Welsh family favorite.

Jacob: There’s this song by a band called Keane, called “Somewhere Only We Know” and that was like the first… I don’t know how young I was, maybe seven… but like I heard it and I was like “This song is amazing! I wanna know every word!”. So my Dad was like “Alright well let’s do it”, and so he kept rewinding and we learned the song together in the car, line by line. And like 20 minutes later we were just singing the whole song together. I mean — Keane is just piano-ballad-pop at its finest and not exactly where my tastes lie, but as a song, oh my god what a fantastic song. And so that was like, I think one of the first memories I have of being really drawn to songwriting.

T: I’m gonna go with another similar pick. On Saturday mornings my Dad always used to drive my sister and I to IHOP or Cracker Barrel or something and one of those trips, we decided we’re gonna do twenty-one twelve [“2112”] all the way through. And twenty-one twelve is a song by Rush — it’s actually a whole like side-A of an LP. It’s twenty-one minutes and twelve seconds long and it’s a space rock opera about a boy who finds a guitar to stop the global federation and the priest of the temple of Syrinx from taking over the galaxy. And I was like “That is the most badass thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life!”.

J: Then you have Season 1: The Ballad of William Hollywood — and if you can’t see the connection… then I don’t know how!

BW: When did you know that music was something you wanted to pursue? Or has that always been something you knew you wanted to do?

J: Oh, mine was like super clear. I mean I think I knew it was something I wanted to pursue… well, there’s this video of me playing “Lay Down Sally” when I was like three. I didn’t know the chords so I’m just like strumming the guitar and screaming at the top of my lungs but I couldn’t pronounce “lay” so it just sounds like “way down sally” with my little baby lisp. So I've been performing forever.

T: For me, I was at summer camp one time… the summer after my third grade and a kid — far wise beyond his years, he brought a guitar-

J: I love this story!

T: -And I walked over and I was like, “Dude I wanna learn how to play guitar, it’s the coolest thing ever, how long have you been doing it?”... and he says, “Dude you can get a guitar, but if you really wanna be in a band you should play bass because all bands need bassists and all the people wanna learn how to play guitar”. So I remembered that for like six months… for Christmas in six months I asked for a bass, which my parents thought was lunacy, like “Who wants a bass, why does this fourth grader want a bass?”… But yeah I think ever since then. Jake and I have both been in bands for a very, very long time since childhood.

D: Well two things to note about Tom is: that the pictures I’ve been shown by his mom and his other band mates when they were in like elementary school, is that the bass was like as big as Tom was-

T: It’s like the same exact bass I play today. It’s already too big now and I was much smaller back then.

D: -And the other note is that his username for everything “tcbassist”, sort of tells you everything you need to know — which I don’t know how long you’ve had that?

T: It was like third or fourth grade.

J: It was his MySpace.

BW: Oh! Devan talk about your story!

D: I feel like I knew that at the end of high school I wanted to pursue something in music but I didn’t know what it was. So I feel like I had an interest in the behind the scenes: live production stuff or like mix engineer, front of house type of thing. But I really think it was like Jake and Tom —  working with Jake and Tom that kinda gave me the confidence that my ideas are good enough to be in like a creative setting. So I feel like it was at the start of our very first show, that I was like, “Alright… I haven’t felt this level of satisfaction from music yet being so involved in the creative process”, which I always thought I wanted to be farther removed from. So I really think it was just the first show of Moontower that sort of solidified like, “This could be amazing” and it also feels really good to do despite its innate challenges.

BW: What do you think is the most fulfilling part for you guys, being in Moontower?

T: I think it’s probably the symbiosis… all three of us kind of do three very different things. And I like to fancy myself more as like the electronic guy, more of the drum and bass type dude. Jacob’s lyrics and the stories he tells through his music will make you cry nine times out of ten and bring some tears to the eyes that you can take home with you. Devan is Mr. Huge: the guitars are massive and the pianos and the harmonies… Also Devan has the ability... you can play any song — and I will be trying to figure out the chords for like three hours — and Devan’s figured them out before he’s even touched the piano. So we kind of all do everything, but also I feel like it’s unique and it’s cool that we all kind of have our own little zones that we like to call our piece of the puzzle.

D: I feel like it’s very much the sum of its parts. Where it’s like... there was a summer when I was back here — I think it was before Moontower was like a public band — and Tom and Jake were in L.A. and I was in Baltimore and I found a bullshit of an internship excuse to be in L.A. just so I can make music with Tom and Jake again. But it was like one of the songs… I think it was one of the very first iterations of “Pilot”, and it didn’t sound like Moontower until the three of us were in a room together. So the “sum of its parts” thing is very much a reason why we sound the way that we do and it's why we love the music so much. Because if any one of us is absent, it’s pretty painfully obvious what is missing.

J: I think too, what is like really nice is that we, from the beginning, have always been focused on being a “live band”. And I think that for all of us either the best part of, or one of the best parts of, being in this band is how much effort and how much fun we have putting on shows. And also we’re just so obsessed with getting to know the rest of the country and the world through playing music for people. It’s just like the single most beautiful thing that we feel we can do with our abilities as human beings. That’s really nice to feel. Like all of us are super eager to just tour until our bones break.

BW: What would you say is your favorite memory or accomplishment you guys have fulfilled as a band that you’re proud of?

T: I think having played Reading and Leeds — having played an international festival — definitely.

J: That was just like surreal… I think that was an amazing moment. It felt like a freaking dream.

T: It didn’t feel real. That was one of those situations where I don’t think any of us really fully comprehended what happened until a couple months later.

J: We like just showed up in England and played a festival and there were like thousands of people watching us and being like “I never thought you’d make it to England this early and I’m a huge fan”. And we’re just like “Here’s a free shirt! Who the fuck are you, you’re my favorite person!” It was so cool. We know that it’s gonna be the first of many and all that stuff, but it’s just… you have to appreciate the firsts and hopefully we never get jaded. You guys have to make sure we don't get jaded because if we ever get jaded then like what’s the point?

BW: Yeah we’ll call you out. [laughs]

J: Also I think maybe like the Moroccan Lounge? Like our first headline show…

T: We didn’t have an agent before that.

J: Yeah we didn’t… We’d just been playing backyards to that point and we got a few opening gigs for people at actual venues. But we were just sort of like,”Okay well, can Moontower actually put on a show at a venue? Will people show up?” Just to sell out our first ever headline show… It just like started a whole new era for us.

D: Stuff also moved very quickly after that. Like we didn’t expect our agent to be in that room and then get called into Paradigm a week later... It was just like the right amount of fire under our butts that we needed to push us into the fact that what we were creating behind the scenes was legit when it was public, if that makes any sense.

T: It’s also like super easy to forget that at that point we sold out the Moroccan, we’d only put two songs out. So that was before “Long Hair”. So “Leaving You Behind” and “William” were the only two things we had out. And like a week after we headlined the Moroccan, we got our agent and our agent called the Echo like “Hey in two months let these guys headline”.

J: We were like “Woah, woah, woah, we just did this show”.

T: And now that was our last headline!

BW: Adding onto that, talking about accomplishments, do you have any goals that you’re set on that you want to accomplish as a band that you haven’t reached yet?

D: We are about to accomplish that in the upcoming weeks here. We spent 2-3 months doing pre-production for our first album. So we’re about to go away here for mid-October, mid-November-ish to start producing it out.

J: And none of us have ever made an album. Like we have the EP’s and stuff but it’s just a whole other beast. It requires a level of [putting] purpose towards a group of music that we haven’t before. That’s a pretty big goal: debut album.

BW: I’d say you guys are very down to earth as people and as a band. How do you guys stay grounded and plan to continue that as you grow bigger?

J: I don’t think that you can plan for that. I think you’re literally trying to plan for something that is unnatural to the human experience… I think what we do a really good job of is, like not trying to color ourselves for our online presence. And so hopefully if we were to reach some level of notoriety — that is just insane to comprehend at this point — hopefully it’s because people are becoming enamored with the people we actually are, so it's just easier to continue to be that honest person. But again, I think it’s a level of sort of consciousness that I don’t think literally humans are made to be able to withstand. So I think it’s gonna require a lot of work and a lot of just having the right people around us to make sure we’re not becoming jaded.

T: … I don’t know, I don’t think that we — and correct me if I’m wrong Dev and Jake — I don’t see fame as being attached to success in any way. Like success is the ability to keep on creating time and time again and the ability to keep on having headline shows and keep on touring. Keeping on keeping on. It’s not like once we got our second write up in E News-

J: Hopefully we’re not in E News.

T: -I don’t wanna be in E News… When you [Jake] start dating Dua Lipa — that’s when we can call it…

D: …I feel like also, each time the three of us go home is like a very good reset button, personally, because our families know sort of so little about like our day to day. It’s when we go home — it doesn’t matter that we’re musicians, you know in the best kind of way. If there’s any off balance that any of us have, all it takes is us going home for a week to like recenter and be like-

J: “We aren't shit”

D: [laughs] Yeah we literally aren’t shit to any of our family members.

J: But also at the same time, like I was saying, we aren’t shit to really anybody and it’s kinda cool… Right now we still have this ability to explore ourselves and not worry so much about what a bunch of people who don’t really know us think. And hopefully, we never really care.

T: And hopefully it’s not that big of a mystery...I don’t know, like we don’t really need to wear a mask if we don’t intend to-

J: You should always wear a mask!

BW: You guys have developed this community around the band and are very open with talking to your fans and stuff like that. How do you want to keep that community as you guys grow?

J: That’s the thing I hope gets famous! I hope what gets famous is the ethos of the community that’s being built right now. I want it to be this place that is so welcoming and so inviting and so open minded that people feel at home there. And I would rather that get famous than any one of us. So that’s what we’re trying to do. We’re trying to give people a place where they see us, I don’t wanna say failing, but they see us struggling, challenging ourselves, working towards the thing we’re most passionate about and laying that confusion — real time, out in the open. Whether that's literally through our music or just through the things we decide to take on. And they see that we continue to push towards the things that we want, the things we’re passionate about no matter what obstacles come in our way. I hope that just inspires people to do the same.

BW: For the direction of your album, are you taking from what you did on your EP’s and incorporating that or are you going in a completely different direction?

J: Yeah I mean — Season 1, the reason we wanted to be a little more conceptual was because the stories we were telling were surreal… and based on things that happened to us. But they were supposed to enact this feeling of surreal-ness and how it relates to love when you’re just at an age where you don’t understand what love is. I think now, just to know ourselves better as people, we are excited about just standing behind and being sort of the conduit for the stories that we’re trying to tell. And then I’m sure at some other time we’ll write our space rock opera like [Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino] and shit. And we’ll go back into the realm of being like characters in a movie.

T: It is conceptual though.

J: Yeah, like Tom was just saying… We love concept records, we love multifaceted bodies of work, like it’s not just an EP: it’s the show, it’s the visual components we release with it, it’s all those things. I mean honestly, we’re on the music right now and we’re sort of on the concept of the album and the larger story that’s gonna be told throughout all the songs and all the other stuff will fall into place too… I think what we know about this album is that it’s gonna be a live album and it’ll come out when we can play shows again.

BW: I know that live music is important to what Moontower is, so has that affected how you’re making the album, especially during a pandemic?

D: I think that while we could not be more bummed about the fact that the headline tour didn’t happen, we know that it eventually will and we’re just taking advantage of the time that we normally wouldn't have. So until live music is ready to come back, we’re gonna live in the album and sort of create with the fact that there are no limits behind what we could do. You know, the time doesn’t feel like it’s ticking as fast as it did before this pandemic came around and it’s a beautiful thing once it’s fully accepted. 

T: Yeah, so I think we are taking our time — but we really are in a world where there is no live music, making music that works live. It feels more important, ironically. It feels like there’s more value around the sanctity of the live show. And like Jake was saying, it’s gonna be a head-knocker.

J: ...We’re like very early on and it’s already like “holy shit”...

BW: When you're working through the visual aspects of your projects, does that come while you're making your music and writing or does it come after you’ve finished?

J: I think it all kind of happens at the same time. Everything has always been one long constant conversation: about crazy commercials and shit we like and things that make us laugh and “how can we represent this dynamic of a relationship?”… Or like “What would be an awesome thing we can do onstage?” I don’t know, it’s all one evolving conversation… And you’ll be able to see one through line from Moontower’s first show to our last show we play when we’re like 82 years old. We constantly are just building on ideas and that’s what we love -- is being able to fall down the rabbit hole of the band’s entire career and see how everything developed into itself.

T: A lot of “What if?”: “What if we did a six part series for Season 1? What if we let WIlliam tell the story for us?”

J: “What if we build a ski chairlift that carries us over the audience so that we can write our concept album about a family that goes on a ski trip to the mountains?” Like that’s the shit that we talk about.

T: It is the kind of shit we talk about.

J: That’s verbatim. We’re like, “Yes! We’ll do this concept record about a family going on a vacation and it’s all about family dynamics and then if we do that, when we play the Staples Center we can totally have a chairlift that takes us over the audience and it’ll be so sick!”

BW: Is there anything you can tell us about the album or where you guys are with it, without giving anything away?

J: I feel like we could… but whatever we tell you, it’s not gonna be like that. I think that we know we’re making an album and as much as we can’t wait to share it with everybody and to have like release plans and cover art and photo shoots and blah blah blah… Like right now we’re just making music that feels really good to us. Like we’ve never gotten to do this and I think like we’re just trying to, selfishly, almost get the most joy out of the process as possible. We’re having a good time, I can tell you that! 

BW: What is some advice you want to give to those people who are looking to start a band or releasing a song or something like that?

T: Don’t feel like you need to expect yourself or pay a certain amount of money to get it “right”. Like doing it yourself on a laptop is super rad and doing it at a studio is super rad, using a cassette field recorder to go around and record animal sounds and fish those around is super rad. There's no right way to do it and trying to do it the same way that someone else has done it, is not the right way to do it.

J: I think the most powerful point in anybody’s career is before you put anything out, before you put your first song out, before you post your first instagram. Like, the lead up time to your first release... I feel like it's so important to do as much self-exploration as possible, fully knowing that you won’t figure a lot of things out ‘til you just go for it and see what happens. Make a plan. Like what do you want stuff to look like? And accept that it will never happen that way. But just be conscious of: in a “perfect world”, What do you want your brand to look like? What do you want your music to sound like? Who do YOU want to be? And have that really, really solid and just be open to the outside world being like, “haha you felt wrong”.

T: And when they do… one of our favorite quotes is, “shoot the arrow, paint the target around it”, so you always hit a bullseye if you’re the one painting the target.

D: Mine is like a two in one type thing: pursue what would inspire you and don’t give up when shit gets hard. The “pursue what inspires you”, is like any excitement will power you through a lot of stuff and amping yourself up is one of the best weapons you have in any creative scenario. Being excited about what you’re creating and feeling like it’s bigger than you are is like, one of the biggest energies you can have in the creative world. But also when things get hard, giving up is not very practical because there’s room for growth there and if it stops then the cycle doesn’t go all the way around. So if you don’t pursue what inspires you and you give up when shit gets hard… the roadblock is already up. So it’s just — relentlessly pursue that and when things are hard, push through and continue improving.

J: We always like to put an addendum to the saying “everything happens for a reason”, we’re like, “yeah everything happens for a reason if you never give up”

BW: Adding onto that, what’s one way that you find a middle ground if there's any challenges and how do you deal with disagreements within the band?

D: I think that any of our gripes are with things that are out of our control. The three of us have an amazing relationship with one another, it’s built on honesty and we actually invite disagreement because it ends up creating a product that is a lot more unique than if there was no disagreement... So it’s like things that are out of your control… Jake can explain it better, but for the stuff that’s out of your control you sort of have to just put it in the “universe box”...

J: Yeah… Here’s a general statement about all of humanity that I have no proof on, but I feel like most of the shit that anyone gets upset about is shit they can’t control. That whole “universe box” is something that somebody on our management team, like the first time he met with me, he said “I have a literal box and it’s my ‘universe box’ and most of my problems that are out of my control I write them on piece of paper and I slip into this box”.

But yeah like Dev was saying, we’ve always sort of adopted the mentality that we can’t hold a grudge on something that you haven't adequately or fully communicated, otherwise you’re doing everyone else a disservice… like if you’re gonna hold hatred or hold an opinion but you can’t share it, then you can’t get upset about the outcome. It’s sort of like don’t not vote in an election and then be upset about the outcome.

T: You see what he did there? That was brilliant! Look at him!

J: But I think that’s always been an important thing for us because it’s like… the hardest thing when you’re in a group is feeling like when you put your neck out there -- that you have the support of the entire team. And we're all individuals so we’re all gonna individually stand for things or say things or do things. And knowing that when you come up with an idea… it could be like, “Hey I wanna play this song first in the set” or like “This should come here on the EP” or “I wanna do this guitar part” — that somebody’s not just gonna be like, “Oh yeah man totally!” And then something’s gonna go wrong and the same person’s gonna be like, “Well, I knew this was going to happen, but I didn’t say anything”. It’s like, no, we succeed together and we fail together.

D: I feel like the greatest news of all is: anything that’s in your control can always be improved on, like even if you think that it’s like a big leap. Like the difference between stuff that’s out of your control and stuff that’s in your control, is that anything in control can just always be better. So if something isn’t good, it can be made better, if something seems really good it will get better.

BW: To conclude is there any message you want to give to you fans or say something that we left off?

J: Take care of yourself.

T: VOTE!

J: Take care of each other.

T: VOTE! VOTE! VOTE!

J: Vote on November 3rd. Oh yeah... and don’t vote for Trump!