Indie emo punk band EMPIRE! EMPIRE! (I WAS A LONELY STATE) did a nice acoustic session for The Switchboard Sessions 5 years ago. Here’s a complete introduction to this amazing free release and the whole idea of TSS. Read up and grab your copy now!
Photo by Elmer Martinez Photography.
From 2010 to 2013, there was a really cool series called The Switchboard Sessions, where site creator/all around cool dude Dane Erbach interviewed bands, as well as recording a few intimate songs via land-line and an acoustic guitar. It includes The Promise Ring, Polar Bear Club, Into It. Over It., Samiam, and more. Obviously, the quality is super lo-fi, or what we in the biz call “charming”.
We recorded ours in 2010, not long after “What It Takes to Move Forward” came out. The format preferred was one original song and one cover song. I chose to do “Rally the Troops!” and a song called “Lucky” by Seven Mary Three. It’s the only cover song I think I have ever “officially” recorded.
We got wind that people have been trying to track them down, so we went ahead and uploaded them on our Bandcamp for free.
You can read the interview here where I talked about the revival before the revival, lol (see the link below).
The site has a lot of gems, so dig deep!
Keith Latinen is “emo” and, despite what the world attaches to this term, he’s pretty proud of it.
“The whole emo debate is really funny to me,” he admits, “I can understand why bigger national bands—like Mineral, or Jimmy Eat World, or Death Cab [for Cutie]—could hate it but, when I was growing up, being called emo didn’t bother me; when people labeled me that, it made sense because those were the bands that I liked.”
Like Latinen himself, his band Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate), who released their first full-length What It Takes to Move Forward in 2009, plays music that could also be classified as emo, but that depends solely on how one defines the term, since it means so many things to so many people.
If one wants to believe musical mythology, emo was a four-letter word even as an emerging genre back in the mid-1980s. Wherever the word came from, it quickly became a condescending way to refer to a handful of bands within the DC hardcore-punk scene that preferred melody to machismo and the personal to the political. Bands that hopped on this bandwagon, though sometimes derided, were often influential; people were listening, even though they may not have wanted to admit it.
Catch EMPIRE! EMPIRE! live at the following stops:
