BUBBY Q&A: Erik Carrizales & Paul Tooke

Q: When did you form BUBBY?

Paul Tooke, Drummer:  We formed in 2018. Around that time, I started getting back into drums, and I really wanted to be in a band. I started posting some clips of me drumming, and Erik found one of them. He saw that we had some mutual friends on Instagram and slid into my DMs.

Erik Carrizales, Lead Vox & Guitarist: Yeah, at the time, I only had my solo project, but I also wanted to be in a group. I figured more people would listen to my music if I had a band. It can be hard to get people to listen to solo artist music. It's not taken as seriously. I knew somebody in high school who was in the drumline and I kept trying to get him to start a group with me, but he actually recommended Paul to me, that's how I landed on his instagram.

Paul Tooke: At the time, I was actually living with that guy.

Erik Carrizales: His name is Marc.

Paul Tooke: We didn't meet at college or music school or anything.

Erik Carrizales: Funny enough, we actually went to the same school, but we had never crossed paths. Paul even worked at this gas station I went to all the time, and I swear I had never seen him before.

Q: How did you guys come up with your band name?

Erik Carrizales: It's a pet name. It’s just a name that you would call somebody. Kind of like sweetheart or something. I thought it was a cute word.

Paul Tooke:  Yeah, trying to pick a name was probably one of the hardest things to figure out because everybody has to like it or be cool with it. We also wanted to consider how our name would look on merch. We wanted to go with something familiar and not intimidating. Some names are just like, what does that even mean? Or it's a sentence or something super complicated.

Q: What kind of sound are you going for?

Erik Carrizales: I don’t want our sound to be too experimental. A lot of listeners can be turned off by that. I try to write songs that feel good and have a good vibe to them. I want songs that are nice and sweet like a Beatles song.

Paul Tooke: Yeah, genre wise, it's always tricky. We definitely identify more with pop because we’re trying to make catchy songs, but I know our sound is more than pop. I'm always at a loss after that pop word. Like is it indie? Is it alternative? Is it soft rock? Like, I guess we’re just a mix of all of them.

Q: How do you know when you've written a good song?

Erik Carrizales: If the song comes to a complete thought that’s how I know I’ve written a good one. I don’t want it to lack resolution or be a jam song. I want it to start and conclude nicely.

Q: What are some common themes in your songwriting?

Erik Carrizales: I wouldn’t really say there are common motifs or themes in my songwriting. if I hear a chord I haven’t used before I try to implement it into a new song. I try not to be too repetitive when it comes to our sound. If we are talking about the actual writing there is a secret that I reference in a lot of songs. I won’t say what the secret is because that spoils the fun. I try to build on it with each song that references it.

Paul Tooke: That’s a good way of explaining that.

Q: As a group, do you all contribute to the songwriting process?

Paul Tooke: Before we started, we were really just playing all of Erik’s originals; I wrote my drum parts to support his songs. Once we started to introduce bass into the mix, we all started contributing more. Our bass player Abraham has added a lot to our mixes. It’s been everything that we could want it to be. It was interesting because we had to learn how to work with each other. We are even collaborative in other ways. We all make videos, fliers, etc.

Q: When you’re writing a song are there specific artists you have in mind that you’re inspired by?

Erik Carrizales: I have the perfect answer: the Beatles, The Beach Boys and Randy Newman. That's it. I'm a Beatle obsessive.

Paul Tooke: Yeah, I’ve asked Erik about how he got his songwriting where it is and he's like, “John and Paul”. He’s very inspired by their styles.

Erik Carrizales: I've been writing songs for a very long time and I can be very self-critical, but I feel like I’ve been on a roll recently.

Paul Tooke: For sure, and it’s fun to watch you grow as a songwriter.

Q: You were one of the bands that got to participate in New New Fest. Tell me about your experience.

Paul Tooke: It was all timing really. I worked with the awesome people at Cave’s Lounge to set up a show for St. Patrick's Day. we played the show with a buddy of ours, Kingsley August. Well, a week before the show I started seeing promotional posts about New New Fest and Cave’s Lounge was one of their venues where they were hosting. It turns out that we were one of the shows we were promoting. It was so much fun. We would love to do that again!

Q: You have a few music videos out, how do you create them?

Paul Tooke: Video is everything now, so if you don’t have any visuals paired with your music good luck. We just started filming music videos. We try to make it look visually appealing, but the video storyline, if you will, doesn’t necessarily have to match the theme of the song. We'll record it and basically hope there's enough footage for me to edit. We’re actually working on another music video right now. A film student found our song “Don’t Lie” and wanted to do a music video for it.

Q: Do you also create your own album art or do you outsource to artists and photographers?

Erik Carrizales: It’s not easy, but most of the covers we’ve made ourselves.

Paul Tooke: We get help from people with brainstorming ideas because sometimes we run dry. So we’ll spitball ideas and try to come up with something unique. We've edited photographs even if we haven’t taken them or we’ll choose the artwork, but we're open to working with people. It just doesn't come up like much because we don't try to message artists and commission their work.

Q: Any new music coming out soon?

Paul Tooke: For sure. The process is always interesting because we have to demo out a song, go cut them in a studio, promote it, and then you can finally drop the song. By the time we do all of that we’ve been sitting on songs for months at a time.

Erik Carrizales: Right now, we are in the process of recording, but this next album that we're doing is pretty good so far.

Paul Tooke: So far, it's everything we could have hoped for. We have a handful of songs that are all good to go on an album together. Next month we have a couple of studio dates so we’ll start tracking the drums and the other parts. It’s just crazy having these songs for months and being so familiar with them but our listeners don’t even know they exist yet.

BUBBY creates music that has a perfect blend of indie sensibility and pop accessibility. Writing infectious melodies with a certain rawness and authenticity that makes their music attractive to the modern day listener.

-BlueGirlHours

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