Sunshine Riot is a nationally touring indie band out of Boston whose sound has been aptly described as Johnny Cash meets Kurt Cobain.
With a live show that delivers killer music and incredible energy, this old school get-up-and-go-wild rock and roll foursome have garnered favorable press everywhere from Michigan, to Nashville, to New York and established a reputation as one of the most exciting live acts in the game today. Sunshine Riot delivers honest, American music.
In this interview spotlight, I chat with Sunshine Riot about the latest project, motivations, challenges and more.
Full Q&A along with links and music below.
Where are you from and what style of music do you create? (In your own words, not necessarily in marketing terms or by popular genre classifications.)
In marketing terms, we create the music you like, where ever you like it. In our own terms, we create music that we like, and that we like to drink to and dance to. We create music for moving bodies. And immovable minds.
What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to stay the course?
The path is a long one. Our first song was about a family of crabs and the bread-winning patrician came down with conjunctivitis. The family came together and fought the disease bravely, but they ended up eating each other in the end. We feel that is analogous to modern life, and the girls that were mean to us. We have not seen any evidence to the contrary, so we’ve been singing those songs for years now. We again have not been proven wrong.
But seriously, music has been the only thing that is not a person that means anything to us. We’ve developed strong bonds with each other that we try to show through our writing, since everything we do is a collective decision. That’s not to say we agree on everything, we just vote on everything, and we feel it presents an honest insight into our minds and (hopefully) the human experience.
How is your new release different than previous ones? Did you set out to accomplish anything specific?
Never specific. If you’re trying to find a singular thing, you have to sift through everything that exists. Our aim always been just to find anything, and we’re getting pretty good at it.
Our previous sounds were tending towards the general, trying to find out what we wanted to sound like. We’ve come full circle on this one I think. We started with a specific punk sound, a sound you will not find on anything but our old YouTube songs. Then we went broad, and now I think we’ve come back around again to a specific sound that is ours, but still eclectic. We never want to bludgeon anyone with 10 songs that have the same feel or emotion. We want to have a human album.
Do you face any challenges as an indie musician in a digital age? On the flip side, how has technology helped you (if it has)?
It’s the open chasm of the internet. Anyone can hear you at any time, so no one does. I feel people on the internet have the idea that they can live forever and experience everything eventually, so they put it off, because why rush it? They then miss a lot of what’s out there, because there’s not an impetus to see what’s out there. Like everything in life, it’s a two-edged sword.
Where can we follow you online and hear more music?
