Boston’s You Can Be A Wesley is singer/guitarist Saara Untracht-Oakner, guitarist Winston Macdonald (above), bassist Nick Curran, and drummer Dylan Ramsey. Together, they are like the band next door. They don’t seem to try too hard or take themselves too seriously, and their music is fun…sex pop. Right before their last show at Cameo in Brooklyn, we all stood on the sidewalk and talked about their inspirations, their upcoming EP, and their obsession with creatures.
Kelly Knapp: For someone who had never heard you before, how would you describe your sound?
Saara Untracht-Oakner: Fuzzy fun sex pop.
KK: And I have to ask the deal with your name.
SUO: I was in Boston a few years back, and there was this homeless guy just yelling stuff out on the street, and he yelled that out. Then I was like, oh, that’s crazy. And that’s what it ended up being.
NC: Yeah, and to our 18-year-old stoned minds, we were like, ah, sweet brah!
Winston Macdonald: Then we spent the rest of the day yelling it at each other.
KK: Then was that your first song right there?
Nick Curran: It should have been.
Dylan Ramsey: We should have sampled it and used it as a rap beat.
KK: Did you guys all meet at Boston University?
SUO: Yeah, we went to BU and Dylan went to Berkeley.
NC: I met Dylan at a café I worked at.
DR: I’m a huge coffee addict, which is how I met Nick, because I’m not the original drummer in the band.
SUO: Dylan was shooting coffee up.
NC: Dylan joined when our old drummer left the band after our last tour last summer. We had almost two or three weeks between when he left and when we had a show, and Dylan was always an incredible drummer, and he was living in Washington at the time.
DR: State.
NC: Yeah Washington state. So I sent him a message that was like, you should move here, move into our house, and join our band.
DR: And I was like, ok.
NC: Two weeks later he’s here.
DR: The day I got here is exactly a year ago from today.
KK: Well, happy anniversary.
DR: It’s my anniversary!
NC: That’s amazing.
DR: And two days after I got to Boston we played a show.
KK: And then it was solid.
NC: Yeah, it actually went really well.
KK: What are you most influenced by as a band?
NC: We are all very much into different things.
SUO: But with a lot of overlapping.
NC: Yeah, we do have our communal record collection in the house. Let’s see, what probably gets played the most? Happy Birthday, My Bloody Valentine…
SUO: Menomena.
NC: Lots of Menomena.
WM: ROAR.
NC: Yeah, ROAR. He’s pretty much unknown, and he’s from Arizona. He just has this one 6-song EP, and it’s phenomenal pop music. I don’t think any of us stopped listening to him for two months.
DR: When I first moved here, the band was listening to a lot of Bear in Heaven.
SUO: Deerhunter. It always changes though. We’ll find something…music is like, a drug when you get into it and collect stuff, and you need new stuff. You find new stuff and then you play it out, then you need more new stuff.
KK: You have a video called “Creatures,” which I like because it looks like an early 1980s National Geographic doc.
NC: Our friend Nick shot that. He shot it all digitally but then bounced it to VHS, then back to computer, so everything is actually organic VHS.
KK: Where was that filmed?
NC: That’s a song from our first record…where was that filmed?
SUO: That was at some quarry, like some national park up in somewhere near the coast, like kind of near Gloucester, MA. Then he took some old wildlife footage and mixed it in.
KK: And you have a video with a monster chasing you guys around.
NC: That one just came out yesterday.
SUO: Yeah, that’s our new video for “Talking Science.”
“Talking Science” by You Can Be A Wesley from You Can Be A Wesley on Vimeo.
KK: So is there a theme of creatures and weird things going on here?
WM: Always has been.
SUO: Yeah. We make little Wesley dolls, and we sew little creatures. We sold them on tour last summer, and that puppet in the video is a puppet that me and my friend Autumn made. We were just talking about a new music video, and I guess it involves some sort of creatures.
WM: We had a whole elaborate backstory for maybe, two or three years that for the most part we abandoned. It involved a lot of creatures.
KK: And you have an EP in the works right now?
NC: It’s done! It should come out in November.
KK: The one you did on Kickstarter?
NC: Yup! I definitely thought it was a scam before signing up for it, and it turned out to be like a modern day patronage of the arts system. It’s awesome.
SUO: We still have to mail out all of our rewards to the donors.
KK: Right, because you promise people things for pledging certain amounts.
DR: We have so much work to do.
NC: I already have my friends asking when they’re getting their CDs.
KK: Do you have to play a private concert or cook dinner for someone?
SUO: No one gave that much money, but we do have to sew a couple dolls, screen some posters, screen some CDs. We actually screened 400 copies of our EP, which is coming out. So that’s a limited screening.
KK: Limited as in only your Kickstarter supporters get them?
SUO: Once those all go out, and we get the ones out for radio, press, and all that, a few extras will be for sale.
KK: I also read somewhere that some of you guys are going abroad.
NC: That was two years ago.
KK: Oh! So I read somewhere that you guys went abroad.
NC: Yeah, Saara and I went to Australia, and Winston went to Ecuador. That was when we finished up college. That was three years ago, actually.
KK: How was that? You guys went together?
NC: Yeah, we actually played a bunch of shows while we were there. I bought a baritone guitar before we went so I could play guitar parts. I learned a bunch of Winston’s leads, and put them with my bass parts, and then Saara and I played these little shows.
SUO: It’s pretty easy getting shows in Australia. It’s funny. We were like, we’re two kids, we’re American, and we want to play shows, and they were like, ‘oh cool! American band! Yeah, totally.’
KK: Yeah! You go on in an hour!
NC: (laughs) Pretty much.
SUO: Yeah, we had no idea what we were doing. We played one set that was like, three hours long in some café during a festival.
NC: We learned so many bad covers of good songs. The best was doing that National song, and just not doing it well at all.
SUO: We wrote a couple songs too, that we totally forgot. Lost, overseas.
KK: Too bad. Well, it’s good that you went abroad and the band still stayed together.
SUO: Yeah, that was kind of when we really started getting serious about the band – when we all finished college and really had time to do it, and not worry about school.
KK: What are your plans coming up?
SUO: We’re going to put this record out and see how it goes, and we’re still writing so hopefully we’ll have a full length going sometime next year, then tour and see where it takes us.
Saara and Nick
You can hear another track off You Can Be A Wesley’s forthcoming EP on Bandcamp, keep up with them on Facebook, and follow them on Twitter for show update
All photos (c) Kelly Knapp
