Nashville – When I asked The Heavy Heavy Hearts to meet in person for an interview, it was both as a fan and a journalist that I sat down with three of the four band members: Beau James, Ralph Alexander and Anthony Mancini. The Heavy Heavy Hearts have only been in Nashville for a few months and already they have made a splash in the music scene. With just one completed EP, Dirty Lies, and two singles out on the market, this band is already making headway in the music world by being lined up to play SXSW in March. As I sat down to talk with them at Bongo Java Coffee, I was curious as to if Nashville is all this fresh-out-of-LA band expected it be and what plans they had in store for after the big festival in Texas next month.

Beth: How did y’all meet and how did the band initially form?

Beau: Well, it started as a solo EP that I was going to do and Clark, I was in a band with him in North Carolina. I had auditioned to be in a band with him and I asked him to play drums for it. And then Tony [Anthony], I had seen him play in a band called Night on Fire in LA and I thought he was a real good guitar player so I asked him to come in like last minute and he agreed. And then we played a show after we recorded [the EP] and that went well and we decided to be a band.

Beth: So how did you come up with the band name ‘The Heavy Heavy Hearts’?

Ralph: It took a long time.

Beau: Yeah it was just us going back and forth looking up, seeing if it [the band name] was already taken and there were just so many different names…it took us a couple months.

Anthony: Yeah, well, it was probably only a few weeks but it felt like it was a couple of months. I mean, we had all these options and we had what felt like throw up parties because we’d all get together and just throw out every thing we could and every single one would be taken. So we’d get frustrated and stop and then a couple days later we’d say “let’s talk about the band name” and we’d sit there for an hour trying to come up with something. It got frustrating because every single time we came up with a cool name there’s another band out there that already had it. So I think in the midst of that kind of throwing up method we threw out the words ‘heavy heavy hearts’ and…I mean, no one didn’t like it. No one hated it.

Ralph: We had a thing where if someone didn’t like it, we wouldn’t go with it. It had to be unanimous.

Beth: So I looked at your influences on your Facebook page, and you’ve got some stuff like Lynyrd Skynyrd listed on there – what are some of your biggest influences?

Beau: I think we all have different individual influences and everyone brings them into the band. Like Tony…

Anthony: I started out in my younger years listening to blues, like Stevie Ray Vaughn, Albert Collins, Albert King…and then later it was Metallica, Pantera and then it was Jeff Buckley.

Beau: I was a huge fan of the whole mythology and music of Robert Johnson and that’s what got me into the blues. And there’s a band called Say Anything and I just think that Max Bemis is one of the best lyricists. I love his lyrics more than anybody else’s.

Ralph: I grew up on heavier stuff like Metallica, Slayer – that kind of stuff. This is the first band I’ve ever been in that’s not crazy, balls-to-the-wall, y’know? It’s really laid back so it’s been a challenge to readjust.

Beth: So Beau told me a while ago that y’all have recently moved to Nashville from LA. How has the transition been for you guys?

Ralph: Well the transition has been really easy – I don’t know about Tony but the other three of us are from the south. It’s like being back home.

Anthony: I miss LA a lot. I moved there because it was where I wanted to be five years ago. I knew someday I was going to end up leaving there but I don’t think I would have ever been happy leaving there if it was twenty years from now. So if it had to happen, it had to happen. But I like Nashville; it’s a cool town and I’m learning more about it. Even just driving here, I’ve never been in this area before and I was like, ‘oh wow, this is a lot cooler than everything I’ve seen since we’ve been here.’

Beth: Why Nashville versus any other city?

Beau: Well it was either here or Austin. And I’d been out here a few times before moving to LA and we looked at the music scenes of all the different places and it seems like Nashville is one of the major tour hubs. Texas would be just like living in LA again where it would take us forever and a day to get out of Texas. But we also noticed that there were cool bands that were playing our style already here and in LA there weren’t many blues/rock acts. People [in LA] didn’t really understand the southern rock aspect.

Anthony: We never had a very hard time winning a crowd over in LA, but that city has a very troubling mentality for a musician because everyone always has like nine things to do that night. And you’re just one of the list items and they’ll come out and they’ll have a great time but the second they walk out the door they’ve got nine other options they’re going to take and you don’t stick in their mind. We’re noticing here that we’ve been here three months and we have a family of band and fan friends that we’ve met already. We never had that in a year of being a band in LA.

Beth: What’s the songwriting process like for your band, is it just one of you or do you all contribute?

Beau: Well it starts off where I’ll usually write a song in my room on an acoustic guitar and then bring it into the band and say ‘check this out’ or it’ll be a riff that I come up with and I’ll say ‘hey I love this’ and everyone puts in their two cents until it becomes a Heavy Heavy Hearts song instead of a Beau James song.

Beth:I know you haven’t been a band for a very long time, but have you ever faced any challenges as a group

Anthony: Endless false promises.

Beau: Yeah, we’ve had a lot of pretty monumental offers that have been on the table for us and we’ll go and do everything in our power to make it happen and he [Ralph] was saying the other day that we kind of feel like donkeys. We have the carrot dangling in front of us and it’s like ‘you want it? Come on, come get it!’ And then you get so close but then the carrot’s just gone. I feel like that’s a struggle with lots of bands.

Ralph: Our band’s slogan is just ‘Fuck it’ (laughs).

Anthony: I think we’re going to make a t-shirt that just says ‘Fuck it.’ Cause so many little things will happen to us individually and then as a band we’ll have so many great opportunities and in the beginning there were opportunities even too big for us. We were talking to major label producers who were talking about national television spots and it all sounded so good and so solid. We were all pretty naïve about it though. We told family and friends about it –

Beau: We were like ‘This is going to be so cool!’

Anthony: Yeah, we were like in six months time we could actually be doing something serious and then for all that it completely evaporated. And I think that was pretty tough on us and our psyches because we started to get annoyed with good news.

Ralph: My line is ‘I’ll believe it the day after we’ve done it.’

Beth: Well you’re going to be playing SXSW [South By Southwest] so that’s pretty cool, right?

Beau: We’ll believe it the day after (laughs). Nah, I’m just kidding, we’re pretty pumped about it.

Beth: How did that opportunity come around for you?

Beau: Just hard work. The first showcase we’re doing is for a blog called Badass Bands Blogs and I think I followed them on twitter and I was like, ‘You’ve got a badass name’ and they wrote back and said ‘So do you!’ And then we ended up doing a video series where the blog brings a band in to play and interview and they videotape the whole thing. It was just really good quality and it was awesome.

Anthony: [Badass Bands Blog] is run by this girl name Jo and she’s like, the most intelligent, ambitious music fan I’ve ever met. She was working with a friend’s band that I knew called Young Creatures and I’m friends with their guitar player, Justin. Jo was doing stuff with them and I had written the blog an email saying ‘Hey if you’re ever looking for a band, we’d love to do your showcase’ and she said ‘Oh I’ve talked to your leader singer, Beau!’ So Jo came out to one of our shows, she had never heard us before except for our EP. She said she was blown away and that she loved it a lot and we ended up talking after the show.

Beau: The other showcase we’re doing is for a studio in California called Swing House Studios and we’ve been to a lot of showcases there and we always said ‘we want to be one of these bands.’ So we chased around Phil, the owner, for like six or seven months just trying to get him out to a show. Sam, the studio’s lead engineer, came out to one of our shows and was like ‘we want to record you! It’s going to be x amount of dollars.’ And we said ‘we want to record there, but we don’t have that money!’ But it went on and on and then Phil came to a show and liked it and that’s when we became part of the Swing House family. He got us in to record and he said ‘we’ll bring you out to SXSW.’

Anthony: Y’know, to our credit, we joke about saying ‘Fuck it’ but everything we’ve actually achieved we worked for, we earned it. It’s never been someone just handing it to us.

Beth: So I’m really curious, what’s it like when you guys get on stage to perform? What’s it feel like to be up there?

Beau: It’s like going to a different world. That’s the way I’d look at it. It’s like blacking out while you’re onstage. You remember it, but at the moment…I don’t know, that’s what it’s like for me. I could be nervous before but I get on stage and I get going and it’s like I’m in a different place.

Ralph: I feel like I’m being a character.

Beau: I feel like I have way more confidence onstage than off stage, that’s for sure. I could go up there and sing songs about hitting on women at bars and everything and I am the worst person at even trying to pick up a girlfriend in real life. Ralph, for example, if you know him personally he’s such a goofy, sweet dude. He’s just a nice guy. But on stage he’s just this animal – his arms are flailing.

 Beth: So what goals do you all have for your band once you return from SXSW?

Beau: One goal of SXSW is networking with people there and when we get back it’s going to be more about getting on the road. And a record deal wouldn’t hurt (laughs).

Anthony: My biggest deal is I want to see us be able to do a full-length album. People like our music but they just don’t have the accessibility to it. My favorite thing about music is the one on one time I get to have with it, whether it’s in my car or in my headphones, getting to close my eyes and starting an album from the beginning and staying there till the end – there’s nothing like it. Getting out on the road is what every band needs to do to eat and it’s something I hope we get to start doing and I think that will come in time. But I think as far as getting fans I think it’s about getting a full-length out there so when we play, they know the words already and we can go to places with a fan base already there.

Beth: So your songs – are they based on real life experience or are they based on what you wish they could be? A lot of your songs are about drinking, hitting on girls and taking them home, etcetera.

Beau: Well every song is based on truthful acts that happen. Our first EP was pretty much a timeline of my relationships that went wrong. But as we’ve gone on, it’s just personal stories that I’ve put into song and that I embellish to make it sound like I have a cool life (laughs).

Beth: What makes your band stand out against all the rest in Nashville trying to make it?

Beau: The owner of The Basement, Mike Grimey, told us what this was. We played The Basement’s fresh faces night and we were the last one on the bill. We were only supposed to play for about twenty minutes and we ended up playing for an hour because Mike was like, ‘Keep going!’ And he came up to us afterwards and said ‘You guys have a lot to teach people here in Nashville.’ We focus a lot on the music but it’s also an experience. We work really hard on making sure the shows transition and flow. If you go to a see a show and the band stops to introduce the next song or tune really fast, we don’t do that. We get up on stage and rock for four straight songs and then say ‘hey we’re the Heavy Heavy Hearts’ and then keep going.

Ralph: I look at it like a train. You want to keep the train going so you don’t stop the momentum. I mean we stop every now and then to promote social media and introduce ourselves but for the most part we keep it going.

Anthony: It’s such a momentum killer when a band plays a rocking song but then it stops and it’s awkward because you’re waiting two minutes while they tune. And then you see a couple people go ‘I’m gonna go grab a cigarette’ or take a piss or something and it gives everyone the opportunity to forget they’re at a show for a minute. In those two minutes people start thinking, ‘man I’ve got work tomorrow’ or ‘I don’t have any money’ or ‘Aw shit my girlfriend’s a bitch’ or something…it’s a shock back to reality during that pause. If we do four straight songs of rock and roll it keeps you in the show mentality.

Ralph: Also now we need to compete with smart phones. We need to keep the crowd’s eyes on the stage, rather than giving them the chance to check their status or their texts. The 70’s, man. They had it so easy. Back then it was just the music.

Beau: I like to say that LA raised us to be a fighting band. In LA you had to fight to win everyone’s attention so we came here with that fight and that angst and when we played our first show, everyone was like ‘What the fuck?! What is this?’

Beth: My last question is a little random. Do you have any fun stories or facts about the band you’d like to share

Beau: We’ve got stories for days. I don’t even know. Tours – when we go out of town, something weird always happens but it’s always a fun experience. One fun show that we did was a biker rally called Run to the Hills. It was the craziest show we’ve ever done. It was no town, it was just this bar and then campsites.

Ralph: It was the Devil’s Disciples [bike gang]. I told my dad about it (he was a biker in the 70’s, 80’s and 90s) and I said ‘Yeah we did a show for the Devil’s Disciples’ and he immediately said ‘don’t ever do that again, that’s dangerous. Those guys will kill you.’

Beau: It was like a scene out of movie. It was this tiny bar, we’re playing super loud rock music, and –

Anthony: Talk about going back in time! Zero cell service (which is a really first world thing to say), but when you think about it you’re out in the middle of nowhere in the dark desert with the nearest gas station being fifteen miles away and it’s just you and a gang of bike guys –

Beau: Who have been drinking all day.

Anthony: Yeah, they’ve been drinking like moonshine and beers all day…

Ralph: I just remember that the first note we hit, it was like the pin was pulled out of the grenade. There were just bodies flying everywhere.

Beau: There were just fights, like people sliding on each other on the floor.

Anthony: Two friends had a fistfight, like a real fistfight, right in the middle of one of our songs.

Beau: And then I felt like a total badass because this dude starts charging the stage towards Ralph –

Anthony: He was basically going to dive into the drum set.

Beau: So I see him coming and we’re in the middle of the song and I just reached out and grabbed him by the throat and I threw him back out into the audience and everyone goes, ‘YEAH!’ and just starts cheering.

Anthony: He just straight up caught him! The guy got close once and he just kept getting closer and all of a sudden he came in way hotter than he had ever and Beau just reached out, saw it coming, and it was just pure throat. Beau was just singing and he just throws the guy back and the bar just froze and stopped paying attention to everything and everyone just started cheering.

Beau: And after that I just scream out, ‘TAKE YOUR SHIRTS OFF!’ and everyone took their shirts off! We took our shirts off; everyone at the bar took their shirts off!

Anthony: Well for whatever reason, I was standing in front of this industrial air conditioner that would blow a sustained 80 mile-per-hour wind of pure cold and the whole show I was fucking freezing and then Beau goes, ‘take your shirts off!’ and I’m like ‘I need a jacket!’

for more on The Heavy Heavy Hearts go HERE.

Photos by Michael Kang