Photo by Taylor Roy
Interview by Julia Kender
Alternative/indie band Good Kid has been busy over the past couple of months, between putting out their second EP, “Good Kid 2”, acoustic videos to go along with it, and releasing their own video game. We were lucky enough to talk to a few of the members of Good Kid about their platform on Discord, the release of those acoustic videos, and more!
Julia Kender: What gave you the idea to make acoustic versions of the songs?
Michael Kozakov: I think I was the one pushing the band to do them the most probably because of the way I listen to music. I'll just be listening on Spotify, and if there's something new, like a new artist that I've never heard before, and I really like their song, I'll listen to the song on Spotify a bunch.
Then I'll be like, well, what does that band sound like live? Then I'll go try to find some live videos on YouTube and watch them perform live.
If that's exciting, I want to maybe find a way to hear the vocalist in more detail, so then I always go look for an acoustic version. It's also really exciting to see if a band can rearrange their song to sound good in a different setting.
[I think] it's kind of like a way for me to get to know a band, to hear them in different contexts. So for me, I've always wanted to see what our songs would sound like acoustic and how people would react.
JK: Was it difficult to get together to redo the songs during the COVID-19 pandemic? How did that work?
Jacob Tsafatinos: It was actually not during quarantine for us, I think. Toronto went in and out of like lockdowns and it was during a period of time where we were actually allowed to go practice and stuff.
We were still practicing with masks on and everything though, we even had hand sanitizer at the door! Just making sure that we were doing it safely.
David Wood: It was a really big topic when we were recording the acoustic videos. I remember it being right before people were saying that we were heading back to lockdown, that cases would be going up because of flu season.
We were in this two-month window in Toronto where we knew that cases were virtually zero. We were like, okay, this is the time to get as much content as we can, and the acoustic session was part of that plan.
Sure enough, a couple of weeks later, we did [go back into lockdown], so it's a good thing we did it then because we would not have been able to get that done as little as even like a week later. It might have been too late.
MK: I mean, I haven't seen these guys, I had seen them in person once. We had to get together to sign some vinyl records, but we couldn't be indoors at that point.
It was pretty cold, like negative three degrees. We were just sitting outdoors signing these records together, and that was the last time I had seen them.
JK: You had to go from seeing each other every day and working together all the time to doing everything digitally. How has that hindered or enhanced your writing experience with each other?
JT: That's interesting, we were literally just talking about this on Thursday. Now we have these weekly Thursday meetings where we get on a call and we try to do remote recording, where we all put our parts and demos into a Google Drive, which is good and bad.
It's obviously bad because nothing really replaces the live setting or the energy in the room when we're practicing. Everything is a lot slower, remotely, but on the flip side, you can listen more closely to each part of the song.
For example, Michael was putting bass on a part that I wrote a guitar line for, and we were recording it. We've been practicing the song for like months, [but] we never noticed that there was a complete conflict between like two notes.
You wouldn't necessarily hear that in the practice space, but on the recording, it's clear as day, like, "this doesn't work and something has to change." You put a magnifying glass on these songs and that's kind of nice...I really like that.
DW: I don't want to say too much, because I am the least helpful so far with demos, but I will say that hopefully this is going to set a healthy precedent for our band, at least for getting more comfortable recording demos, before we go into the studio, for example. A lot of the times we do like sort of pre-production before going into the studio to record a song and then we feel kind of exposed in those moments.
You kind of panic and have to figure out on the fly what you can do to fix it, which is obviously not an ideal situation to be in. Even though the situation we're in right now is tough for songwriting, hopefully we can learn to be more proactive so we're 100% ready to record when we go in.
JK: I want to talk about the Discord server because that's something I don't think gets talked about enough. The band has its own community on the app, which I think is really cool and unique, it's your own little corner of the internet! What made you guys want to choose Discord as a platform and put all of this together?
MK: So at the time, we were about to go on tour in the United States. This was the first time we ever played in the States, and we wanted to figure out if anybody was going to come to see us, who those people were, and if people could invite their friends to the shows and make the tour a good time.
So we were thinking, "there are all these people who keep reaching out to us, can we put them all together in one place?" In the beginning, we were talking about maybe doing a Facebook group, floated some other ideas, but I think at the time Discord became a tool that we already all liked and used outside of the band; Nick [Frosst] uses Discord just to communicate with all his coworkers.
We were all really comfortable with it, we liked it already, and we thought we could use it as a community tool, so we did it. At first, we called it a street team, and it was just a bunch of people who were down to help us figure out that tour; it ended up being so much fun.
All these people showed up to the shows, and after we finished the tour, we came back and we realized that there's actually still a community there, those people are still talking to each other, they're still making friends. Every once in a while people jump on voice chat and talk to each other about things that have nothing to do with our band, and we love that.
To me, it felt really special that people met each other because of our band but they were able to form connections because they like each other, regardless of the band. I think it all really culminated during quarantine when people couldn't leave their house and were stuck at home on the internet a lot.
A lot more people found us, a lot more people joined the Discord server, and it became our main tool to communicate with people who listen to our music. At that point, there were no live shows, no situation where people could come up to us after a show and chat.
Normally when you release a record, you play a release show, and we couldn't do that the way we traditionally would've. Instead, we got on Discord, united everybody there, chatted with them, planned special events for them, played acoustic shows, stuff like that.
DW: I love our Discord server. I remember hosting a couple of video game nights, we'd live stream, all the Discord members would get on, it'd be really fun.
I also remember like, game nights would just happen without us even being involved, none of us planning it. The community got to know each other and did its own thing, and those are always the moments that like blow me away.
It's surreal. There's literally a Dungeons and Dragons group in the Discord and none of us in the band are members.
MK: I think the one outcome that I didn't expect from it was that I actually ended up making friends, like real friends with people who I talk to outside of that Discord server, and it's amazing to see the same faces show up and say, "Hey, good morning, how's your day" type of things. It's awesome.
JK: The Discord server was integral to figuring out the ARG as well, so let's talk about that for a little bit. What inspired you guys to do an Augmented Reality Game?
JT: Honestly, I think it was the Discord community. We posted a joke once and someone asked, "is this part of an ARG?" Of course, we said no, but then the wheels started spinning.
Ever since then I had been thinking like, okay, we have to do an ARG. We had this video game that we had been working on for like, forever, we were talking about how we were going to release it, and so we kind of built this entire ARG around the concept that we had.
At first, we were trying to design this ARG to be something accessible to people who aren't in the Discord, like anyone on social media could find it and play along, but then we were like, hey, we have this Discord of amazing people and an amazing community, there should be elements of it that are specific to the Discord.
And so we like made some things harder for them! We had a whole bunch of roles on the Discord, the whole detective theme, rewards, and all of it was Discord-exclusive which made it really fun.
MK: What was John's character name? That was my favorite one.
JT: John was "Ace Attorney!" He's a huge fan of the Phoenix Wright video games, so that's how that happened.
JK: What made you want to do a video game in the first place? How did it come to fruition?
JT: I programmed that game and worked on it for over a year on-and-off, not consistently though. I honestly can't remember what the motivation was...I think I just wanted a video game.
MK: We had a pixel art lyric video for "Witches" and we were like, "that would look amazing in a video game." At the time I guess he just felt like learning how to make video games.
JT: Yeah, that's exactly right; Gabe made this amazing, pixelated "Witches" lyric video and I was like, those sprites are so cool, I want to use them in something. I started working on the game for real when we had some more assets and resources.
One of the cool things about being in this band is that we get to do a lot of creative stuff and we get to use the band as an outlet completely unrelated to the music. We got to make a video game and just figured out how to tie it to the music.
Any interest you have, we can just put it through the lens of the band. That's really fun.
This band was a pleasure to talk to, and we can't thank them enough for their time! You can support Good Kid by following them on Twitter @GoodKidBand, joining their Discord server, "Good Kid Street Team", picking up some merch, and listening to their music on all streaming platforms.
Who do you want to see us interview next? Let us know by tweeting us @lgndsoftmrw!
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