The Harbour, a local band from the 757, builds up the hype for their debut single, Blind To It All. The Weekender Section Editor Faith Macwana reached out to The Harbour whose members are Caleb Brandal, Luke Brandal, and Elijah Andrew for a virtual interview to discuss the new single as well chat about beginnings, music and future plans.
Faith Macwana: How’d you come up with this whole idea of putting a band together? How’d you come up with “The Harbour” as a band name?
Elijah Andrew: Yeah sure so honestly this is a pretty spontaneous thing. It was more of a “it’s quarantine, let’s make a band” type deal. I met Caleb and Luke like about a year and a half ago and we vibed a little bit. There was a church in Harbor View Suffolk that we played at and it’s right by a harbor, so we called it [band] “The Harbour.” Not anything too deep. But yeah, I mean we jammed a little bit and we vibed. We wrote some songs and yeah, here we are.
FM: Who are your biggest influences?
CB: My biggest influence is definitely Switchfoot and John Foreman. LB: Yeah, we definitely listen to a lot of Switchfoot, but I really like Needtobreathe too. Just their song writing and like their, uh, you know the way their albums are set up and stuff is really nice. I really like how they do their stuff over there.
EA: Yeah, uh, shoot my influences. Uhm influences, I’ll specifically list the influences that kind of birthed The Harbour along with Caleb and Luke. My personal influence for guitar is John Mayor. John Mayor and Mateus Asato. Those two I have been watching for a lot of years and I try to implement a lot of those techniques in my style. But influences for The Harbour, lots of Indie Rock, lots of surf rock, like Colony House. Big Colony House fan. Hippocampus too. Even some older indie stuff like Young the Giant, a lot of that stuff. Black Keys are good too.
FM: How would you describe your music to someone that’s never listened to it before?
EA: I’d say it’s like your mom’s favorite band, kind of like that deal. Like she’s into the California surf rock vibe, you know? Just really, really easy to listen to. Something that you can just put on the radio and just drive to work or drive to school and jam out.
FM: I guess the next few questions are more music based, but how would you describe your songwriting process? Could you walk me through it?
CB: I would say for me because I do a lot of the lyric writing, it usually starts with an acoustic. Usually it starts with a melody line in my head and then what I try to do is just fill it all in with like random words and then maybe go back later and then present that to them [Elijah and Luke] which allows them to get the structure of the song. Elijah does a lot of that too like he understands how to take my little ideas and make it like a full product.
FM: So, Blind To It All. How excited are you guys to drop it on Halloween?
CB: Oh, I’m very excited like it’s amazing that we can take something that we wrote on my bedroom floor over there and now we hear it and it’s beautiful.
FM: Would you mind describing it a little bit? What’s the story? Where’d the inspiration for it come from?
CB: So, the story, it’s just kind of an accumulation of a character in my head of this nerdish guy. I kind of think of like Rivers Cuomo from Weezer and it’s kind of like his love letter to this emo rock girl about like his ecstatic love for her. But she has no interest in him, she’s never really like paid attention to him. It’s kind of like this overdramatic saga of like a nerdy little kid that has Led Zeppelin CDs and this emo chick that likes Black Parade.
FM: Any future plans?
EA: Ooh future plans, yeah. We’re releasing Blind To It All on October 31 and then we have plans to at least, hopefully release one more song before this year is over by December. If not December, then going into next year. We are aiming for two more songs to be released by May of next year. Maybe an EP towards like late end of summer or end of the fall of 2021. We’re planning on going on tour by 2022.
For more information and updates, be sure to follow the band on Instagram: @theharbourva. Blind To It All will be available October 31 on Spotify and Apple Music.
By Faith Macwana
fpmacwana@vwu.edu
