Feature | Busty and the Bass

“It’s f***ing gorgeous out,” said Milo Johnson, bassist for Busty and the Bass, as he ended his afternoon stroll to talk to EWM. The ecstatic emphasis Milo put on the habitual “how’s the weather?” line mimicked Busty’s music and set up EWM for an informative convo on music education, touring, Bustified and a fear of foreign microwaves. Here’s what Busty and the Bass had to say.

EWM: So in March you went to New York and you played a few shows?

Milo: Yeah it was actually part of an 11-day tour. We were like, “ok boys, let’s see if we can put together a tour.” It ended up being from Montreal down to DC, then out to Kingston and back.

EWM: How did you hook that up? How did it happen?

M: Lots of phone calls and emails.

EWM: Yup, we know what that’s like.

M: Oh yeah, the grind that people don’t talk about. It was just a lot of, “huh, lets Google places to play in Hartford, Connecticut. Lets call all of these places and hope that someone bites.” Yeah it was a good experience. Jordan [Benjamin] came along and was our tenth guy. It was super, super fun.

EWM: Ok, quick question. How come there aren’t any girls in the band?

M: We all met in the jazz department at McGill, and I guess it’s just a representation of the demographics of the department I would say.

EWM: Wow…that is so depressing.

M: Yeah it is depressing! That’s why we’re trying to branch out. We’re working with a couple of female vocalists on some upcoming projects. We’ve done stuff with people live, but the core group is all male…as it were.

EWM: Fair enough. So how do you coordinate so many dudes? I mean, nine people in the band…what’s that like?

M: You know, very frustrating at times. But it can be even more rewarding… No I’ll be real with you – mobilizing nine people isn’t always the easiest, especially after the tour. The tour brought everyone to their wits end. We’d be out late the night before and then have to leave and drive six hours the next morning. The drivers would be like, “guys like get the f**k up!” But we’re figuring it out. We’ve been together for a little over three years, and we’re still figuring out our process. It’s cool because it started out super “throw-it-together” - friends making music - and then we were like, “oh, we should start figuring out how to do this for real if we’re going to do it after school.” So this summer and this year have been really big year for us in terms of us getting our s**t together. Period. We’ve gotten a little better at coordinating.

EWM: You guys are from all over the place, ON, BC, AB, Maryland, Massachusetts, NY, Cali…after graduation are people moving away, are you going to stick in Montreal? What’s the plan?

M: We haven’t made any decisions yet, but I think that the general plan right now is Toronto - just because our fan base is between Toronto and Montreal and then between Montreal and New York. You know? Montreal is nice because it’s cheap but it’s also really limiting in terms of the music industry and then the market too. Toronto is good because it’s not too far away and it keeps us in our track of where our audience is so far. It also allows us to meet people in the industry. Toronto is sort of the jumping off point to the bigger markets in the US. We can get on radio and daytime TV there that’s not in French.

EWM: We read that you wanted to do a masters degree in finance…why?

M: Oh! That was sort of just like…I don’t know. That was partly parent influence, but it was a really good decision for me just because without that business knowledge we might not have gotten here. I also have some problems with the music school here. Learning music in an institution, just because that was never how I’d done it before. Basically, to run a band of nine people is a business, so you have to have to know how all the parts of that work together, and one part of that is definitely finance.

EWM: And hence the finance part of the degree!

M: Yeah it just ended up being a business minor. I really don’t like math that much. The guys in the band, we all improved a lot just from where we were and the fact that we were given lessons and a space to play everyday is extremely valuable and I think if we had met anywhere else we wouldn’t have stayed together. It gave us three solid years to get to know each other, to play in a group that was not financially sustainable whatsoever just because it was fun, but while we were in school it worked! School definitely facilitated us because we couldn’t play our music if were untrained musicians, but it’s back to that balance that really just isn’t taught in school.

EWM: With that being said, when do you all feel like you’re totally satisfied with what you’re putting out? I guess in reference to the new album, Bustified.

M: (Laughs) Oh never. It’s a constant drive to better yourself. With everything that we can do musically and with the different perspectives of nine inquisitive members we’re always striving to do something better and new. I would say that what we just put out is a documentation of our development over the last eight months, but the music we were playing was from the last three years. With the possibilities of things we can do musically just given the size of our group and nature of the different members means we’ll never have a problem thinking of new things to try out. I think that is the exciting part.

EWM: I really enjoyed Bustified by the way. Is there an over arching theme to it?

M: Ok so a little background on the name first. We use “busty” as an adjective a lot. So if a certain activity is “busty” or if someone is feelin’ “busty” then that naturally translates to, “yo, that s**t is “bustified””. We used to play a lot of covers, we had a lot of fun taking songs and making them our own. When we would talk about what we had just done with the cover, it would be like, “Yeah, we just bustified that cover!” We did that with “Toxic”. That was the first video we put up from like two years ago. So yeah, I guess that’s the story behind the name – this is what we put together in a context that people haven’t heard before. The actual music material actually started with Jordan [Benjamin]. We got together before we went on tour, and in the span of about two hours we had written four full tracks. The musical chemistry was off the wall right from the beginning. One day we ended up having nothing to do in NY and our guitar player found a friend’s studio (some guys who had played at the Manhattan School of Music) and their whole thing is that they want to make a professional quality recording accessible to more people so they charge $40 an hour for a really nice space and a really good recording engineer. We went in and were like, “Yo, ‘Don’t Forget Me’ is the single, we got to record it.” That was the theme song with Jordan.

EWM: You guys have listed people like Stevie Wonder, KC Roberts, Live Revolution Disclosure, BADBADNOTGOOD, Kaytranada as some of your influences. I think a lot of people listen to your music and think it’s funk and can hear the Stevie Wonder vibes, but where do people like Kaytranada and BBNG come in to your music?

M: In the last three months we’ve only recorded one new track, and that was the one we did the music video of, “Tryna Find Myself”. We got a bunch of new toys over the summer that have let us delve into the electronic realm a bit more, and our trumpet player Mike and drummer Julian are both producers. Within the group there are a lot of people with experience in production and we all love listening to that stuff, but it wasn’t until this summer that we had to tools to make it a viable option at shows. Up until then we had one keyboard that had only a few sounds. Basically, we got new tools that allowed us to play all these sounds that you would hear in a Kaytranada track, or any other producer that we listed on our influences. That was also like ten artists out of thirty that we had to choose from. With that in mind, I think you’re going to hear it more in where we’re going.

EWM: So then what are some of the artists that excite you and make your eager to hear more?

M: Right now Chance has been the guy that I’ve gone to for a lot of my thinking on how we want to proceed. Chance the Rapper - he’s the man. Born in April of the same year as me, only about six months older than me, which is such a good motivator. I’m thinking, “Man, this guy is everywhere.” Musically he is someone we look to because he brought trumpets back to popular music. It’s just really cool to see someone be able to release music in the way that he did and then keep it so him. It’ s not like someone saw his talent, threw a bunch of money into him and the influenced the way that he sounded and how it was presented. He put out an album, earned some street cred, spent a year working the next one and did it pretty low budget with a bunch of guys he knew from Chicago. Then he put it out after making it perfect or, as perfect as you can make something in a year, and he put it out for free. The thing blew up! And that was only a year ago! And now he’s the biggest thing out there. That’s super inspiring for us, and also helpful in terms of where we should be focusing our energies. I mean this dude put out a thing for free; it did well and got him some street cred. Then instead of rushing and throwing stuff out he took the time, put it out for free again and how he’s touring all over.

EWM: Now a bit of a personal end to the interview…We hear you have a fear of microwaves?

M: Ok well unfamiliar microwaves are scary sometimes you know? You go in, you’re trying to heat something up and you have to press four friggin’ buttons just to choose the time, like…that’s frustrating.

~

After speaking with Busty and the Bass, it was clear that they had the drive and talent to do big things. Fortunately, our thoughts were made reality on Monday, October 27th at 1PM. As Busty wrote to us,

“[We were] gathered together in a living room, crammed onto a couple small couches, waiting for the winner of the ‘Rock Your Campus’ competition to be announced on CBC radio 3. As soon as we heard the word “Busty”, we all jumped up into a big, loud, group embrace. Pure love and celebration. We’d been working towards that moment for months, and the idea of winning it still hasn’t entirely sunk in for all of us. We feel incredibly lucky and grateful to be in this position, and we can’t wait to show everyone what’s in store for the future."

EWM definitely recommends you keep a firm eye on Busty and the Bass….maybe you can be the douchebag who said, “I followed them wayyyyy before they got huge”.

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