INTERVIEW: Minus The Bear

Yesterday was the day I was able to make many of my friends extremely jealous. Yesterday was the day I was able to interview Seattle’s Minus The Bear. I was able to talk to keyboard player Alex Rose about their upcoming tour and their future plans as well as what it’s like having Jimmy Chamberlain from Smashing Pumpkins’ new band Skysaw open for them. You can catch Minus The Bear at The Handlebar this coming Friday May 27th with Constellations and Skysaw.

So how’s the tour going?
It’s going well, we’re a few dates in and so far so good.

Right on, we’re all excited that you guys are coming to Greenville.
Yeah I think we’re actually playing 2 SC dates on this tour.

Yeah I saw you guys are playing at Charleston at the Music Farm also. It’s really cool that you guys are doing a lot of SouthEast dates, a lot of times people overlook this region. What made you guys decide to do a tour around this part?
It was just all routing. We had a date booked at The Hang Out Fest and we just worked our tour around that.

Cool, so you guys just released your new EP for free. What made you decide to do that?
Well we just really wanted to promote our new single “Hold Me Down” and let people know it was out there.

Yeah I thought it worked out really well that it came out about the same time as your tour.
Yeah I guess it did just kind of work out that way.

So tell me about the re-mix, how did you guys go about including a re-mix on the EP?
We actually had a contest for it, and we listened to over 30 submissions, and this guy Mitchs’ remix just blew us away. It’s always really cool to hear your music interpreted through somebody else.

Right on so any plans for recording a new album or anything like that in the works?
Yeah we’ve already started writing for a new album. We’ll hopefully record in November or December and have it out next year.

Will you guys be recording with Joe Chiccorelli again like on your last album?
No, we’ll be recording with Chris (Common) who did Planet of Ice and Menos el Oso. Thats the thing with Omni, we just wanted to try recording something different and to see what was all out there, but now it’s good to be going back to what we’re comfortable with.

Cool yeah at first I was going to ask you about why you guys chose Dangerbird to work with vs a major or something like that, but after seeing the roster I was like ,”I want to be on this label!”
Yeah it’s a really cool label and they’re pretty much anything we could ask for in a label after we decided to leave Suicide Squeeze. Nothing against Suicide Squeeze because they were a great label but we just had to see what else was out there and we kinda outgrew them a little.

Speaking of your label, I saw you are taking some of your labelmates out on tour with you, like Skysaw?
Yeah Skysaw are on our label, but Constellations aren’t. We try to keep it in the family whenever we can. Skysaw actually have Jimmy Chamberlain (of Smashing Pumpkins) playing drums for them which is really cool because Smashing Pumpkins were a huge influence on me growing up.

Me too, they’ve been my favorite band since I was 13 or so. So what’s it like with Jimmy on tour? You get to hang out with him some?
Yeah he’s been hanging out with us some, which is cool. I’m still like “This guy recorded Siamese Dream!”

Oh man I’m extremely jealous. Speaking of bigger artists I saw you guys were playing in Hawaii with Incubus?
Yeah that will be soon and should be really cool.

Didn’t you play some dates with Soundgarden also?
Yeah we did, but those were smaller shows, to them at least. The Incubus one will be much bigger. We actually did a few dates with Foo Fighters a few years back and those were great also.

Oh wow, those guys are amazing live. I saw them on The Colour and the Shape tour and saw them just blow Red Hot Chili Peppers away.
I bet. Yeah they’re really nice guys. They were just at Hang Out Fest also and we got to see and hang out with them some there again.

Awesome, so whats in store for you guys after this tour? Any more big plans for you this year?
We’re just playing some more dates here and there and working on new material. We have some big news coming up which we’re not allowed to talk about yet.

Oh, secret huh?
Yeah it should be announced in the next few months.

Right on, well I just wanted to say thanks again for taking the time to talk to me and I wish you the best of luck with the tour and hopefully I’ll see you Friday!
Yeah man, come say “Hi” if you can.