By Kate Tocke, PR Director

[Album artwork courtesy of Lilah Watson]

Lavandula is a name that has lingered in the Athens music scene throughout the last three years. The group consists of Joey Negrete on vocals and guitar, Isaac King on bass and vocals, Wyatt Fratianne on drums, Landon Elliot on lead guitar and Zach Winkleman on keys. The band has released a few singles over the past two years and has secretly been hard at work crafting a bigger project. Lavandula’s EP, out on December 6, will finally give us what we have been waiting for. I was lucky enough to sit down with the band and talk about the creative process and what we can expect from this new project.

[This interview has been edited for length and clarity]

Kate Tocke (KT): You guys are releasing an EP on December 6. Will the songs on there be similar to singles you have released in the past?

Isaac: Not really, to be honest.

Joey: Take me back is on it.

Isaac: Take me back is the second track on it. And then there are five other tracks that no one has ever heard. It’s going to be good. We have a five and a half minute jazz fusion instrumental. 

Joey: They are pretty different because “Can’t Wait” and “Colors of Love” we wrote freshman year. All of these new songs we wrote after we started playing live.

Zach: I think there are a couple in there that are along the same lines as “Take Me Back”.

Wyatt: I think “Make Believe” is there.

Isaac: The ideas have been going for a while. I remember Zach playing the “Make Believe” riff. We used to call it the Billy Joel song because it sounded just like Billy Joel. 

Zach: I think it’s nice because the songs we have on there, we have been playing for as long as the ones we have released roughly. It’s going to be nice to have a year overview of our thought out version of it. 

KT: So this has been in the works for quite a while?

Isaac: Way too long.

Joey: We have been playing them for quite a while and just haven’t put the finishing touches on it until recently.

Isaac: We went through like three or four rounds of critics.

Landon: Multiple different recordings for some songs.

Joey: Some are older and relatively new.

KT: What does an average songwriting process look like for you guys?

Isaac: Usually one or two people bring an idea, like with “Cabin Fever,” which is the fifth track off the EP that Zach and Joey wrote. And then everyone added their own things to it. 

Joey: That’s how most of our songs happen.

Isaac: We have one person pitch it or for “Colors of Love” we all got drunk one night. I wasn’t actually there but I got a facetime call from every drunk like, ‘look what we made!’

[All laughing]

Zach: Sometimes it spawns out of boredom and shooting stuff around.

Wyatt: And I think with some of the stuff, since we have been playing it live for like a year or two, it has changed from the shows we played. Adding things we like and taking things away.

KT: You said there is a jazz fusion track on there, which is awesome. Where do you guys pull inspiration from?

Joey: Kind of everywhere. Everyone has different musical styles they like to play. I know Zach and Landon do a lot of Jazz. Wyatt you do a lot of stuff, like Reggae and Funk. 

Wyatt: All of our own interests come together. 

Isaac: We all like CASIOPEA, and that is where we get some inspiration at least for Landon’s guitar solo. And “Cabin Fever” is kind of shoegazy. What’s a shoegaze band for that?

Joey: Rug. 

[All laughing]

Joey: They are not shoegaze, but you know hahaha.

Zach: I think the biggest thing I like about our fusion of genres is that we are trying to make stuff that sounds new and inventive while keeping the crowd that enjoys pop music and straight forward stuff. And I think that is what sparked our interest for jazz fusion, and Landon and I are going to school for music, specifically and mainly jazz. So it’s fun to pull from something that has such a wide variety of things you can do with it.

KT: Who produced and mixed this project?

Joey: Just Isaac, hahaha.

Isaac: It took a while, but usually if I am mixing for someone else, and I hate to say it, I don’t spend as much time on it as I should. Like with this stuff, I really wanted it to sound good because I care about it more than the other stuff. If I mix for a band I don’t know I will definitely put hard work into it, but this band, I saw these songs come out of nothing, so I really care for them more than most music. So it took a while. With “Crying On The Lawn,” which is the last track, we made and mixed that song in a week. Let it sit for like two or three months, then came back to it. When it comes to us, time is very important because there have been so many developments. With the jazz fusion song, it sounds nothing like it sounded at the beginning.  

Joey: We are super wishy washy, we go back and forth a lot. There was a lot of ‘Isaac can you fix this, Isaac can you fix this over many many weeks.’ So it definitely helps to have a lot of time to figure those things out. 

Isaac: For “Make Believe”, we recorded once in the Schoon studio, didn’t like it, went back to my house in Cincinnati to record it, didn’t like it, and then went back to the Schoon studio and finally liked it. 

Zach: Painstaking process.

Isaac: At the end of the day, I am happy we did it. 

KT: Would you say that there is one person who has the creative direction amongst all of you, or do you think you all share one creative mind?

Zach: I think we all do.

Joey: Yes. I would say Zach probably brings in the most stuff, like the beginnings of songs, but we can all together see something going a certain way. If one of us brings something in, we are all good at spitballing and adding stuff on to make it our own sound.

KT: Besides this EP, what is in the future for Lavandula?

Isaac and Joey: Graduation.

Isaa: We don’t really know. I guess we will cross the bridge when we get there.

Joey: Making tons of money.

Zach: Playing more shows definitely. We have talked about having other musicians play at our place as well, it would be a tight thing to fit into the next few months. And we’d collaborate with other musicians. 

Isaac: We also have our album release party on December 7! And the big coverup next semester!