NYC has long been the epicenter of everything cool in rock n’ roll and you don’t get much cooler than The Sweet Things. After unleashing their debut record on the world in 2019, the band went through some personnel changes and is back with Brown Leather. Guitarist and vocalist Dave Tierney and bassist and vocalist Sam Hariss recently took some time to talk about this great new record.
Please press the PLAY icon below for the MisplacesStraws Conversation with The Sweet Things –
On the changes in the band – Dave – We teamed up with Hector (Lopez) first, actually, he ended up doing in the last little tour we did. Sam – I went to go see Alejandro Escovedo and Hector was drumming for him, and that’s how I initially met him. I asked Al who was busy, and of course, I said that the whole band wants to go and have a beer with me, and Hector was the only guy that said yes, and that’s actually how we had our first conversation. I knew he was good with poor decision-making, which is a pretty important part of it, and then the real stuff. Then we found ourselves doing our last road run before the pandemic hit, little run down the south and we needed a drummer and we reached out to Hector, and so we’re playing with him ever since then. Sam actually met Tobin (Dale). So I guess throw it back over to you. I was playing in this pickup, terrible thing in Philly that was just a bummer. It was just a bad situation. But luckily, I through it, met Tobin, and Tobin was really looking for something to do. I remember Dave and I had seen him on Facebook and we thought he looked really cool, and I had had Medicine Bird, which was the last EP he put out and I really liked it. I said to Dave, “What do you think?” And he was like, “Okay”. And I was like, “Not sure if we should mention it to him, but I would love to bring him into this thing we’re doing”, and we were sitting in a car and he said, “I love your last album, I wish I could play in your band”, and I was actually talking to him a couple of days ago, and he had no idea that we were gonna ask him, he just found out last week that, I was trying to figure out how to say it when he said it, so it was very serendipitous and lovely, and it worked out well. We were listening to a band called Flies on Fire, who I think about six people have heard of, and we’re one of them and he’s the other one. Because of it, that kind of set a precedent. There are so many things that Tobin knows that I’m shocked he knows because I thought I was the only person or Dave was the only person, or Dave and I were the only people. Through the music we listen to, it was so seamless that it paved a real easy path for it. Yeah, and the second time I actually even met him, and I was down in Nashville where he lives for unrelated reasons, and I had just started writing “Brown Leather”, the song, “Brown Leather”, the lead track off our new record, and we went over his house and just like I said we barely met before and just jammed on the song, it wasn’t even a whole song with and on the half of the song that was written. It was just perfect, even just that from the beginning. So we know it would be a good fit. 1:11
On the evolution of the band’s sound – Dave and I really had this kind of idea of where we wanted this band to go that stems back a while ago, and I think the amount of time it took to get this record was kind of the amount of time to kind of bring it from the brain to the hand, I guess. I had never recorded a record before the last record, and so having all these tools at our disposal was a bit jarring and really learning what not to do. I feel like last record was very much a kitchen sink, “We can use it, throw it on there”, and now you can be a little more selective and kind of like the song speak for themselves, and at the same time, the songs are percolating and it takes a little longer because of the pandemic. So you can really give yourself enough time to be objective with them. Dave will have a better answer. Our songwriting was definitely moving in a different direction, we’re not the kind of guys who wanna make the same record twice. We were stoked about In Borrowed Shoes on Borrowed Time when we did it. We don’t wanna make the last record twice, we’re gonna make this one a couple of times. But for instance, we were saying Tobin is such a good fit, but a third to half the songs were written by the time we started playing with him, so we were already moving in that direction. We wear a lot of our influences on our sleeve, but on this record is a lot of different kind of singer/songwriters that we’ve both been listening to that maybe, I don’t know if they come through or not, a lot of classic country stuff, a lot of outlaw country. You’re directly influenced by what you’re listening to, especially if it’s music, in that case, very much so. But yeah, I think I can listen to the record and think of any song and be like, “Oh, that was that point when I was really listening to that or when Dave was talking about that”. It’s really a reflection of what we’re listening to at the time, I think they’re very easily seen. 5:30
On writing for the record – These are just the ones we kind of went with. We did a lot of the record in Muscle Shoals. I came down to Muscle Shoals, a couple of songs planned to record there, and even the cover we do, “It Hurts Me Too”, was something I had wanted to do down there. That’s something I’ve been (playing) just by myself, just sitting around with my acoustic guitar. So there is a little less collaboration on the songwriting and this one, although I think there’s more collaboration on the production actually. Whereas for instance, the second-to-last song on the record, “Problematic Life”, which is on that Sam wrote, I love that song. It’s such a cool song, he brought it in and we just kinda threw that one back and forth with all these different ideas in sculpting it from what was really just a song he wrote, and so just on his bass or guitar into a real big sounding album closer, which we got through a little bit of trial and error and tossing ideas around in the studio. 8:16
On Rob Clores’ keys on the record – He’s amazing, and we love what he plays, and we also love the man. Obviously, we hung out a ton and we also got to play together a ton locally, but also a little bit on the road, which is nice too. Usually, in the studio, we just play Rob a song and the first thing he plays is just exactly what we would want but better. There was one instance, and I think we were working on the song “Mentholated Blues” on this record, there was a little part where I was a little unsure to play, there’s an organ part. I was like, “Do like what Billy Preston would do”. He was like, “Billy Preston’s my favorite, I got it” the next day, it’s on the record. So he is just a perfect fit and he just played so much cool stuff. A lot of it is just great taste, he knows when to be in the front, he knows when to sit back, he’s just a real smart player and cool guy. 9:42
On picking the cover track on the album – We were in Muscle Shoals. We were there because it was between two other places that we had to be for shows. We weren’t coming with material, it was what we had, and Dave kinda had this cocked and loaded. I’d been playing it a lot and we were just like, “Yeah, let’s lay it down”. Like I said, it was just something I was doing by myself at home. It wasn’t even originally planned. We had a lot of fun doing the production of it. I said to Hector, “Maybe do a drumline thing at the beginning”, and that worked. The thing that I love on that song more than everything, is Dana Athens’ backup vocals on that. She does this kind of “Great Gig in the Sky” vocal thing at the end, that makes my big toe shoot up into my boot. The whole Dana session was great because she was in Muscle Shoals with us, but we brought the track back to New York and she did all sorts of awesome stuff and she’s just really fun to kind of record with and to hang out with, so he’s had a really fun, just really creative session. She does so much in that song, actually, regular backups, and then like Sam said, that kind of “Great Gig in the Sky” ending. The backups always remind me of the Ike &Tina, version of “Rock Me Baby”. She just blew me away. 11:15
On putting the record together during the pandemic – We didn’t know what we were gonna do with the recording originally. It was more just like, we have these shows in Georgia and Alabama and Tennessee, and we’re ending up in New Orleans. We decided instead of putting together, whatever, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday shows, we decided just to hit the studio and take those days off and just record some stuff that we had. The stuff we had and had recently written or stuff we’ve been playing, but we didn’t have a plan for it, so then it was just kind of sitting there in the can, and then when we had a lot of touring plans for the spring of (2020), but along with everyone else, it got canceled, and around then we just started our line-up change instead of just trying to figure out what to do with our time, we just decided to finish those songs and then write a bunch of new ones and record the rest of the record. It was basically shelved from November 2019 until April 2020 when we started working on them again. 13:15
On possible touring – We got some stuff, we got a little bit booked that we’re gonna now soon, probably in the next couple of weeks, and then figure out what to do after that, hopefully announce even more and get ourselves on the road, hopefully, several times next several months if we can…I think Sam wants to play the biggest venues possible. I’d be down to play some big venues too. I think for me, the perfect thing would be something of a mix. Do a two-week run opening in arenas, then two weeks in small clubs then hit a bunch of festivals and then repeat…We’ve got a small string of East Coast dates we’re gonna announce in a little bit. I think we’re piggybacking everything on everything else right now. The momentum has been really good for the past, I’d say a year. Just even behind the scenes. Now that it’s kind of going in front of the curtain, just keep going up. We’d like to play as much as possible, it’s a little hard when the band spread out amongst several states but we’re giving it a go. Everybody seems to be pointing in the same direction as far as wanting to get out there a lot, and so I think we’ll be able to make it happen. We just played LA, we just played Austin, we’ve got a few more cool ones coming up, so should be good things beyond that as well 14:30
On the video for “Brown Leather” – It’s the first track on the album. We did this big fake live show of the band playing at a country-western roller disco club. The band’s playing and it’s a rowdy cast of roller skaters who are dancing and it turns violent. The place turns into a big brawl and eventually takes the band down with them. It’s kind of a live scene that I don’t know if it exists, we dreamed it up, but we made what we wanted to see in the real world, we made that on the screen in our video. The second video connects to the first one. So there’s a cliffhanger, the second single will pick up where the first one leaves off. In the “Brown Leather” video, we dreamed up the idea, me and Sam and my girlfriend, Scarlett. We were sitting around one night just trying to think about the video and what it should be and Scarlet said it first. We were like, “What should this video look like?” She said, “I see roller skates and butts”. We started just tossing ideas around and bullshitting and came up with the basic plot. Scarlet’s a roller derby skater for the Bronx Gridlock in the Gotham Roller Derby League. So once we started putting this idea together of a roller-skating video, we figured it made a lot of sense to invite a bunch more of the Roller Derby skaters from the league, and so we did, and a lot of them were totally down to participate in the ending result is what happened and what we got. Well, what’s cool about the video is that for a storyline like the one we kinda came up with, it only works if everybody really gets into it and decides to have fun and not get all stingy about looking a little silly. The room was full of people who were totally cool with looking silly. The video doesn’t look silly, but nobody was too cool for school, everybody really got into it, everybody had a great time and I’m still shocked at how cool it is. I think it came out really well. I think people are gonna like it. There was a lot of planning and pre-production and all that that went into it, but when we got to the day of the actual shoot, it was a lot of fun partially, because we’d done so much preparation, but also because like Sam said, everybody, he was just so into it, was a 100% in. It turns into this big brawl, and we had planned a lot of fight choreography that we talked to the skaters, and show them what to do in different scenarios, and for the most part, this fight choreography was unnecessary because once the skaters went into action to start fighting, it just went so hardcore after each other and just so hundred percent. It was hilarious from our position on the stage, you try to say character, act like this is totally normal, whereas you have this room full of 75 people, just throwing each other around, going completely wild. It was really great. 19:00
