“Make Music, You’ll Make Friends”: A Conversation With Starkville’s Bored to Tears
Interview ★ Nash Jones ★ @_nash_jones ★ 1.7k Words
“Okay. So. You guys are in Bored to Tears.”
I’m speaking with half of Starkville Mississippi’s 4-piece emo band over Zoom, taking a minute to find my footing. Currently joining me is part guitarist, part bassist and vocalist, Quinlan (Quin) Kurtycz dressed in a suit, having come directly from a capstone presentation, he explains. Lead guitarist Phillip Domingueuz is also with us, wearing over-the-ear headphones, his dark curly hair pulled back. A third icon pops up— blond-haired drummer Joshua (Josh) Whitfield, a colorful tapestry in their background. Along with Bored to Tears, Whitman is also drummer of Doom Metal trio Sludgelung.
The four have been a band for nearly three years, having put out an EP, and now a new single with the announcement of an upcoming full-length project.
Before discussing their current endeavors, though, we take a look back at their first shows as a band. They formed at the college they all attended at the time, Mississippi State University, which holds a Battle of the Bands each fall.
“Wallace literally pulled us together like 2 weeks before… he had a couple demos.”
“It was for battle of the bands. Like he wanted to do battle of the bands specifically,” adds Dominguez.
Whitfield tells the serendipitous backstory of how he joined Wallace St. Paul, with whom Kurtycz switches back and forth on roles with.
Whitfield with Bored To Tears
“I was playing The Midnight Bizarre [former night music and art market] with a different band. Wallace was playing as a solo act. He was playing… ‘Someday’ by The Strokes… and he was the last one to go that night. My drums were still on stage, and so I was like ‘hey, I know that song, do you wanna play that song to end the night…?’… And shortly after that, he was like, ‘hey, let’s do battle of the bands,’ and he knew Phillip and Quin… He wanted to do battle of the bands specifically. I guess he just felt like he couldn’t do it alone.”
St Paul with Bored To Tears
Kurtycz says he also had previously planned to play The Midnight Bizarre, putting together a band with St. Paul on bass, before deciding he didn’t have the time to put the songs together. “…and then right after y’all [referring to Whitfield and St Paul] got offstage, he was like, ‘hey Quin, I’m gonna do battle of the bands. You play bass.’” We share a laugh at his anecdote.
Kurtycz with Bored To Tears
“So y’all weren’t necessarily planning on making this a multi-year project?” Not at all, the three tell me.
“It’s really cool that it turned out that way.” What was the secret? Simple, Dominguez tells me, they like one another.
“I think so much of this band’s, I guess, relative success… is because we happened to get really lucky with a really good group of people, and we can work with each other… Like, if we hated each other we definitely would not have survived, so we clearly have some attachment to one another in a positive manner.”
Dominguez with Bored To Tears
I mention the local art scene, “I think it’s one of the most important things connecting people.”
Whitfield expands on the influence of the DIY music scene. “Our first show after [Battle of The Bands] was at 929 [coffee shop.] Lishman booked it, [Starkville DIY founder] and it was with Bad Data [“Fuzzy Scuzzy Indie Rock”] and Hartle Road [Columbus-based Indie band.] They kind of set the example of what a band could be in a small town because they’re just incredible… We were huge fans immediately, of both of the bands… I think that was pretty much all of our inspiration at the time… to keep playing shows.”
“Phillip was gonna rage-quit cause they were so good,” Kurtycz adds with a laugh.
“It was demeaning almost,” Dominguez adds wryly,
“But they were also just really nice and welcoming… and that kind of helps get you out of the rut of ‘damn, we suck.’”
(For the record, Bored to Tears puts on a great live show.)
After covering the story of how the band came to be, I ask about the band’s structure. St. Paul and Kurtycz both play bass, switching between that and rhythm guitar and vocals.
“You sing on some of the songs, Wallace sings on some of the others. How do you guys figure that out? Is it, ‘I sing the songs I write’…?”
“Well at first, we would come with a demo… like pretty much a whole song completed, and then we’d just fill in the rest of the parts. That’s how it worked for the “Bored to Tears” EP… that would be ‘I sing on the stuff I write, and Wallace sings on the stuff he writes’… But more recently, we’ve found our sound is a lot more cohesive when we write in the room together… We’ve just learned how [one another] works. We’ve learned our tendencies and where to fill in space. It’s just been a much more collaborative effort recently.”
That was the process for their upcoming LP, he tells me.
“‘For Your Entertainment’ came when we were just jamming… and we were like ‘okay, let’s try to write another song.’”
I ask how their last shows have gone. They recently played several shows with two other Mississippi-based bands, the Jackson-based Smokies and Hattiesburg’s Defluo Cervus.
“I think in the past year… we’ve been really focusing on, ‘so we’ve written a lot of music,’ and just trying to focus on the performance component, which is really alien at first. So it’s really nice to play with other bands,” Dominguez responds, going on to praise the acts they performed with.
“Smokies is fantastic… they have such a unique and cohesive sound, which we all really love. I think the interesting thing is, from show to show, you can really take in different parts of what these bands do best and just try to understand what we could do to match that energy.”
Whitfield jumps in with a bit of self-deprecating humor. “I think our strategy is just like, book with people who are really good live, and then just feel bad about yourself… And then you hopefully go home and practice for a few hours to try and match their energy… I feel like that weekender was pretty cohesive because we all have that DIY sound. So I think it ended up gelling pretty well.”
“It was also very eye-opening to what tour is going to be like,” Kurtycz adds, much to my surprise.
“Oh? Let’s talk about that.”
“We haven’t announced it yet,” Dominguez clarifies.
Kurtycz expands on the unexpected announcement:
“We’re playing a ten-day tour in the Summer going all the way out to Chicago, Columbus Ohio, and Atlanta… It’ll be the last thing we do as a band ‘cause everyone’s graduating, but it’s something we’ve always wanted to do, and I think we’re gonna make some really good memories.”
Having heard about their upcoming tour, I want to know more about what it might sound like, so I ask if they want to share anything about the upcoming album.
Whitfield comments first:
“We spent a lot more man-hours on the production, but there’s also gonna be a lot of different sounds. We’re gonna have one track that’s more demo-quality, ‘For Your Entertainment’ is our attempt at doing something more studio-quality. We’re also gonna have… a recording of a song on tape… We tried to follow the spirit of what these songs wanted to sound like.”
“The interesting thing with the LP is, it wasn’t written from a perspective of ‘we are writing an album,’ it’s more so a collection of songs from the past three years that we’ve been a band… I think that’s what makes it interesting, that you can hear the different influences that we’ve taken on over the years,” Dominguez adds.
“Hopefully you’ll hear a lot of influences- like we talked about earlier- from the local scene, and the people who have helped bring us up along the way,” Kurtycz says.
“What are you most excited about regarding the upcoming album?”
Dominguez starts first here:
“I think the thing I’m most excited about is that people who have heard us at shows will finally get to hear… what we had in our heads this whole time when we played it live. I also think it’s cool because it’s very indulgent at times. The back half… is a lot more ambient and noisy in nature.”
St Paul has joined at this point in our call:
“This is more detached from the album itself, but… having an album out at all has just always been something I wanted to do. I always wanted to start a band and, like, have music out. I’m just excited to have something… to prove we existed, we were a band. Thirty years from now, even if no-one’s listening to us, someone can find that, It’s gonna be there,” he answers.
“I’m on a similar mindset to Wallace,” Kurtycz begins. “These songs mean a lot to me, and all of us. It’s kind of an immortalization of the time I’ve spent with these guys who were strangers two weeks before a show, and have become some of my closest friends here, and ever, honestly. I really love these guys.”
Whitfield answers next, expanding on elements of his bandmates answers. “I think what Phillip was saying earlier was like… we have our own handful of listeners here, but we really made it for us. That’s why you call it a recording, I guess. It’s like a record of what we’ve been up to, what we’ve spent a lot of time doing. Yeah, I’m just happy that it’ll exist.”
Mississippi’s DIY arts scene is something close to our hearts, and it was a joy to hear these four discuss the impact it has had on them.
Lastly, I ask if there’s anything else they’d like to add.
“Start a band!” Kurtycz tells readers, his bandmates echoing in similar agreement.
“Yeah,” “Make music,” “You’ll make friends.”
Make music, you’ll make friends. A sentiment echoed by four people who represent it perfectly.
