Interview With Republic Tigers' Adam McGill

We've posted about Republic Tigers before on GFP, and I was able to catch their stellar show in Minneapolis at the Fine Line Music Cafe back in April when they opened for Travis (personal opinion? Much better than Travis, plus they did an amazing cover of "Heart of Glass"). Adam McGill was kind enough to take a break from their current busy tour to answer a few of GFP's questions about the band.

Ok, to start things off...if you could only describe your sound in five words, what would they be?

5 words? Hmmmmm.... here we go: decent, alright, pretty good, eh, ok.

What are your top influences/albums/songs of the moment?

My personal favorites are kind of weird. Right now I'm really into old bollywood stuff like Kishor Kumar, Lata Mangeshkar, Rajesh Khanna etc. I'll always have a soft spot for the arrangements of Ennio Morriconne, Michel Legrand, and Krzysztof Komeda. All of the artists I just mentioned have extremely interesting arrangements that I feel should make a larger impact on modern music than they currently do. As far as bands that exist currently,.... that's a tough one. I always enjoy anything that Air does. I'm still listening to Portishead's "Third." I'm still listening to Arcade Fire's "Neon Bible." I tend to get annoyed with "current" music. I'll listen to a record over and over for a month or two after it's released and then if it stands the test of repeated listening that's a good sign.

How did it come about that you were the first band to be signed to Chop Shop Records, founded by the infamous music supervisor Alexandra Patsavas? I heard something about your Myspace playing a part.

That's exactly right. One of the girls in the Chop Shop office (Brittany Warfield) heard us on Myspace and showed it to Alexandra. She liked what she heard and the rest is rock 'n' roll history.

How did the album Keep Color get its title?

We pulled that title from lyrics to our song title "Contortionists". That phrase "Keep Color" seemed like it had many different possible meanings, and we like the way it looks and sounds when you read it.

Which comes first for you, the music or the lyrics? Or do they come hand-in-hand?

Typically the music comes first. However, Kenn keeps a lyric book on hand and anytime something pops into his head he jots it down. When one of us presents an idea to the rest of the band oftentimes Kenn will remember a page of lyrics that may work for that particular piece of music and we take it from there.

What has been your favorite moment as a band thus far?

That's a tough question. I think my favorite "band moment" was when we were released from being detained by customs while we were on tour in the UK. We didn't have our visas properly worked out so we were being deported. We were actually boarding our plane to go back to the U.S. when security received a phone call that our visas came through. They pulled us off the plane and escorted us into the country. It was such a wonderful moment in part because of the prior 26 hours of terrible despair. However, that doesn't tarnish the overwhelming joy we felt to be free and on our way to tour a new country. That's the happiest I've felt for a very long time.

Any quirky traditions/superstitious rituals that you guys do while on tour?

Hmmmm,... no, not really. The closest thing I can think of is the almost religious morning and evening shower routines of Kenn and Justin.

What can we expect from you in the future? I know there's been desire to release an annual 8-song EP if you could...is that going to become a reality?

Hopefully people can expect a lot from us in the future. We're beginning to work on our next record. So far the new songs are pretty amazing. I feel like many of them in the early stages are better than songs we've written previously and spent a long time developing. That 8 song EP a year idea sounds great. However, that's tough to do while we're touring regularly. If we were another band with less obsessive members we'd have no problems doing that. Unfortunately, we're so obsessive we make Larry David look like the Fonz.

And finally, we have to ask, what's your guilt-free pleasure?

Everything I do is done "guilt free."