A R I Z O N A

by: Kate Myers (Photos by Emma Golden)

A R I Z O N A; a band that's on the rise, but has us very captivated. We were very fortunate to catch up with Dave, Zach, and Nate to talk about their music life on the road.

You are currently on “The False Hope Tour” with Kevin Garrett- how has the touring dynamic been so far?

Z: Dave does a lot of hands-on work with the team during the show, but I know off duty we’ve been amazing together, off duty, it’s been great.

D: It’s been really cool because we’ve been able to share a bunch of equipment. Kevin’s been super gracious in helping us to keep the integrity of our sound.

N: Yeah, they’ve been super accommodating to us and it’s been a such a good thing, especially on our first run.

Any specific fun memories, so far?

D: So Kevin, backstage one day was like, you know “I really need to ask Zach how he does he fit all that into them jeans?” Cause Zach is probably known for wearing tighter jeans and then he also commented that Zach has an amazing “Boot–to-Cuff” ratio.

Z: That’s an art.

D: And so I think, probably post-tour, we’ll do a Jean and Boots seminar… for Kevin. To give him all the secrets.

Last month you guys released several remixes of “Oceans Away.” How did these come about? Can we expect more remixes leading up to the album?

N: A lot of them have been put together by the label and some of them have been more organic through us, like we just put out a Midnight remix which Zach actually reached out for, we’re just big fans of him.

Z: Yeah, basically, a lot of the stuff that happens through the label is great because those are connections you wouldn’t otherwise have, so when you're able to get those people to collaborate with you, it’s something that wouldn't have happened if you were just by yourself. But the Midnight was cool because, we were bumpin’ his records randomly on Spotify and I was like “This is insane! This guy is crazy!” I looked him up and I just had to get in touch with him, so I tweeted him: Midnight + A R I Z O N A remix???????” It took a couple days, but he got back to be and was like “Hell yeah!” So we called him on the phone and I was fanboy-ing super hard and he was just this really cool dude. So we became close friends and he ended up doing the “Oceans Away” remix because it was just good timing . So that was a really cool organic example, but like I said, the label stuff is great as well because those guys are awesome. It’s great to have someone to do it with you.

Has that been your first “working with someone you really love” moment?

Z: For me? So far, yes.

D: We’ve got a situation brewing right now that we can’t talk about, basically we have one of our heroes working with us. We love to have stories around the people we work with, so for example, the mastering engineer is from New Jersey

N: We were born in the same hospital

D: Mastering usually doesn’t happen in person, but we went to see him and brought him a Taylor Ham Egg and Cheese, which is a New Jersey staple. I think we love working with people we have strange connections with.

So that leads us perfectly to the next question. You guys recently released a behind-the-scenes video where you speak about Corolla Studios. Do you ever mix and master your own songs & would you ever consider recording for other bands?

Z: For a long time before we were A R I Z O N A, all we ever did was produce and write and mix and master and do everything else for other people. So Corolla Studios was kind of related to that. We had nowhere to work so we took my mom’s old car and put a studio in it. We made the record with “People Crying” on it in that car. We mixed our whole album, that's not even out yet, we mixed most of it in our basement, on regular speakers. Then we’ll take a couple days to go out in the city to kind of level it out, but for the most part, everything happens with these guys (referencing to Dan and Nate) and nothing outside usually happens until the very end. So when those special occasions come up, it’s really exciting.

D: It all kind of happens top to bottom from us, outside of the mixing too. All the graphics, all the content, everything.

N: Everything down to making our own cables.

D: Yeah, we’re very DIY

Will you be releasing more Behind The Scenes videos while you’re working on your album?

D: Yes. We have a lot of stuff coming out about the journey behind “Oceans Away” and the making of that video. Aside from that, Zach likes to vlog all the time, so he always captures little moments. We’re figuring out the best way to put that all together so it makes sense because … it’s always funny to us, and we want to make sure it’s funny to everyone else too.

What does the name A R I Z O N A stem from, especially the cool spacing?

Z: ( Joking) Well, with the spacing… its not called “Arizona” it’s called “A- R- I-Z-O-N-A.” Because of the spacing.

D: Oh my gosh.

(Band laughs.)

Z: No, actually there is a story behind it. We were hanging one day and it was a word that came off a piece of clothing that Nate was wearing. We were just hanging out when we made our first record, we had a moment when we were like “Hey, maybe we should do more songs like this.” The more we thought and had this dream, we thought “ Wow, wouldn’t it be cool to be a band? Just a few broke producer kids. Nothing else is working, lets just make a band out of it.” Then we kind of hit a wall with like “oh, what are we going to call that?” I think we concluded that It doesn’t matter. No one’s going to care. Let’s just name it something fun that Dave, who does all our design, can work with. Dave pointed to Nate’s shirt and was like “Just Name it Arizona” and we laughed at that for a couple minutes. And then we stopped laughing. And then we named our band Arizona.

So your album is set to release later this year- what can we expect from the album? It there an overall concept/theme to it?

D: The album is titled Gallery, I think we went with that because for each one of these songs there’s a point in time we can reference, possibly being specific events, so it’s us on display. So initially we were going to call it something else

Z: We were going to call it Museum of Feelings because we went to the Museum of Feelings that was a pop-up shop for Glade, like right before we got signed, and it was super tight. And we were like “We’d love to call it that” and Legal was like “Sick! We’re not going to do that.” So Gallery was cool because we grew up learning music at this place called The Galleria, so we were like yeah, let’s call it Gallery, which is cool, because it’s kind of like a museum.