Beth: I’m with you on that. I find that performing is not something that comes naturally to me. Depending on the day, I’d rather just curl up in a hole and hide under the covers. I feel like I’m growing as a performing and proud of that. I enjoy finding the enjoyment in it! With all the fear that leads up to it, it’s nice to get that “okay this is why people do this” [feeling]. It’s not totally frightening.
Grant: Once the worse thing that can possibly happen to you happens when you are on stage, you feel liberated.
Beth: I don’t know, I still haven’t been pantsed.
Grant: Well, all you had to do was ask, Bethany.
[Group Laughter]
Ashley: Who inspires your music? Who do you listen to that really listens your songwriting process?
Grant: Leonard Conan, right?
[Group Laughter]
Beth: Well I’m a big Leonard fan but I think this is always a tough question because we have so many diverse influences that are sort of all over the map. It’s always tough to say. We don’t really have this muse that we filter or emulate or something like that. I’m sure influences sneak into it, I’m always curious to hear what other people hear in our music or what they would compare it to.
Ashley: So far with Autumn Still, what accomplishments are you most proud of?
Beth: For me, [I always have wanted to tour] with a musical project of mine, so getting the first tour done felt like a great accomplishment to me.
Grant: [Touring has] been a dream of mine since I was 18.
Trevor: For me, it’s been awhile since this point, but putting out or first EP because there was this big process behind that when we worked [on it] for so long. We worked for quite awhile on those three songs, we got to a point that you’re [almost] terrified to put it out there [because] it’s so important and special to you. At that point, we finished recording it that summer and then started performing. It was great when it came out too; we got a lot of positives responses. You only thought about making it as good as possible and people were responding to it and that was really great.
Beth: It all feels likes baby steps leading up to this album. It’s going to feel so good I just can’t even conceive it right because there is so much to do. Roger is a very talented recording technician so he works for us a lot of the time.
Trevor: He recorded our Ep.
Beth: Yeah and he’ll be a huge part in recording our album along with Jay Reilly who will be mixing it and stuff like that. That will feel really good to have that in our hands.
Ashley: About going on tour, who made that decision? Who planned it?
Roger: I think the decision was already made when we were doing the EP. Because honestly way earlier on there was talk of touring, it was really really early.
Trevor: We knew for sure that it was going to happen. I guess you could say I planned most of it and booked the shows. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t too difficult, because we had the amazing luck and got such a good response from the EP. Especially Ottawa and Toronto and Windsor. We had people actually playing the EP and giving us a lot of promo.
Ashley: And how did you start with that? Did you approach venues first? What was the process?
Trevor: I reached out to venues and to local bands in those cities [at the same time]. We had our general idea planned early on and it was just filling in the blanks. Essentially we are a band that was fairly new that put out our new EP fairly recently so we didn’t have that cache we can just walk into the city and get a great show. It was a bit of a mismatch; we got help from some bands and venues locally too. We actually got a lot of support from people on that tour.
Beth: Grant went on Reddit.com and found people in different cities to put up posters.
Ashley: What advice would you give to beginners who are starting to record an EP who want to get their music out there?
Trevor: I would say personally that anybody that is trying to start out should just focus on the music first and foremost. It’s the most important thing and then worry about the whole business side that we talked about being so stressful. Make sure you are actually making music you actually love.
Grant: Another part is the recording of it, which is a super important element that allowed us to propel ourselves without a lot of resources besides with that we had. If we couldn’t have recorded it ourselves we would pretty much have been dead in the water.