Ashley: How long have you been playing?
Kieran: I’ve been playing music my whole life. I’ve been seriously playing for six or seven years. The buffalo band has been together for three and a half years.
Ashley: Why did you guys decide to start playing together?
Kieran: Well, I was working on writing a lot of songs and was just going to perform them by myself because I had had experience playing in bands that weren’t that great and kind of wanted to just do my own thing. But I started to really miss playing rock shows and having fun where people dance and single along. That doesn’t really happen when you’re playing mellow acoustic shows. Right at that time I met this band “Little House”, a girl that I was dating at that time introduced to me their music and I totally fell in love with their music and they became my favorite band in the entire world. I wanted really badly to just be in that band because I admired them all so much. It was a four-piece band and they all wrote songs together and I loved that. They really reminded me of the Beatles. We would hang out and I would show them all my songs and they all really liked the songs and stuff. They wanted to help me out so we started talking about doing a couple shows together called “Kieran West and Little House” or something else. It just turned into this whole thing and we decided that we wanted to be our own band. The line-up has changed, it’s not just little house, but that’s where it started. I wanted to play rock shows and they came in there.
Ashley: What is a practice or jam session like with the rest of the band?
Kieran: We are very informal. As Roger Miller once said, he’s a country singer, “We play a highly informal set. The higher we get, the more informal we are.” That kind of perfectly describes our practices. We practice in our basement, drinking and having fun really. There is such a cohesive bond between the guys and the band because they had been playing for four years before we started so they have been playing together for seven years so there is such tightness. The songs aren’t really that complicated so we just get together and have fun; that’s what we do when we play shows anyways to it just makes sense to practice how you play.
Ashley: So you primarily write the songs so how do you bring those to the band?
Kieran: I write the songs, the verses and the choruses and whatever else; but it comes back to the way that we started. Just hanging out and me showing them these songs that are completed but, like I said I’m just a huge fan of them as a band, and I just tell them to do what they want. It’s never the way I that I hear it in my head when I write it but it’s always better. They always have so many ideas. They are all so musically inclined and these musical brains and they’ll come up with these ideas that make the song more interesting or exciting. They’re always working to improve the song.
Ashley: So what is your songwriting process like, then?
Kieran: Well it’s always kind of different but most often I’ll come up with a line in my head like maybe it’s start with some words, or something I want to say. From that, I’ll put a melody to those words and those will become my chorus. I usually start with the chorus and the hook of the song. We have the song “Big black bug”:
“Big black bug living inside my brain, and the thoughts inside are horribly arranged.” That’s all one complete thought that will happen in my thought and I’ll have that chorus and then start from the stop down and write the verses. I’ll use rhyming dictionaries a lot too. Yeah, usually start with the chorus then work the verses around it.
Ashley: So you’re music is more lyrically driven?
Kieran: Yeah, the whole reason I play music is because it’s so emotional for me and my songs are all about stuff that I have experienced or things that I feel. It is lyrically driven but it’s also with the band; they make it so musical that it’s a nice mix of both.
