Jets Overhead
December 23rd, 2009 - Written by judith
On Saturday November 28th, I had the privilege of meeting two members of a great up and coming Canadians band from Victoria, BC, called Jets Overhead. I sat down with Adam and Antonia to discuss how their band dynamic works and to discover very interesting people.
CONFRONT: Hi Adam I’m Judith, CONFRONT magazine nice to meet you!
ADAM: Hi Judith, nice to meet you too! We’ll just wait for Antonia, she will be joining us for the interview as well…
CONFRONT: Great
We chatted about the weather for about 5 minutes when Antonia walked into the dressing room
ANTONIA: Hi, I’m Antonia, sorry to make you wait
CONFRONT: No worries we’re in no rush!
ANTONIA: great
CONFRONT: So first I would like to start by explain to you what we are. Well our magazine is called CONFRONT magazine. We are an online music magazine that some friends and I started 3 and a half years ago. We want to bring music to the world!
ADAM: this is great
ANTONIA: way to go this is a very interesting project
CONFRONT: yeah, we are very proud of the work we’ve been doing J so let me start with some fun questions we ask all of our interviewees, we call them the CONFRONT questions!
ANTONIA: cool good for it
CONFRONT: What would be the first and the last CD you remember buying?
ADAM: the first CD I bought… right of top of my head would be Vanilla Ice… in like 1991!
ANTONIA: I remember the first CD I bought was The Best Of Leonard Cohen
CONFRONT: love this man… tells a lot about your music influences…
ANTONIA: yeah… and of course I bought some tapes before that but…
ADAM: she is the poet out of this relationship
(here to be noted that Adam and Antonia are a couple in life)
CONFRONT: aww sweet! So the first and last Concert you remember attending as a fan?
ADAM: first would be the Rolling Stones for me
CONFRONT: cool
ANTONIA: yeah that’s pretty cool… my first was Spirits of the West
ADAM: the last concert… well we saw U2
CONFRONT: wow
ADAM: yeah it was a great show…
CONFRONT: lucky you… ok talking about music a guilty pleasures musically…like anything that maybe you fans would not expect you to like or even that maybe you wouldn’t want anyone to know you like… obviously they will now J For me a guilty pleasure is something i listen alone in my car …
ANTONIA: I have HUGE guilty pleasure for top 40 hip hop songs…like… Fergie, the Black Eyed Peas… well you know I don’t feel guilty about it because a awesomely crafted song with hooks, it’s great pop songs… like I still… if anybody puts on “Hot in Here” by Nelly… I still sing at the top of my lungs and dance like a teenage girl… it’s an awesome song…
CONFRONT: it is, I agree
ADAM: I don’t’ think I have any guilty pleasure I think…
CONFRONT: well anything cheesy you know all the lyrics to?
ADAM: (thinking) hummm
ANTONIA: Well “A Whole New World” from Aladdin”
ADAM: (laughing) yeah I do know all the lyrics to this song
CONFRONT: well it is a classic
ADAM: well I did sing it in school so… what about GREASE..
CONFRONT: yeah that’s good
ADAM: I’m a sucker for it
CONFRONT: I’ve read a lot about you guys… I’ve been trying to get as much information as I can obviously…and then I came a pond your biography on the official website… I found it very interesting how you guys put it up as a story…
ADAM: this is all her (talking about Anotnia)
CONFRONT: Great way of doing it
ANTONIA: thanks
CONFRONT: can you explain how your creative process work? The story reads that you’re all from different background and that you all had conversations with each others that brings up different types of emotions? The way I see it… is that you all are friends making music from the heart… am I right??
ADAM: totally
CONFRONT: do you have a specific creative process like you work on the riff, I’ll create a melody and you’ll do the lyrics … how do you guys work??
ADAM: well I think we’ve reach a point in our career and our band history that we’ve become comfortable enough with each other to let yourselves be vulnerable, to create a group atmosphere… we all work together… without any specific role for each band members… basically we set aside about 3 months when we went in (studio) about 2-3-4 times a week for about 2 hours… all set up at our instruments… press record and played, jammed. We would not listen to those sessions for weeks, you know just create and listen later… we came up with about 80 songs idea… could have been just riffs, harmonies or full songs.. it just happened. After that we just came together to cut down and created the album. I think it’s for this reason that people sometimes have trouble putting us in a specific category… it’s because there is 5 of us coming together to create music… that our songs are different.
CONFRONT: well it makes you guys pretty unique as well… as I was doing my research for this interview… I was listen to an advance copy given to me by your record label… and I just can’t stop listen to it
ANTONIA: wow
CONFRONT: I feel like this is just one song… to me the songs flow into one another like they were meant to be one song with different parts J
ADAM: wow this is great to hear… and someone who actually listens to the album they’ve been given…
CONFRONT: Always, I find it’s very important, specially when it’s from and up and coming Canadian band
ANTONIA: well thanks again
CONFRONT: you’re welcome… you guys have a very interesting name for the band… Jets Overhead… where does that come from??
ANTONIA: that came from Adam
ADAM: well at first we were pretty sure that the name of our band was going to have something to do with transportation… because we consider our music all about transporting one’s self, loosing yourself, escaping one’s reality… going on a trip so that’s why this name came about and well the second reason as because I did a trip to Europe… I had left actually just like a week after my dad, and I was on a soul searching journey travelling around for about a month… I flew a lot and well in big cities like London and so on there is a lot of traffic in the sky so… this was fascinating to me… but I actually only thought of it when I was back in Victoria… Jets Overhead… here they are again… that would be a great name… and eventually… it took a while but the band took on.
CONFRONT: this is a very cool story. You guys coming from so many different musical background.. what would be your personal musically influences?
ANTONIA: well me I grew up listening to Simon and Garfunkel… so I think this is were I get all my love for beautifully crafted voice harmonies.
ADAM: yeah that’s her ingenuous and her ever so natural harmonies. She’s got the most natural ability to find and harmony like that… I can’t do that (laughing) Thank you Simon and Garfunkel
ANTONIA: I just love singing them so it helps a lot too… so they would be my main influence.
ADAM: for me personally it’s Radiohead… they touch me emotionally in a way no other band can…
CONFRONT: Yeah they are very unique…
ANTONIA: I would also say… talking for the rest of the band that Fleetwood Mac and Pink Floyd are two big influences as well.
CONFRONT: great, love it J ok we’ve come to the end of our interview… I have one last question for you guys… what would you want your legacy to be… Jets Overhead in 5-10 years?
ANTONIA: that’s a good and hard question… I guess I would say.. you know what you said about the album being like one long song… flowing through… well I think it would be that… that we’ve done great music that touched people and they can listen to over and over again.. that we’ve created music that people want as background music to their lives it to me what I would want our legacy to be
ADAM: just to add on to that… our goal is that we shall be remember an emotionally deep band… we are a band that touch people… I’d like to know that our fans will want to pass our music on to other generations…
CONFRONT: I’m sure this will happens. Thanks do much for sitting down with me guys…
ADAM: you’re welcome it was our pleasure
ANTONIA: thank you
This was my interview with Jets Overhead. Hope you had as much fun reading it as I had doing it. To learn more about them and to listen to their awesome music you can visit
http://www.myspace.com/jetsoverhead
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