KBPS Interview: Gringo Star

Peter Furgiuele, Nicholas Furgiuele, Jonathon Bragg and Josh Longino make up band Gringo Star from Atlanta. With their album ‘The Sides And In Between’ out on 26^th August via NevadoMusic we spoke to member Pete, co-founder of the band with his brother Nick, on the eve of the band heading out on a massive two-and-a-half month tour to talk about their new album. Their longest tour to date, Pete was excited about their upcoming time on the road, coming twenty years after first writing music with his brother as teenagers.

Describing the band’s live sound as rock and roll with a bit of garage, he was keen to emphasise their diverse sound. “We try to incorporate more than one approach when we’re writing, so it’s a range of melodic rock and roll.”

Talking about the record Pete told us “It’s a continuation of where we’ve been going. We had a slightly different approach this time as we did it in our own studio which we’ve been building for the last couple of years. Last year on tour I got really lucky. We randomly went into a gas station which was out west in casino country and on a whim I put twenty bucks into a slow machine and won almost $6000 on the jackpot!

“We were heading to LA. We have a really good engineer friend out there who has worked on some of our past records. He helped me secure a couple of pieces of nice audio equipment and it really helped us solidify the studio and bring the quality up to a nice level.

“That really helped with the overall sound of the record. We’ve done things on our own before and it’s been a little dirtier. This one is still dirty, but it’s a little bit cleaner!”

The band have also been working on new arrangements and involving their friends, incorporating instruments like a violin, saxophone and mandolin into the mix. “We tried to be a bit orchestral and mix up the sounds.”

Gringo Star’s latest album was recorded in a couple of months in their home studio, a process Pete described as fun.  Featuring newish member Jonathon Bragg on drums, Pete saw the record as an evolution. “It’s progressed more. I feel confident, we all like it, and it’s our best album yet.”

Their own studio has given the band the freedom needed to really work on the album. “Just having more time and less pressure to really get things how we want them [is great]. Sometimes when you’re in the studio and you have a limited amount of time [to record vocals] and people are waiting for you, you sometimes have to be like ‘that’s good enough’, but with this we could spend enough time to get vocal takes as we wanted them, which is kind of a luxury.”

With more time for experimentation and getting a more instrumental feel thanks to getting their friends involved, the studio seemed to have given the band more freedom on the record, and Pete, when we asked him to pick his highlights from the album, seemed genuinely happy with lots of the tracks, mentioning opener ‘Rotten’ alongside ‘Heading South’, ‘Get Closer’, ‘Knee Deep’, which included the violin, and ‘Going Home’. “For me that’s a really personal song. I get a good feeling from it. It’s called ‘Going Home’ but it actually feels like home to me, as it’s an honest song.

“We tried to mix things up so no two songs were the same. It’s an approach we’ve always had, but we tried to make it so you’re listening to the same band but not the same song ten times. So each song has its own character.

“We like a lot of styles. We like to incorporate a lot of different rhythms and arrangements, but there is a certain way we do things. I think there’s a common thread they all have; it’s pretty cohesive even though we mixed it up.”

Pete revealed a video for ‘Get Closer’ has recently been filmed and is currently being edited ready for release soon. He talked to us about the video, created by the same director who did the promotional video for ‘Rotten’. “He has great ideas. He brought with him a 16mm camera, and we did it all on real film, which we were really lucky to have the opportunity for. The video has quite a dreamy look to it, and he used some older Kodak film and there’s still grain left on it. It’s not an effect, it’s the natural film. It’s pretty cool and his editing has been great so far, with some techniques to make things look slow and frantic, but going with the music. It was done on a really sunny day and is a really sunny video!”

And what plans do the band have for the future? “We really hope to come to Europe,” he told us, talking about early 2017. “Nevada Records have a branch in Europe so we’d really like to go and support the album there. And to keep pushing on this album.

“With our manager and label combined I feel like we have our most cohesive team together to go out and tour and be the best supported we have been.”

‘The Sides And In Between’ by Gringo Star is out on 26^th August via NevadoMusic. Find out more about them via their website.