Let's start with the obvious. You live in America and the rest of your band lives in England. How does it change the band dynamic for you when you can't just sit in the same room even if you wanted to?We make it work, but it sucks. When we wrote our first LP we had a practice space we would go to and meet up multiple times a week over the summer and just write/practice for hours and it was great. After I moved writing became way more challenging, we would have to all write and record ideas on our iPhones and message them to each other and go from there. When we were in the same country for a tour sound checks would be become writing sessions, we wrote the song 'Spoiled' during a sound check in Germany somewhere and ended up playing it by the end of the tour. Now it just requires everyone to push each other because you can't be in the same room and just jam or mess with ideas. However with this new sense of pressure to make each moment we are together count is a good thing and pushes us to be creative.If there's one thing we can say about Basement, it's that the songs are great. They sound cool too, but beneath all those layers is a great song. How important is that to you?Thank you! I mean song writing and being musically creative is the most important thing to our band. There is nothing like the feeling of a song coming together with everyone excited about making it the best we can. I like melody and and creating a catchy element to our songs, where as each person brings a new aspect to our song writing and I love that. It's very rare that one person writes every part to a song, everyone plays an important part in shaping and crafting our songs.Do Basement songs start in a more stripped down way? In other words, do you have a general sense of the melodies and progressions before you really start adding everything else? Or do guitars and vocals happen separately?Before I would only write guitar parts, but recently I have been humming along rough ideas for melody and sometimes Andrew uses what I have, other times he takes what I have and writes his own. I cannot write with bass and drums in mind. I write riffs/parts and show everyone and we go from there. Sometimes Andrew or Ronan have presented a full song and we all shape that together. But for the most part we start with a riff or guitar part and build on that as the foundation.Being that you're so far away, how do you pass ideas back and forth? Are you constantly tweaking and revising?I just record on my iPhone, Andrew has used Garage Band to add layers and drums, but mostly it's just us sending iPhone recordings of guitar parts. Then someone might add or tweak and idea and send the revised idea back. However we usually save that for when we are together, it's easier and more direct.What's the most important thing to you when you're working a song?To record early stages of the progression, sometimes I'm messing around with a riff and forget to record it and then it's gone the next day. I try to record my ideas as soon as I have them even if they are super rough. Writers block is real and it can be infuriating, I try to relax and just play guitar and let ideas come naturally, but there's no real formula for that.
