The Orion chatted with the musicians of Wanderers & Wolves about their band name, creative process and sound after their performance at the last fall A.S. Productions “Nooner” on Wednesday in Trinity Commons.
The Orion: How did you all meet?
Christian Crandall, guitarist: I met Joe a few years ago and we started playing together and started jamming out on guitar and drums. Shortly after, I met Gabe and he mentioned that he was a singer and we had this idea that it would be funny if we all played together.
Gabriel Reyes, lead singer and bassist: Most of our best ideas come from ‘wouldn’t it be funny if we did this,’ and the two others (band members) will be like, ‘no, let’s do it.’
The Orion: How long have you been performing together?
Reyes: We started playing together back last April.
Crandall: Though I think that each of us have been playing our respective instruments for the majority of our lives.
Joe Stone, drummer: Oh yeah, we’re all pretty comfortable with our instruments.
The Orion: What’s the story behind the band name?
Crandall: We were wandering in the middle of a forest and Gabe killed a wolf with his bare hands.
Stone: Yes, he saved a very attractive woman, mind you, so it was worth it.
Reyes: It’s really, what it was, is …
Stone: (Interrupts) I wear wolf shirts all the time, and, on top of that, we do a cover of a song called “The Wanderer,” and we’ve all always been really junky at band names …
Reyes: (Interrupts) I disagree.
Stone: Oh, maybe I’m just the junky one, or Christian and I always have these crappy ideas. I just knew I wanted to do something with the wolf and once wanderers came around I was like, ‘I really like the way that sounds.’
Crandall: The original idea was we were just gonna be called ‘The Wanderers,’ because ‘The Wanderer’ was the first cover we did. Then Joe said, ‘How about Wanderers & Wolves?’ So we said alright and kind of just stuck with that.
Reyes: And also, Christian’s favorite story growing up was ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ (laughs). We were originally going to be a concept band.
Crandall: I was going to dress up like Little Red Riding Hood.
Stone: Just make sure you come to our Halloween show and Christian will be dressed up as Little Red Riding Hood.
Reyes: And next year we’ll be doing ‘Peter and the Wolf.’ Christian plays the oboe — small secret.
The Orion: Your Facebook bio says ‘when we get together we write, debate, drink, and fist fight until we create music that we are proud of.’
Reyes: We actually do two out of three of those things.
Crandall: Yeah, but we won’t say which two.
The Orion: Your sound has been compared to Sex Bob-Omb from the film ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.’
Crandall: I think, because we are just three guys, in an attempt to not sound thin, we all play really hard and loud.
The Orion: What’s up next?
Stone: We are just finishing up our EP, which should be complete in the next month or two. We have been working with Scott Barwick from Origami Lounge on that, which has been an awesome experience. Then this month on the 10 we’ll be playing The Maltese with Lisa Valentine, the 16 we’ll be playing the A.S. Productions show in the (Bell Memorial Union) with Surrogate and Hellogoodbye. Halloween we have a show that will be fun.
Reyes: Yeah, we will need to lay down plastic first for that Halloween show. Also, this year look forward to Christian adding to his hot sauce T-shirt collection.
Stone: New songs and new hot sauce T-shirts; that is what you have to look forward to.
Jeffrey Fox can be reached at [email protected] or @FoxyJeff on Twitter.
