Earthside, an up-and-coming rock band is making waves with their debut album, “A Dream in Static,” twhich has already garnered Earthside numerous awards. The band is currently touring across the country in support of the new album. Guitarist Jamie Van Dyck was nice enough to talk with The Daily Campus about the group and their latest ventures.
Jamie Van Dyck: Hey, we’re currently driving through, I guess we’re still in Washington state, it’s super rainy, nasty weather up here.
Daily Campus: Where exactly?
JVD: Southern Washington state, we’re bound for Portland, Ore. right now.
DC: Did you guys just play a show up there?
JVD: We played Seattle last night.
DC: How was it?
JVD: It was good, over the course of the show we warmed them up and they were a crowd that you could definitely draw in.
DC: So how’s the tour been going so far?
JVD: It’s been going well. It’s our first full tour of the U.S. and first tour hitting Canada. We’re getting to hit pretty much every major market.
DC: Is there anywhere you’re going on this tour that you’re excited about?
JVD: Yeah, a lot of those cities we already hit. We’re a band from Connecticut so just hitting New York City is kind of the closest thing to a hometown show and we’ve never gotten to play New York City before so getting to kind of play a hometown-ish show and having it be the most major media market in the whole world, arguably, that was a real thrill. For me personally, I took French in school so it was really cool getting to play in Montreal and Quebec City and getting to speak a little French on stage. Just yesterday playing Seattle, it’s my favorite U.S. city to visit on vacation.
DC: Kind of changing the subject a little, How did you end up with the name “Earthside?”
JVD: Well, we actually sort of had the music written and were looking to try to rebrand since we’d played together in the past, three out of the four of us, and we wanted to kind of reload as a professional band. We were feeling really, really proud as it felt like a new beginning and so we just started brainstorming names over the course of the year. There is a [Microsoft] Word document we shared on Dropbox called “name jar.” We all have a joke list of really bad band names on there. I think Ben, our drummer, came up with “Earthside” at one of his inspiration brainstorming sessions. It felt like a name we could define and make mean whatever we wanted it to. We felt good about it; it’s a name that suits us.
DC: How did all four of you get together as a band originally?
JVD: Well, our keyboardist Frank and I grew up next to each other so I’ve actually known him since he was six and I was seven. Soon after becoming friends, we started playing together and writing music together and early on in high school Frank met our drummer Ben and the three of us have been a nucleus together for a good eleven or twelve years now. As Earthside we’ve only been playing for about four to five years.
DC: Sounds like a good four to five years.
JVD: Yeah, good is kind of too simple a word. There have been some phenomenal highlight moments but there have been some hardships too. We went out of our way to make the process of making a record more difficult than most bands.
DC: You released your first album; do you think having that under your belt now sets you up better for the future?
JVD: Well yeah, I think these days in the industry with bands there’s a kind of exponential growth model in terms of popularity, like your debut album can’t propel you. The industry is not designed for a debut album to be able to launch you anywhere near as far as it could in the past. I think our debut album did about as well as it could do for us: it has us on the map, it has a group of fans that are very dedicated.
