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Interview with Aloha
By: Meagan Rockne
 Aloha have never been to Hawaii.
Instead, the foursome began in Ohio, not exactly a tropical
island getaway. The band came on the music scene in 2001
with their debut album, That's Your Fire. They
set themselves apart that year by using one sole instrument:
the vibraphone. This has come to define the band.
With the band going through a hard time, with original
vibraphonist leaving the band soon after the release of their
second album, Aloha was able to pick up the multi-talented
vibraphonist T.J. Lipple to join Tony Cavallario on guitar and
vocals, Matthew Gengler on bass and Cale Parks on
drums.
The band is currently touring on their 2006 release,
Some Echoes. But do expect the debut album
from my and Tony's new band sometime soon...as soon as I
learn to play the ukulele.
Tony Cavallario: You want a piece of chocolate?
NowOnTour: No, I'm fine.
Okay. It's not against the rules.
I don't know what you put in there.
That's true. It is open.
You could have poisoned it. I don't know you. You
could have slipped roofies in there.
[Laughs] in a gruff voice "You're gonna do an
interview." "Is it girls? All right we'll do the
roofies."
See exactly.
Bands don't really have time to do that sort of thing. Don't
have time to deal with the ramification of roofiering
people.
No, they just get weird about being roofied
themselves.
Yeah, well what happened to me yesterday is I think I ate a
piece of pizza when it was too hot and it burned the roof of
my mouth. I think that maybe there was burning skin that
was kind of in my mouth and whenever you drink stuff you
can feel it. I kept drinking my drink and I would think,
"Someone put something in this. It feels like I just swallowed
something." Then I started to feel the effects of LSD, but it
wasn't really. It was just me envisioning it.
You're from Cleveland, not exactly the first place I
think of when I hear Aloha, so why the name?
Well, the name basically comes out of our desire to have a
name that sounds pretty and looks pretty and doesn't add
any gravity to the music. I feel our music's emotional and
kind of intense to begin with. I mean, that's the way we see
it. Some people think it's really mellow and soothing, I think
it's more intense.
At the time - this is in the late nineties - when there were a
lot of hardcore and emo bands that had pretty serious
names. We felt that our name would be light and airy and
just sort of be a change of pace. After we picked it, we've
definitely had a lot of people tell us different things of what
aloha means, like in Hawaiian. So, I don't know. It's
interesting. It works, I think.
Ohio doesn't really have much to do with it.
You could have named yourself Buckeyes.
That's true. I don't think we were trying to be ironic though,
I think it's more trying to be different.
How did the band come about?
Well, at the time we were just people who lived in a college
town, some of us were done with school and some of us
were still in school. A couple of us used to play in a punk
band and when we were gonna start a new band we realized
we didn't have to play hardcore music, we could play just
whatever kind of music we felt like. And Aloha's just kind of
what came out.
But now you all live in different places. How does
that work?
I don't know. Even since T.J.'s been in the band, which is
over two years now, our sort of rapport, as musicians and
friends, is very developed at this point. So when we get
together we can be pretty productive. We can really get stuff
done. We definitely look at our time together as pretty
precious and we just schedule things in a way in which we
can get together and get stuff done.
Basically, if we're gonna go on a tour or something we'll say,
"Come to my house in Rochester and we'll practice for five
days." After we get that first awkward show out of the way,
we're ready to go.
And when it's time to write an album we do a lot of things
from a distance. We'll send each other files or CDs. We're
always emailing back and forth ideas and stuff. It's not hard.
When we run into each other, it's never more than a month
or two we don't see each other. If you think about it, like this
year, Cale came to my house the last week of February and
we've been pretty much together since then. It's pretty
intense, the amount of time that we spend
together.
I don't think the distance does anything to harm us and in
many ways I think it helps us because when we don't play
there's a definite build up of "I want to play music," so when
we get together there's a lot of energy and there's always a
deadline and something motivating us when we're together.
It's never pointless. We never get together for no reason. It
works.
Do you have normal jobs when you're at home?
Everyone has stuff that they do when they're not working
with the band. Matthew kind of goes to school, T.J. runs a
recording studio in DC, Cale plays with a lot of other bands,
I'm the only one that can really say I'm not doing anything
else right now. I'm sure I will try and find some work, but at
this point my goals for myself for the next few years are
trying to do this as much as possible because the time is
right, I feel like.
You've released a few albums, have you ever said
to yourself, "Screw this, I'm gonna go play some acoustic
folk."
Yeah, I think of this daily. [Laughs] It's just one of those
things...the band in a lot of ways is a terrific blessing, we get
to do a lot of cool things and if we did nothing else but make
records it would still be one of the most important things in
the world that I live in. The music that make is really
important to me. I'm really glad that I'm able to do
that.
Aloha's not a rich and famous band. We are still a
work-a-day sort of band. We scrap for everything that we
get. There's definitely a lot of times that you think, "You
know maybe I can do something that would be a lot easier. I
wouldn't have to compromise all these other people. I
wouldn't have to get along with other people." But obviously,
the whole thing about a band is the way four people in a
room make music - that's what it's all about. Every time that
I write something good, it's gonna be Aloha before it's
something else.
Your newest album came out this year, how has
the response been?
It's been really good. It's kind of freaky how good it's been.
We ride around in the van a lot and people will tell us about
reviews when we haven't gotten a chance to see them.
People will be like "You got this. You got an 8.0 or 4.5, you
got an 8.5" or whatever. And I don't know...
We're a band that can't really cross over that threshold to
get our music reviewed in Rolling Stone or
whatever, but the places that do take the time to listen to
the record, I think the response has been really good. That
stuff's really important to us. When you're not playing to
really big arenas...I guess I'm just trying too say that we're
the band that's at the level where reviews do matter to us;
they do make a difference. So it's good. It's a good
feeling.
Who wants to be in Rolling Stone
anyway?
I think my parents would like to see me in there. Next to
John Mayer or something.
What does "Brace Your Face" mean?
It's basically describing this frustration... One way to
describe it is this year that I had - I titled it "The Year of
Diminished Expectations" - which is sort of a way to be
happy by not expecting too much and then just being
pleasantly surprised by everything. Like living in upstate
New York and saying, "Oh look, it's a beautiful snowfall"
instead of saying "Oh, man I thought it was gonna be nice
today so I could play basketball or plant flowers," or
something.
That song, "Brace Your Face" is all about trying to
communicate, especially via technology, and just sort of
failing. I don't know, I guess if there's any sort of hopeful
message it's sort of scaling back to something that you can
achieve, like talking to someone face to face. I don't know,
that's sort of where that song comes from.
I read that you got a record deal with Polyvinyl off
of a demo, did the band sent it in, or a friend?
Yeah, I sent it.
Do you remember the songs?
It was actually the four of the five songs from the first EP.
We just recorded it and we're like "This sounds pretty good."
We sent it to a lot of labels that we thought would actually
put it out. We didn't send it to Matador thinking, "Matador's
gonna freak out over this demo from this band from Bowling
Green, Ohio."
Polyvinyl was a label that when we would play at a fest or
wherever, their stuff would be at a table. So we sent it to
small but good labels that had records out that we liked. I
think Polyvinyl was looking for a band and I just got in touch
with them and said, "Look out for this demo." And they
listened to it and were into it. Came and signed us and put
out a record.
Why all the weird instruments, a marimba, a
vibraphone, Mellotron - I don't even know what a vibraphone
is?
It's kind of like a marimba except it's made out of
metal.
Basically, Aloha has a habit of having two drummers in the
band at all times. [Laughs] When we first started the band,
the guy who was in the band, Eric, he was a drummer who
became a vibraphonist. He just wanted to play it, you know.
And then when I met T.J. and we worked him into the fold,
that was just kind of what he was all about. He was a
drummer who could read music, write music, could arrange,
could produce and could play mallet instruments. I just think
the way it works out...Cale's a really good drummer and he
plays kind of crazy stuff and the mallet instruments is
another way to add a melodic instrument, and also just add
another rhythmic element. A lot of Aloha's songs, there's a
lot of rhythmic texture going on and I think that's the sound
that people react to the most.
But T.J., he's the kind of guy who plays whatever he thinks
that songs needs. If he thinks it needs something really high
and floaty, he'll find something. If he thinks he can do
something really cool with a marimba - because I think he
just has fun playing that - then he'll do that. It's not really
set in stone what's gonna be on each song. But we do kind
of narrow our [choices] down to a palette [of sounds] that
we can make when we're all together. There aren't gonna be
any children's choirs...
Those are creepy.
They can be creepy, but they can be pretty.
No, they're always creepy. You should try the
harmonica.
The harmonica? I saw a band that had made great use of
the harmonica.
Who?
Helio Sequence.
I saw them on
Wednesday.
Oh yeah. They played here, right?
Yeah. They had a really good set.
The harmonica was my favorite part of the set.
Have you ever thought about a ukulele?
No.
If I told you that I was a ukulele expert, would you
let me play on the next album?
Are you really an expert ukulele player?
No. I wish I were though.
Maybe. It's possible.
So if I learn to play it and I send you and email
and tell you that I finally learned how to play the ukulele...
In that situation, I think that I would be like, "I think I could
do a side project." Then I could be independent of the band
and all its ups and down. It would be like ukulele and
vocals.
I think there needs to be more ukuleles.
Don Ho, wasn't that the big ukulele player?
I think so. And you know, Aloha...but it would be a
side project so we would have to come up with a new name.
Mahalo. That would work.
That one's good.
We should probably go to Hawaii. One time we got a
MySpace message from somebody who was like, "You're not
from Hawaii. You don't know what aloha is. You don't
understand aloha spirit." I felt kind of bad.
We didn't try to appropriate anyone's culture or anything.
We just are using the word and adding our own sort of thing
to it. I feel like we're gonna make music that's nice and not
hurting anyone. We want people to be cool with it. We
haven't had any problems expect for that guy.
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