Laura Bridget Regan of Bridget and the Squares is coming back to town and talks about Brooklyn, finding her sound and why you should never go to Waffle House.
Six years ago this was all just a pipe dream. A year and a half ago, it was a dead end. These days, in a phone interview that found Laura Bridget Regan and her two band mates in Bridget and the Squares driving through Georgia on their first ever tour, Regan says she’s finally found the way forward.
“It was very hard for me to get to the point where I’m at now where I feel like I’m a stronger bandleader, and I actually have more of a vision, and I know what I want,” Regan said from the backseat of the band’s rental car. “It took me a long time. Now I’m at this point where I’m like, ‘this is what I want, I know it’s right,’ and I’m just pushing it forward from here.”
That drive is what helped to save a band that seemed to have hit a wall. Playing music in Boston for over six years, earlier versions of Bridget and the Squares had fizzled out almost completely by late 2009, and Regan began to look for a change. She found it in Brooklyn, new band mates and a brand new music scene ready to welcome her with open arms.
“Playing indie-pop, I didn’t feel like there were a lot of bands [in Boston] that were comparable to us,” she said. “My main goal in New York was to find new band mates and then intricate myself into whatever music scene that I felt my music fit best in… New York is so big that there’s so many more opportunities and options for bands in every genre.”
The restored confidence and the new band members led to the release in June of Bridget and the Squares’ debut recording Still Life, which included some songs that were six years in the making. The trio’s album represented a benchmark; it was a chance to document what Bridget and the Squares had been, and use that as a launching pad for what Bridget and the Squares is becoming. And that, said Regan, is what excites her the most.
“Still Life is actually pretty consistent with what we sounded like the first three years of Bridget and the Squares – we were quirky, it was really straight-ahead indie pop,” she said. But with a new lineup comes new takes on songs and a new direction – an evolution that Regan hopes to embrace and capture with a new EP this year. “We have a heavier sound, a more aggressive approach to our music now… that’s the best thing about music, is that you never stay in the same place. You keep getting better.”
So with the band off on their first tour, a venture which began in Regan’s adopted home of New York and has taken off down the East Coast before finishing up with a hometown show in Boston this Sunday, a short learning curve has taken effect (“We’ve learned to not eat at Waffle House. Waffle House is always a big mistake”). But mainly they say, the tour has been full of affirmation so far and, more importantly, validation.
“A friend of mine, Jinsen Liu (of the band 28 Degrees Taurus), told me once that the road is either going to make you or break you,” she said. “When you go out on tour, that’s when you’re going to learn: am I good enough? If you can’t go on the road and impress people night after night, then why are you doing it?”
Bridget and the Squares plays the final night of its tour this Sunday, Jan. 23 at O’Brien’s in Allston.
This is an account occasionally used by the Daily Free Press editors to post archived posts from previous iterations of the site or otherwise for special circumstance publications. See authorship info on the byline at the top of the page.
