Catching up with Milo Greene

SoCal natives Milo Greene are exploding onto the indie folk scene right now with their impressive eponymous debut album. Before hitting the road to embark on a summer tour through the coastal U.S., multi-instrumentalist Graham Fink took some time to chat with music editor Sydney Moyer on folk revivals, imaginary people, and professional soccer.

SM: So I know that you all had solo projects before coming together as Milo Greene…how did the band take shape?

GF: Andrew and Marlana were making music up in Northern California together and Robbie and Curtis were in a band in LA, and I was in a band in LA. They all kind of knew each other from college, and they started sending songs back and forth and then ended up writing some stuff together and realizing that they liked it more than the individual bands they were in at the time. My band and Robbie’s band had played together a few times and we had kind of become friends, so he told me that they had written some songs, and that it was starting to turn into something and then I heard like two songs and I was sold, and we were kind of together from there.

SM: This album will serve as the band’s debut…what was it like recording an LP together for the first time?

GF: It was a really long process—I mean, we did a lot of the recording up at Bear Creek in Seattle but there are pieces on the record of five or six different recording sessions that we did at friends’ houses and family homes throughout California…it’s a bit of a hodgepodge, you know, different sounds, different pieces of songs from over the past two years. So it’s been a long line, but we’re just very happy that’s it’s finally coming out.

SM: Milo Greene has no lead singer, so you all just interchange musical roles in different songs. How does that affect the band’s writing process? Do you write together?

GF: Yeah, I mean, four of us are songwriters, so every song is different. One person will bring an idea maybe half-complete or complete or just one melody and the rest of us will help it grow. It’s very collaborative, and every song comes from a different place. And then when we’re out performing that song, it’s kind of just whatever feels natural. We’ll move around and switch instruments until we find what makes sense. On every song, we’re switching instruments and we’re moving around and playing different roles, you know, I’ll go from singing lead on a song to just playing shaker and keyboard, and it’s the same for pretty much everyone in the band. It’s kind of cool because you never get bored of one thing because you’re constantly running around the stage doing something else.

SM: What would you say are some of the driving inspirations behind the record, in terms of either lyrics or production?

GF: I mean, production and feel-wise, this band as a collective has always been really inspired by film, so I think one of the driving forces behind the music that we make is always thinking about it and setting visuals and kind of having a cinematic quality, so we wanted to make an album that you could get lost in it a little bit. Lyrics-wise, we weave a lot of simplicity and repetition and just try to find phrases and ideas that kind of capture this feeling, you know, sometimes tug at the heartstrings. I think we wanted to make a record that had a lot of emotional grit to it. We only really used songs that we all collectively agreed really hit us emotionally.

SM: I understand that Milo Greene is the name of the mysterious fictional character behind your music. Could you talk about that a little bit?

GF: [laughs] Yeah, when everybody was in college in different bands, there was the idea that came from somewhere to create a fake booking agent/manager type person to seem more professional. So at some point this person took shape into Milo Greene— a fake person with an email address that would send out to clubs and promoters trying to get shows for these separate bands that everybody was in. And then when the band came together with all of us, it felt fitting to pay a little tribute back to the character that helped everybody along the way.

SM: What music would you cite as influences on the record?

GF: It’s all over the place, with the four of us. We definitely have areas where we agree—Fleetwood Mac is a big one, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, stuff like that, Radiohead, Fleet Foxes, really the obvious ones that are very loveable. But I come from more of a rock background, you know, David Bowie, Talking Heads, whereas Marlana is a big fan of pop and melody…Robbie’s a little bit weirder, he’s more into the indie/experimental side of things and across the board eclectic, and Andrew comes from more of a singer-songwriter place originally, you know, he loves Ryan Adams and Delta Spirit and stuff like that. So you know there’s a big venn diagram, a big overlap, we’re all kind of in different corners, so it’s nice having all of us come together because I think it makes our music a hybrid of a lot of different voices.

SM: Entertainment Weekly printed last fall that readers should listen to Milo Greene if they like the band Mumford & Sons- how do you feel about this comparison?

GF: I mean, we’re happy with it, I think they’re great band, so it’s hard to complain. I think there’s a lot of easy comparisons that you get that, you know, some are closer than others, but they all revolve around this idea of this folk revival. You know, we get compared to Ed Sharpe and our buddies Local Natives and stuff like that—The Head and the Heart. And I don’t think any of us ever envisioned sounding like any of these bands, not that we dislike any of them, we think they’re all great, but it’s kind of funny, it’s like you play one song with a banjo and all of a sudden, you are a folk band in the eyes of the world. And it wasn’t exactly like we started a band and said, “hey, you know, we’re gonna be this folk band and part of this movement!” [laughs], we just kind of got lumped into it, but I mean, it’s all good bands, so can’t really complain.

SM: If you weren’t making music now, what do you think you’d be doing instead?

GF: Professional soccer.

SM: Professional soccer, really? What position? 

GF: Probably center mid, although it depends. [laughs] It’s half a joke, but it’s half the dream I had before I got so into music. I traded a soccer scholarship to play music and stay in California to try to stay with the band I was in. I don’t regret it at all, but somewhere out there, my soccer dreams are existing in an alternate reality [laughs].

Milo Greene is playing the Middle East (upstairs) in Cambridge on July 28.