Lightouts released their fourth single, “The Cure for Shyness” just last week. Check it out right here!
“My earliest memory of vinyl is a slinky one.”
“When I was in 1st grade, my parents would send me to my babysitter with a selection of my favorite records. By far, my fave was the “The Pink Panther Theme” by Henry Mancini . I would play it over and over, spinning in circles and playing a mean air sax until my babysitter would make me play something else. At that point, slink would turn into slither as the Jungle Book’s “Trust In Me” played over and over.
Childhood vinyl took a backseat to cassettes and CDs until high school, when my friends and I discovered the pleasures of mixing weed with our parents’ old record collections. My parent’s collection was eclectic for their generation—not a Beatles or Stones album to be had, but there were staples like Fleetwood Mac, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and oddities like Tiny Tim and The Kingston Trio that would become major influences to my songwriting.
As I started writing my own music, vinyl continued to play a role. At one point I sampled an LP of Vietnam War sounds to in an attempt to emulate the amazingness that is Ministry’s “The Land Of Rape And Honey.” My young career in industrial music didn’t make it much further than my bedroom though.
Fast forward to college in the mid 90s and my first official release with a band was on a white vinyl 7″. We were a punk band called silver. (no typo there—we were an official lowercase-spelling-buttressed-by-a-period band), and releasing 7″ singles was what you did in that era, especially if you wanted to get a coveted review in Maximum Rock N’ Roll.
One of the coolest things about 7″ culture at that time was the split single. We paired up with a punk band from Ohio, split the pressing costs, and each put two songs on a side. It’s a wonderfully lofi collaborative endeavor.
Greg and I plan on doing a split single for Lightouts’ first foray into vinyl, hopefully in late Spring. The question is, who’s gonna have our back on the flipside?”
—Gavin Rhodes
