“My first record ever was a yellow 7″ that I do not remember the name of. It was an eerie couple of kid’s songs and I somewhat remember—a chorus of men singing lyrics about a girls head falling off. I fucking loved it, but alas I was only 2 or 3, and the record probably didn’t even survive till I was 3 or 4. (Kids are hard on stuff.)”
“I grew up in a fairly censored household. My parents were very religious and didn’t allow me to listen to anything that wasn’t Christian. So I grew up listening to a lot of shit. But there was one guy, Russ Taff, who was, and IS excellent, in spite (if you will) of his religious lyrical agenda. I got his tape Medals and I remember I used to just keep flipping it over and playing it through.
It had musical depth and cool sounds and groove and reverbs and chorus and distortion and huge 80s drum machine drums and synthesizers and pretty much everything I love most about music. Seriously, check it out. If you can’t get past the fact that it’s probably about something you don’t believe in and appreciate, the awesome 80s pop/rock masterpiece that it is, then you’re probably pretty fucking dumb.
The rest of my childhood music experience was a lot like having sex with out cumming. I would listen to music and analyze it, but in the end it didn’t move me emotionally because most of it was either K-LOVE or main stream country.
When I was a little older I heard Juturna by Circa Survive in my friend’s car and I was hooked. It was this wall of sound with so many layers. It was emotional and raw. I put on headphones and walked for miles at night soaking it up. It was a soundtrack to a lot of self discovery and experimentation.
Next came Deloused in the Comatorium by The Mars Volta. That album for me was more engaging than any movie or video game or mix of senses times 10. There’s the term “better than sex,” but it literally distracted me from having sex once—a funny story, but I won’t get into it. It was this emotional journey that you could take over and over again, but never ever get tired of because it was so intricate that you could never fully come to a conclusion as to how they had written some parts of it, or what was actually happening musically.
I was drumming a lot back then and Jon Theodore pretty much instantly became my hero, which in turn led to me purchasing my second record ever. Theodore had listed Billy Cobham as one of his influences in an interview I read. I ran across a vinyl record titled Best of Billy Cobham that was in pretty great shape at a thrift store, so I bought it, came home and hooked up the record player—and so the journey began. Super sad news: that record broke in my last move.
Last but not least, in fact perhaps most… Mew’s And The Glass Handed Kites.
I think this record turned me onto the idea of dance music as a whole. If I had never heard this record, I’d be an entirely different musician today. The whole thing felt like deja vu. Something about that album reminds me of childhood. Not necessarily of a memory but of just being a child. It’s innocent, yet perplexing like something you can never get all the way back to.
It happened when more people would still listen to a record all the way through. People were downloading, but there was no Spotify or Soundcloud or a million other ways to stream whatever record you wanted. I think the faith they had in their listeners to listen to the whole album really gave them the artistic freedom to create a masterpiece.”
—Dustin Brown
“Getchya So Good” is taken from NTNT’s sophomore EP, “And Then the Moon” which lands on store shelves February 24th.
