Recently, Houseguests, the four piece indie-rock outfit born in Allston, invited me to talk with them while they practiced for their upcoming show at T.T. the Bears. Not only did they sound tight, polished, and ready for Wednesday night, but Noah Yastrow (guitar, lead vocals), Graham Cooke (bass, lead vocals), Evan Radkey (lead guitar), and Evan Linsey (drums, vocals) proved themselves as some of the nicest dudes in the Allston music scene. While practicing, Houseguests radiated the energy of four great friends who truly love playing music together. As a new Fall semester begins, Houseguests is heading into their third year together, and with graduation from BU on the horizon for 75 percent of the band I asked the band about future plans, songwriting, and creative synergy.
Allston Pudding: Noah, according to bandcamp originally Houseguests was comprised of you and some family members, Steve, Arna and Levi, right?
Noah Yastrow: Alright so Houseguests was me and Evan [Radkey] to start. The original EP was recorded by us two in my basement in Chicago. Arna and Steve are my parents *chuckles*. We just say Arna on the record because she housed us, gave us food, and paid for us to go to and fro.
AP: She was the band mom.
NY: Exactly!
Graham Cooke: Fro?
NY: So Evan and I recorded in my basement.
AP: Are you both from Chicago?
NY: No, no. I’m from Chicago. He’s from San Francisco, but we flew out to Chicago over Thanksgiving break of our sophomore year, two years ago now. I have a studio in my basement, and my dad actually hired my cousin, Doug, who’s a professional engineer. Doug’s actually done work on both of our albums. He engineered our first album, and actually recorded some bass tracks. My brother did all the drums, and my dad did some guitar.
AP: So was Houseguests originally your brainchild?
NY: To start, to start.
AP: Graham and Evan [Linsey] joined up in December of 2012?
NY: Yeah it was like right before winter break. We played like a couple times together before, but we kind of started writing right after winter break. The first song we wrote was “Little Rumble,” but yeah they came in and it was more of a process of figuring out if we could play together initially.
AP: How did Graham and Evan [Linsey] come into the band?
Evan Radkey: Well I actually met Graham in a School of Management class. I played in a band in high school, and we went on Warped Tour, which was really fun. So, I gave a presentation on that, it was like a little introduction sort of thing. Graham was in this class, and saw that I had played this festival. So he was like “Hey! You play music!” And I told him about Houseguests, and auditioned him. We met Evan at a gig we were playing over at BU Central. We just met him, sorta recruited you guys. It was essentially one try out.
AP: Then the pieces just fell into place?
NY: It was a conscious decision though. Evan [Radkey] and I wanted to go beyond us just playing acoustic guitars together.
GC: *Chuckles* Radkey was like “come jam with us!” Right, and two years later here we are! Like, oh shit, how the hell did that happen?!
AP: So, Evan [Linsey] and Graham, as you guys have come into Houseguests have you brought a distinctive creative style to the band? When it comes to songwriting as a band, do you all democratically collaborate, or does any one person particularly take the lead?
NY: It’s 25/25/25/25, yeah.
AP: Right on.
ER: It’s very democratic, which has its challenges, but it’s all of our influences and all of our styles that gives us the best product. Rather than just one of us dominating it, because everyone has something to add.
Evan Linsey: I think we all have our unique musical skills and know-how, and we can all come together to create something cohesive.
GC: In terms of actually writing, what tends to happen is that one of us will bring just a piece of something to the table, like a guitar riff, or two of us will work on fleshing out a chorus or something then we all bring it together and it’s like…Um, I hate to use this ridiculous business term but it really is a synergy.
AP: You’d call it a synergistic effort?
GC: Yeah man, a synergistic creative effort *chuckles*.
NY: (Pointing at Graham and Evan Radkey) They call it that.
GC: *Laughing* But yeah I really think that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
AP: Fantabulous, so this question goes for everyone. How long have you been playing music for?
NY: I started with piano when I was like seven, but I quit a few years after that. I started playing bass when I was ten. Then I picked up a guitar when I was thirteen.
ER: I started with piano too actually. Just could never appreciate the instrument, and it actually made me dislike music, which is a shame. It’s a great instrument. If I had time I would go back I’d like to go back and learn a little bit. But, I played metal for awhile, and I saw this band Avenged Sevenfold, and this guy Synyster Gates just shredding up there, and was like “I want to be that guy.”
AP: So do you come from a metal background musically?
ER: Yeah that’s what I really grew up playing, and then I sort of opened my mind to other styles of music. Later on when I decided to go to BU I met this guy [Noah], and we just started playing a whole new style of music.
GC: Do you know The Story so Far?
AP: Yep
GC: They opened for Radkey’s old band [It Starts With Alaska] *chuckles*
AP: No shit?!
ER: Yeah now it’s the other way around!
GC: Yeah, if you’re listening The Story so Far we will gladly open for you!
EL: *Chuckles* Yeah so I played piano for a long time, and then in high school I picked up drums and bass guitar. And then I wasn’t really sure what I was going to be playing in college. I didn’t even bring a drum set to school. But, once I met these guys I started getting invested in this.
GC: I started playing music around the age of seven. I was enrolled in an acoustic guitar class, but I didn’t take it seriously. I hadn’t delved into music, yet. Eleven or twelve I got really into pop punk and some hardcore, and that made me pick up a bass because three friends and I were going to form a band, but I was the only one that actually learned an instrument. So I was like, “okay well maybe I should play guitar too, because it’s kind of hard to play bass by yourself.” So yeah, now here we are. I play some rudimentary drums as well, and now I’m the third least shitty drummer in Housguests.
AP: So Noah, you exclusively wrote the lyrics on the first album, right?
NY: Yeah, I wrote the lyrics for the first album, and I wrote the majority of lyrics for the second album. I mean we all collaborated on a lot of the lyrics for the songs, but I wrote most of them. “This Machine,” Graham wrote lyrically, and mostly musically.
AP: Initially, what did you want to accomplish with Houseguests? What sort of band did you want Houseguests to be?
NY: For me personally it was less about… I never thought it was going to get to this stage, man. It was just about not doing school work all the time, just having something else to do.
GC: *Chuckles* Ya know, creating beautiful music, reaching out to the hearts of people…
NY: *Chuckles* The answer is I love music so much I wanted to do it instead of school!
ER: I don’t know, man. I wanted to play psychedelic funk, but [Noah] was like “nah, we’re not doing that.” You know we were just acoustic so it’s hard to say, just us two for awhile, so even at first the thought of new members was like, “Oh I kinda like what we’re doing just us two.” But ya know, change is good. When we got these guys we got a more rocky vibe, and now we’re more of a full fledged rock band.
EL: I think too, that when we started playing together it was more about learning what [Evan Radkey and Noah] had already written, and adding bass and drum lines to that. But, as we developed musically…our tastes were pretty disparate to begin with. Like my idea of what we should sound like was very different from Graham’s. Graham showed us the intro to “The Little Rumble,” and it was a pop punk riff, so I was like “I don’t know if that’s the right thing for this band.” But we worked on it and found a commonality.
AP: Right, the synergy that Graham mentioned earlier.
GC: Yeah, and then we wrote a “doo-wop” part. *chuckles*
AP: Yeah! How did that happen? That part sounds phenomenal on “This Machine.”
NY: Graham literally came to practice and was like, “We should write a doo-wop part!” And we were all like, “yeah!”
GC: Okay so, except for “The Little Rumble” we wrote pretty much all of the songs for Year of The Pilot in like three months, and I really wanted a song where I sang the lead vocals because fuck you guys *chuckles* So I wrote “This Machine” a few weeks before we left for California to record. I tend to write pretty quickly, so I came to the table with the bare bones of “This Machine.” Then Linsey was like, okay so how about these four doo-wop chords? Then there it was! We try not to follow the archetype of what an indie band should be.
NY: Yeah, and we like to surprise the fuck out of people!
EL: It’s nice because we tend to take ourselves like pretty seriously. Like Year of the Pilot can be pretty dark, so it’s nice to have a moment like that.
AP: In the past, you guys have been compared to Local Native and Band of Horses. Which bands or who as an artist inspires Houseguests?
ER: My favorite band, Local Native. I love a lot of the stuff they do. I don’t know if the vocal work, or the harmonies that we do are exclusively Local Native, we just got a bunch of guys who can sing, so from that perspective, totally. Personally, they’re a huge influence.
GC: I’ve been listening to a lot of Wu Tang, so you we’ll hear how that comes through on future music.
NY: I’m really into Weatherbox, they’re a very cool, punk rock band.
AP: Word. So what’s next for you guys?
GC: We might go…I’ve got a friend, an “associate” who plays in a band in Connecticut, where I’m from, and they’ve been blowing up in the last few years. They’ve sort of been the flag bearers for the emo revival movement. It’s looking like we may record with one of the guitarists from [an awesome, established emo revival band that this writer is hyped about but the band doesn’t want to make it public yet until it’s confirmed]. It makes sense because we’re influenced by that sort of American Football sound. Personally, I’m stoked to release new music.
NY: Well we actually just bought a van, so hopefully it’ll be easier to get to shows, recording studios and such. Right now, we’re working on scouting and kind of planning for tours, but we’ve got some local shows booked. And as Graham said, we’re getting back into the writing process and are hunting down engineers to record. This Wednesday, the 17th we’re playing T.T. the Bears with Bent Shapes, Yeehaw, and Daphne. The following Sunday, the 21st, we’re playing the Allston Village street fair. We’re playing a bar in Lowell on October 4th, and then we’re playing Church on October 29th, and November 7th we’re playing a benefit concert at BU Central. And, if anyone wants to throw a basement show hit us up!
GC: Yeah man we love doing basement shows.
ER: Yeah, we’ll be working on some basement shows.
GC: We’ll be in the Tri-State area over weekends and breaks. We’re definitely going to do some serious touring because although we joke around a little bit, but we’re all very serious about this band, and we want to continue full time after we graduate.
NY: The future of Houseguests sort of depends on how things play out this year. It’s the idea, and unless something dramatically terrible happens, you know, we want to keep playing music together.
GC: Also, it’s the only thing we’re good at….I speak for all of us. You guys all suck at everything else you do except for Houseguests, so you can’t leave!
NY, ER, EL: *Laughter*
ER: Regretting every day we gave you a mic, man!
AP: What’s the most embarrassing thing that’s happened to you all on stage?
GC: Well we kept Noah in the band.
NY: *laughing* Yeah man, I fucking came up with the name for this band man!
GC: Two shows in a row, I don’t know why because it never happened in practice, but I’d go to sing and my voice was just *noise like a cat in a blender full of gravel*.
ER: Remember Roggies? It was our first go at our first song, and your voice cracked. That was one of our less good concerts. But, we had a good time.
NY: Yeah, just minor technical hiccups. Like one time I played a full step lower than I was supposed to play. But, we’ve all had our minor missteps on stage shit happens, live music is live music. That being said, we’re sounding better than we’ve ever sounded before, so hopefully these hiccups happen less *laughs*
AP: Oh yes. So do you all have a band drink?
NY: Only three of us are twenty one so…
EL: I’ve never had a drink in my life. Alcohol is illegal, and I do not condone the use of it. What is alcohol?
NY: For me it’s rye whiskey, Bulleit rye.
ER: Dark for me it’s probably Jägermeister. I like the flavor, I’ll just buy a bottle to drink straight, which really grosses a lot of people out.
NY: He doesn’t even wait until he’s outside Blanchards.
ER: *Chuckles* Lately though I’ve been digging gin also.
GC: I’ve been known to have a few. I enjoy alcohol. I think it lessens the nerves, and it makes me think that I’m funnier than I really am, much to the bands’ dismay. Dark beer like stouts, or gin.
AP: Anyone that you guys want to give a shout out to?
GC: My Friend, Zach Haughn- he listened to one of our songs and was like “I like that one part, on that one song, that little rumble part,” which was on “Wooden Kingdoms,” and that’s where we got the name for “The Little Rumble.” Also a Professor of mine, who, for the sake of his job will remain nameless, he came to our first house show, which was like something out of a college movie. We were two songs in and a friend came up to me so I started thinking that something is horribly wrong and she just says, “Our professor is here.” I look over and there he is just in the middle of this basement in Allston, so I yello into the mic “Everyone! My fucking professor is here! Give it up for Mr._______!” All of a sudden, a hundred drunk Allston kids start cheering for this dude. It was incredible.
ER: I want to give a shout out to the brothers of Lambda Chi Alpha at BU. [Graham]’s a brother, and they’ve been so good to us throughout our existence as a band. It was their basement that we practiced in the last two years, and we had a few house shows that went over super well. They’re all super nice, and are good buddies of ours. We wouldn’t exist without them.
EL: For me I’d shout out to my friend Maggie Swanson, because I asked her to go see Houseguests one night playing BU Central. If she hadn’t gone with me then I probably wouldn’t have gone, and stayed in my room like a loser, and not met these guys, and then I wouldn’t be here.
NY: Shout out to my parents for purchasing the van for the band.
ER: Steve Yastrow, Noah’s dad, has been huge on the music side. He paid for the production on the first album, and helped us workshop songs, and just understand what we were doing from a theory sense.
GC: I’d like to shout out Nick Squir, Coleman Clancy, Nathan Klingher, and Brendan Travers. Some of my best friends in the world- they helped me through some rough shit. We play music because we love it and have a lot of love for the people around us. Also, WTBU who got us a gig at Brighton Music Hall last year, specifically John-Michael Sedor. Playing Brighton Music Hall was a dream that the band shared since we formed, and we’re all stoked that it happened.
Check out Houseguests on Bandcamp, and see their show with Bent Shapes, Yeehaw! and Daphne Wednesday, September 17th at T.T. the Bear’s.