Spotlight On The Shadowboxers

You’re doing showcases, and your band seems to be getting more attention, and yet you’ve been around since 2007 – so what exactly is going on?

Adam: I think we feel right now like a brand new band. We’ve been around for eight years and we have a record. We’re proud of it but we don’t feel like it’s even a good representation of what we’re doing now, what we stand for or what we sound like.

About two years ago we got a new bass player and drummer and everything just sort of changed. We feel like whatever we put out next will be our “first” record. That’s also because Red Room, our first album, didn’t really make any splash so we’re lucky that we get that opportunity again.

When people ask what we sound like, Red Room has straight folk on it but we’re pretty much a soul/funk band with a ton of pop influence. I see us as a year-and-a-half-old band.

Scott: – That has done seven years of development.

So you just came back from Electric Forest.

Scott: Yeah. Wild! Wild.

Matt: Absolutely mind-blowing.

Scott: Let’s just say we played for a lot of “very enthusiastic people.” We had two sets. We had a 5:30 set, which was fun. I think it took people about five or six songs because there weren’t a lot of bands like us there. They were either jam bands or EDM so it took people several songs to collectively decide if it was cool or not. The second set was the same way but it was 11:30 p.m. at a hidden stage in the woods that had this elaborate design to it. Once the people committed to like the second set, it was a lot of fun.

Matt: It was one of the strangest shows we’ve ever played.

Maybe strange but you’d do it again?

Matt: Oh, absolutely.

Scott: It was odd. There was a variety show on right before us. Stilts, clowns, girls dressed up like Marie Antoinette.

So what’s your gauge on the people you work with in the business?

Scott: Oh, we’ve got a great team we’ve put together. Part of it was when we moved to Nashville. I think that’s when we consolidated the team. We love Ali Harnell and Carolyn Snell [of Twelve5 Management] and Jay Williams and Matt Elam [of WME] have been great. We actually just met with Jay in New York. We were playing the Bowery Ballroom and actually sold it out, which was our first time playing that room so it was gratifying. He was there with Ali and we had dinner. He’s just great; he cares about what we’re doing and invests in it. We’re really happy with everyone we have on our team so far.

So you have a fan in Justin Timberlake?

Adam: It’s very apparent on Twitter, which is super cool. He’s a big supporter and wants to help any way he can. It’s a very exciting time for us.

How did he learn of you?

Matt: We don’t know! All we know is he saw a cover of ours [“Pusher Love Girl”] on YouTube that we did for a cover series that we did last July. It was not even a week after we posted it, he retweeted it with a really sweet comment.

Adam: It’s one of those things where you cover one of your favorite artists and you send it to them on Twitter, but you don’t think they’ll actually see it. And we’re not sure if that’s how he saw it or someone showed it to him, but he reached out to us afterward. It was a Christmas morning kind of moment. We were all together in Nashville and just lost our minds.

Matt: It literally was like Christmas morning. We were jumping on top of beds.

So, generally, what do you think your lives will be like next summer?

Scott: Man. I hope we’re playing a lot of the bigger festivals. Hopefully by then we’ll have our second album, or even an EP that we can push. Some new material.

Adam: And doing the Bowery last week was a taste of what we would dream our lives could be like on a consistent basis. I think a year from now a lofty but maybe realistic goal is we’d be playing 600-person rooms all around the country with music to promote.

What about touring for the rest of the year?  

Scott: We really don’t know what our touring will look like. We just know the next record is our priority. How long that’s going to take is sort of a mystery.

How about the fanbase? How’s that building now?

Adam: It’s kind of cool because we have been a band for quite a while. We’ve spent two years touring with the Indigo Girls, which was super interesting. We had a decent fanbase but it wasn’t a lot of younger people, or people who were into the music we were playing. Then, when we did the cover series on YouTube and got the Timberlake bump, a lot of people coming to our shows would tell us they saw us on YouTube. That was the coolest thing to us because that was the whole idea of the series. We’re not going into the studio right now so our fanbase got plugged in through YouTube.

Scott: But even now, our agent, Jay Williams – I’ll quote him – after he saw the show at Bowery he said, “I’ve been here a million times and this is the most diverse crowd I’ve ever seen.”

And I think the reason for that is because our music has a broad appeal but because we started in college we’ve got the more young, professional fans and then we toured with Indigo Girls and got an older fanbase, then the YouTube series attracted more of a soul-loving / R&B audience. And maybe our personalities – I dunno – maybe our Instagram postings and humor attract even a different audience.

We kind of like that we’re appealing to different types of people and that the music has broad acceptance, which is what pop is about.