This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[0:09] Robert Bannon: Well, welcome to the round table, everybody. My name is Robert Bannon, and you're listening to us on Broadway World over here on the Broadway Podcast Network, iHeart, Spotify, wherever you listen to artists talking about art. I love, you ever have a band, you know, when you have a band in like high school and you grow up with people and you meet in my head. This band met. They were like in the band room. This might be a lie, but they were like in the band room and they met each other and they like practiced in garages and annoyed their families with their rehearsing, and then all of a sudden they become a thing and they become a big deal, and they go on tour and they put out albums, and then they disappear for a minute, and then they come back with more albums that are incredible and go back on the road.

Is this story true? We're gonna find out because the band is here, everybody. Atta Boy, they're here right now, and I want you to know that July 17th at the Bowery Ballroom and Silt, the LP is out, out, out. You need to be streaming it right now.

[1:02] Robert Bannon: Well, would you mind going to ladies first? Would you mind introducing yourself and what you do with the band, and we'll go down the road?

[1:09] Eden Brolin: Yes, thank you. I'm Eden. I sing, and I play guitar.

[1:24] Dashel Thompson: I'm Dashel and I play the keys.

[1:26] Freddie Reish: I'm Freddie and I play guitar. And our buddy Lewis is a drummer, and together they make Atta Boy, and they are out here on the road.

[1:36] Robert Bannon: So Eden, you play guitar and sing, and I joke and say you really sing, but you like really sing. When did you discover you can sing?

[1:45] Eden Brolin: I don't know. It's just been a long time. I've been in choir for as long as I can remember, and I feel like I was sort of just placed there. I think it was one of those things that sort of came to me through that and singing communally. I think singing communally is such a magical thing to get to do anyway, and it really helps kind of your imagination sort of melodically flow and figure out what things sound like with different vocals around and how to really concentrate your ear and your sound. So that was a long, that was probably not probably five or six years old, but it's always been a fun pastime. I would sit in my mom's closet and write little songs on GarageBand and make harmonies on it. I just was obsessed with harmonizing too.

[2:40] Robert Bannon: See, I'd be fired because I, with we're harmonizing, I'm just gonna sing the melody and you're just gonna have to deal with it, cause that's all I got. That's why I'm not in a band touring around the world right now.

[2:49] Eden Brolin: That's what you play, your synth and the keys of it all. And sometimes what I love about your sound is the synth sound, that epic sound in the background that kind of gives it a nostalgic indie. I don't know how to describe it, you gotta listen to the music to describe it. How do you all work in creating this music? Do you fight? Do you throw things? Is there like, you know, music stands thrown through windows, or are you all just making music together in a fun, joyful way?

[3:15] Dashel Thompson: No, I think our creative process is so lovely just because we've gotten, I mean, we've had so many years to refine it essentially. I feel really lucky that these guys are always coming in with really constructive things to say. If they don't like something that I have, it's not, you know, it's not stands through windows. It's like, okay, well, what if we adjust it this way? What if we adjust it that way? You know, that synth pad that you're using needs a little bit more high end, it needs less low end, whatever. Those kinds of like little adjustments rather than just like no scrap the whole thing. It's just a beautiful thing. Well, that you know, Eden can come in with a fully written song, or Freddie and I can have been jamming on something that Eden's like, I really like that.

Let's run with it. We have so many different ways that we can work together to make these songs that we're so proud of. So as constructive as it is, I think that there are music stands being thrown sometimes on the inside.

[4:12] Freddie Reish: Yeah, um, but I think we've gotten pretty good, especially as we've gotten older, and just have known each other so long as a group that we're pretty effective at communicating feedback and also being able to take that feedback too.

[4:26] Robert Bannon: I love it. Freddie, you're playing the guitar and writing some. Do you know, Freddie? If you Google your name, Freddie, there is another Freddie that has your name that is way more scary than you with a lot of tattoos, and he has a very big guitar and he looks very angry. And I was very confused because you came on versus the picture on Google, which was a very scary man. So I'm so happy you seem lovely and charming.

[4:53] Freddie Reish: Can you please send me whoever this is?

[4:56] Robert Bannon: I'm gonna find it for you, and I'm gonna DM it to you or something on social media because he was a scary person that didn't fit what I thought the band was about.

[5:05] Freddie Reish: I'm glad I positively catfished you.

[5:08] Robert Bannon: Yeah, you're a good, it was a good catfish.

[5:10] Freddie Reish: Yeah, so Freddie, how do you describe the sound of what you all put together? Is there a way to describe it?

[5:17] Freddie Reish: Um, to ask this question. Yeah, I would say it's good music.

[5:26] Robert Bannon: It's good. I like that answer. That's nice.

[5:32] Freddie Reish: But like, you know, indie rock. Sometimes we lean more Americana, sometimes a little more like indie pop.

[5:41] Robert Bannon: Yeah, all the way from indie rock to indie pop, the whole spectrum. See, I love that. So, Eden, you guys have a new, firstly, I have to say, I really, really love, and you can be streaming it right now. "Oh Mama" is an incredible song, is a beautiful song that you need to listen to. Like I told you all, they're an incredible band, and Eden sings her teeth out. And what I love about this is that you guys are on the road, like right this second. Like you're about to hit the road. So while we're talking, you can go to weareattaboy.com and shows starting July 9th and going all the way into the fall. What is the, have you talked about? Do you know what your live show is gonna be like? What you're gonna pull from the old stuff, the new stuff? Are you excited?

[6:24] Eden Brolin: Very excited, very curious to know how these songs are gonna play live. We just started practice in the last couple of days, and so we're just sort of starting to get our feet under us. I think it's gonna be a really healthy combination, and then a couple that I think we've wanted to play in the past that have just been shelved for whatever reason. And so, because it continues to make it interesting for us too to get to go back into the old work and sort of be like, ooh, let's try this out. Let's see how this sounds. So hopefully it'll be a nice mix of the new record because these are gonna be set as release shows. So I think we're gonna play a lot of the new record and then we'll pull some things that we have seen in the past people really enjoy hearing, and then some that will be just for our pleasure, probably.

[7:23] Dashel Thompson: But yeah.

[7:24] Robert Bannon: I love that. Dash, you guys are not just doing LA and New York, you're going through the South, through Middle America, the Midwest, all across the country. How's it feel to be able to get on the road and play, you know, Nashville and Texas and bring this music to all sorts of people all around the country?

[7:42] Dashel Thompson: Oh, it's so incredible. We're so lucky to be able to do this. I mean, I'll speak for myself, but I think these guys probably agree. We really love being on the road. We fell in love with it when we first started doing it a couple of years ago. We were very tentative as a group to kind of start playing live. And so it wasn't always a guarantee that we would be doing this. As you said in your intro, we started obviously when we were at high school, and it was kind of this thing that we did as a one-off album, and then we went away for a long time, living our lives as young adults and came back to it only like right before the pandemic started. Literally, we recorded the second album, you know, like a couple weeks before everything shut down.

And so touring wasn't really a thing that we thought would be in the cards for us. But I don't know what finally made us flip the switch. We played like four shows in 2023. And I think that really changed a lot for us. Just being able to be together in this concentrated way when we're all living kind of across the country is really special. And then, like you said, being able to bring the music to people is so, so incredible. I wouldn't trade it for anything. We're really stoked to be able to play a bunch of places we've never played before. We've been lucky enough to play in Nashville previously, but yeah, like Texas, we've never been to, Oklahoma, we've never been to, Indiana, we've never been to. So we're playing a bunch of places we've never gotten to go. And again, being on the road is just so much fun. We're absolutely, absolutely stoked.

[9:07] Robert Bannon: I'm excited. I'm so excited. If I'm in New York, I'm gonna be in, I'm waiting for a, you know, you could come to Detroit. You could play in my backyard. I'm in Detroit right now, you could play in my backyard.

[9:17] Dashel Thompson: I know. I don't know why we keep getting like, they keep kind of ducking Detroit from us because I feel like we hear a lot of people being like, you know, you could come to Detroit.

[9:28] Robert Bannon: It's like you could hang out, I'll hang out with you. I'll bring you a vegan cone dog or, you know, some cheese fries.

[9:36] Freddie Reish: So, Freddie, now I'm gonna ask you a question, and now I don't I want to ask the wrong person the wrong question. You came through though in the end, Freddie. You came through. I was proud of you. So have you is my story about you all meeting in school and like finding out you all play is it somewhat the truth? How did it happen?

[9:54] Freddie Reish: Yeah, that it's that was pretty accurate on how it started. I mean, we were in homeroom in middle school, like all three years of middle school, and Lewis came in seventh grade, and we were like in and out of music class together. Um, and um Dash and I had been trying to get like start a band and had some failed versions of that. And then one day we asked Eden if she wanted to write some songs with us. Um, and she said yes, and we went to a park right around here and wrote a song about some crows, and then we're like, oh, we need a drummer, and we obviously like okay. Um, and we asked Lou and had our first band practice at his parents' house, and came up with the name, and that's how it all started.

And we haven't, I mean, except for the eight years where we stopped, but we haven't stopped since then. I think the biggest the biggest inaccuracy in in your uh fantasy story is that we had any semblance of success before year like four that our first record was out. We had this among our family, couple of close friends that you know like to come to our practices. But um, but yeah.

[11:12] Eden Brolin: How do you describe what happened then, Eden? Like, was it you're four years in, you're playing in your family's garage, the basement? You have a rec, you this is your fourth record that's coming out. So at some point, someone must have said, you know what? Attaboy has something worth sharing to the world. How did it happen?

[11:32] Eden Brolin: I think that uh I think that we owe a lot of our like initial first wave uh following to um Marcel the Shell. Oh Jenny Slate to Jenny Slate, no, not Jenny Slate. Was it Jenny Slate? Yeah, yeah. Jenny Slate like posted Walden Pond on like Instagram or something, and I remember we got like, are you in this band? Did you want to do you want to take a moment to hear the hear the story? It's about you. Like it was 2016. I woke up to a text from Emily. Okay. Um, and it was just a screenshot of Instagram. That's so funny. And all of a sudden, yeah, people were like, Hey, you should check out a boy's Spotify. Cause we had what that would have been, yeah, 2016, four years after we released the album. And all of a sudden we had like, you know, tens of thousands of monthly listeners, and we were like, What is going on? Um, and we don't really know what happened besides the Jenny Slate post.

[12:34] Dashel Thompson: Yeah. People connected to your music and to your sound and the message that that you're sharing with it, and that's so incredible and so beautiful. Dashell, now that you have this new album after the break, and now that you heard the story about how this happened for you, yeah. How is it to reconvene after an eight-year break and and and get together and get back in the booth and record and and and to and to start working together on a more consistent basis?

[13:00] Dashel Thompson: I mean, like I said about being on the road, it really is such a like incredible thing to have known these people since we were like, you know, 12 or 10 or whatever it was when we first met, and to now be these adults allegedly, um, is really incredible. Um, and to have had all the time together and to watch each other grow um is really special. Um, but to be doing it also in this way where we're creating together and making music that we feel really passionately about and feel really proud of. Um, again, I I wouldn't really trade it for anything. Um, that first album in what we were started recording in 2020, um, back from the break. I mean, that was our second album overall, um, Big Heart Manners.

Um, that we definitely some growing pains in making that. I think we had to figure out how to work together again because it had been so long and we were like kind of different people, even if at our core we were the same people, of course. Um, but it was there was definitely some lessons, I think, to learn in in how to collaborate again. Um, but being able to carry that from now from then to now, um, I think has done a lot for our creative process in being able to effectively communicate, to effectively write music together, to be on the road, you know, tight quarters in the van and whatever space we're sharing, um, and being able to work together in those ways. I I I don't I don't think we would be able to be here without having had that first initial kind of like, oh, wait a minute, how do we do this? Um kind of moment when we first reconvened.

[14:39] Robert Bannon: I think that is what is so exciting and so incredible about this that everybody needs to stream the album and get a ticket to go see you. So, Freddie, what does Silt mean? Why is this why is the album called Silt?

[14:51] Freddie Reish: Um wrong question. You could you could phone a friend, you could find somebody else. Um the originally the song Silt was real was written as a as a song exercise in a in a workshop that I did with Adrienne Lenker, and she um oh, it's okay that I'm saying that so much. But um she had given us a um a photograph to look at the sort of different perspectives of and details of and sort of write based on um a certain perspective in in this photograph by Genesis Baez. And the the photo series was called the Silt of You. And I had just kind of assigned the name of the song to the project assignment just to remember what it was. And um, and it really for some reason it sort of just carried through as like a thematic through line and then ended up just kind of making sense as the as the album title.

And I think as the um songs sort of found their way, and as we were started to understand like what the themes around the record were gonna look like, it's things just kind of keeps kept sticking to to silt.

[16:18] Dashel Thompson: Um and do you want to expand on the sort of silt stuff a little bit more for me?

[16:24] Eden Brolin: Yeah, yeah, no, totally. It it I mean, there's like a kind of the first blush of like why it is so effective is that the album has a lot of very like kind of nature-y themes running through it. Um and it's so very it's very nice to have this like earth-based name, like right on the on the album cover, of course. But we really like this sort of metaphor um about like being in some body of water, the silts at the bottom of that body of water gets kicked up and you can't see, and there's this moment of uncertainty and like maybe fear about the lack of visibility, but knowing that you either have to wait to let it settle down or move through. Um, and that kind of also that theme of uncertainty, but of of patience and of waiting and the cycles of the dirt getting kicked up and then falling back down, those kinds of ideas are are through the album as well. And so, like Eden said, it's this really almost happy accident that we we kind of came into the name of this album that actually has a lot to do with what the content of the record is.

[17:26] Freddie Reish: Um it's way better. Yeah, it's way, I love it. I love the title, I love the idea. And after the years of of you guys um figuring it out and growing up and getting back together, that silt that has been in the bottom of this ocean is back, it's rising, it's ready to be back uh and back on the road. It's better than mud or gunk or or or things other than we're working on gunk right now. Gunk is a gunk is the album by the scary version of you that's on Google. That is the truth. Kudos. Uh kudos to you all for your friendship for showing what good true artistry and commitment to one another can be. Kudos to all of you on individually on the work that you all do and then being able to have big lives and all these incredible projects and on stage screen and in music and then bring it all back together and come together as family and friends and put out music that the world can love. That is a beautiful thing that you can have it all and make it all work. And I give you all the most incredible, credible kudos. Break legs have the incredible tour. Enjoy every single second of it.

[18:32] Eden Brolin: Thank you so much, Robert. The album is out. Go to we are at a boy.com. Find out all of the tour dates. Find out how you can get all the information. The merch, all the info about it is all online, and we'll be following and sharing and uh have an incredible time. My show's your show. Come on back anytime.

[18:47] Freddie Reish: Thank you so much.