(This interview was conducted on January 22, 2002)

 

Josh Nacho:  I want to start with how I heard about you and then get in from there.

 

Matt: Ok.

 

J.N.: I first heard about you through MP3.com, that was how I discovered you because I go through and randomly download music. I don’t want to dis MP3.com, but a lot of the times I’ll download a song from a band and I’ll kind of hear it and be like “eh”.  It’ll be kind of generic and I won’t want to hear anything else by the band.   I’m trying to turn this into a question now.  What do you think about MP3.com- if it has helped you- and how people get into your music, that kind of thing?

 

Matt:  Personally, I think MP3.com was really good for us- to help us put music out.  There’s people that have never heard of us and can download songs.  Also, you can see how many downloads you get.  Then out of nowhere, we’re getting a constant flow of emails and downloads, which is cool.  It was really good ‘cause the first songs we put on there we actually recorded at band practice.  So it was something that we didn’t want to put on a demo and we weren’t sure if we wanted to put them on a CD so we figured we’d put them on there and see how it goes.  From there we wound up recording those onto a CD and we wound up handing out about 250 of those.  It was a three song demo EP.  As far as MP3.com, I like it a lot.  A lot of my friends’ bands are on it.  I think it’s good because you can do searches by genre. 

 

J.N.:  Yeah, it gets really specific.  It’s not like you’re searching for just punk bands, it gets right in there.

 

Matt:  Right.  Especially when we first started, we were very big into the Anniversary, and we started listening to them two years ago.  It was like, “Wow, this is really good”.  So if we start putting “sounds like the Anniversary”… Just for example. I think that’s a great thing about MP3.com.

J.N.:  Or you can put “sounds like Jimmy Eat World” and then people will download you.

 

Matt: (laughing) Yeah, exactly.  Accidentally. 

 

J.N.:  This is a question that I actually haven’t asked a band in a really long time, but I just want to know- how do you go about describing your music?   It’s like, pop punk, something with hardcore parts, and then there’s keyboards… It’s weird because I’ve been getting into a lot of stuff with keyboards lately like the Beans and Veronica, and I listen to them, but you have a different kind of keyboard where it sounds almost like piano parts to me, you know?  You mix that in with these hardcore guitar riffs and break downs… And there’s singing and screaming.

 

Matt: What you just said is kind of how we have to describe it.  When we first started, everyone was new to their instruments.   I’ve been playing guitar for probably two years.  Matt, our drummer, has been playing for a long time.  He was a schooled musician.  But Eric, our other guitarist, he didn’t even own a guitar for the first couple practices, but he wanted to learn.   So at first it was a pop punk sort of thing with keyboards.  Keyboard played the lead guitar, you know, until we could learn how to play guitar.  What you said is probably how we describe it.  The best way to say is that it’s rock’n’roll.  That’s mostly what we’re going for.   All the other guys were in hardcore bands before this.  I was always in indie rock/pop bands.  I played drums when I was in high school, came to college and started playing guitar.  So all the roots are there- and we still use them- but it’s no genre.  And it’s so hard.  No one wants to pigeonhole their band to a certain kind.  No one wants to say they’re emo.

 

J.N.:  Emo is like the label of death right now.

 

Matt:  Now it’s like “Stop being an emo”.  That’s our joke around the house.   It’s rock’n’roll, but, it’s exactly what you said.   It’s the punk pop, pop punk, power pop, rock, hardcore, emo rock—it’s so hard.   And I think the best way too is the CD we have right now is $3, so I’ll just carry them around and be like, “You know what? I know it’s three bucks, but just listen to this and then you’ll understand better”.  And then they listen to it and they’re like “Oh yeah, that’s what you said you are”. 

 

J.N.:  Three dollars is good though because then it’s a dollar a song.

 

Matt: Yeah.  It’s pretty funny we make our CDs at home, so we go through all our old CDs we don’t listen to any more and taking the cases apart.  Ripping theirs out, putting in ours from Kinko’s… It’s worked out pretty well.

 

J.N.:  I hate it when bands have like, a five song EP and it’s like, $8. 

 

Matt:  Yeah.  And you can download.  We always tell everybody too- everyone that comes up to our merch table- look for it online.  If you

can download it, that’s awesome.   What we actually did, was we put the lyrics in the CD book- our incentive to buy the CD because they’re not posted any where else.  If you’re out there and you want to post the lyrics- then you don’t have to buy the CDs any more. 

 

J.N.: Sticking with the subject of music, I know you have new songs.  Where are they going to go from here?  Do you have plans for a full length or an EP?

 

Matt:  We just recorded three demos from band practice again.  We’re thinking about putting them up on our web site- it’s pretty bad quality- but we’re trying to get something together and have a real six song EP, but money’s so tight.   I wish we could find a label that just wanted to fund it.  The first album we funded ourselves, and people offered us help, but it’s nice to do it yourself- to not be tied to anybody.  To not have anyone telling you how it goes.  So, right now we’re just trying to get them down and hopefully after March, maybe April, we’ll head into the studio.   We’re chipping in money into our band fund as the months go by- just out of our pockets- trying to save up for half the studio time we can afford.  I think they’d sound really good well recorded too.  We want to go to a studio and say “capture this, capture what we sound like live”.   To put out a six song EP is our aim right now. 

 

J.N.:  If you were looking for a label, what would be your ideal label?  Who would you be looking for?

 

Matt: That’s so tough. I wouldn’t even know.  There’s so many small labels.  It’s so tough because every label now any way is funded in some way by a major label.  I’d say it would be anybody who’s kind of willing to let us do our thing.  When we first started, we were kind of talking about Drive Thru- that and all the pop punk bands- and we’re like, “Well, we don’t know if we wanna be a pop punk band”.  And you can look at that label and I’d love to be signed by them, but genre specific labels I don’t think are really the way to go.  When it’s like, “Oh, they’re on that label… I know what they’re going to sound like already”.  So it’s kind of like anybody that would be interested that’s really into our music is more important than any amount of dollars. 

 

 

“… it’s rock’n’roll .  That’s mostly what we’re going for .”

 

For more on the Secret Handshake, please visit their own web site at:

www.thesecrethandshake.com

and check out MP3.com for some music.