NYC Rockers Station recently released their second album More Than The Moon, followed by some touring which brought them to a newly opened venue in Smithtown, Long Island, New York known as The Rail on June 23rd, 2018. It’s a pleasure to catch up with this talented group – I first interviewed them when I was in college radio right around the time their self-titled debut record came out – always friendly and a lot of fun, Chris Lane and Patrick Kearney even came in studio to do an acoustic set. We always seem to touch base whenever they’re in their hometown, the New York/Long Island circuit – this time around, after their show at The Rail, Chris gave me an inside look into the making of and the meaning behind More Than The Moon, and we faced some comedic interruptions as we discussed music video antics and the Long Island music scene. 

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The first thing I want to start with, the latest news with you is of course, More Than The Moon, and there’s a lot I want to get into about it, but let’s start with the origins of it, just what got you started working on a new album following the self-titled.

Sure, so oddly enough, “More Than The Moon” is really an old song of ours, we had it when we recorded our EP, and the reason it didn’t end up on the first record was because we didn’t feel it would stand out, because there were other songs just like it. You know, the same kind of moderate ballad tempo idea, so we didn’t really want it to get lost in the shuffle, so we said we’d hold onto it for a second album, if we made one. We recorded the first album in 2014, released it in 2015, and we wanted to do a follow-up album right away, we had material, but the problem was that we were so busy playing shows and promoting it that we just didn’t have a block of time to do it. So we took on some new management, and it was very short-lived but they convinced us to record two singles instead of album, which is why we released “All You Need Is A Heartbeat” and “Never Enough”. We did that, and then we changed to our current manager, and we were like, “We’re going back in the studio, this is happening now”. So now this kind of puts us on a tour/album cycle where I think every year and a half or so we’ll record a new album, so there will be an album three!

Nice! So what’s behind the title, More Than The Moon? 

Well, it’s one of the songs on the album, and the name of the song comes from the movie Arthur, with Dudley Moore and Liza Minelli. 

Oh, I love Arthur!

As do I, it’s my favorite movie. And, she says that she was convinced the moon was following her, so when I heard that, I kind of internalized it and the song is about just…silly games in dating. Especially long ago when I was single and in the city, I had just moved there, it was just funny how certain people acted, and how it was all just kind of a game. So it being “more than the moon” is just thinking that it’s real when it’s actually real. Thank Liza for that one. 

And the album art is interesting, it’s catching on and getting popular, I see on social media people are even getting tattoos of it?

It’s weird, I wouldn’t even get a tattoo of it, my mom wouldn’t get — look, if Patty Lane is not going to get a tattoo of her son’s album cover, I’m a little afraid when you want to. But I think that’s awesome, I mean, I think there are four or five people now with More Than The Moon tattoos, it’s crazy. And it’s incredibly flattering. It’s the phases of the moon in dot form, and I made it, and I had Krista, who’s our merch girl/social media person and graphic designer, she does everything with us, she took what I had made and fixed and made it actually not stick figures. I thought it was really obvious at first, and then I showed it to the band and no one knew what it was, and no one has gotten it. So I was like, “Okay, so it’s just going to be like a cool looking piece of modern art?” and they were like “yeah, why not”, so that’s why we put it on. It was there because it was there. I mean, I like the way it looks, and it means something if you explain it, but pretty much it just looks cool, you know what I mean? It’s kind of like the first album with the girl on the cover, it doesn’t mean anything, it just looks cool.

It’s just there, I get it, and that definitely suits the style you’re going for.

The vibe, yeah. I think the second album sounds a little different, so it’s going somewhere where album three ultimately will be different. 

But still along the same lines, where you know you’re still listening to Station…

No, it’s going to be dubstep.

…

…

…I think you guys could pull it off. *laughs*

Eh, I don’t know. My whole thing about songwriting and production is that they are two completely different things. And I believe very strongly that a good song can be played as a rock song, a country song, a pop song, a dubstep song. What we choose to do production-wise is kind of the mood and spirit that we’re in at the time. So don’t get me wrong, I know we’ve got the long hair and the 80’s vibe, but the 80’s production that went along with the first album, I mean it’s there in the second album too, sure…it’s really just a product of us treating the songs the way we think they would sound best. So our credo is like…we have a song on the new album called “Walking Away”, and it’s completely acoustic, and there are only three parts in the song other than vocals, literally, and it doesn’t sound like the other stuff, but I thought what we did to it suited it. So our thing is that we serve the song, and if we all of a sudden woke up and started sounding country, I would expect us not to try and cram it into something else, just try to make it live and breathe, and it represents us. I think that bands that try to get into this world of, “Well, this song’s not about that, therefore we can’t play it”, I think that’s ridiculous. Write what you like and write what’s inside of you, and just do your best to make it as presentable as possible. 

I understand what you’re saying, you’re not trying to take that song you wrote and force it under a template of production.

Yeah, it just doesn’t work. And to be honest with you, that gets really stale real fast. I will say, we’ve made two albums, so I would like to hope that we’re very early in our career. But even now, I listen back to things and think of other things we could have done, I think of little ways to improve on stuff, and I’ll always do that, you know? But at the same time, I can only imagine what it would be like if you had four or five tools only that you could use, and had to apply them to everything you did. Because if you did, I’d go crazy. Like…”there’s a goat that belongs in this thing, it has to be at the end!” You couldn’t do that, you’d go nuts! So, yeah. 

*laughs* Also, I wanted to ask you about the music videos, when I was watching the video for “I Won’t Break Your Heart”, I noticed it said “Concept by Chris Lane”, so tell me more about that concept, and what was going through your head for that?

I like making the music videos, I’ve made all the music videos in terms of conceptualizing them and trying to set up the visuals, I’m really into that. And I also kind of like fun and happy and smiley things, so the concept of the video was that when the Station music is playing, the blank canvases come to life. And it presented a serious challenge because we filmed it here on Long Island, but the lighting consistency that you need in order to do that is monotonous. So our Director of Photography and just overall good guy, Igor, who we’ve worked with on several videos now, spent so much time lighting everything. We filmed the video in about an hour and a half, and we spent about nine hours lighting it. I can’t tell you how much sitting around and like…imagine trying to move something by half an inch, and back a quarter of an inch, and back an eighth of an inch. I mean, that’s what it was all day long. And my wife Tesh, she does interior design and stuff, so she helped stage the entire thing, helped clean it up in terms of making everything presentable, and weighing the different shapes against the wall…

Cool.

No, it wasn’t cool! Because all of a sudden she’d be like, “This deserves a long one”, and we’d be like, “We don’t have lighting for a long one!”, and it was just…a long, long, long day. Our parts were shot the next day on a green screen, so that’s a very weird experience as well…

[At this point we’re interrupted by a somewhat drunken patron who mumbles a compliment to Chris saying he “has some Slash in him”, and proceeds to make somewhat nonsensical suggestions on things to do musically “for next time”. He bids us goodnight, and Chris and I are both left thoroughly confused about what just happened. Priceless moment, as we continue on with the interview.]

…so yeah, that was a real pain in the ass.

I did want to ask you about…I haven’t interviewed you guys since before this happened, but you played the M3 Rock Festival last year. 

Yes, we did!

I love the M3 Rock Festival, and I was really excited that you guys were playing that. So tell me about that whole experience.

I mean, it was a great experience. It would have been really great if they had opened the doors when we started playing, so that was a whole thing. 

Oh, no!

No, they treated us really well, and the truth is that, we play a lot of festivals, and it’s very different to play a festival that’s built into a venue, because little things like press and trying to get around backstage was much easier there. It was a great experience, it was a short set, and lot of people really represented, they had flyers, they had this giant banner they made, t-shirts, and everyone was just really cool. It was a huge stage, so it was a really nice experience, a lot of fun. 

Yeah, things do tend to move quickly there. But, any festival, that’s the case. And I also saw a snippet on social media, you guys played a show at Sweetwater Headquarters, you want to talk about that?

Oh, yeah! Yeah, so we were just recently on tour in the midwest, and we had a day that we were going from somewhere in Ohio down to Nashville – on the way was Fort Wayne. So, we’re musicians, so we get a lot of stuff from Sweetwater, and they’re always the best people to deal with, so we reached out about performing nearby and they’re like, “We actually have a venue on campus”, and it is a campus! Sweetwater has a whole building to go into different things that run the business, and a giant slide. We played an acoustic set in their restaurant/cafeteria area, and they were great, they gave us a tour, we all spent money because we all needed stuff, it was a great experience. It was a really cool place though, because it’s really well set up, it’s well run, and it’s open to the public, but it’s also functional. You can go and buy guitar strings, but there’s also the shipping end of it, and there’s a restaurant, and there’s a hair salon, and there’s a gym…you know what I mean? It’s really cool, it’s just very well set up, and I had no idea it was there. Because we had passed the building a million times, but from the outside, it looks like a corporate office building, it’s not, it’s just great.

You’d never know the wealth inside, right? The multitudes of…stuff!

Yeah, I had no idea — Goddamn it, Tony! The drummer is interrupting our interview now! What do you have to say for yourself?

[As Tony runs past carrying gear, he responds to Chris’ joking anger with a small squeak resembling a “meow”.]

…That’s going to be a hard sound to transcribe. 

*imitates the sound*

Small, vague squeak? Anyway, I know you guys have to get your gear out of here, so I’ll start wrapping things up, coming back to tonight, you just got off the stage of a new venue, The Rail here in Smithtown…this is home turf for you! 

Yeah, I grew up on Long Island. This is farther east than I grew up, but I grew up in Plainview. What’s really unfortunate is that when I grew up, in the time of Emo, and me, Mister “I Love Van Halen”, hard to get a date during that time, but I grew up in a time where there were tons and tons of music venues on Long Island. Not only were they music venues, but they were accessible to local bands who were trying to build a following, and people would go to hang out at these places. I went through high school having them around me, I went to college and I formed a band, and I came back, and they were all gone. And there have been places that we’ve embraced that were around, there used to be a great venue farther east, in Port Jefferson called Lulu’s, that we loved, unfortunately it closed down. And the reason is that it’s very hard to support the scene out here. So when we heard this opened up, all my friends’ bands who are here, we’re doing the cycle, all playing here! One was last week, I was here last week seeing them, I’m going to be here next week, so it’s cool. It’s nice to see that there’s an original local style venue, and not just something that touring acts can come through, it’s something that a local band can play, because honestly, other than this venue, I know of maybe two. It’s really sad to see, but I’m happy to see that there’s a glimmer of hope that means that maybe others will open. 

Absolutely, it’s definitely exciting to have a new venue, plenty of great things on the horizon for the future. And speaking of that, why don’t you just tell me what’s on the horizon for Station?

Well, the near future, the next three months, we’re going to be playing shows all over the place, probably a big show at the end of the summer in the city, but we’ll be everywhere. Maryland, Raleigh, Atlanta, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Connecticut…everywhere but New York, pretty much. And then we’re off for the month of October because Mister Singer is getting married, and then when we come back, we hit it really hard with some touring and probably we’ll be in the studio in the middle of next year. So pretty much, we have shows all around sporadically, until October, and then some aggressive touring coming up.

Aggressive touring, sounds like a plan.

A lot of time in a bus! 

I mean, that’s not a bad thing.

No, we have a power converter, so our hair dryers work. 

Oh, perfect, that’s all you need. *laughs* All right, well, some great things coming up, thanks for taking the time to talk to me.

Thank you!

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Keep up with the latest on Station at: https://www.stationband.com.