Sup Philly! The other day I had an awesome interview with Case Closed, a group of guys out of Jersey who know how to put on a great show and a sweet after party. They told me about their new moves for 2012, the next single, and the Case Closed house parties. Check out the band's new single, "A Tribute to a Man and his Orange Juice" and connect with them on their sites!
So what’s an average day like in the life of the members of Case Closed?
Phil: Well, we all have day jobs so we're always trying to find that happy medium to balance work/music. Our guitarist, Dave, and bassist, Dan, share a house together so that kind of become our headquarters haha. We do mostly all of our writing there and that usually always goes down sometime after 8 or 9pm, so occasionally we'll invite some friends over and play some songs for them. I think I speak for all of us on that one...if we didn’t have to work to pay for the things in our lives, we'd do absolutely nothing but music 24/7.
Curt: I should mention that I work at a mulch company in the summers, Dave works at WaWa, Dan works at Sear’s hardware, and Phil works at a retirement home.
That leads me to my next question, I heard about the Case Closed house and the parties you guys throw down, can you tell me a little about how the house is and how the parties are?
Phil: Hahaha that's so funny to hear that the rumors of the house are spreading. Well the guys that live in the house are Dave and Dan, but our good friends Kevin and Kris also live there too. So needless to say, 4 guys living in a house together, in a college town can lead to a lot of drinking and a lot of partying! Once we moved our equipment into the basement we realized we could definitely start playing during parties because we had enough space and we never had noise complaints before. We've only done it a handful of times but they've been fun times...it’s usually a group of 30 or so of our closest friends. I know the lease is up in the summer and if the guys decide not to keep it, I'd like to know we made the best of it while we had it. So hopefully we can get a few more basement shows going and start inviting CC fans to come enjoy the atmosphere we've created.
You recently moved over to Black Ink MMG, how did that come about and what do you expect to come from it?
Dan: The idea of moving to Black Ink came from Isaac, our manager, after we had been with his management and promotions company, Monster Entertainment for a year. We're hoping that by teaming up with BIMMG, we will create a bigger team to help get our music out to the rest of the US and then take it international. They believe in our music and they think we have potential, we like that and we want to show them that we're dedicated to what we love. Our ultimate goal is to be able to tour all over the world and have fans at all of those shows. Yeah, of course we want to one day have the money to record big production albums and hear our music on every station across the country but we've always been about live performances.
You guys are planning a pretty cool video for the new single “A Tribute to a Man and his Orange Juice”. Can you guys tell me a little more about that?
Phil: Yeah actually we decided that we wanted to try a more DIY approach to our first official video and so we'll be doing it ourselves. There's been talk of bringing on a friend of ours who's offered to help free of charge and has experience. But for the most part the video will be a montage of all the fun times at the CC house, as well as some shots of us at 1 of the 2 shows we have coming up at the end of the month. We've all kind of always been camera shy and so we've stayed away from videos up until this point. Maybe it’s because we don't want to be portrayed as something we're not, ever, so by doing it this way our fans will always know the true Case Closed.
So where can a CC fan catch you guys live in the next few weeks?
Dave: March 30th we're playing at The Gibson House in Marlton, NJ and 31st we're playing at the Berlin VFW in Berlin, NJ with our good friends in Ridgemont, Youth, and bunch of other awesome south Jersey bands.
What’s the best spot Case Closed has ever played at?
Dan: I was a big fan of the RAW Artist Showcase we played in Philly over the summer. We were chosen to play at an event featuring 4 music acts and a handful of some of the best artists in the city, then to top it off was a fashion show. The showcase mixed everything together so well and we got to play for a packed house of 300 people.
Phil: I think another great show we had was at the 93.7 WSTW Flower Market we played last May where we opened for The Ready Set and 2AM Club. It was our first time playing outside on a really large stage (kind of had the Warped Tour vibe) it was a really great time.
What can a fan expect to get out of a Case Closed show?
Curt: We're pretty passionate about the songs we write so we always want to play every song we release. Unfortunately sometimes venues give us short time slots so we have to pick and choose. We love to change stuff up too so you can't guarantee the same set every time you see us. Besides mostly all of the songs off of CLOUDS, we're planning on unveiling some new songs at the next shows. These are songs that will be coming out in June on our new EP.
That was one of my other questions about anything new coming out. So you're releasing an EP, are you finished the recording or how is that going?
Phil: We haven't actually hit the studio yet. Between me and Curt, we have a lot of our own studio gear. So we've been doing the pre-production all by ourselves. We're still in the middle of demoing but generally we record drums in Curt's basement and then he'll send them to me and I do all the mixing, as well as bass. He does all the engineering for guitars and vocals. Our new EP is going to be 5 songs and right now we have about 5 or 6 songs written, 3 of which have already been demoed out but we're trying to write/record double what we want on the EP, that way we can pick and choose which songs fit best.
Curt: We plan on going back to record with Jesse Cannon at Cannon Found Soundation, who engineered and produced CLOUDS and we really loved the way it sounded. He's an amazing producer to work with.
Are there any awesome summer plans for Case Closed?
Phil: I think after the release of the EP we're going to try and do at least 3 self-booked tours with some friends in the New England area, maybe start making our way out west towards Chicago....we've never toured anywhere but the East coast so we'd really love to start seeing some new states and new faces.
Anything else you guys want to say to your fans before we wrap up?
Curt: Yeah. We hope to see you guys out our shows this month, we should have new shirts in for the shows and if you're planning on coming to both shows then you will get a chance to hear a couple new songs we think you might like.
Phil: Open invitation to come to a party at the CC house to anybody who loves our music!
Download the single at: http://caseclosed.bandcamp.com/track/a-tribute-to-a-man-and-his-orange-juice
Check them out:
http://www.facebook.com/CaseClosednj?__adt=8
http://www.reverbnation.com/caseclosedrocks
http://www.myspace.com/caseclosedrocks
http://www.twitter.com/caseclosednj
http://www.vimeo.com/caseclosed
Lauren Resnick
Monster Entertainment LLC
lauren@wearemonsterent.com
www.wearemonsterent.com
