Brilliant Red Lights

By Fringe Staff

This Is What It Looks Like When I’m Doing What I Want
By Eric Davis

FRINGE: Let’s talk about influences. I can’t pin any of Brilliant Reds Lights down. And that seems to be something I find with a lot of Sacramento bands, especially the midtown and downtowns ones. Are Sac bands more of an influence on each other than outside sources are?

EVAN: I think our influences are directly tied to the onset of the iTunes culture, which allows anyone to be literally immersed in music. My first year of college was spent downloading 40 gigs of new music, discovering zillions of new bands, then walking over to Aaron’s dorm room to exchange. I can leave my computer on random and not hear a repeated song for 11 days. That’s nuts! Because of this, we’ve been fortunate to be exposed to all kinds of stuff I would’ve never had access to before. And you see that, “Hey, this Bjork song is a lot more similar to this Prince song than I would’ve ever thought.” And when that gets recycled through our brains in songwriting, we have this much bigger pool of stuff to be affected by.

FRINGE: I’ve loved the Sacramento scene since I was a kid. How has the music scene from this one place stayed constantly great for so long when most scenes seem to have way more up’s and downs?

EVAN: I grew up in the South Bay Area, where ska and skate-punk were really prevalent. Coming up here to go to UC Davis five years ago introduced me to this whole new scene I was previously unaware of.

The first show me and Aaron saw together was hella in a basement with 11 other people. It absolutely ruined me because I was in no way prepared to hear music that good. I asked Zach Hill to autograph his bass drum after the show and he looked at me like I was crazy After that, when we had started our band, we started playing locally (where we would later meet Noah via his old band, The Dining Room Romance) and got introduced to all these other great bands like Mister Metaphor and Tera Melos, who weaved this spastic, technical proficiency into an understandable product. I fell in love. The scene will always ebb and flow, but Sacramento is such a bizarre area, that great bands will always pop up out of somewhere.

FRINGE: Your band tours and tours and tours. What has changed for you over the course of the bands career on the road thus far?

EVAN: Touring is a nonstop learning experience, because you’re always trying to improve. You’re constantly looking ahead, playing new songs, going new places, making new connections. After you’ve done it for a while, it’s really exciting to stop for a second and realize you have a social network that extends to places you don’t actually live. You get to meet the friends you’d be hanging out with if you lived in Santa Fe, NM. How crazy is that?

FRINGE: Your shows are great, high energy without the song losing their technical strength. How do you guys keep your passions for your set fresh after so many shows?

EVAN: I think it’s one-half having a clear idea of what your band is all about, and one-half loving the people you are in a band with. If you are happy with your band’s direction and you know that your band mates have your back, it’s just great.

FRINGE: What are some other great bands you guys love that we may not know about?

EVAN: We have helpfully provided a list of them on the side bar of our MySpace page. I love it when I see a band that I’ve never heard of before blow my mind. Nothing is better than seeing your favorite band that you never knew about. Using that criteria, Hella, Anathallo and Tera Melos.

On the web at: www.myspace. com/brilliantredlights