Sometimes you hear an album that you know is going to lead to so much more. And album that blurs the conventions of the present and reaches into the soul of the great music of the past. Sweat’s debut album ‘Who Do They Think They Are’ is such an album, Progressive in outlook, organ and guitar heavy it takes a fresh look at the British Prog influences of the past to cast a spell and create a new form of Classic Rock. If you love bands like Deep Purple, you’ll get it just from the album title. Mark caught up with Kayla and Sue to find out more about what might just be one of the best records you will hear all year.
Mark: Hello!
Kayla: Hello!
Sue: Hello!
Mark: Welcome from Australia, I hope you both are doing well?
Kayla: We are!
Sue: We just had a Fosters to celebrate the occasion, I donlt know if it’s the best beer though?
Mark: It’s definitely not the best beer that we have down here. But we do have many good ones. Maybe nothing as good as Stone or Anchor but some great local breweries.
Kayla: (laughs)
Mark: Listening to your new album reminds me so much of all the great English Rock bands of the 70’s. It’s fantastic
Sue: Yeah! Thank you so much.
Mark: It’s a record that gets better every single time I listen to it. It’s funny when I wrote the review I scored it out of ten and I’ve been in and adjusted the score up every time I listen.
Sue: Thanks you.
Mark: Thank you for making time to talk today. For me one of the most important things about hearing great new music is telling people about it. I’ve been talking so much about this one I now have a bout 5 friends who own the red vinyl!
Kayla: That’s awesome.
Mark: First things first though, where did this all begin? There has to be an origin story for the band – how did you guys all get together?
Kayla: I wasn’t there for the beginning but Sue definitely was!
Sue: I moved here from Switzerland and I grew up listening to a lot of that British music you were referencing so I guess that’s a little of what you hear in there because I’m from Europe. My friends had all these 70’s Prog bands in their record stashes, so I listened to a lot of that stuff. So I moved here about 5 years ago, and I guess about 4 years ago I started Sweat.
Kayla: That sounds about right, I think you guys started in 2019.
Sue: Yeah, but we kinda lost a whole year because of the shutdown. So the band really has only been active for about 3 years, because that year you can just toss. So I met Rich (guitar) just here in the Pittsburgh scene, I saw him play with his band at the time and I thought “Oh, wow” I loved his sound the way he played and his whole aesthetic. And that was just what I needed as I wanted to start a 70’s – Organ heavy Rock band. So shorty after I’d seen him at that show, I ran into him at a bar and I started talking to him. I said “Hey would you be interested in starting a project” and he said sure – he was in immediately. And then Da the bass player we knew because he was in a band with my husband so I knew he was a really good musician. So he hopped on the train. And then we had a drummer but we parted ways during the pandemic, it was hard get things going for a variety of reason, and I already knew Kayla from the scene. We were at a party one night and we were outside because it was the pandemic, it was one of the first parties when people could get back together again. And I casually told her that our drummer had left and she was “Wait a minute, I play drums!” (laughs) And I was like “Of course we want you! She’s fantastic! please!”
Kayla: (laughs) I guess I did do a rehearsal type thing, but then you and I we just kinda like jamming a writing for a couple of months after I joined. There weren’t really a lot of full band rehearsals until a little bit later on because of the way things were at the time.
Sue: So I kind of started the thing, and people started joining. I had been drawn to this kind of music for many years, I had other bands back home in Switzerland that did that kind of thing. But it was never as concise as it is with Sweat, I feel like Sweat hits the hammer on the head for my vision and what I have in my heart.
Mark: It’s a wonderful album and one that so many different textures. It references at times a number of great bands of the past without actually trying to sound like any of them, and to me that is the magic of it. Sometimes you listen to music that is 70’s influenced and it just sounds like a pastiche of the other band, but this is something else. There are so many ideas going on, are there lots of songwriters, lots of input? Do you all get involved?
Sue: The main songwriters are me and Rich. So I guess there’s a diversity there in ideas and structures. But when I write I just write the music that comes out of me organically, because like you said when I try too hard it just doesn’t work out.
Mark: I know what you mean and I think teh press release is good in that it references a lot of the sounds you hear like Deep Purple and Rush. I read an interview with you Sue that I guess just demonstrates teh music that we Europeans didn’t hear growing up when you said that you hadn’t heard Kansas before you arrived in America. We got all teh European Progressive bands but missed out on some from the States.
Sue: No! I loved it! And hear people here are so tired of it! No that they don’t think they are a good band just that they have heard the songs like 50 billion times! It’s not even real music anymore it’s on the radio all the time. I remember hearing ‘Carry on my Wayward Son’ and my mind was blown! That songs is like a freaking opera! And I had never heard it! And here it plays on the radio constantly, and The Eagles! Obviously I knew The Eagles but just to hear them on the radio constantly.
Mark: It’s interesting how things are different all over the world, It has been said that there is a comeback of 70’s rock in various parts of the globe but some would argue that in Australia it never really went away, indeed Australia in some ways is still in the 70’s! Though to be fair most bands do sound like AC/DC, but there’s also Pub Rock which has that 70’s feel, organ, guitar, a great rhythm section – maybe not as progressive as the music you are making but a lot of the elements are there.
Sue: Oh for sure it’s coming back here too.
Mark: I love the sound of the album too, and I think the bottom end – the bass and the drums are particularly well placed in the mix. Who did the production?
Kayla: The record was self-produced, although our engineer Nate Campese did have a hand in producing as we went along, but we made those decisions as peers as a group. So it was all done together but there was no producer sitting in on the project.
Mark: Well that has worked out remarkably well then. I love the clarity of the single ‘Paradise’ but I think ‘My Side of teh Mountain’ was the moment when I really thought “Wow” how good are these guys? What’s going to happen next? And that is the perfect way to close an album.
Kayla: (smiles)
Sue: (laughs)
Mark: It’s a wonderful way to close when you can finish a great album full of different colours and textures with a track that just says – hey this could lead anywhere!
Sue: Thank you.
Mark: How did you shape the album? Were there more songs, was there a culling process or was this pretty much what you had ready?
Kayla: (laughs) We had to go through a writing process actually! Because we initially had an EP ready to go.
Sue: Yeah, and we were gonna self-release that and then Teepee (Records) approached us and said, “You know it makes more sense to release an LP, it just gets more attention.” So they said they would help us out and send us back to the studio, but to record more songs. So we had more songs, but we did write ‘My Side of the Mountain’ a week or two before we went into the studio. Because we kind of had to get those minutes in! But we already had some parts of tat here and there.
Kayla: Yeah some of it was borrowed from a few things we had already written. But it started because we had borrowed a twelve string acoustic just for a really small interlude or outro that we had for the EP, and we were just sitting around one day and Rich had the twelve string still and we just sort of stumbled across this almost Folky, Classical intro. And we thought “Hey that sounds like something we should finish!” (laughs)
Sue: There’s a little Heart vibe which I’m a total sucker for, where it’s Folk but it’s also Hard Rock at the same time in the same song!
Mark: You’re right. The best Heart for me was the 70’s Heart and maybe the early 80’s but not the MTV version.
Sue: Absolutely! They’re fascinating. We just recently watched some live footage and I just thought – this is as good as a band gets in my opinion. To watch them perform that stuff, and it’s so hard to do, it’s absolutely breath-taking to be, it’s absolutely amazing!
Mark: You have a very distinctive vocal Sue, which I love. For me there’s a lot of Grace Slick in there.
Kayla: (nodding)
Sue: (laughs) So many people say that, it’s funny. My Dad always said that.
Mark: Were they an influence at all?
Sue: Their earlier records for sure.
Mark: So lets dig a little deeper, has music always been a big part of your lives? Did you always know you’d be in a band?
Sue: I think I’ve always been drawn to music and I grew up with it as my Dad’s a musician and he took us to shows early on, and it was just part of my life. We were seeing bands play live, there was music playing at home a lot, and Dad was playing a lot at home – he would play piano and guitar and sing. So it’s kind of like, I don’t know how you would say this in English, but in German it would be “It was laid into my crib.”
Mark: A great phrase, like destiny from an early age.
Sue: It was just always there. But I don’t know if there was a specific moment I knew I was going to be in a band. For me it wasn’t really a conscious decision it was almost like I had this inner necessity to create music in order to be myself. Almost like it’s not an option, it’s a necessity. I hurt if I don’t make music.
Mark: What about you Kayla, have you always known?
Kayla: I started playing instruments when I was like 8 or 9 and stumbled into drumming when I was 11. I think I liked it because, even though my family listened to a lot of music all the time and we always had it playing I was really the only musician in my household. So I think that I like it because it was a little departure for me, like this special thing that I liked to do. And then I just kept t n my life in a pretty big way for all this time. Was there a defining moment? To be honest I didn’t really see myself in traditional bands when I started drumming again 4 or 5 years ago. I was thinking I was gonna do more projects and session stuff, but as soon as I joined Sweat and we started writing and recording, it felt correct. (laughs)
Mark: I love the album as a whole, and love the opener ‘Arrows’: take us back – what was the very first song you did together and thought “Yeah this might work?”
Sue: I think the first song I wrote and brought to practice was that one – ‘Arrows’.
Mark: A great place to start.
Mark: If you could have been a ‘fly on the wall’ for the creation of any album in the history of Rock and Roll – just to see how the magic happened, what would you love to have seen being made?
Kayla: That’s a good one.
Sue: Probably it would have to have been to be in the studio with The Beatles. I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall for Abbey Road or the White Album. I’ve seen lots of documentaries about The Beatles and the way they wrote songs just ad hoc together is something I’ve never seen in other bands, maybe the Rolling Stones were like that a little bit too? But it’s just – we’ll throw you in a room together and you’ll write these ‘world hits’ one after another, and it just kinda like happens. They juggle ideas back and forth and you can literally see the song evolving right in front of you. And those are some of the best Pop songs ever written. And that’s not even an opinion at this point, that’s a fact. (laughs)
Mark: It would be nice wouldn’t it to have that much money and that much time to do that?
Sue: Well you do bring up a good point, they had so much time they could just mess around in the studio for months on end. I sometimes feel like if we had that much time we could do so much more.
Mark: Well maybe that’s just around the corner for you, let’s hope so. What about you Kayla, an alum that stands out in particular?
Kayla: I think I would have loved to have been around for some of the Led Zeppelin records. Just watching those unfold.
Mark: You can’t go wrong with Zeppelin. For me I would have loved to see III, but the creativity involved in getting sounds just right was incredible.
Kayla: For sure.
Mark: It’s been great to talk with you both today and hopefully turn some more people onto what I think is a great record. We traditionally close our first interviews with a really easy one… What is the meaning of life?
Sue: What?
Mark: The meaning of life.
(There is a big pause)
Sue: The meaning of life is for me is to… never stand still. And always keep creating. I think that’s something that’s unique to us in a way, this artistic way of expressing ourselves as human beings. That’s something I want to do till my last breath. Never standing still, keeping creating and always being driven.
Mark: Sounds great, and now Kayla, no pressure but the drummers always give me the best answers to this question because you’re there driving it all and watch it all happen in front of you..
Kayla: Well I guess mine is a continuation of Sue’s in that the meaning of life is death. That’s always there ahead of you so you might as well do something while you’re here, because at any moment that can be taken away.
Sue: The music will remain hopefully long after we are dust.
Mark: And hopefully there will be a lot more years and a dozen more albums before that happens. The reason I started this website 14 years ago was to tell people about great music, stuff that I thought people should be listening to. It’s albums like yours that make it all worth while for me. So thank you so much making it.
Kayla: Thank you.
Sue: Thank you for talking to us.
Mark: here’s to the next one! Catch you soon.
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