Hello, music lovers!
Have I ever mentioned on here how much I love social media? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have found some of the music I have it weren’t for Facebook and Twitter – like the band that I’m showcasing this month, a folk group from Missouri called Pawns or Kings. Pawns or Kings found me on Twitter awhile back, and asked if I would check out their music. I obliged, and I instantly saw a lot of promise in their music, given the explosion that folk music has enjoyed recently. They’ve just released their second full-length album, Pomme de Terre, which you can find on their Bandcamp page and on iTunes. In addition to Twitter, they’re also on Facebook and Tumblr, and you can find some of their music on their YouTube page.
I recently got in touch with Ed Stengel, lead singer and banjo player of Pawns or Kings, to chat about music, inspiration, challenges the band has faced, and lots more. Take a look, then maybe take a listen. Enjoy!
Erin Daly: Basics first: – who’s in the band, and what is everyone’s role in it?
Ed Stengel: Our current members are Ed Stengel (me), Ben Bigelow, Devin Langer, and Justin Arndt. We also occasionally have our friend Caleb MacDaniels. I play banjo and do lead vocals, Ben is the main guitarist and backup singer, Devin is the bassist and 2nd backup singer, and Justin takes care of all percussion. Caleb is a master fiddle player and you can hear him on our “Live at the Gramophone” album.
EMD: Where in the world are you right now and why are you there? Is the rest of the band with you?
ES: I am currently in Jakarta, Indonesia teaching 5th grade at a private school. Teaching has been my day job for a while, and I love working with children. The rest of the band is still back in the United States. After our biggest challenge (which I will explain more about later) we were all left penniless without a record or distribution deal, without even enough money for gas for tours outside of the Midwest. It was a discouraging time, so we agreed to take a hiatus from live shows for a year or two, so we could get jobs and save up money so we would not starve.
EMD: Tell me a bit about the origins of the band. How (and when) did you guys get started?
ES: We have all been very good friends in high school, and we played together in our school’s symphonic and marching bands. We went through a few phases where we jammed around with different people, and then we finally made a band about five years ago that we called The Race to Olvido. We played as a progressive rock band for about a year until we got burned out on it and just focused on university work. That was around the time of my life where I fell on hard times – I had a brush with death in the hospital, and was left nearly homeless without any money. This lead to me sleeping in an old chapel, where I found an old broken piano. That, on top of me living in the library whenever I could, had me reading a ton of philosophy books and writing lots of new music. I had just started listening to the likes of the Avett Brothers and Mumford and Sons and I rather liked the vibe they had. It felt so much like home and the folk music that influenced the Ozark area I was living in. I eventually started making short recordings with nothing else in mind. Ben heard them and asked me if I wanted to try seriously recording them. Somehow, Pawns or Kings was born out of that session and have been going strong since then. It has been about four years since then.
EMD: Who writes most of the lyrics for the band, or is it a collaborative effort? What’s the songwriting process like in the band?
ES: I (Ed) typically write the lyrics and melodies. I’ve always loved poetry and started writing music because I wanted to say something, but had no idea how to say it without music. I also write quite a few of the chord progressions, but my favorite songs of ours have always been the ones with riffs and progressions made by Ben. Whenever I write a song, Ben and Justin always take it and turn it from a rough idea into a polished song. I am very thankful for their understanding of how I write and how well they compliment the style. Devin, the comedian of the group, and his dog Snoopy are usually in the studio with us.
EMD: You guys are very interactive with your fans on Twitter. I get the sense that social media has been a great tool in recent years for helping musicians, writers, etc. spread their work and make connections. What role has social media played for the band so far? What’s your favorite part of using it?
ES: We owe a lot to Twitter. It gives us the perfect medium to talk to our fans all around the world. It has been a rather difficult process going from being completely unknown to where we are now. We are endlessly thankful to the fans who supported us from our first (rough) EP and keep up with us now. The road has been very hard and you guys make it worthwhile.
EMD: Speaking of social media, a few months back you guys kept teasing your fans on Twitter about a super secret, special project that you had been working on, and I was thrilled that the project turned out to be a cover of “Voices,” a very little-known song by Mumford & Sons that I think they’ve performed live just once. Where did that idea come from, and what has the response to it been like? Right now the video has about 5,000 hits on YouTube, but I thought it went bigger than that.
ES: The idea came to us actually from a fan suggestion. An English fan showed us the grainy video where Mumford and Sons performed the song and it was pretty hard to hear. Ben and I decided that we liked the song and that it deserved to be fully fleshed out. We spent hours playing the video over and over. We wrote out the chords and lyrics, and added a bit of our own flare to fill in the spots that don’t come through in a studio cut that you get live. For a brief moment in time, the video brought us some fame. It hit 60,000 views pretty quickly and our name was being thrown around by the big Mumford fan sites. Sadly, a month later YouTube deleted the video because we had advertised it with a 3rd party company that was not Google. That company must have been involved in something shady because they erased it all. We re-uploaded the video (which took us a long time considering we had to re-edit the whole thing) but it only got a small percentage of the buzz it originally had. It was crazy; there were Tumblr posts with 300+ reblogs sharing the video. We actually have a full studio version coming out this summer on our next EP.
EMD: What would you say has been the greatest moment for the band so far? Or, what’s been your favorite part of this adventure?
ES: I would say our greatest moment was this magical moment where we went from complete unknowns to being the “go-to” folk band of the middle Midwest. It was so strange; we were getting so many gig offers that we had to turn them down because of university classes. People began to recognize us and buy us drinks at bars. It was such a struggle just to get to that point, but man it felt good, and very humbling. We were told by music critics that our sound was trite and we did not have much hope in the business, so it was a huge surprise when fans proved them wrong.
EMD: What’s been the biggest challenge?
ES: There have been NUMEROUS challenges. The first biggest one came when Pomme de Terre was just an EP and was set to be released 2 years ago. We were in talks with some folks at Communion Nashville, and had tons of publications lined up to review the EP. On release day, there was a mechanical failure on the studio main computer and we lost everything. A year of hard work… was just completely gone. All the labels dropped conversations with us, managers stopped following us, and we lost a ton of fans who simply got bored with us waiting for this EP. We kind of had to start at the bottom again. For the next 2 years we kind of toiled in obscurity, playing every gig we could and passing around our first album Letters to Lucy for free just to get someone, ANYONE, to listen to us. We had no money, and, to be honest, we considered just dropping the whole thing. The fans that stuck by us though… they kept us going. The small group that we refer to as “Team Pawns or Kings” is made up of folks from the US, UK, Jordan, Australia, Germany, Sweden, and other places, and they have been the ones keeping this boat afloat all these years. They are a true blessing.
EMD: Let’s talk a bit more about your music, starting with your latest album, Pomme de Terre. Where did the name come from? I Googled the phrase and it roughly translates to “apple of the earth.” What relevance do you feel that phrase has to the album?
ES: “Pomme de Terre” does directly translate to “Apple of the Earth” but it is basically the word for potato. We like the first translation better but we also really like potatoes. I actually wrote most of these songs will rafting and canoeing on a local river called the Pomme de Terre river. It is a place that I associate with some of my greatest memories. It is by the small town of Bolivar, Missouri, and I consider it one of the greatest places on earth. My friends and I used to call it “The Promised Land.” I thought it was the perfect name because this album just has an “earthy” feel. When I think of the sound we found on this record, I think of the smell of a fresh spring rain kicking up dirt. It may sound strange, but that is one of my favorite smells. You can almost hear the river rushing and the clouds rumbling in the distance in a few songs.
EMD: One of my favorite songs on the new album is “Late Have I Loved,” and I couldn’t help but think of a quote by St. Augustine that goes “Late have I loved you, O beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you!” Am I reading too much into that song title, or is that what you had in mind? You cite people like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton as inspiration for your music on your Facebook page, so I suppose St. Augustine isn’t too much of a stretch…
ES: You hit the nail on the head. Though there were many inspirations for the song, Saint Augustine’s Confessions did have a big impact. It had this idea that I had spent so much time loving the wrong things and it was bringing me nothing but suffering. It was a big time of revelation for me.
EMD: Your first full-length album, Letters to Lucy, contains a few covers of songs by artists like Mumford & Sons, Fleetwood Mac, and City and Colour. I can hear traces of these artists in your own music…what other artists or styles influence your music, would you say?
ES: Matthew and the Atlas had a big impression on us. I would say Matthew Hegarty is my favorite artist. His voice sounds like raw folk. Every now and then you will get a glimpse of our prog rock days in Justin’s drumming or Ben’s riffing. I have played in numerous metal bands as well. The Avett Brothers, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Led Zeppelin have really influenced us as well. The song “Name and Maps” is a tribute to these bands that continue to inspire us today.
EMD: You guys are based in the Ozarks/St. Louis region, and your Bandcamp page says that your music embodies the feeling of the Ozarks. What do the Ozarks mean to you guys? What do they get you thinking about, or how do they inspire your music?
ES: I would say I have lived my best years thus far in the Ozarks. Rare is a place that has hundreds of acres of open forest where you don’t have to worry about the weather and predators like you have to do in the high mountains. The Ozarks are low mountains with tons of caves, springs, rivers, and lakes. It is the closest thing I can think of to paradise. Whenever times are hard, the woods are always there to make it better. Bluegrass is a way of life here and that had a massive influence on our sound. There is also a love and friendliness that is hard to find elsewhere.
EMD: The Write Teacher(s) is dedicated to the arts. What role have the arts played in your life and in the life of the band? Why are they important to you?
ES: Well, Ben is a professional graphic artist. In fact, he is the best artist I know, hands down. He does all the artwork for the band, as well as the mixing and producing. We were all in symphonic and marching band; the other guys did a lot of jazz for about 4 years as well. I LOVE reading and writing. Writing is how I deal with the problems around me – without it, I don’t think I would be where I am in any way, shape, or form. Also, as a professional teacher; if you take away the arts, you are taking away half of the students futures. Not everyone can or should be a mathematician or a businessman. Visual and audio arts mean freedom to many people who feel trapped in a world of strict rules.
EMD: Have you guys performed live much yet? Do you have any goals for live performances: places you’d like to go, dream venues, etc.?
ES: We have played live quite a lot in the last few years (trying to keep money coming to get more gigs). We have played weddings, gone on small tours, opened for bigger acts, and have played tiny bars. We are not super picky – we just love playing. We dream of playing festivals with the big names of our genre, but we also dream of just getting to tour with the lesser known ones. To tour with Matthew and the Atlas, Boy and Bear, or David Mayfield would be amazing. We were once given a chance to open for The Lumineers before they exploded onto the scene, but once again university had gotten in the way there. I regret not being able to do that, but you can’t change the past.
EMD: Just for fun: favorite movie, favorite ice cream flavor, favorite animal. GO.
ES: Movie: So many, but I will have to go with The Last Samurai or The Kingdom of Heaven. Ice cream: Mint chocolate chip for sure. Animal: the barracuda.
EMD: Who is/was your favorite teacher, and what kinds of things did they teach you?
ES: Every grade level I had a favorite teacher. In university my favorite professor was the one who guided and believed in me even though my skills where so different from most teaching majors. I realize that my favorite teachers were always the ones who fought the school establishment to actually teach us useful things and not what to write on a test. Some of those teachers have been fired for it and others are always on the verge of it. It is sad that the best teachers get purged in an attempt to equalize everything. As a professional teacher myself, I aim to be like them, and I am glad I have music because I will not budge on that aim, meaning I may not be a teacher much longer.
EMD: Anything else you’d like to add?
ES: You can pick up the new album on all major online music stores or our Bandcamp page. If you want to chat, hit up our Twitter, I check it every day and always reply. You can also find all of our stuff on YouTube if that is what you prefer. You are all beautiful.
Live, Love, Learn,
Erin +