A Chat With: Hot Flash Heat Wave

This San Fransisco dreamy rock band made up of Adam, Ted, Nathaniel, and Nick had a chat with us before their gig in Montreal. We talked about their first time touring the East Coast, our Canadian delicacy Poutine, their DIY style and more!

So, how has tour been going for you guys so far?

HFHW: Really cool, its been a blast

Ted: It’s our first time in a lot of these cities, New York and Toronto and now Montreal, Chicago too

Nat: It’s our first time as a band in all of these cities

And today is your last show of the East Coast tour, how are you feeling that its over and you’re moving onto something else?

Adam: Kinda sad and exhausted. I’ve been super sick the last week so I could probably like rest for a while when I get home but its been really fun

Ted: We all kinda wanted to stay in New York

Has anything outstanding happen on tour so far, anything crazy?

Ted: We snuck into this club in New York one night and it was a legit club, it was huge. There was probably hundreds of people in there. And everything in New

York feels like you’ve already seen it in a movie before, that was definitely one of those moments, we were waiting in line for this club and then they shut the doors right in front of us so we were just wandering around and we snuck into a smoking section and ended up in this other place and yeah there was just all these drunk people in there like dancing around but it pretty good music, it was a classic New York club scene that we just got popped into

Anything else fan related happen?

Adam: It was pretty sick in Toronto there was all these kids who like ended up being super into us and this one kid had us stay at his parents house. Which was kinda weird in theory but it was really tight. They gave us their whole basement and set up beds and stuff and his dad directed a bunch of the Saw movies and they made us dinner for almost every night we were there. It was super cool

You guys tweeted ‘Poutine hangover,’ how much did you guys have?

HFHW: ahaha

Nat: Just one serving, that’s enough to dehydrate you

Nick: I think the part that was really the linchpin was the fact that it was after we’d already eaten dinner and gone out, we ended up at a poutine spot at like 1am

Such a classic move during a night out

Nick: It seems like a good idea at the time and then you sleep with the brick in your stomach all night

Are you guys gonna do that again?

Nat: Its like a mistake you say you’re not gonna make but in reality you’ll do it again

Ted: It keeps coming right back,

Adam: 1 o’clock rolls around and you just have to get the poutine

Nick: Just a couple drinks to impair your judgment and soon enough you’re down that rabbit hole

Adam: The poutine hole

Ahaha and that’s just one night for you guys, imagine us here all the time

Ted: I don’t know how you guys are still alive out here

Your second album is coming out soon, how are you guys feeling about that?

Ted: Excited, we’re really excited. It’s been a long time coming now. It always takes longer than you expect to roll out the album so usually by the time it’s actually coming out we like can’t wait to share it

Has it been written for a while now?

Adam: Definitely yeah, it was written for a while but we recorded it last summer. So its taken all that time to work out all the details to put it out

That’s so long, isn’t it frustrating in a way? Like more things happen in your life during that time so you write other things and now you need to go back to that ‘old’ material

Adam: Yeah but its good to play it to people cause its new to them so its like you feed off their energy. But yeah we don’t necessarily play these songs for each other anymore

Nick: We live vicariously through the crowd. But I’m excited for people who have not heard it, of course cause its not out to hear yet you know

Ted: Yeah, all the excitement is happening now, we’ve just been sitting on it. So now that people are hearing it for the first time and having the physical copies of the album and putting out the videos we’ve been working on, the excitement is definitely building

Nick: And we have it on vinyl this time. The first record Neapolitan, we only had CD, the digital download and there was via Turntable Kitchen like 4 songs of the record on a vinyl and an old demo of Hesitation but now theres cassette which is pretty popular, and then vinyl

Can you guys tell us something about the making of the album?

Nat: Um, a lot of it we were experimenting with tones and we have these really nice tube amps but we ended up recording a lot of it on this 10watt tiny amp. So we have these huge nice amplifiers but we just were getting sounds that we really liked out of this tiny thing so we just ended up using that

Nick: We had a lot more time, Neapolitan happened within like a week of recording and then this album we had a lot more time in finding what we wanted to do with these songs

Cool, and can you tell us a little story behind one of the songs that hasn’t been released yet?

Ted: We have a song coming out next week, it’s the 3rd single on the album. It’s based on this demo that Adam and I made 4 years ago, it was a beat and then I kinda rewrote it as a time piece of that period in my life. I had just moved to San Fransisco and I didn’t get along with my roommates and I was just totally alone and then I kinda wrote this song looking back to that time just realizing how all the pieces came together. So yeah that song is called Lonely Times

About the artwork of the album, how did you guys decide on that photo?

Adam: Well it was based on an old drawing Ted had done of a sketch of this person with these ferns. And then we were working with our friend Ryan Molnar in San Fransisco who’s a really cool photographer, we wanted to recreate it on film or on photo and yeah we just set up a studio in our living room and took a ton of pictures. We found that particular one out of hundreds that was perfect and that was it. We just had the concept, and we found the right girl to model in it and it all came together really well

Lets talk about your videos now, how was it making and coming up with the video of Gold Years?

Nat: It was just a lot of ideas we had that were fantasies we had our whole lives of just different situations we find ourselves in or exaggerated versions of real life situations. And we have this VHS camera so we kind of just took it to a park like 10 minutes from our house and recorded it all in 2 days

Ted: We bounced around a lot of different ideas that we were all laughing about and we got our friend who’s in another band in San Fransisco, his name is Field Medic and he plays the shirtless wizard so yeah we were just throwing ideas back and forth and had fun with it

Nat: And then I edited it so it was cool cause it was the first video we’d seen from start to finish. We came up with the idea, fully made all the props and whatever, filmed it ourselves, like DIY

Yeah like all your videos have that DIY look to it, would you say that’s your aesthetic?

Ted: so far yeah we’ve used old formats on every video. First one was Gutter Girl that was filmed on Super8 and we filmed another video for Bye Bye Baby which was all on VHS

You guys did a crowdfunding campaign for the Raindrop video, tell me more about that?

Adam: Well pretty much we were working with the same people who directed the Gutter Girl video and when they told us they wanted to do this video at first they said they could work with a lower budget, which was something we wanted but then when they actually ready for the video they said it was gonna cost like 10 thousand dollars which seemed pretty crazy. One of the directors, Luke, he said he thought doing a crowdfunding campaign would work well cause a lot of people do that in the film industry for their projects to get funded. We felt kind of weird about it at first but after a little bit we were just down for the cause. They wanted to make a really cool piece of art for us so we did it and we made some money which definitely helped out, and yeah we shot that video right before going on tour, we were shooting it every single day until we went on tour. Its in the editing process now, but yeah it was a lot of fun making

And what’s the connection to this song?

Adam: I wrote that in Hawaii when I was hanging out there with my dad and yeah, it came out in a couple of hours I wrote it, it wrote itself kinda

Nick: I made this whole story in my head about that song about just being in love and how it always starts out as this fantasy

Adam: I feel weird sometimes talking too much about what it means cause i reference things in my personal life but I also leave it vague because everyone interprets it in their own way. Like the people who made the video had their own specific way of what they thought it was about, which I never really intended it to be like that so yeah I like leaving it up to people who listen to it

Ted: Yeah I mean thats a big part of music, no two people are gonna hear the same song the same way. A phrase can mean different things to different people

FIRE ROUND

Go to Karaoke song?

Ted: Believe by Cher

Adam: Material Girl by Madonna

Nick: California Girls by Beach Boys

Nat: Sugar, We’re Going Down by Fall Out Boy

Favourite song from your upcoming album?

Ted: I secretly like the last track, its called Blue

Adam: I like the intro

Nick: I’ll say Blue or Raindrop

Nat: I just don’t wanna choose one of my own songs I’ll sound like a douchebag…I like every song that I wrote the best

If anyone could cover one of your songs, who would cover it and what song?

Adam: Toro Y Moi covering So Many People

Ted: I wanna hear Paul McCartney covering Bye Bye Baby

Nick: Like Albert Einstein cover Raindrop

Nat: Bill Nye