Interview: Tiny Moving Parts

Tiny Moving Parts have released ‘Pleasant Living’ on iTunes and Bandcamp on Triple Crown Records. We caught up with the melodic-emo band from Minnesota to talk about their latest release, what it’s like to be in a band with your family and how they go about song-writing.

How did Tiny Moving Parts begin? Considering you’re all family you must have started playing music together a while ago.

Indeed, we did!  Way back in junior high, we got our instruments and just started playing together.  Back then, we would just cover simple punk songs for fun in Matt and Billy’s basement or garage.  We played as The D-Cups throughout high school, but once Billy moved to Fargo for college in 2008, we changed our band name to Tiny Moving Parts.

Does Minnesota have a thriving punk scene to speak of, compared to other places in the USA? Has that made it any more difficult to get your music out there?

Where we grew up, in Benson, MN, it was just a small farm town so there wasn’t much of a scene.  We eventually all moved to Fargo, ND and there was a good scene there!  Definitely smaller than a lot of big cities, but it has a very welcoming scene.  I think it was hard to get our music out there, because we lived so far from other cities.

You guys tour as consistently as you can, so you must have some cool stories to tell. Does the amount of tour dates that you commit to ever get overwhelming?

The amount of shows we play never gets overwhelming, but we have a few stories of frustration.  We’ve had a handful of van problems that have caused us to miss shows.  We missed a show once because of a stomach virus that had us all puking and shitting uncontrollably.  We got broken into once.  So ironically, missing shows is really the only overwhelming part.

Your debut LP, ‘This Couch is Long and Full of Friendship’ was deservedly well received. Do you ever get phased by critical success?

We were stunned and flattered by how well the record did.  Our intentions were to write a record that people would like, but also, be fun for us to play for people.

Releasing an LP is probably something that I’ll never do, so how does that actually feel?

It’s a great feeling!  When we released ‘This Couch’, we had no idea what we were doing.  There was no release date, we just put it up for download on a Sunday afternoon.  A week later, we left for a 56 day tour across America with no vinyl or CDs.

That album pretty much nailed that free-flowing emo sound. How do you go about writing songs: is it a collaborative effort? 

Dylan fools around on his guitar on his own time.  Then, he brings his ideas to band practice and shapes together a song.  Sometimes, we write a song in a practice, but other times it gets thrown around and changed for days or weeks.  We rewrite the songs over and over, changing, removing and adding parts.  After we have a song instrumentally down, we demo it and start figuring out vocals.

Also, how do you achieve such a loose, organic structure, especially in terms of the guitar work? Is that something you aim for or does it come naturally?

I guess it just comes naturally.  We just write songs that we will have fun playing live.

‘Pleasant Living’ came out recently. The release must have been exciting and a little stressful right? 

‘Pleasant Living’ came out on September 9th via Triple Crown Records and it was very exciting!  Not so much stressful.  We had a release date set for this album and a lot of touring, so it was all excitement!

Are you aiming to achieve something with this LP or just make it a continuation of everything you’ve done?

Well, we didn’t want to make the same album over again.  So it is a different sounding album, but I think it still sounds like Tiny Moving Parts.

Are there any other releases that you’re excited for this year?

Free Throw has an album coming out around the same time as ours, and we are very excited for that!

https://www.facebook.com/tinymovingparts/

https://twitter.com/TinyMovingParts