veryone’s favorite dance dance band is back, if only for a hot minute. Tooth & Nail’s Queens Club, consisting of former members of The Chariot, are back to give us just another addicting taste of their signature sound. The group decided to release Friendly this last month as a free gift via their Facebook. The EP holds two acoustic tracks off their full length debut Young Giant as well as a few new gems that didn’t make it on the record. At a low low price of completely free, we highly recommend you go grab a copy of Friendly from Facebook. Drummer and all around nice guy Jake Ryan filled us in on the new tracks and where Queens Club is heading next.
It’s great to hear a few new tracks from you guys! Were these some that were scrapped from the full length? (If so, why were they scrapped? What about them made you want to make sure they were heard?)
Jake Ryan: Actually, we are just always writing music in our spare time, and these songs just came early on in 2010 between tours and what not. We decided to finally track them, just for the purpose of not forgetting them and as time went on, we wrote more and more stuff and these songs became kind of old to us. We figured they wouldn’t be on the next record, so we might as well try and release them because we haven’t played them live (with the exception of “Darkkstar”), so that we could perhaps integrate them into our live set for fun.
You also recorded some acoustic versions of some of the danciest songs on the record. I think when a song gets so stripped down that the lyrics really end up in the forefront so talk to us about “Upstart” and “Less Talk” as far as the message behind them.
JR: I’m not really the lyrics guy for the band, Dan is definitely the man behind that. He will usually show us the lyrics and explain what spawned them, but to be honest those songs were written (lyrically) over 2 years ago now, and I can’t really remember how they came about. (Laughs)
Do those tracks take on new meaning for you guys at all when you begin stripping them down into a more mellow version?
JR: Well, I feel like they sonically become different songs for sure. I definitely feel like its appropriate to treat them as their own entity while hopefully showing a side of the song to people who know the original, that they will enjoy hearing.
It’s great that you were able release the EP for free. What led to this decision? Have you seen a good reaction to it so far?
“I wanted the EP to be free, because, well, no matter what way you look at it, music is free. We are in the digital age, and people are gonna get a hold of the music regardless of you selling
it or not”JR: I knew we had these songs that we were just sort of sitting on doing nothing with, and at the same time we had kind of toyed around with the idea of recording a couple songs acoustic. Put two and two together and decided we could release an EP. I wanted the EP to be free, because, well, no matter what way you look at it, music is free. We are in the digital age, and people are gonna get a hold of the music regardless of you selling it or not. I wanted to provide a place and opportunity for people to get some music directly from us. I know that it still gets put up on other sites people normally go to share/swap/torrent media, that’s cool and awesome to us, we want people to hear our music and share it with their friends. But at the same time we have really enjoyed seeing people come to us to get the EP and drop us a comment on our Facebook page letting us know what they thought about it, or thanking us for the “gift” as some have called it. I think that is a really cool way that we have been able to connect to some of our listeners, and I hope that we can come up with new ways to “gift” some music and media to our listeners while balancing the need to actually “sell” records to keep our head above water as artists and to pose some sort of stance on the charts of actual sales. Its really a Catch-22 wanting to satisfy the artist/musician that just wants to give away music because you know that art is free… while knowing that you need to survive and as evil as it may sound make some money doing your “job”.
EPs such as this are often released to hold fans over until the next full length. When can we expect more new material from Queens Club?
JR: That’s really up to where we feel that Young Giant’s “cycle” has been run. We know that we could potentially extend its life and with a few ducks in a row really breathe new life into that record. That, along with when our label (Tooth & Nail Records) feels its time to get the ball rolling on a new one. I know that we are already doing demos for songs we feel like would be great for the next record, and usually when that starts happening its easy to get into the process of actually doing a next record. I know we are all always excited to share new music… and with these new songs we have been writing that is very much an understatement. We are completely pumped about the songs and would do a record this second! (Laughs) 
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