This week on Studio Live (November 11, 2022), KSMU is hosting rock trio the Meanwhile. Born out of the band Failing Minnesota, the Meanwhile debuted with a new record on Valentine’s Day earlier this year. Now, they are releasing an original Christmas song.
The band, made up of Michael Gandy, Austin Robertson and Chris Carver, came by the station to talk with KSMU’s Jess Balisle about the new song and its accompanying video.
BALISLE: What was the idea to do a Christmas song?
GANDY: That idea came from Chris, actually, the guy who probably hates Christmas the most. But, he came up with this idea to write a Christmas song. He’s like, “You love Christmas so much that why don’t we write this Christmas song?”
BALISLE: What were your reactions to this?
GANDY: I was down for it.
BALISLE: So, you love Christmas music?
GANDY: I love Christmas music. I’m that dude that’ll listen to it in the middle of summer. So, we started writing this thing and it morphed into this nostalgic, happy Christmas song. And it’s called Christmas At The Movies. And, so it is just about Christmas Movies and it tries to bring that nostalgia to people, something people loved about Christmas. It’s fast, it’s fun. We love it.
CARVER: Yeah, we reference over 20 different movies in it. It’s kind of a nostalgia thing. Mike loves Christmas. I’m surprised his Christmas lights aren’t up already. That may be what he’s doing this weekend.
GANDY: Don’t worry about that.
CARVER: And so, I do not like Christmas. I’m the Scrooge of the group. And so, it’s just kind of I had some ideas of some songs around Christmas last year and thought about doing that. And like, we should do a Christmas song and write it in 3/4. Mike can’t write in 3/4, so it’s in 6/8. And so, yeah, it kind of morphed into this. It was a good, collaborative project.
BALISLE: I’ve seen what I’m assuming are some shots from the set of the video on your Facebook page, which definitely has a very throw-back, retro vibe to it. The wood paneling, kind of old-school looking tree. When did you guys start putting that together and what were some of your ideas for that? Was that, like, directly from your childhood memories?
GANDY: Yes. We tried to look and see what about watching these movies and what about Christmas in the 80s and 90s, whatever, watching these movies would bring memories back to it. So, we found as much as we could that really invoked that feeling. The wood paneling walls, the large 9,000 pound tube TV, the Nintendo, the 8-bit Nintendo. As much as we could, we tried to find sets that really invoked those feelings. ‘Cause that’s what we want. We want people to look back and go, “I remember when I was a kid and I love Christmas.”
BALISLE: Where did you guys find these? Did you kind of build this from scratch or did you find…
CARVER: Mmhmm.
BALISLE: Oh, you did!
CARVER: Yeah, we hired somebody to come in and do the filming.
GANDY: Yes. The genius known as Rob Adams is the director and we had this enormous, expansive script that we wanted to do that was way beyond anything we had any business doing.
BALISLE: Did you guys, like, storyboard it out?
GANDY: Yeah.
ROBERTSON: Well, he did.
GANDY: He actually storyboarded it out.
ROBERTSON: But yeah, that was a point of discussion between the three of us, like, with that many references, how do we translate that into a video that logistically we could do without a massive budget, because we don’t have that. And Rob came at us. He did a little animatic for us, wrote out a little script. I mean, it was everything that I had envisioned in my head going through the lyrics of this song. Like, this is the only way that this makes sense to translate into a video is if it looks like this. And that’s exactly what he came at us with.
Christmas At The Movies comes out on all of your favorite streaming platforms Friday, November 11, 2022. Be sure to catch the Meanwhile on Studio Live that day at noon here on KSMU.
