travisstoliker.com

Disclaimer: I do not have any ill will towards the guys in Jenns Apt, but I want it to be clear what happened. I am trying to write this as dispassionately as possible.

I want to add some more detail to what happened w/ the Jenn’s Apartment situation because what Roy typed was only half the story.

Aprox 3 years ago when Roy and Matty approached me about playing music together, I was clear that I felt playing local shows to “friends and family” is a fruitless way to build a fan base and I had no interest in promoting our music that way.  I was only interested in making quality innovative music. At the time we were all cool with that decision even though Matty and Roy wanted to play a lot of shows.

So here’s what happened w/ the band…

Quickly Roy and Matty convinced me that they wanted to do shows and I agreed with one caveat, we had to be really tight.   They agreed. So we started practicing intensely for about 1.5 years before playing our first show. 

After that Roy wanted to go into the studio, we did 1 horrible ep w/ afriend. Then we did another EP w/ that john guy in lansing.   — All of them sounded pretty terrible. And this was not due to the recording, it was due to the fact that we never sat down and wrote songs together. We never put in the effort.  We proceeded to do this same thing w/ Divide and Conquer.

So here’s how I saw things and this is what I was trying to telling Roy and Matty for the past 3 years.

Roy is an amazing guitarist, songwriter and lyricist; however, he’s a poor singer.  His singing, in my opinion, has been one of the primary elements that has held back our recordings.  For this reason, I was the only person in the band to work w/ Roy and try to help him find his voice.  I was the one who suggested getting singing lessons.  Now Roy is starting to sound much better.

Matty:  Matty is a really great guy and fun to be around.  We always vibed really well when it came to practice and free flowing, but Matty and I never really sat down and wrote our parts together. This caused the bass and drum parts to drift apart and not compliment each other. This was another reason our CD’s didn’t sound great. Matty and I never wrote together.

—–
So these were the problems that I saw in the band.  We were not professional musicians, yet.

So whats been happening for the past 5 months or so???

In effort to improve our song writing, roy and I started trading songs back and forth online (like postal service did) so that I could practice and write different parts, then we could all sit down and pick apart what we liked best.  This process has been going on for about 3 months or more… and its been working fantastic. We have rough recordings done that, to me, sound like the BEST stuff we’ve ever written in our 3 years.

So if we have the best stuff that we’ve ever written roughly recorded and we’ve had all this time, whats been the hold up?

Well we’ve been waiting for Josh and Matty to learn their parts because they recently switched instruments AND the second reason is because instead of focusing on the CD - we get distracted by offers to playshows. 

So here is where the conflict comes in…. Matty, Josh and Roy all wantme to jump on and say “YES - Lets play this show!”   - but I don’t want to because the last shows we have played sounded like SHIT.  People didn’t know their own parts.  I don’t want to play shows when we soundlike ass, sorry.

So, Josh and Roy live together now.  Josh gets online one night and starts talking to me about how we need to play a bunch of shows and weneed to practice 3 times a week… I say to him “I already know myparts, I don’t know why I have to practice 3 times a week until you know you’re parts”  (we have all the parts recorded so he can learn what he needs) — Josh and I continue to talk online for a few more hours. I also mention that I think we need to be very slow about recording the next album and that recording it one song at a time, or three songs at a time might be a better idea so that we can make sure each song sounds perfect.

—- So Josh leaves his computer. tries to tell roy all this.  Roy gets an offer from Hero’s, Love, Revenge and wants to go do that…  Then roy, matty and Josh make a decision to kick me out of the band and find a new drummer without ever contacting me to discuss what was going on. The only thing I got was an email from Josh saying that they are replacing me.

Jenn’s Apartment is now trying to say that I left the band because I didn’t want to practice and play all the great shows they were getting… the fact of the matter is this…

I wanted Jenn’s Apartment to record a professional quality CD w/ songsthat are intelligently written.  And I was sick of sloppily playing local shows to our friends and family.

I was not let go because I wasn’t willing to put in the effort. I was let go because I thought our effort could be better spent writing and recording professional songs rather than playing small shows to our friends and family. 

So to sum it up…. after 3 years of playing together,   Matty and Roy didn’t have the courtesy to discuss this w/ me. But had josh break upw/ me in an email.  

Looking forward:
I was pretty bummed w/ how the band was stagnating over the past 4 months so leaving the band isn’t hard for me. I just wanted to type this to clear up the details. 

I wish the guys in Jenn’s Apartment all the luck in the world and I hope this plan works out for them.