Tonight on WEFT Sessions (10 p.m. on WEFT, 90.1 FM), some of the fresher faces on the Champaign-Urbana music scene will be featured. Sunset Stallion, made up of University of Illinois students Chad Warner (piano, guitar, vocals), Hannah Newman (vocals), Martin O’Donnell (drums) and Otto Stuparitz (bass) formed this past spring, and they have only a handful of gigs under their belt. However, the songs on their Myspace sound like they’ve been together much longer, despite O’Donnell’s admission that “before that recording was done, we’d only played those songs together four or five times.”
Check out the rest of the interview with Sunset Stallion after the jump.
Warner describes the band’s sound as “folk-pop, with some a capella.” The band’s individual members have influences that mostly remain in the tuneful end of the spectrum, from Kings of Leon for Warner to Wilco for Stuparitz to Jenny Lewis for Newman. O’Donnell says, “As always, I try to channel Dire Straits, Thin Lizzy, and the country stylings of the Jayhawks.”
The band has had a short, disjointed run, forming shortly before the end of spring classes and reuniting recently. “We did next to nothing over the summer,” Warner noted. “I worked at Sea World so that I’d have money to buy instruments. We borrowed everything when we played together before summer. We did kind of a Postal Service thing where I emailed songs and everybody worked on them.” Newman added, “When we got back together after the summer, it was only one week until our first show” in late August at the Canopy Club.
As far as tonight’s show goes, the band is ready for a different sort of performance. “It’s definitely a bit of a strange dynamic, being on the radio and having to juggle two separate audiences,” O’Donnell said. Warner chimed in, “We’re really excited to see Todd. It’s fun to talk to him in between songs.”
Sunset Stallion will be performing at Pygmalion Music Festival next week as well, with a 4:30 p.m. gig at Canopy Club on Friday, September 19. “We’re looking forward to being on the same poster as so many of those great bands. We’ll also see some new people who don’t normally come to our show,” Warner said.
The interview closer was a two-parter: First, if you could be any kind of tree, what kind of tree would you be? Second, What was your favorite band when you were 12? The incredibly revealing answers are below:
O’Donnell: Redwood, Better Than Ezra
Newman: Weeping Willow, Spice Girls
Warner: Bonsai, Modest Mouse
Stuparitz: Spruce, Incubus