California’s Bay Area is home to some of the biggest names in music: Grateful Dead, Journey and Green Day, just to name a few. Finish Ticket, an indie rock band also native to the Bay Area, seemed to draw inspiration from their predecessors and subsequently have taken the music industry by storm.
Twins Brendan and Michael Hoye and their close friend Alex DiDonato formed the band when they were still in high school. Their dynamic live shows and catchy guitar-driven pop songs helped them build up a solid fan base in their hometown and caught the eye of Elektra Records, who re-released their debut album, Tears You Apart, in 2013. The three members then brought on brothers Gabe and Nick Stein who play drums and piano, respectively, to complete their sound, which gears toward reflective, memorable arena rock. The group is now getting ready to take this new sound all over the country with their new EP, When Night Becomes Day.
Finish Ticket will be performing with Vinyl Theatre on Feb. 19 at Terminal West. The Wheel spoke with the band’s guitarist Alex DiDonato over the phone about touring, their love of NorCal and the band’s overall experience in the music industry thus far.
Ilana Berghash: You started playing together in high school. What made you decide to put a hold on education to pursue music?
Alex DiDonato: I went to college the year before the Hoye brothers [Brendan and Michael] did, so I would just come back on the weekends. But we kept the band going throughout that year, and the next year when the other two guys went to college; it was a little bit harder because everybody was spread out more. We were all still in California, but Brendan was in Southern California, and Michael was in Davis and I was in Santa Cruz, so we were hours apart from each other. We were still trying to keep the band going, because it was our passion, but we realized that we were half-assing both the band and school. We knew we could be doing better if we had not been doing the band, but we also knew we could be doing the band better if we weren’t doing school. We all made the choice together that we could put school on hold, because we knew that if we wanted to go back to school, we always could. We felt like we only had one chance at making the band a career, and it was right then and now. So we all dropped out together, and here we are, [still] not in school.
IB: It’s admirable that you pursued your passions. Maya and I are trying to reconcile our passions with school and luckily we have the opportunity [to do so].
AD: Thank you! Yeah, it’s tough. The whole world wants you to do school so if you do anything but that, it’s not an easy path. One of the main deciding factors of making that decision was [that] the second year I was in college and the first year the Hoye twins were, we won a local radio show competition that our radio station puts on every year to open for their annual winter concert where they have a bunch of big, huge famous bands in this arena in Oakland. We were just a local band, but we won the opening slot. Then we got to play with Phoenix and The Black Keys and My Chemical Romance, and that was mind blowing for us as teenagers. We realized from then on that we needed to keep doing this no matter what. Seeing that and being given an almost in-your-face look at what music really could be if we tried really hard was a huge factor in our decision.
Maya Nair: Tell us about the evolution from the indie pop sound of Tears You Apart to the alternative rock sound of When Night Becomes Day.
AD: The evolution was kind of natural. Tears You Apart was a little bit different for us, because it was just the three of us, the Hoye twins and I, at that time, because it was right after we dropped out of college. Our other two members, our drummer and our other guitarist, who were with us throughout high school decided to stay in school, and they didn’t really want to pursue the band full time. We split with them amicably, but then we became a three piece. It was a fragmented process trying to get those songs completed, because we had them all pretty much ready or getting there — we just didn’t have a whole band. That was kind of our test run throughout that process of making that album of also forming a band together. We met Gabe, our [current] drummer, in the middle of that process, so he ended up recording drums on pretty much the whole record. A lot of the process of making the album was not as a full band, and we always want to have a whole, full band look and sound. That was a little different for us.
Now, When Night Becomes Day was being recorded, we had a full band; we had Gabe on drums and Nick on keyboards, and we filled out our lineup and have been touring together for a while. We were all comfortable in the whole five-piece band set up. Our desire with that EP was to make songs that would hit hard live. We just really wanted our live energy and performance to come through in those recordings, because we felt like we didn’t really get the chance on our album as much. A lot of those songs [represent] how we envisioned playing [them] live.
MN: Do you think the next full length album will continue in that direction with that sound?
AD: Yeah, definitely. It’ll still be the same five of us recording it, so I think there will be a lot of similarities between this and the EP. We want to keep moving forward too, and I think we’ve got even more aspirations with this next full length. We want to sound even better than the EP did.
IB: Finish Ticket has opened up for many big acts, and you have said that was huge [for the band]. Is there any advice you got from the acts you performed with or anything you learned while on the road that you think will stick with you throughout your own musical career?
AD: Totally. I think we try to pick up as much information and knowledge as we can from every big, successful act we play with. We were lucky enough to open for Ed Sheeran a couple times, once in San Francisco and once in New York City. That was really cool to see Ed, who’s just one person and only him on stage, but he’s so ridiculously famous and huge. It was cool to interact with him and get to know him, because he’s also the most humble, nice[est] person we’ve ever met. It was cool for us to see that even on that scale of fame and popularity, you can still be really humble and nice and cordial to everybody. And we toured with twenty one pilots a couple months ago, and that tour was mind blowing. Just to see the full scale of their production, because they’re a band that has everything together in a well knit package. Their road crew and everybody they bring on tour are the most professional people we’ve ever worked with. The two guys [in the band], Josh and Tyler, they’re so at the top of their game. They’re really professional, super humble and nice. It’s cool to get all of those reminders that you can keep your integrity even if you’re at the top of the music scene. Those are always important things for us to remember.
IB: The Bay Area music scene is so impressive and well distinguished. Do you think it’s influenced your music at all?
AD: Most definitely. Probably more than anything else that has influenced our music. Especially when we were starting out — we started the band, because all of us would go to local shows in the Bay as often as we could [together]. We would see these bands that were part of this local scene and see how good everybody was. Especially [at] the time when we were forming the band, there was a standard of quality that was so high right when we started the band. We knew that if we ever wanted to be successful in the local scene, we had to have an incredible live show and interact with our fans and just work really hard on our music and make sure it was good and not [be] just another random shitty band. The local music scene was probably the most important influence to us because we knew we had to get [through] the local scene, [and] it was so high quality. I’ve seen a lot of music scenes across the country, and I don’t if I’ve ever seen one that was as professional and [such a] high quality of music and bands.
MN: If somebody who has never listened to your music was going to listen to only one song, which song do you think would sum up who you are as a band and why?
AD: It’s hard for me to choose anything other than the song, “Bring The Rain” because [of how much] we pride ourselves on our live shows. I think it’s the most fun aspect of being in a band for all of us, just to go and play out and connect with people across the country. And that song, we keep it as a staple of our show. We ended with it [in] pretty much every set we’ve done in the last couple of years. It’s a really powerful song, because it conveys a lot of the emotions that we convey in a lot of songs with our band, and we like how it’s got [that] emotional power without trying to sound too self absorbed. No matter if it’s the worst show we’ve ever played or the best show we’ve ever played, when we’re about to play “Bring The Rain” — we’re all in the zone, and we’re just ready to shred. It’s a way for us to get out our emotions, like no matter how we’re feeling about that show or day, we all get it out together on “Bring The Rain.”
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