Underground Hottlanta: The Goldest

While I cetainly have my preferences towards more progressive and experimental music, I still love some good, easily accessible pop music when it’s done right. An Atlanta supergroup called The Goldest, featuring musicians who have been with such illustrious groups as Dropsonic, Jupiter Watts, Long Knives, The Sudden Rays, 3D5spd and Envie to name just a few, recently released their debut EP. It contains 5 upbeat, sugary sweet jams that I have been absolutely loving. Another thing is the album sees a plethora of guest appearances from other ATL superstars, most notably Michelle DuBois (Luigi) and Tracy Clark (The Preakness). In Athens, you often see records featuring dozens of guest appearances from other local musicians, but you don’t see that so much in the Atlanta scene.

Anyways, give it a listen:

The Goldest: Already Gone

The Goldest: FMGold

For your reading pleasure, I did an interview with The Goldest‘s Justin Gray, Matthew Chenoweth, and Kevin Wallace via email:

Ohmpark: How did this project come about?

Justin Gray: Matt and I met at The Happenstance, an annual show at the Earl that throws musicians together that have never played before to write and perform 4 songs in the same day. I was already in a band (the Sudden Rays) with Kevin that was making a record at Southern Tracks, and that’s where we met. I had played previously in American Dream w/ Susannah. Lastly, Matt brought his former band mate Wilson on to round things out.

Matthew Chenoweth: Justin and I got paired up a couple of years ago at the Happenstance and it really clicked between us. He’s the perfect bass player in my opinion – solid lines, heavy grooves, musical approach. We ended up in Day Mars Ray together and that was a great way to find out we dug the same kind of music and wanted the same kinds of things from a band. The next step was jamming together on some song fragments we both had, and we left the rehearsal space completely juiced. Next was to land the perfect drummer – we both wanted Kevin (Justin already played with him in The Sudden Rays and I knew him from Jupiter Watts). Kevin sat in and was convinced after one jam session – we wrote a song in that session that eventually got recorded (not released yet). Next time we got together we wrote “We All Want More.” We seemed to click beautifully on the creative tip and almost every time someone started playing it turned into a song. We’d all done the rock trio thing and wanted a bigger sound so we kept writing and brainstorming on how to build what we thought would be the perfect band. Lots of vocals, etc. Next thing I knew Justin had booked us into Southern Tracks to cut ‘Fine’ (another spontaneous writing effort) and when Susannah came in to sing we knew we had another member – even if she was too busy, we’d wait. Didn’t take long. Sus was a full member by the time we recorded ‘Already Gone’ (she’d been on every track anyway). When we booked our first show we knew we needed a little more support in the band which came from Tom (the engineer who’d been recording us) and my friend Wilson (he and I had been in The Lord is My Shotgun together). Both great additions – Tom adding big full guitars and Wilson covering additional guitar parts in the recordings, along with vocals and keyboards. Voila! The Goldest.

JG: So that is the nuts and bolts but what really got us going was our 1st trip to southern tracks to record “fine”. We started recording in the 10am and left at 3am with a finished song—

something about moving so quickly yet being so fully immersed in just one song really got our attention. We knew that we had found a sound that was very, very special and unlike anything any of us had done before. Our sum was truly greater than our parts. That excitement, some good fights, and fumes got us through the next year and now here we are… loving what we’ve done, and optimistic about our future!

Ohmpark: Could you tell me a little bit about how the songwriting process works with the band?

Click here to read the entire post…