'Best Day Of My Life' hit makers, American Authors on their new EP.
"Here to stay" would be an appropriate description of the Brooklyn originated rock band, American Authors. Initially breaking charts back in 2014 with hit singles such as "Best Day Of My Life" and "Believer", it goes without saying that the four-piece ensemble are no strangers to the charts. Now just as the world turns in a negative state, the band has released their newest project, 'Counting Down,' with the hopes of bringing about a bit more positivity.
The project, which seems to take influence from multiple rock subgenres, combines the eclectic poppy feel fans are used to with a more modern indie reverb. The five-song EP provides a range of emotional tone with songs like 'Microphone' bringing the enthusiasm and 'Best I can,' which serves as a melancholy house style track. Turncoat got ahold of American Authors long time bassist, Dave Rubin, to learn the story behind 'Counting Down'.
What was your inspiration behind ‘Counting Down’?
D.R: “The whole concept came from just having some songs we really, really loved on seasons. We also wanted to test the waters of our musical diversity while trying a lot of new styles and to keep the framework of American Authors, which is almost nostalgic acoustic while being fun-loving and hopeful, so counting down came about from listening to all of the previous things that we had loved making before and bringing bits and pieces of those elements into a new project. We kept a lot of things from each album on the EP, so there's a little era of our first album, a little era of our second, then a little of our third, which made Counting Down more of a "counting down to the future of American Authors" metaphor.”
How did you put the EP together?
D.R: “We went down to Nashville and converted an Airbnb into a studio, this was last summer before we went on tour with OAR and literally did five songs in four days. One song with our old producer was Brick By Brick, and then the rest were just things I had on my computer. When we were going through Counting Downs tracklist, we started sending out all of these different songs to people to see if they could revise them in certain ways; we love collaborating with the world and the music community.”
What was the inspiration behind the Brick By Brick music video?
D.R: “The inspiration was literally Covid forced us to do this. That's it. Zac's in LA, I am in New York, Matt's in Nashville with James, so we were like "OK, how can we do this?" Zac has a little pod of people who don't have Covid and hang out together. One of the people in the pod happens to be one of our good friends and a great director, so it was kind of this funny thing where it was like "OK you know, let's just put Zac in a funny compromising position that looks crazy and just have a blast with the song" because honestly, the song is kind of a call to galvanize in a way and tear down the things that are holding us back especially during this time so it's really fun to kind of just throw shit at our lead singer, to be honest.”
When you first Joined American Authors, did you think you were going to be this big?
D.R: “I'm gonna be straight up with you, and this is my arrogance as a musician coming out, I always knew that this band was going to be something big. It was something that when I joined back in the day that I realized there's a certain energy and synergy when you find people that you're supposed to be working with that's kind of an unspoken thing. Yes, we were going to hit a lot of hardships; that's just something that happens in music, But we all knew that each of us had our own thing to bring to the music world. We went through a lot of struggle and compromise of being broke and doing the hustle and all of that stuff for years, and we would've continued to go on whether or not we had the love of the world or not, but because we stumbled upon the love of the world it's such a great and beautiful thing that we can communicate on a much larger scale with our message of positivity.”
Top 3 music inspirations?
D.R: “We love the Killers, Coldplay, and Mumford and Sons inspired us. Those are all bands that we can unanimously say are incredible, and we love them. They continually reinvent themselves, and that's the type of band that we are; we continuously reinvent ourselves. It's such an honor and a privilege to see other bands reinvent themselves successfully because it allows bands like us to move the chest piece down the board.”
Counting Down is out now on all streaming platforms.
cover photo by Spencer Kohn.
