【Interview】Ratboys’ “Printer’s Devil” : Full of Openness and Love.
Q1. Your new album, while leaving a feeling of nostalgia in your songs, this time, we could also hear a new aspect in your music. There are songs that give us some emotional feelings that mixtures of nostalgia, warms, and makes us remember past memories while others are up tempo, powerful and there are also pop songs. How do you view this new album?Wow, thank you. That is very kind of you to say. I view the album in a similar way, it makes me feel very nostalgic for time I spent with my family in Kentucky, where I grew up. A lot of the music is inspired by sounds, big guitar sounds and intimate folk sounds, that I listened to a lot when I was a teenager. I remember spending time in my bedroom, listening to Sufjan Stevens and Green Day. I love contrasts like that, and I am happy that our record provides similar moments of contrast and variety. Q2. Drummer, Marcuss Nuccio and Bassist, Sean Neumann participated in this work. After releasing your previous work ”GL”, you toured with them together and came to Japan. And Julia and Dave, you two are support members of Jupiter Styles which is Sean Neumann’s project. You’ve worked and experienced many things with the two of them, and there’s a lot of good influences in this album. Are there differences between this record and your previous record regarding this? Exactly, yes we have known Sean for many years now - the first tour we ever did for Ratboys was with his old band, Single Player. We met Marcus in 2016 and started touring with him in 2017. He is a rock solid, amazing drummer. We have spent so much time together, so we are all really good friends, and we have great chemistry playing music together. For Printer’s Devil, we spent a couple months working on bass and drum parts and rehearsing songs live together as a band before we went into the studio to record. So, we were a lot more prepared at the beginning of the session than we had been before we recorded GN or AOID. Because of this, we were able to record many songs live, tracking all four of our parts simultaneously. That was really fun and new for us. I think it sounds really good that way.