Back in 2007, drummer Jacob Merritt and guitarist Isaac Karns were each in different bands; however, they had played some shows together and liked each other’s music. When Meritt’s band (Retail Age) broke up, he contacted Karns, whose own band (Open Oh Colored World) was also breaking up. Pretty soon, they recruited Joey Cook to play keys. At their first practice together, the three wrote the song "Nursery Magic," now on their first EP Two Eyes, and the seeds of Pomegranates were sown. (Ironically, the band began practicing in the basement of a house owned by one of Merritt’s old bandmates). About a year and half ago, Joshua Kufeldt, a high-school friend of Karns, joined on bass.
Cook talks to us just as the band finds itself releasing a second album, Everybody, Come Outside!, and getting ready to play the important music-industry showcase South by Southwest - for which, by the way, they still need a place to stay.
How do you guys go about writing a song?
Well, most of the time, one of us will get 10-second idea on guitar or bass or something, and Jake will start playing some sort of beat over it. It’s real slow, sort of gradual, and, you know, very collaborative. We all just build on what each other is doing and then we find parts that we like and decide to keep and build off of those. Often it might be something totally different from what a person’s finished idea was. I’ve been writing stuff on my own, separate from Pomegranates, which is nice too, but there something really cool about being extremely collaborative and working together.
You guys are playing SXSW this month - are you looking forward to it?
We are really excited. We were going to play last year, but it didn’t work out for whatever reason. A lot of our friends (the Heartless Bastards, Bad Veins, Kim Taylor, the Seedy Seeds and Seabird are the local acts set to play this year’s festival) are going to be down there, and we are going to get to meet a lot of people and see people we haven’t seen for a while. It should be a really great time, and I don’t think we’ve ever been to Texas before, so it should be interesting. I’ve heard a lot of wild stories about Texas.
What kind of stories?
I don’t know, it may not be fair, ‘cause stuff happens everywhere, but most of the stuff when you hear about other bands being broken into seems to be in Texas. So, hopefully, we have good luck and don’t lose our stuff.
I was at your Crash Mansion show (in New York City), and all the band members were wearing face paint. Tell me the story behind that.
The initial idea was - we’re doing this thing, where we got hooked up with this organization that is working to ban landmines. It (landmines) really is a bigger problem, than I even realized it was. It’s really something to think about. We each had a different country that is suffering from this and we had the colors of their flags represented with the face paint. The organization is The International Campaign to Ban Landmines. There are a couple of different websites with information (www.ICBL.org and www.DPI.org). It’s just something we wanted to bring attention to. You know, it wasn’t something I’d heard about a ton, and yet there are these countries where people are suffering because their farmland has been made totally unusable and it’s horribly dangerous to go near to fix.
Would you consider your band to be political or does it have any message to get across to the audience?
I think the message that we would hope to share with anyone - and I think it’d be pretty safe for me to speak for everyone on this, and they would elaborate if they were here - the biggest thing is to love each other. I mean, that’s the overall theme that Jesus taught or that any religion says, is to love each other. I guess you could take that politically or however you wanted. It’s just a pretty basic message that if more people followed through with and lived by - and I know it’s cheesy, cliché or whatever - but the world would be a better place.
Would you say that your band is spiritual?
I’m pretty sure that we were all raised in church and I think Joshua’s dad is pastor, so I think that played a role in whatever a person is. You know whatever a person is around the most, what goes in is what comes out. So we all aspire to be those things that we’re taught - to be selfless and love everyone. That’s something that we take seriously and think is important, so it would come through in the songwriting, but I wouldn’t, by any means, say that we are a Christian band.
DON'T MISS: Pomegranates CD release show. 9 p.m. Friday, March 13 at Southgate House, 24 E. Third St., Newport. $11, $8 ages 21 and up. 859-432-2201 or www.southgatehouse.com.
