Alt-pop band The Strike have announced their forthcoming third studio album, “A Dream Through Open Eyes,” arriving in October.
Known for their electric live performances and nostalgic 80’s influenced anthems, the band has set out to capture that unmatched energy across 11 tracks, including previous releases “Soundtrack,” “The Getaway,” and “Just Friends.”
We sat down with frontman Chris Crabb to chat about their beginnings as a wedding band in Utah, opening for Journey, and how they managed to replicate the energy of their shows on the record.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast. Responses have been edited for clarity.
In many ways, the album is a tribute to the band’s journey so far. What originally brought all you guys together?
The band actually started in Utah. I grew up in Los Angeles, but went to college in Utah at BYU, which is a private religious college. I graduated from school and I didn’t have any intention of doing music full-time. I thought I wanted to go to law school. My dad was a lawyer. I ended up working at a tech company, but I was playing weddings and corporate events on the side, like cover gigs. In the course of doing that, I was in a band with the guy, his name’s Jake, and Jake’s no longer in The Strike, but Jake really wanted to start an original project. He and I were doing the cover circuit in Utah. And he was like, ‘I want to start an original band.’ And like, I think he would be awesome to sing in the band. And I was like, ‘I don’t really want to do it.I’m not interested. Like, I just kind of want to play gigs and make money and all that stuff.’ But he was pretty persistent. And eventually I kind of acquiesced. I was like, all right I’ll try writing a few songs and we’ll play a few shows and it will just be fun. You know, it’d kind of be like a little hobby type of thing. And so we did. I had played in bands in the past and I could tell right away that this was kind of different, but there was an excitement behind the project, behind The Strike that wasn’t there in previous bands that I had been a part of and immediately I became obsessed and addicted to pursuing the band. So yeah, we started the band right after graduating college and then we’ve gained and lost personnel over the years, but I was roommates with our current drummer, Jay Tibbetts, and he and I decided we wanted to move to LA to pursue it more full time, so we did, and that’s kind of where we’re at now.
One of the songs on the album, “American Dream,” actually brings us back to playing the weddings and state fairs. Can you share the inspiration behind that song and the process of making it?
The band, very early on, played a lot of covers in conjunction with original music. And that was sort of a strategy because when you’re an original band walking into playing for a fresh audience, who has never heard from you before, that’s incredibly challenging. So we thought to ourselves well, what if we play maybe two covers and then an original and then two covers then the original, two for them, one for us. That strategy proved to be actually very successful. We were able to win over fans in a live setting much more effectively, I think, than we would have had we only played original music from the get go. That allowed the band to get hired for weddings, we’d get hired for corporate events. And in Utah, there are tons of these city festivals, very middle American. I grew up in LA and this was kind of like a new thing for me actually because in LA they don’t have these. I really always enjoyed those gigs for whatever reason. I like weddings and stuff, but weddings always came with this pressure, and the corporate events we would do, people typically were checked out, not really paying attention, but at these like city festivals, people would come with their friends and with their family. There’s always just a really nice atmosphere in the air. And I always think very fondly of those events that we did. We don’t do as many as we once did because we don’t reside in Utah anymore, but that song is sort of a tip of the cap to those events that we used to play when we were in Utah and the atmosphere that was there.
Listen to the full interview on ECHO – The Podcast!
Featured Photo Credit: Maya Fuhr