BestFan blog editor Vanessa Francone had the chance to speak with Pat Kordyback of I65 over the phone. Formerly part of the band Stereos, Pat talks about the new band, Movember moustaches and the road trip that changed everything! Read the full interview below.
Vanessa: Out of curiosity, what city are you calling from?
Pat: From Calgary
V: You are on tour!
P: Yeah we are, but we’re broken down at the moment actually.
V: Because of your van right? I was reading something on Facebook about that.
P: Yeah, our van broke down on our way to Regina so we missed a couple shows, but we should be not missing anymore.
V: So how is the tour going?
P: It’s very surreal! By the time we stopped touring in our last band, I think that we were ready to take the time off and figure out what we wanted to do and now it’s come full circle where we’re playing with a brand new tour with brand new music. It’s really hitting us how the last two years of work have led to this and it feels amazing. There’s definitely been a few times where you never know if you’ll get back to this point.
V: Is it a mixture of old and new songs or is it strictly just I65 music?
P: This is a good opportunity to clear up a common misconception…there are no old songs because this is not the same band with a new name. It’s a new band. I get the confusion because three of us were in the last band, but I65 is a completely new band who have one single and are about to release their first album, so we definitely won’t be playing songs from our old band.
V: Congratulations on selling out your Edmonton show. I read on twitter that Jacob and Dave from Hedley stopped by. Are you guys friends?
P: It’s funny you asked that because I didn’t know they were coming either! Dave has actually been a really good friend of ours and we’ve hung out with him a lot. We toured with them in our last band but we didn’t have the opportunity to hang out that much.
I hadn’t seen Jake in a couple years, but with Dave, he was in the studio when we were recording and we would hang out whenever we were in the same city, but I didn’t even know they were in the same town as us and they’re definitely a band that I look up to. For them to show up and even care that we were playing a show…that felt really cool.
V: Now I know a lot of media outlets are going to be asking you this, but what happened with Stereos and why the change to I65?
P: With Stereos, it’s a cliché, but everyone got egos, and I can definitely speak for myself on that. Things were going so well so easily and quickly for us for a couple of years that then when things stopped going well, everyone adopted a new ego. When the going got tough, we really weren’t being friends anymore.
I’m very thankful because Dan kind of sat me down and said, you know, this isn’t working and we all don’t want to do this anymore, so Dan, Robb and myself went on a road trip to reconnect. And It was just to become friends again, we didn’t know what was going to happen, but on that road trip we decided that we needed to stop what we were doing and create something new or one of us would have wound up dead or we definitely wouldn’t have been friends.
V: You named the band after the highway you drove on to Nashville. Was there a defining moment during the car ride where one of you or all of you decided to form a new band?
P: It was an agreement we all came to. I go back to Dan sitting me down before the road trip, him being the real catalyst for the change. Without even knowing it at the time!
Throughout the trip, it was just us and there were no other distractions. We were staying at a terrible motel, just listening to country music and drinking beer and realizing those connections we have had as best friends when we started six years ago had been completely missing. And that they weren’t going to continue in Stereos.
V: Would you go back and change anything in your time with Stereos? Or do you think everything has fallen into place?
P: I believe everything happens for a reason. I’ve been shown that so many different times in my life that it does.
With that said, who I was when we started making music and who I turned into was not someone I was happy being looking back on it. So there’s definitely things I would change if I were in that situation again.
I don’t think I would’ve been happy with that music and in that kind of scene forever anyways. As a person, what matters more than anything, is being in a band that’s just for fun. Success in a band shouldn’t be why you do it. For me personally, now coming out of the other side, I think I’m better off.
V: You’re also on a new record label, 604 Records. How do you feel about the change up?
P: It is exactly the kind of home we need for this band. I would never talk badly about our formal label, they were exactly what we needed for that band. We had a lot of great years with them and we owe a lot of our success to them. But for the kind of people we are now and the kind of music and creative environment we want, we are in the right home and I couldn’t be happier.
V: You said you were listening to country music while in the motel room. What kind of country music was it because I’m a huge fan of that genre!
P: I like it all! I like music that’s different and I don’t care if it’s super catchy. I get tired of hearing the same thing over and over and I find that a lot of pop and top 40 can be that way. Who I really like is Alan Jackson, George Strait, George Jones, the old stuff! The Band Perry is still one of my favourite country acts and Darius Rucker. He was part of one of the shows we went to and he blew me away. And I also really like Blake Shelton.
V: What can we expect of the new album?
P: It’s like a diary entry for us three. It comes from the place we were at right after Stereos and trying to figure out what we wanted to do with our lives. So it’s not a happy album, but it’s an optimistic album. It’s catchy, but it’s a lot more rock than anything we’ve done in the past.
It’s also a very personal album. In the last band, I wrote songs that I thought people wanted to hear or that I thought might do well for us. Now, the only thing I cared about was writing songs that the three of us liked. There’s tons of stuff that people can relate to on the album. But it’s all about playing stuff that makes us happy before anyone else.
V: Is there a song that you relate to the most?
P: It’s funny, I spent so much time on the writing that there isn’t one word I don’t mean on the album. So all of them. But there’s a song called “True Love” that sums up better than all the songs, the place we were in.
V: Now, it is Movember. Are you and the band participating?
P: Oh my goodness, are they ever! Dan, as opposed to the moustache aspect of it, he’s taking it to the whole face, a whole ‘no shave Movember.’ I’m going to star for the next part of the tour because I hate shaving anyways.
V: Do you guys have a competition going on?
P: Oh I think in every aspect of our lives, especially with Robb and myself, we’re definitely the most competitive people we know. Whether it be facial hair or football, we’re always trying to outdo each other. We compete with each other every minute of the day.
V: What you are a ‘best fan’ of? It can be an artist, TV show, food, anything!
P: That’s easy for me. I’m the best fan of NFL football. My favourite team is the Cincinnati Bengals. I grew up in Edmonton so I didn’t really have a geographic tie to any football team, but when I was six years old, there was one team that had tiger stripes on the helmet and the quarterback’s name was Boomer, so as a young kid I was sold on that. Since then, it’s been a very painful 20 years…I’ve never wavered as a fan!
I65 is currently on a fall tour and they have released their first single “Another Summer.” Check it out!
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