SHAED
vinyl | Atlanta, GA | 7.8.2017
Honey Punch writer Kira Wilber was able to catch a few words with the electro-pop trio, SHAED, while they were on the road with Sir Sly on their current tour! Read below and find her live photos of both bands here.
Twins Spencer + Max Ernst with Chelsea Lee | Photo by Nicole Mago
How does it feel to be on tour with Sir Sly and how did you feel when you found out you were going to be touring with them?
Chelsea: We’re really excited I mean we just got off tour with Bishop Briggs so to jump back into another tour was so much fun for us, you know we love Sir Sly. The first day has been great so I can only imagine what the rest of the tour is gonna be like.
Are you guys going through the whole tour?
Chelsea: Yeah, yeah!
Max: We’re big fans of their music too which is always nice.
I was actually going to ask if you had listened to them before.
Max: Their new album, we’re really really into it.
You released your first EP last year, are you currently working on anything else?
Chelsea: Yeah we have a single coming out on the 14th so next Friday and so now were just kind of gearing up for that and writing a bunch of other songs.
Any inkling of what it may sound like, cause you guys say you make “colorful music?"
Chelsea: Ahh, okay.
Spencer: Yeah this song is definitely like a fun, summery, colorful song.
So what is your writing process like? How long would it take to write one song for example?
Spencer: We could write a song right now, during this interview.
Really?
Spencer: No I’m kidding…yeah it just depends, some songs are easy and you can write it in a day and other ones will take like a couple weeks to really, to really write all the parts so, just depends but we all write together. It’s really collaborative.
That’s good. So if you like, say you’re writing a song and then you leave it, and if you come back to it, do you erase it completely or just keep working off of it?
Max: Uh, I mean it depends sometimes we’ll revisit an idea and you’ll be like this isn’t worth pursuing, and other times you’ll be like “oh yeah, lets try to see this one through”.
So what are your musical icons or influences that help the writing process of your music?
Chelsea: My gosh so many, um, it’s funny cause we have kind of a set you know group of influencers. We love Radiohead, we love, I love the 80’s like 80’s alternative so we always go back to that but we’re always listening to music constantly so right now we’re listening to Active Child, we’re listening to Sigrid. So it kinda depends on our mood we’re being influenced by a lot of different artists.
That’s good. So what motivated each of you to get into music, to decide that you wanted to do this as a career?
Spencer: Well, my brother and I, we’re twin brothers so we-
I can tell.
Spencer: So we started at an early age, our mom was a musician who plays guitar and was a songwriter so she got us into it at an early age and we just fell in love with it and never really stopped, so.
Chelsea: A similar type of thing with me, um, just kind of was always singing and I loved the karaoke machine, I was all about the karaoke machine and so-
*Screaming girls walk by*
Spencer: Those people are ready for the show.
Chelsea: Um so yeah basically just kind of sat in the basement for hours and played with the karaoke machine and then just started playing shows.
How did you all come together to form SHAED?
Chelsea (to Spencer): You got this one?
Spencer: Yeah! Well we’ve been friends with Chelsea for a while, we met her in high school and we were doing different projects at the time and we were really good friends, but we were doing different things. Max and I were in a project, and she was in a project. We just became really good friends. Chelsea didn’t have a license at the time so we were driving her around in high school.
Chelsea: It was awesome.
Spencer: I mean yeah, we’ve just been friends for a while and it’s really nice to be able to actually work together on projects.
It’s good that you guys were friends before and weren’t thrown into it.
Chelsea: Yeah yeah no you’re right.
Did you guys establish when you first became SHAED what you wanted your music to sound like from there on out?
Spencer: Uh, not really we were messing around with different keyboards like Max and I got a really cool keyboard that we were messing around with and that kind of influenced the sound and we also got this program called Ableton that allowed us to do more electronic sounding stuff. It just kind of evolved naturally.