Get ready to rock

An Interview with 2AM Club’s lead singer, Marc Griffin. 2AM Club will be playing at Cloister Inn for Lawnparties this Sunday.

Q: How did 2AM Club come to be?

A: The guitar player, Matt Reagan, and I grew up together in Mill Valley, California, which is 15 minutes outside San Francisco, and the emcee in our group, Tyler, and our keyboardist Dave grew up together in Seattle. Then Tyler and I met up in our freshman year of college at University of California Santa Cruz, and that brought the four of us together ... It’s like a family thing for the four of us: Matt and I coming up together, and having Tyler and Dave coming up together. Then we just kind of become one in Los Angeles.

Q: What did you do between when you formed up and when your album dropped?

A: In the beginning, we met in our little one bedroom apartment on bunk beds and just wrote songs and played all the time. It was me, Tyler, Matt and Dave living on the cheap east side of Hollywood in this nasty, roach-infested apartment eating Top Ramen and writing music, having people come over, playing on our couch and figuring out how our voices work together and what kind of direction we wanted to take these songs. We started a residency at this place called “The Darby” that we called Tiny Porno and started to throw a party once a month for all our friends and people that liked our music and it just turned into a thing. We started getting a few hundred people out, and people knew it wasn’t a normal concert ... It was just a party people would go to, and the first looks we got from of the record label was from that party we were throwing.

Q: So when you’re writing, what kind of process do you have?

A: I think one of the things that separates us, first off, is that we do write our own material and we fully collaborate as a band. It’s not one person that writes songs and brings them in — we do it all together. We sit in a circle in the rehearsal space and just chip away until we get a product that everyone enjoys listening to, that hopefully translates to thousands or hundreds of millions of others enjoying the same song.

Q: How did you develop your sound?

A: Honestly, it was pretty natural. We never forced our sound ... It’s always been about us making music that we like and getting to that moment when everyone in the group gets the chills and says, “Yeah, that’s the shit, whatever you did, just keep doing that.” ... If you listen to our album you’re going to find a whole bunch of sounds. There’s not one thing that we really stick to.

Q: Would you say you have any particular artistic influences?

A: Everyone. We’re influenced by everything, all the music we grew up listening to, from 2pac to fucking Jimi Hendrix. For everyone in the group it’ll probably be different. My favorite group ever is Sly and the Family Stone, and I really love D’Angelo and 2pac. I’m from the Bay Area, so a lot of Bay Area rap is what I was raised on. Then, for people in my group like our guitar player Matt Reagan, he could sit down and have a conversation all day about all the guitar greats, blues guitarists, rock guitarists, everything, jazz, so I think we pull from a lot of different stuff. We pull from a lot of stuff that isn’t music too. Being in New York City and soaking it up, the nightlife, the cold, the women ... it all goes into the music one way or another.

Q: How has it been going from from living in a grungy apartment to being so successful?

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A: I don’t even really know. I think it’s amazing to have recognition and have people know who you are and be doing interviews and be on TV, and we appreciate every opportunity we get, but for us, it’s been a grind, and it’s always been based around our live show. That’s always been the most important thing to us, and I think when people see us play live they can really understand who we are.

Q: Any crazy shit that’s happened to you and the band?

A: The weirdest thing that’s happened in a while: We just did a run in Canada, and there’s some crazy music fans in Canada, but we had this one show where this family — a mother and her two daughters — was trying to collect germs from everybody. The mom was like, “Make sure you get the germs,” and at first I was like “Oh, she doesn’t want her kid to touch anybody cause she was like germophobic or something,” but she kept saying, “Get them, make sure you get them, get the germs!” And she was like rubbing, trying to get our ... it was fucking really strange.

Q: What are your thoughts on the music scene today?

A: It’s such a fun time if you think about it. Look at the new Kanye album and the features that he has. The sound of music right now is such an amalgamation of what’s been going on in pop, hip-hop and rock in the past 30 years, and I feel like we’re one of the first bands to put it all together in one group. That’s hard sometimes too ... it’s not easy to categorize us, which sometimes makes our career a little more difficult because we have to show everyone what we’re about, and it takes longer for people to get it right away. But the flip side of that coin is that once people do get it, and once people do get down with the sound, there’s nothing else like it, and we’ve got fans for life, hopefully.

Q: What kind of stuff can we expect to see from you guys on Sunday?

A: Man, you guys can expect to see an amazing rock-and-roll concert. We go hard on stage. People are always surprised by the level of musicianship we have ... We sing our songs and we play them just like you hear them on the record. For us, that’s the fun part, to make our songs come alive on stage, and people dance, people get loose, so that’s what we look forward to the most.

Interview conducted, condensed and edited by Trap Yates.