Impact Chats With... WINSTON AUDIO

Winston Audio recently stopped at Mac's Bar on their tour with Death On Two Wheels (and, coincidentally, will be back in Pontiac at the Pike Room on April 29), and came into the Impact Studios to share some tunes and chat with Mike Weber.




Mike Weber: So, “Winston Audio”, how did you choose that name?

Daniel DeWitt: The founding member, and namer of the band, who’s not with in the band anymore, he told me that his dog, Winston, really liked to change the stations on the radio. If he didn’t like a song, Winston would change the station on the radio. That’s it.


MW: You guys formed in 2003, and have had a few changes in the line-up. How did you get together and how did things shake out?

DD: Dan [Gleason] used to play in a band called The Last Broadcast that Winston Audio went on tour with. They broke up about a year later and we courted him, and got him to move down to Georgia.
Dan Gleason: That’s always when we tell people the band was formed, because before that it was much different. We decided to just keep the name of the band, even though Daniel and another guy really wanted to change the name.
DD: That was in 2006, and while we were waiting for Dan to move down, we kinda rethought the whole approach to the band. February ’06 was the reboot of the franchise that is Winston Audio.


MW: It should be known that Dan IS from the Lansing area, St. Johns to be exact. You packed your bags and moved to Georgia. So, are you still considered a ‘Yank’?

DG: At some point I’m gonna move back up here, I mean, this is home. I love Atlanta, I really do. It’s become a second home.


MW: You guys were picked up by Andy Hull of Manchester Orchestra for his label, “Favorite Gentlemen”. You guys just wrapped a tour with them this summer. How was that?

DG: It was great! We owe a lot to those guys for taking a chance on us and bringing us out and putting us out in front of people. They’ve been HUGE supporters.


MW: How did you guys hook up?

DG: They got in contact with us, actually, through a friend. One of our friends played guitar on “I’m Like A Virgin Losing A Child”. I guess our friend showed Andy an EP that we put out back in ’06. Ever since he was interested in just playing shows with us.


MW: I listened to your CD, The Red Rhythm, and, not in a bad way, it loses a lot of that energy you guys have on stage. You guys are unleashed when you’re on stage.

DG: I really feel like where we were at the time, we were kinda… we weren’t as energetic back then. I feel like, especially on thistour, there’s something else thats come out in the live show that a little bit more raw. Which we can attribute to these other guys sitting here with us, Death On Two Wheels. We’ve been talking about that over the past two days. Every night we’ve seen them play, which has only been two nights, Shane and I were saying that we just wanna play right after them. It’s not a competition thing, they just make us wanna have a great time playing music because they have such a great time playing.


MW: It’s been almost a year since the CD dropped, what are you guys working on and when do you plan on going into the studio?

DG: I think we’re gonna start on the record in May, trying to figure out where were gonna do it, but it sounds like (to DeWitt), I haven’t even told you this yet, maybe Nashville is where
we’re gonna do it?
DD: Interesting…
DG: Straight to tape.
DD: I have not heard that yet… I kinda like that idea.
DG: And we’ll probably do it then.


MW: Who does the bulk of the song writing?

DD: I’ll usually write a song and structure it out and demo it in Garage Band and send it to the other guys and they’ll let me know what they think of it. Then Shane will track drums to just the acoustic track. That’s actually worked pretty well. We live kinda spread out from each other, so it’s kinda hard to get together as often as I think we’d like.


MW: How has social media changed the way you market yourself? MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Pure Volume, that kinda thing?

DG: It certainly enhanced a lot of it. I think there’s an over-saturation that goes along with it, where people don’t reallyappreciate a great band like they used to, because great bands are just a couple clicks away. So, that part of it is bad, but pretty much every fan that we have we have because of the Internet. We did a cover with these guys, Death On Two Wheels, and we were able to throw it up [on the web] a day or two after it was done and say, “Hey, we did a cover, download it for free”, to promote the tour.



Check out more video of these bands' performances on our YouTube channel:
http://www.youtube.com/impact89fm