BAND: My American Heart
INTERVIEWER: Kelly Engle (Kelly@bandvibe.com)
DATE OF INTERVIEW: 05.28.07

BAND MEMBERS:
Larry Soliman- Vocals
Jesse Barrera- Guitar/Vocals
Dustin Hook- Bass
Steve Oira- Drums
Matthew Van Gasbeck- Guitar/Vocals

BV: With being on tour, your CD “Hiding Inside The Horrible Weather” coming out June 26th and your upcoming Warped Tour dates, what is your anticipation like right now?
Larry: Honestly, just get more. Get this record pumped for kids to buy it, ya know. I want to have a huge continuation of selling records and be sure this gets out to the public. We’re gonna do whatever it takes.
Steve: I’m kind of nervous.
Dustin: Me too. We kind of don’t know what to expect. We’re gonna work it as hard as we can you know, push it. The response that we’re getting already is really good; so we’re excited. The nervousness is starting to turn more towards excitement

BV: What got your band to this point?
Larry: The fans and us. They kept coming and we kept going.
Steve: It’s like breathing. We need the fans to like live. They’re like everything, and if we don’t have music for them to listen to we won’t have beds.
Larry: That was a deep analogy.
Matt: The fans have been really positive about it. We come to shows and people are already singing the words to some of the songs. People are getting behind it. The old fans just stick with it and new fans are coming in so it’s cool.

BV: What influenced you to start making music and pursue it as a career?
Larry: I think we’ve all had this passion for music before we were ever together in a band.
Dustin: It’s kind of like when your fourteen, and you go to a show and like everyone’s singing the words. You imagine what it’s like being in their shoes. You think wow that could be a really fun lifestyle. It’s just really miraculous.
Steve: We were just a cover band before, with our original members. It was just a hobby I guess, something to do after school. It got the best of me. Music took over my life, took over our lives.
Larry: I would sit in by bathtub and sing Beyonce. I’m not even kidding. I was like in sixth grade.

BV: Since writing your debut at the age of sixteen, how have you progressed as artists?
Dustin: In this record, you can just tell. You don’t need words and lyrics for things to have feeling, but we do. A lot of these songs are about what’s happened in these last few years. On a musical level, we’ve been touring forever. When you do that you grow and bond as a band. After so long, you just mature. It’s kind of like the melting pot of all that. Growing up as people in a band that’s what this record is about.
Larry: I hope people get to see how much we’ve progressed and evolved with this record.
Dustin: We all like a lot of different styles of music, and we bring that out in this record. There’s a lot of variety.
Steve: We grew up living on the road and touring and meeting all these strangers and meeting this strange world. Then all of the sudden, you become nineteen and you realize how much power we have over this world just because we want to manifest our reality. This is our dream. We’re living our dream. To be an artist, you have to live your dream, not just dream. You have to make it real.
Larry: Manifestation is a beautiful thing.

BV: What can your fans expect from your new CD?
Steve: Awesome vocals, awesome stories, beautiful moments, scary moments.
Dustin: Experiences. The last two years have had a lot of ups and a lot of downs. This is just our way of saying that we’re not gonna let things stop us. We want to stay positive. We want to be a positive band and give out a positive vibe.
Steve: As much as we go through tons of shit after all the negative there’s always going to be that positive that you’re still striving for. That’s why we wrote this record to show that there’s a light behind the fucking mist of horrible sh*t, weather.

BV: What writing process do you use?
Larry: It’s variant. Like someone will come up with a melody and we’ll be like oh sh*t lets make something to that. Or someone will come up with a riff and we’ll all vibe off of it.
Steve: What we usually do is we sit down in a garage, we throw out a riff or lick, and we’ll jam on that and we’ll put all these different moments and then we’ll have Larry and Jesse sit down together and think about what the song should really be about and write lyrics about the feeling of the song related to real life, to our lives. As much as Larry’s lyrics are personal to him they’re personal to me too. They’re personal to everyone.

BV: Being that you’re from San Diego, what’s it like to play in your hometown?
Larry: I think it’s the best show ever. If I could, I would bring this whole crowd with me to every city I went to.
Steve: It’s love it’s your friends and family. These people know you the most. They’ve seen you grow up and to play for them is like giving it back. I wish we could take our home crowd everywhere we went.

BV: How do your band members get along with each other?
All: We’re brothers!
Dustin: We fight about the stupidest sh*t, when we do fight.
Matt: Everybody gets along. Everybody has these crazy personalities. It’s always business first though.
Dustin: We’re all mature enough to realize sh*t happens. You’re gonna bother someone, and they’re gonna bother you. But it’s all good.

BV: What’s the best thing about touring?
Dustin: The experience. I think the coolest part is to go see cities.
Steve: The weather, like seeing different skies and sunsets. New Mexico is the prettiest. Like as sh*tty as the place is the skies and sunsets are awesome.
Dustin: It’s cool to see how people in different cities are different than people from others. It’s awesome to actually visually see everything.
Larry: The moments, just like whatever happens happens. It’s like a new adventure every time we’re in a new city. It’s a brand new adventure, like what are we going to get into today, what are we not gonna do today. It’s pretty interesting. It all depends on the location of the venue.
Matt: It’s funny cuz you’re like out on the road with all these people and everybody has their own role and they’re in their own band, their a tour manager, a booking agent and you get close to everybody. You feel this cool vibe. Over a couple of weeks, you become really good friends with people you never would have met in any other field.

BV: Where do you see your band in the future?
Steve: First band on the moon.
Matt: My life’s goal has always been to paint the moon, like green or something. You know cuz everyone looks at the moon and it’d be cool to see something different.

BV: How would you describe your style?
Dustin: There are songs where you’d think we’re on the verge of suicide when you hear it and then the next song on the CD you’re thinking that we just hit the lottery. There’s a lot of emotion. We’re definitely an emotional band. Emotional rock for sure.
Matt: I feel like most of the record we did have a conscious pull to use the masses. We definitely want everybody to be into our music, but we want to do it in a way that’s clever that we all are proud of.

BV: What would you like to say to your fans at Bandvibe?
Dustin: We love you!
Steve: We love you! Thank you for f*cking everything.
Dustin: Come say hello when you see us. We’d love to meet you all if we haven’t already.

For more official information on My American Heart, please log onto:
http://www.myamericanheartrock.com
http://www.myspace.com/myamericanheart

Check out Bandvibe's photo coverage of My American Heart: