For those people that haven’t heard of The Violet Mindfield could you tell us a bit about the band, your story?
We are a five-piece, 60’s inspired, American rock’n’roll band, based in and around the Inland Empire of Southern California. Sean (bass) and I (John, lead vocals/guitar) have been friends since we were very young and started playing music together in our early teens. We’ve had various bands through the years and started releasing music as The Violet Mindfield in 2013. The current lineup began taking shape in 2019 with Harry
(drums/backing vocals) and Victor (2nd guitar/backing vocals) joining the group and solidified last year when Clifton (organ/percussion/3rd guitar) came aboard.
Who inspired you to get on stage and perform?
In the beginning, for me, it was Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Pete Townsend, Robert Plant, Kurt Cobain, Johnny Thunders, Bob Marley, Bob Dylan, Chuck Berry, Roger Daltrey, The Jefferson Airplane, Janis Joplin, John Lennon and Sean’s older brother.
Are there any artists or albums that have inspired your music and stuck with you through the years?
The Who, The Beatles, The Kinks, The Stones, and The Velvet Underground are my mainstays. I can always count on them for inspiration.
Do you have any songwriting rituals?
Coffee and cigarettes haha!
Could you tell us a bit about the writing/recording of the ReverbNation Competition winning “I Don’t Wanna”?
I wanted to do something kind of uptempo, catchy, and relatable. I’m not sure where the title lyric came from, maybe I was listening to the Ramones at the time (looking up, scratching chin) I don’t know but once I had “I don’t wanna” I thought hmm, what’s something nobody wants to do? “Get out of bed” seemed like a reasonable answer. Then I thought it would be interesting to make the next line a contradiction of the one before and more or less followed that pattern for the rest of the song.
In the second verse, I tried to get a little more “deep” haha! So I introduced the concepts: fear of rejection, need for acceptance, and the insecurity cultivated by the two. I thought these are universal experiences that I know I personally don’t want to experience sometimes. As far as the recording goes, I wanted to make it lo-fi, mainly to keep it interesting to my ears, so I recorded everything with my Tascam cassette portastudio. This was during the pandemic lockdown so I just knocked out all the recording and instrumentation myself. My partner Roxanne provided the backing vocals.
What are some of your favourite venues to perform at?
The Wayfarer in Costa Mesa, Permanent Records Roadhouse in Los Angeles, and Highland Park Bowl are the top three for me at the moment.
Here at Artistic Echoes, we are always on the lookout for new artists do you have anyone to recommend?
Hmm there are so many, off the top of my head I’d say The Premonitions and The Killing Floors, oh and I’m biased but The Mulberry Tops (my other band) haha!
What plans do you have for the rest of the year?
We’ve got a new LP on Outro Records titled “California Burning” coming out, actually, the shipment of records just arrived this week. So we’ll be promoting that, playing gigs and shooting music videos. We’ve also got a couple of 45’s in the works. One is going to be with Outro Records and the other is with the new French label Disques Rogue.
