by Sebastian Mackay
The Stop Motion EP is the latest release from Vinyl Thief. It’s a collection of songs from their upcoming album and it’s a long way from where vocalist Grayson Proctor says they once thought they’d be.
“We never figured anyone would ever hear the songs we were writing.”
Now that people have heard their music (this is their second EP) Proctor says it’s incredibly gratifying to have people interested in and appreciative of what they’re creating. So much so that the band now gets “cranky” if they’re not able to release material.
“We get kind of cranky if we’ve had some songs that we’ve been sitting on for a really long time and haven’t been able to share them,” Proctor says. “We’ve been cranky lately.”
He says it feels good to put music into the world. And now they’re not only making music “for sport” but because “[they] love it and can’t do anything else.” Which goes quite a way in removing any anxiety about people hearing their lyrics.
“We freak out more if people aren’t hearing the songs.”
They’re from a small town and so their audience, as you can probably imagine, was itself fairly small. But if anything, growing up small has rather been beneficial. Proctor says that the biggest benefit he and his bandmates got from growing up in a small town was that there was no pressure. None of them knew how to play our instruments, and so they were free to take their time and really learn to just enjoy making music together.
After taking their time they moved to the musical city of Nashville and Proctor says that not being the only band in town gave them a better a foundation. Their first EP, Rebel Hill, is what the band calls the first time they had something to say. It followed “a bunch of really awful music,” says Proctor “which almost everyone does when they start.” The Rebel Hill EP was the first music they’d written that they were excited about and that translates to the latest EP.
“One thing we look for in new writing, we want to be excited by it.”
While Proctor says there was no specific goal with the Stop Motion EP it’s part of a greater goal – the album. “Our goal with the album was to show our diversity.”
Proctor says they wanted to show different routes that they could go in the future. “I’ve seen bands do this before with their debut album, and I remember being really excited to see which route, if any, they were going to chase on their new project.”
He hopes people can find a melody in their music that perks their ears up. Lyrically, he hopes people find themselves in a familiar place and are able to connect with his thoughts. Vinyl Thief is a band on a mission; to connect and to create music. As well as playing Kung Fu Necktie they’re planning on playing SXSW, a few festivals (still TBA!) and Proctor’s looking at doing deep sea fishing later this year.
But he does say this: “if I get to do this, writing and performing, for the rest of my life and don’t have to go back to bussing tables (nothing wrong with that, I loved it at the time), then I will be very content.”
