Written by Gavin Tysl
Jake, TJ, Matt, Kyle and Stitch together are Fruitfly, a self proclaimed “internet indie/emo for sad nerds” group, hails from Cleveland, Ohio. I saw them for the first time a few months back at Beachland Ballroom - I was blown away by their live performance of their song Brain Rot. After it reached the coveted title of my #1 song on repeat, I knew I had to interview them and learn some more insight on their process. We had a wonderful conversation, and if you haven’t already, I strongly recommend listening to their live EP It Was Fine Last Time.
Gavin: My first question is… if you were a household appliance, what would you be and why?
TJ: I think we’re a blender… I don’t know, its the first thing that came to mind
Kyle: I feel like it works, I feel like, we are a little…
Jake: Blunt?
TJ: The things we make come out smooth.
Jake: And we’re real loud, and no one can hear anyone else talk when we’re going.
[All laugh]
Kyle: I feel like we take a lot of different influences, you throw them all in, and that turns out to be us.
TJ: So real.
Gavin: I’m glad you brought up influences, because that brings me to my next question. I hear a lot of different kinds of sound in your music, everything from midwest emo, to new wave to math rock… all awesome genres. What would you say your collective influences are, and the sounds that make Fruitfly unique?
Kyle: Everything thats out so far was written by me, so I guess I should answer this one. The three genres you just named are huge for me. Fruitfly as whole started out as me just writing songs during 2020. When it first started, I was inspired by a lot of solo musicians like Will Toledo of Car Seat Headrest, Dayglow was a big inspiration… he has a few different albums and got his start as a solo writer and producer. There’s a youtube series of him breaking down all of his songs and talking about all of the effects he used, it was great information to learn from. As the project grew, those became touch points for the first album, and then I got very into midwest emo… I was always kind of into math rock, my dad played me a lot of 70’s progressive rock growing up.
Gavin: Me too, yeah. You get it for sure.
Kyle: Right, yeah. Definitely coming from that angle a little bit too. I personally also love hyperpop, it doesn’t really make its way into our stuff that often. But stuff like the breakcore part of Brain Rot, or maybe even like some of the more vaporwave-y stuff in Brain Rot pulls from that. In terms from the emo side of things, The Brave Little Abacus is a really big influence for me, they’re another emo band from the early 2010s. Anthony from People in The Daytime, he and I are the two biggest Brave Little Abacus fans I know, so he’s always showing me more Brave Little Abacus memes.
[All laugh]
Kyle: It’s great. So yeah, Brave Little Abacus, Death Dynamic Shroud, Car Seat Headrest, 70s progressive rock. Its pretty all over the place I feel like. You put all those things in the blender
[All laugh]
Gavin: What else? Does anyone have any influences they feel are really substantial?
Jake: I feel like we all like most music. Like Kyle said, we all started learning Kyle’s music because we all liked it. It’s kinda cool. But through the writing process, its become a lot more collaborative since then, and thats been an interesting journey because we all have different preferences, and thats been really cool to see how that stuff blends together in the blender. I’m really into folk, funk, and jazz, its definitely a big melting pot of things.
Gavin: A melting pot of genres is how innovation begins musically. I can really hear that in your own music, especially in your song Brain Rot and in a lot of your other songs, and I think thats really what sets your music apart. And speaking of which, I love that song. One thing I really want to know is why is it about brain rot? What’s the storyline?
Kyle: Yeah! That’s kind of a “chicken and the egg” kind of question. I’m trying to think of what part of that I really had first. I went and saw Injury Reserve live and I really loved their live setup where Parker had, I think it was an Ableton Push 2, and he was doing a bunch of live signal processing on stage. I had recently bought the sampler that I used when we play live, and was immediately inspired to mess around with that. The opening part of Brain Rot came from a little bit of our song Lopsided, and that like, that first noise that comes in in Brain Rot is Lopsided, but a tiny little chunk looped over and over. It was during a time when I was really experimenting a lot with that kind of stuff. I had all these different ideas for a parts of a song, and it kind of came to be where I found ways to naturally go from one to the next. The name Brain Rot came from the idea of making it almost like micro songs, kind of playing into the whole idea of short form content. Its like, none of these are long enough to be its own song, but I’m just gonna put them all in here and its just going to go from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next, to the next, really quick. Almost playing into the idea of overstimulation from when you’re scrolling really quick on your phone. That’s kind of where the Brain Rot angle came from.
Gavin: That's cool. I loved hearing it live, I definitely see the process there, and what was experimental with the arrangement of all the sounds. Transitioning into more of the origin story, how did Fruitfly originally form and how did everyone meet?
Kyle: TJ and I definitely met first. We were neighbors growing up when we were really little, and he moved away when I was like 3. Me, TJ and Jake all went to high school together, Stitch was really good friends through my brother Kevin and I kind of met him there. They were good friends when they were in college together. Matt and I met when we started our first job out of college
Matt: Funny story there, I knew his brother and I also knew Stitch before I met Kyle
Kyle: They all went to Baldwin Wallace, its like there’s two, the Olmstead Falls crew and the Baldwin Wallace crew.
Matt: I didn’t know Kevin had a brother, so when I started my new job I just looked over and was like… he looks like Kevin. I gotta tell him that. That’s how that started.
Kyle: In terms of the origin story, it started as a solo project for about the first year that I was working on it. It was during 2020 when everything was shut down, and I just was compelled to go all in on music stuff. Not just Fruitfly, my friend Joe, our old keyboardist had another project called The Trapeeze Artists and we were working on stuff for that. Stitch’s other band, Electric Freakshow that I’m also in, we were working on recording the first album for that. All three of those projects were happening at the same time in 2020 and I was just immersed fully. I had always done music stuff like choirs and bands in high school and college, but never really tried to write, record and release my own stuff. I went head first somehow, and by the end of that summer, I was recording three different albums. It was zero to a hundred, and I got a lot better really quick. And now we’re here. Once I finished writing the first album, Running on Fumes, was when I got the idea to get the live band together and do shows in Cleveland. After the first year it blossomed, and I was just extremely lucky that I just had friends already who played all these instruments.
Gavin: That's a huge blessing, seriously.
Stitch: It was cool to be in the space where all these projects were incubating. All of those projects were being worked on in 2020 when things weren’t happening in live music, being practiced in 2021 when things weren’t still up to… “can we play music live?” And so once 2022 hit, we did the live band stuff, I think we really all caught the bug for it and didn’t want to stop. I think ‘22 and ‘23 were the years things really kind of started to pick up for us.
Gavin: Once you’re really locked in and you begin to see the growth, especially in music is super rewarding. I’ve experienced that too, its great to see. On that same topic, I’m still exploring the Cleveland scene and I was very excited to start discovering it when I moved here. With that being said, what's it been like navigating the Cleveland scene?
Jake: Well, me and TJ talk about this a lot. I feel like we’re oldheads in the scene, we were playing in bands prior to covid. It’s been really interesting to see the transition over covid, cause like, prior, I feel like it was very different. At least the spaces I was in. There was a lot of pay to play stuff, 7 bands on a bill, and you play for 15-20 minutes. That occupied a lot of the shows that would happen around Cleveland. My opinion/theroy… my headcanon, is when covid hit, all those people who put on pay to play shows couldn’t make money and left to places that weren’t shutting down. That left all this space where people who decided to pick up an instrument during covid created a group that's grown and started filling in that space, and it's grown from there. It's been really cool to see, honestly, I love the Cleveland scene because of that reason. It feels very community minded.
Gavin: It's amazing to see a silver lining of something great being created during such a difficult time like covid. People consciously took up learning music, and then there being a shared passion that builds community is a beautiful thing. I was in a group not too long after covid with some friends from college, and it was really awesome to see how not only our stylistic abilities grew, but how those also changed as we all grew as people. That kind of wholistic development is really encouraging, especially when theres a shared passion. So my last question really is, do you have a preferred platform where you want people to listen to your music?
Stitch: Our second LP is on an awesome local record label on Bandcamp called Flowerpot Records. You should check it out.
Gavin: Cool, thank you! We have a minute left on the call. Any closing thoughts you want to share with the world?
Jake: … Big things coming?
[All laugh]
Jake: Stay tuned… and be nice to people.
Matt: Eat your fruits and vegetables.
[All laugh again]
Gavin: Fruitfly - you’ve been wonderful, thank you for your insight and your time!
Fruitfly’s music, and their new LP can be streamed here:
https://fruitflymusic.bandcamp.com/
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