Louisville based art rock band PAKG talk inspiration and motivation
Comprised of Ace Holmes on bass, drummer Kym Williams, lead guitarist Pinky Clay, and frontman/guitarist Leon Grey, PAKG is not a band to miss.
Stream The Kids are Watching and catch PAKG Dec 26 at ZanzaBar
First, can you tell us a little bit about yourselves?
PAKG: We’re brothers and we’ve been making music together for a decade- hip hop and R and B primarily in our early days. So us making music together wasn’t anything new, just a new genre.
What is most important to you as artists?
PAKG: Our collective goal as artists is to inspire as many people as possible and to push our peers towards internal liberation! We look at ourselves as messengers or vessels if you will, and we try not to take credit for the ideas and energy that flows through us. So our goal, or our job rather, is really just to translate the messages of the universe via song for those who have trouble following the signs out here! We want to make songs that lead them to develop the celestial relationship they need, if they haven’t already developed it.
Can you tell us about the inspiration behind your docu-series The Kids Are Watching?
PAKG: We feel like showing where the content derived from is just as important as sharing the content itself. Showing someone a finished, polished project is cool, but showing them the steps that led to the project is cooler and more inspiring! We all love watching documentaries and vlogs of our favorite artists, so in the event that we ever become anyone’s favorite artist we want to have that stuff around for them to check out! And there are also things that we like to go into detail about, messages and concepts we want to share, that we don’t necessarily have songs for. So things like documentaries or vlog posts or whatever give us an opportunity/platform to say those things.
Tell us about the early days. What was your first practice like? Did everything just click?
PAKG: Our first practice was interesting to say the least. Our lead guitarist Pinky has been playing guitar for almost 20 years, and at that time he was the only one who really had a handle on his instrument. Our drummer had been in a metal band and a church band in his younger years, but he hadn’t touched a kit in years either! As a collective we were very rough around the edges, but we’re all fairly disciplined beings and we knew we’d get better with practice. And ya gotta start somewhere. At our first practice, we found some chords, wrote some songs that sucked and that no one will ever hear, but yea at our first practice we were writing songs and pinky was blazing up great guitar solos to our shitty rhythm playing, and at that time our frontman couldn’t even sing and play together. lol. So we sucked but we were hopeful.
How would you describe your songwriting process? How does your music and art evolve from an idea into a fully produced album?
PAKG: Our songwriting process is very natural! Our frontman has taken on the responsibility of keeping an open and honest line of communication going with the universe so the gods send him experiences and entrust in him to articulate those experiences in written form. After that happens he finds the key and the chords that are comfy for him and once he has practiced them enough to effectively articulate the message to the rest of us, he presents the idea. At that point, we usually take a listen or two and then within moments everyone has a good general idea of how they want to approach the record. It usually just gels together. After that, and if it feels good, we add it to the rehearsal rotation.
Ideas turn to songs, songs turn into more songs, more songs turns into an album eventually. As far as things like effects, recording approach and track listings goes we’re all producers in our own separate right so as we’re rehearsing the records we’re thinking of tonal approaches, effects that would or wouldn’t sound good and when we put together our show setlist we typically perform the songs how we’d put them on an album if it feels good and flows well live it will usually work for us on record. We don’t really overthink. We’re more emotionally driven and we have a stripped down approach: some ‘verb, some drive, and some subtle phasers and flangers every now and then, but we’re old school when it comes to effects. We don’t want to dilute the message! find the right tone and the right space! of course we’re learning as we go; our upcoming body of work is going to sound light years better than our recent effort that we still love but yea we’re just growing as producers and musicians we create it’s very raw and pure everything surrounding it.