What inspired you to first start making music? And how did you come to be in your current incarnation? Or if you prefer, a brief bio about you.

Stray Owls started out as a duo in 2015 with Scott Griffiths & Matt French, but after recording our first album with Jerry Kee (A Series of Circles), he joined the band full time in 2017 and rounded out our sound. Stray Owls Versus Time & Space was released in 2020 during the height of the pandemic…a few months after it was released we started working on what became When the Going Gets Weird.

Provide us with some info about your latest release…

The owls still aren’t what they seem. Stray Owls took three years to finish When the Going Gets Weird, then it took another year for it to finally put it out.. Life happened. New songs surfaced. Significantly, especially in the early days of COVID, which kept the members of this North Carolina trio from practicing IRL. With their usual songwriting process interrupted, they tinkered at home, recording and sharing embryonic audio sketches. Once Stray Owls could get together, they found themselves working with instruments outside of their usual guitars, drums and keys palette. Out came the dumbek, mandolin, piano and ukulele; Out even came the bass—a Stray Owls rarity. “It was kind of like putting together a puzzle for three years, but we didn’t have a photo on a box to reference, ” recalls Matt French, primarily a guitarist, songwriter and vocalist. There was no explicit end goal. Rather, one day he, drummer Jerry Kee and guitarist Scott Griffiths looked up, realized they had a dozen songs, and called the record done. They also realized they’d expanded beyond their simple instrumental roles—and beyond the borders of what their band had been before. When the Going Gets Weird is a sonically rich document from the opening psychedelic jangle of “Hey Now, Now. ” Sometimes the album swirls, like on the Meddle-inspired “Scapegoats, ” and sometimes it builds like a rogue wave, such as on the post-rock fever dream “Whatever Afterglow. ” There are nods to the rural weirdo-folk of Stray Owls earlier albums, such as on the Griffiths-fronted “Moonlight Shadows, ” but it’s more twisted, more damaged than their older tunes. The song sort of splits the difference between sounding like Sebadoh covering Neil Young and Village Green Preservation Society-era Kinks, as Griffiths’ vocals lock with his brother-in-law Brian Sink’s piano, before concluding with full-on Neutral Milk Hotel fuzz. (Sink also plays piano on “Whatever Afterglow. ”) “I don’t want to waste half my life / for some BS consolation prize, ” French sings on the Grandaddy-meets-early Beck “Ballad of a Middleman. ” “Just to be an extra in the movie / of some Replicant’s dream. ” Structurally, When the Going Gets weird intersperses lyrics- driven songs with the aural equivalent of negative space: drones and collages and soundscapes. A few tracks draw from both directions, such as noisy folkscape “Elemental Static, ” which juxtaposes noisy clatter with placid instrumentalism as North Carolina journalist and musician Corbie Hill’s reads his existential meditation “198 words about bodysurfing. ” “There were a lot of ‘What if we… ’ conversations that led to more adventures in backwards recording, vibrato bass and looped guitar bits, ” Kee says. If recording When the Going Gets Weird was Stray Owls’ response to the long COVID lockdown it was also, almost paradoxically, an exercise in not taking time for granted. French was drawn to a mug with an image of a caterpillar turning into a moth as it approaches a bug zapper, inscribed with the words “give yourself time. ” And having given themselves time, Stray Owls’ latest record was allowed to grow organically into their richest listening experience to date. “Everything that stuck to the wall is somehow cohesive, ” French offers. “And that’s the album. ”

When the Going Gets Weird Recorded and mixed by Jerry Kee at Duck Kee Studios, (Mebane, NC) (https://duckkee.net) August 2020 through January 2023, With the occasional overdub by MF at Stairway to Mebane. Mastered by Greg Elkin at Pershing Hill Sound https://pershinghillsound.com Kind Words / Excellent Vibes / spoken word on “Elemental Static” by Corbie Hill https://landispbo.bandcamp.com Cover Art by Chad Yenney – @chadyenney – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chadyenney/?hl=en Stray Owls: Jerry Kee (drums, vocals, guitars, synthesizers, mandocello, sequencer, xylophone, percussion, mandolin) Scott Griffiths (guitars, vocals, bass, percussion, field recordings) Matt French (guitars, vocals, synthesizers, bass, piano, percussion, field recordings)

Which ones would you consider your main influences both music-wise & non-music-wise?

We’re influenced by british invasion bands from the ‘60s, CCR, the music played during old warner bros cartoons, sci-fi movies, Kerouac, Grandaddy, Elliott Smith.

In what way does your sound differ from the rest genre-related artists/bands and why should we listen to your music? In other words, how would you describe your sound?

I don’t know, that’s a good question. We don’t really talk about “what we should sound like.” We’re still evolving.

Please name your 3 desert islands albums, movies & books…

The Beatles s/t LP (aka The White Album)

Help! – film

The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions: The Official Story of the Abbey Road Years 1962-1970 by Mark Lewisohn – book

Do you prefer studio or performing live and why?

Yes. For different reasons.

Is there any funny-unique story you would like to share with us, always in relation to your music ‘career’?

Lots of funny things have happened over the years. Too many to list but none are coming to mind now.

Which track of your own would you point out as the most unique and why?

Elemental Static from the new album is part sound collage, part spoken word. Our friend Corbie Hill read his poem “198 words about bodysurfing” and it fit perfectly.

Would you like to share with our readers your future plans?

Hoping to play some more live shows in 2025.

Free question!!! (Ask yourself a question) you wish to answer and haven’t been given the opportunity…

Curated by: Christos Doukakis

 

Recommended listening:

Connect with Stray Owls:

https://www.instagram.com/strayowls/

https://www.facebook.com/strayowls

https://strayowls.bandcamp.com