The Ceremonies Get Real About Weird Halloween Hookups
Take three hot brothers, put them in a band, and then you have The Ceremonies. They’ve got a new wave sound with a touch of 80’s vibes. While finding inspiration and doing all sorts of creative shit, from writing songs to painting, they still have time to think of original Halloween costumes and hook up with babes. Can we say bae material?
Is your song “Love Caught” taken from a real experience one of you had with a girl?
No, its not. That song is a tongue and cheek sort of statement on fandom culture, it was more of a hypothetical situation. I guess it does effect us in the way that all three of us have been victims of being fans of helplessly just like looking up to stars growing up and doing whatever we can to be like someone else so in that sense… yes.
Being brothers do you guys fight about having a crush on the same girls or do you have different tastes?
I mean, I think we have pretty similar tastes most the time, but we like to use the dibs method. I remember there have been times where we have all been like, “oh so which one of us is, uh, getting the lucky stick here” and then we usually just let the girl decide.
Matthew you find inspiration in poetry from Shakespeare and William Blake, that’s very romantic of you, do you also use poetry to get girls?
I think, yeah. I’m probably just at the core more of a romantic, but yeah I also am a big fan of language and I think that writers, particularly of the early 20th century, are probably my jam. Specifically Aldous Huxley. I really like the way [the writers] formulate language and are able to convey ideas with more emotion and more clarity.
You all have other hobbies within the art field. Michael, how does painting feed into your music?
I think with painting it’s similar to song writing. Just what comes naturally and what flows from your subconscious and whatever is true to what you’re feeling in that present moment is what comes out and that’s what it is.
Other than painting, what other areas do you guys use for inspiration?
We definitely draw a lot of inspiration from books and other than that I think movies are a big inspiration. We love David Lynch and Paul Thomas Anderson. I think that video definitely is a source of inspiration, other people making art encourages you to make art. It gets your brain stirring, anything that encourages shifts in perspective and just forward thinking. Like the soundtrack of There Will Be Blood by Jonny Greenwood has always struck us and inspired us to push the envelope.
When you released “Land of Gathering“ it was just the three of you. When did Kane come onboard?
So Kane is our cousin and he’s joined us as the drummer. So we brought Kane onboard and now we are actually in the process of having our close family friend Jackson assimilate into the band as well. It’s looking like its going to be five.
I read Kane, Micheal, and Mark’s birthdays are in chronological order, do you guys do a three day party bender?
Yeah, that’s extremely accurate actually.
What was one of the best three day birthdays you guys celebrated?
Well we like to do Halloween Horror Night over at Universal Studios in LA. Last year we did that one night and then we did another night at No Vacancy and then another night somewhere else. It was just a string of a lot of costumes and scary faces and just madness. We actually went a couple days ago and what was really fun was while we were going through one of the mazes we got an Instagram comment from somebody saying, “hey guys I just saw you go through the Halloween horror maze just so you know I was the one with my body chopped in half. Cant wait to see you guys live” or something like that. It was really funny.
So what are you guys going as this Halloween?
Matt is gonna be Jareth from the Labyrinth (the David Bowie character). Mark is going to be Louis from Interview With The Vampire (the Brad Pitt character) and Michael, which is me, I’m going to be Legolas from Lord Of The Rings.
I’ve done Edward Scissorhands for the past two year and it’s gone over pretty well and I want to do it again, but everyone’s calling me three-peat. I don’t know, theres got to be some rule as to doing the same costume over and over again. It’s my favorite character.
Wasn’t it hard drinking as Edward Scissorhands?
The gloves are surprisingly really functional, you just put your hand in them and the scissors go on top so they don’t really get in the way unless I want to really live in character. Do some method acting… Michael actually recently was cast in a Sprite commercial and he filmed it in Argentina.
Did you get loads of free Sprite?
I drank so much Sprite I can’t drink anymore for a lifetime.
If you could do a song featuring a singer or a band who would it be?
Oh, we always say the same one, we choose David Burns cause we are huge Talking Heads fans and admire him in so many faces. The fact that he’s a visual artist, fine artist, actor, musician, director, writer, author… and I also think its really cool how he’s collaborating with contemporary artists like St. Vincent.
Your Twitter and website really show insight into your lives compared to other artists who try and stay more private. Did you want to make stronger connections with your fans?
Thank you! It takes a lot of effort. Yeah, I think. I see it as an extension as who we are as people. Like the three of us are very personable people, we love people. I just like to joke around, have fun with people, connect with people. I think part of the problem with this whole mystery thing is that in 2016 it’s almost like an unnatural, sort of try hard, out of your way doing that because that’s not the way that people are living anymore. If you want to live in the now then it’s about communication and the reason why artists in the 90s or 80s didn’t share that stuff is cause they didn’t have a way to.
What’s the hottest Halloween hook up you’ve had, and what were you both dressed as?
It was on the dance floor I was Jax Teller from Sons Of Anarchy. I had the full hair on with all motorcycle rockers and everything and probably my hottest hook up was with a vampire.
I was the nurse version of the Joker and she was Thrasher Magazine. That was a fun hookup.
Did you guys get each other in trouble as brothers, especially as twins?
Yeah we tried to do that typical twin [thing], but we never looked enough alike to pull the Lindsay Lohan thing. I wish I had a better story. If anyone asks us if twin telepathy is real we say yes and try to prove it, but it always goes wrong.
Any last things you want to share with us?
We are working on our new EP, which is almost at the point of release. I think we are going to try and plan out another song before the end of the year. Probably follow that up with a music video and the new EP. It’s been three years since our first [EP] so it’s going be a cool restart button.
Also, we are doing a music video with Milk Studios, it’s still in development. We are probably going to have a couple friends being in the video with us. We are also incubating a fashion line called “New Nostalgia” by The Ceremonies which has our merch and also different things we’ve designed, a lot of hand done designs by us. We have a website newnostalgia.co where you can find them.
