A Chat With: A R I Z O N A
A R I Z O N A is definitely not your conventional band. The Jersey natives combine their love of eclectic sounds and raw lyrics to deliver songs such as "I Was Wrong," "Oceans Away," and "People Crying Every Night." We recently caught up with Nathan Esquite from A R I Z O N A (the band, not the state) to talk about dad jokes, road trips, and their upcoming debut album Gallery, which comes out May 19th.
A R I Z O N A is Zachary Hannah, David Labuguen, and Nathan Esquite
Photo Credit: Jimmy Fontaine
ANCHR Magazine: What are some of your musical and non-musical influences?
Nathan Esquite: Hm. I like the addition of non-musical because there’s a lot of influence you can get from non-musical. For me, personally speaking, a big musical influence would be Jeff Buckley. He’s a huge one for me. Saint Vincent, Ben Howard and punk rock. For non-musical, I love cinema. A lot of the stuff that we’ve done is inspired by movies and video games.
AM: What are some of your favorite movies?
NE: My all-time favorite movie is definitely Pan’s Labyrinth.
AM: I’ve heard that dad jokes are a thing amongst the band. What’s the best/worst one so far?
NE: Full disclosure, Zach talks a lot about dad jokes, but he actually gets them all from me. For example, he tells this story like it’s his all the time. While we were on tour, we do a lot of driving, especially through farm country. So we're driving through cornfields and I look to my right and see this huge flock of cows. I look at Zach and I’m like, “Dude check it out there’s a huge flock of cows over there.” And he goes, “Flock of cows? Bro don’t you mean herd of cows?” and I go, “Of course I’ve heard of cows there’s a whole flock of them over there!”
AM: Stop! Was this planned or did that just come out?
NE: Nah that’s the way he told the joke. Pretty good right?
AM: That’s incredible. So at your homecoming show in Brooklyn with Kevin Garrett, Zach talked about all of the negative things going on in the world, and how we should be better humans. Do you think it’s an artist’s responsibility to spread positivity?
NE: I believe that it is everyone’s responsibility to spread positivity, not just an artist. I believe as an artist, you know you feel another calling to it where things that are happening around the world influence the way you do things. Being an artist, you want to share what inspires you and the way you see the world with other people. I believe artists tend to do it more out of that feeling inside of us to share what we see in the world, but I think it's everyone's responsibility to share what they see and what they feel and spread positivity.
AM: Awesome! So, you guys are definitely fighting against the odds. You’ve only been a band for almost two years and you’ve already gone on tour with Kevin Garrett, and are due to play big festivals like FireFly and Governors Ball this summer. How incredible is that?
NE: It’s pretty unreal. If you asked any of us when we started “Hey where do you see the band in two years?” The last thing any of us would have said was “Oh just finishing our first tour and playing all these festivals.” We just want to make music and have fun doing it. To have all these opportunities in front of us, especially me being someone who grew up going to festivals, it’s like a dream come true. It’s a lot of fun.
AM: Yeah that’s my favorite thing about seeing artists grow. Just seeing an artist progress and getting bigger and better is amazing and it makes me so happy. So why call yourselves A R I Z O N A (the band not the state of course)?
NE: We thought it’d be funny.
AM: You guys do a great job writing about love and loss while maintaining an eclectic sound. What can we expect from the debut album?
NE: Well the debut album is called Gallery. A lot of that goes into for all intended purposes is like a collection of our past experiences over the past 10 years in a lot of ways. Just like journeys we’ve gone through and knowing each other and trying to make it in music, trying to make it anywhere in life really. You see a lot of that throughout the album what this journey has been like for us from point a to point b, and you can also hear that in the music. There’s songs like “I Was Wrong” that we wrote two years ago, but then we have songs we wrote a couple of months ago. You hear this huge growth, not just in our writing but our music and how were trying to push our sound.
AM: What inspired you guys to travel around the U.S in Zach’s mom’s Toyota Corolla?
NE: It was a mix of a lot of things. It was a mix of us not having anywhere to work, Zach at the time was living in his aunt’s spare room, I was living with my mom and my five brothers and sisters, Dave was living with his super strict parents so we decided it would work. We took Zach’s mom’s car and we would just sit there and make music all day. We felt like we had this sort of freedom to go wherever we wanted. Why are going to sit in a basement and make a record when we’re in a car? We could go to the beach if we wanted to. And we just kept pushing it further like, ok why are we just going to the beach why don’t we go to like Nashville?
AM: Did that influence your sound in terms of your music? Are you using any of the songs that you made on the album?
NE: Well “People Crying Every Night” was one of the songs we started in the car. But more than anything, I feel the journeys we took in the car, it kind of put us in a position where we were like “Hey, let’s take this seriously and try to do something for real for a second.” When we did the first major road trip we started in Jersey, made our way down to New Orleans and the day we came back from New Orleans, we were like “You guys wanna try this for real now?”
AM: So was that your defining moment?
NE: In a lot of ways, yeah. This was always something. When we started, we would always laugh about it because this was just never about being famous or about making money. It was just like “Hey we have nothing else to do let’s give this one last shot and have fun doing it.”
AM: Last question, what’s next for A R I Z O N A?
NE: The album comes out May 19th and we’ll be on tour all summer!