Fresh off of a tour with Lord Huron and featured regularly on KROQ’s Locals Only show, L.A.-based indie rock duo PAPA doesn’t plan on slowing down. Tonight, Student Committee for the Arts brings Darren Weiss and Danny Presant to UCLA’s Kerckhoff Grand Salon for a campus concert. The Daily Bruin’s Ashley Jakubczyk spoke with singer and drummer Darren Weiss about the inspiration behind the band name, how to write songs like a hip-hop producer and what to expect from tonight’s show.
Daily Bruin: What inspired the name of the band, PAPA?
Darren Weiss: PAPA was what I called my grandfather growing up. He was important in sculpting my worldview. He had a really interesting life growing up in Chicago working in so many aspects of what I think of as the American dream. He would always tell these really incredible stories about his life, and when he spoke it was almost like you were at church or temple because what he was saying was like the gospel. When he talked, you listened for the right reasons. That is the kind of artist and the kind of band that I want to be – someone who people listen to for the right reasons.
DB: Who inspires you musically?
DW: The thing about this band is we have a really wide range of influences. Some of them are musical, some of them are not musical. For me personally, my influences began with punk bands like The Clash and (The) Murder City Devils. Now, though, I listen to all kinds of music. Both Danny and I listen to classical music. We both love (Claude) Debussy and Duke Ellington. But on the other hand, we love Bruce Springsteen and Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Soul music always seems to find its way into whatever we’re arranging. There’s something deep within us that keeps reaching back into it.
DB: How would you describe your sound?
DW: That’s not an easy thing for me to do because in the same way that we have such a wide range of influences, I think we try to convey a wide range of output. I don’t think we necessarily fit into a genre. I think most people would say that we’re an indie rock band, which is true in the sense that we have been functioning independently, but stylistically I don’t think that has very much to do with us. I like to think of us as American music.
DB: You and Danny have been friends since childhood. How do you think that impacts your music making process?
DW: We met when we were 7 or 8 years old. We’ve sort of been through the gauntlet together. He and I are really different people, and that shows in our different styles of songwriting. Danny composes music almost how a hip-hop composer creates music – he centers it around a beat or melody, feeding off of one loop and adding to it – whereas my process is really different. I write on piano and acoustic guitar. Most of the time it first ends up sounding like a folk song, and then we add our other voices and sounds to it and change it up a bit. I think that because we listened to the same music growing up and we have such a history together, our writing styles recognize each other. There’s always a real understanding of what we are trying to achieve because we recognize each other’s artistic styles.
DB: What can we expect from your show here at UCLA?
DW: Whatever the audience can walk away from the show with is the same thing that we hope to walk away with ourselves, which is that we aren’t just some rock band that played on a stage in front of you. The whole point of what we do is to share our music, and there’s no point for me to just hit the drums and sing the same lyrics if I don’t feel like the audience takes something of us with them when we leave. It’s important not to just perform, but to connect. You can expect to encounter four guys working hard on stage, working to prove it to ourselves just as much to you. Like Bruce Springsteen says, we’ll do it all night.