INTERVIEW: Catching Up With NO ICE + Watch “We Get High Together”

If you live in the greater NYC area and enjoy great indie music and haven’t caught a set by NO ICE yet you’re seriously messing up! The band led ny Jamie Frey combines a classic elements of rock, soul and pop and are a formidable force in the live arena.

The band is getting ready to follow up on their excellent, latest LP, Come On Feel The NO ICE, but before they do they’re now sharing a video for cut “We Get High Together.” The multi-tiered conceptual piece is a collaboration between Frey and director Joe Wakeman and plays out not unlike Michel Gondry’s Be Kind Rewind.

To learn more about the project, we sent Frey some interview questions. Check it all out below!

WE GET HIGH TOGETHER || NO ICE from Joe Wakeman on Vimeo.

Hi, NO ICE! Congrats on your new single. Can you tell us a little more on who you are and how you first got into making music?

I started playing music with my two best friends in my early teens, mostly futzing around on covers and trying to write songs in my Parents’ basement. By Sophomore year, we had a rhythm section and I was the lead singer, practicing every Sunday in the basement and writing originals as a group. We played our first show at a Bensonhurst metal club called L’Amours and by the last song, I knew I’d want to spend the rest of my life singing rock n’ roll onstage. When I was in college, a few friends from High School and I decided to start a Brooklyn rock n’ roll group and called it The Brooklyn What. Jesse Katz joined us by our second gig and he and I have been performing together ever since.

NO ICE started three or so years ago as a side project for myself and Jesse while The BKW was still playing. I had broke up with my girlfriend and started writing these introspective pop songs and began playing guitar seriously for the first time. We started performing as a duo more informally, and were joined by Gwynn Galitzer on vocals and Jesse’s brother Jacob on bass, as well as BKW guitarist John-Severin Napolillo, and then a little later, Sean Spada started playing with us on keyboards, and we recorded “Come On Feel The NO ICE” with that lineup. Sam Braverman and Jordan Smith on guitar and bass respectively completed our lineup.

What’s your songwriting process like? Who are some of your biggest influences?

Most of my songwriting happens in one quick spurt and the process often starts and ends in less than 30 minutes. I often wish I had more of a work ethic, but most of the things that people respond to come out with any labor, and the things I labor over people rarely hear. I like to tell people the title is more important, and I might write down the title and think about it for a few months, but when it’s ready to come out it’s usually quick. I’m sort of a simpleton musically, so I don’t really “hear” the song sometimes until the band starts playing it, and I hear everyone doing their thing, and the group chemistry makes the arrangement come to life beyond my own imaginations.

I’m influenced by lots of different kinds of music, and the members of the band between us, have a tremendous and diverse record collection. When I wrote the songs on Come On Feel The NO ICE, I was listening to lots of sad music like The Lemonheads, Chet Baker, Liz Phair, Big Star, Joni Mitchell… this current phase I’m in I’m really attracted to music you can dance to, lots of disco and synth-pop and I think that has to do with the current lineup of the group, as well as the times we’re living in. People need to dance right now, not just more sad boy guitar rock. I’ve been listening to lots of Curtis Mayfield, Nina Simone, Sly & The Family Stone and Prince as well as stuff like Robert Palmer, Suicide, Prefab Sprout. At one point Gwynn, who shares a love of classic pop with me, introduced me to Marshall Crenshaw, who I think has become a big influence of the NO ICE sound. I started doing a little more DJing, and the band as a group likes the dance and get funky. At a certain point, I have become obsessed with writing perfect pop songs and constructing some kind of bulletproof hit, I’m trying to open my ears to newer pop but I also spend plenty of time with the masters, like Brian Wilson, Phil Spector, George Gershwin. I’m really excited about the new material, we’ve been playing a few new things live and the response has been really encouraging so far.

What is “We Get High Together” about? How did it come to be?

“We Get High Together” is a song like I was talking before where I had the title and some of the hook for a while and then the whole thing I shat out in five minutes and was recorded in the studio the next day. I took the melody from “Chapel Of Love”, the second song I remember hearing in my life (after “Be My Baby”) and wrote this song about a girl I had a crush on, that I would smoke pot with often and describe this experience.

What was the process like in filming the multi-tiered music video? How did the idea originate?

After the record came out, my good friend Joe Wakeman, who’s an awesome auteur filmmaker and plays in the incredible band Toyzanne approached me about making a video for the song. We got together and dreamed up I think two ridiculous concepts, and then landed on Joe’s first idea: filming his parents getting high on Medicial Marijuana for the first time, and watching Turner Classic Movies, and having all the movies be starring NO ICE. I had wanted to do this Chaplin pastiche for ages, so that fit in. The footage we got for the “films” were so good, Joe decided to complete each short, with Sean and Jon “Catfish” DeLorme (ZZZwalk, Psychic Ills) to do original scores. He came up with the Swashbuckler movie for Jesse, Gwynn and Sean and the Cowboy movie for Jordan and Sean.

What artists inspired you growing up?

When I was really young I loved classic films and comic books. My early heroes were Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis, Groucho Marx, Gene Kelly and Batman. My parents are baby boomers so the music I heard when I was young was stuff like Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, John Lennon, David Bowie, The Rolling Stones, Tina Turner and The Ronettes, my father used to tape music obsessively off the radio, we had hundreds of tapes. When I was 12 or 13, I started listening to the radio, fell in love with rock n’ roll and forgot everything else. My Dad brought me to J & R Music World and I picked out albums by Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Metallica and then a little after The Ramones, The Sex Pistols and The Clash, this is what got my through the most terrible moments of growing up, the awkward, angry and sad years. When I was in High School. I’d spend all my cash at the CD stores, discovering the stuff that would dictate my future: The Velvet Underground, Pixies, Elvis Costello, The Replacements, Pavement, The Beach Boys, Television… and I think quickly absorbed that stuff as I was beginning to write my own music, they became really inescapable influences.

Any new artists/venues/purveyors of the arts in Brooklyn you could turn our readers onto?

We the People’s Republic of NO ICE are so fortunate to be surrounded with some of the most insane talent merely in our friend and peer group. I have to mention my brother Oliver Ignatius, producer of “Come On Feel The NO ICE” who is cooking up his own solo shit at his studio Holy Fang (formerly Mama Coco’s Funky Kitchen) and producing tons of great records. I live next door to the band Sic Tic, who are an incredible power trio made of three inspirational musicians forming beyond the sum of their parts. Some other bands I implore you to check out in the community that we love to play and hang with: Prima, The Regrets, Holly Overton, Toyzanne, Bodega, Big Cheese, Old Table, No One and The Somebodies, Stringer, Irrevery, A Deer A Horse, Weeping Icon, My Teenage Stride, ZZZwalk, Thick, Milk Dick, Eleanor… I could go on and on. There’s lots of smart people doing really different cool stuff around here. Swanson from Sic Tic made this website: http://www.nycdiy.xyz/bands.php just as a headquarters to catalog all the shit going on around here, I’m gonna be helping work on this as well in the future.

Where can we follow you and where can our readers catch you live next?

Our music exists on http://noice.bandcamp.com and you can get our record there, we’re also on Spotify and all the other outlets. I have an Instagram, instagram.com/comeonfeelthenoice that has band news. We’re at Alphaville this Saturday Feb 24 with Mark Perro from The Men and his band, Big Cheese and Shadow Monster.

Any parting thoughts? Open platform

The people in NO ICE are my family, and a lot of the people in our community are our family and despite what how it may feel sometimes, we as a group have a lot of power and influence amongst us, and we have to be conscious to use this responsibly and for the forces of good, and actively try and avoid corruption, misogyny, racism, sexism, cronieism, let’s leave that for the rest of the world and make places with music places where people love and understand each other, make each other feel better. The dream of being a great musician isn’t just about prestige or money or a bigger audience, it’s about being able to help people and make people feel better, just by giving them music. It’s a privilege and a responsibility we take on. There’s cool things going on in the community that are designed to help people. Gwynn is the editor of Suffragette City, intersectional feminist art and literature zine as well as throwing great shows and events, giving female identifying artists a platform and bringing together a really incredible collection of people, really contributing in an important way that is quite inspirational. Another thing to check out is The Sound Of Progress, a group that former in reaction to the emergence of the #metoo movement, that published an “Open Letter To The Music Industry”, taking the industry to allowing countless acts of sexual abuse and misconduct. I think everyone should read and sign http://thesoundofprogress.org/openletter.html. Venues are doing cool things too, Our Wicked Lady does a weekly event called Thursdays For The Cause, a benefit show every Thurs with a different cause and different bands each time, and they throw in 10 % of the bar that night. Also, that site NYC.DIY.XYZ that Swanson is working on, I’m gonna get involved too, we’re gonna offer resources for people who wanted to get involved in the music scene, like for kids starting out, how to start a band, how to book a show, how to start a venue, etc. These are dark times, but I’m really inspired and impressed by the strength, determination and resilience of the community around me, it’s a beautiful feeling. My version of success, the dream in my mind, would be to spread that feeling and give that strength, through music, to anybody who wants it or needs it.