Our pick for this week’s In the Spotlight is the student band Franny, made up of Lee Pender ’07 (lead guitar and vocals), Ashraf Rijal ’07 (bass guitar) and Caley Monahon-Ward ’07 (drums). Named after Franny Glass of J.D. Salinger’s “Franny and Zooey,” this exceptional indie-rock band has recently released its first CD, “Franny,” available for $5 at www.frannyband.com. Their next show is on Friday, April 16th at 10 p.m. in the WestCo Café. No one should miss the opportunity to hear the heartfelt, powerful songs of these talented and sexy musicians. I had the opportunity to speak with them about their experiences as we rode up and down the elevator in Shanklin Hall Wednesday night.
How and when did you form?
Lee: I saw Thatcher [a band of six Wesleyan students, including Caley] play at Awesomefest and at that point I had a solo acoustic group called Goodnight Moonshine. Well I guess it’s not a group…a solo acoustic project. I saw Caley on the street one night and I was like, “Hey, are you in too many projects?” and he was like, “No.” So then we started playing together.
Caley: It sort of just became us two. And then we wanted to pull Ashraf in.
Lee: Ashraf also plays in Thatcher. So basically I siphoned away all the members of Thatcher.
Ashraf: By all you mean two.
Who writes the songs?
Lee: Well, I wrote the songs, most of them, on the album, but it wasn’t like a law or anything. It just kind of turned out that way. Caley wrote “Amphetamine Death” [the fourth song on the album]. And I’m sure Ashraf is going to have some stuff on our next album.
Did you write the songs before you formed the band?
Lee: Most of them before. I wrote Kung Fu Katie while we were together [motions to Caley]. It sounds like we were in a relationship.
What is your past music experience?
Ashraf: I played Carnegie Hall with my school jazz band. I played guitar for that.
Caley: Ashraf is very capable on the guitar. I’ve been playing violin for twelve years or something. I also play mandolin, guitar, bass, drums, and I play viola.
Lee: [to Caley] There’s basically a shorter list of what you don’t play.
Caley: Right. I play a lot of jazz violin. I play bluegrass and Irish music. I also sing.
Lee: I play guitar. I can play drums and bass and shit but it’s not very exciting. I’m a fucking off-the-chain tambourinist.
Caley: He’s a virtuoso of the tambourine.
How much of your life does being in a band take up?
Lee: Well, during school not much. Unless we have a show coming up really soon.
Ashraf: [joking] Or if we have a show in class. I think about the band a lot.
Caley and Lee: Yeah, me too.
Caley: Actually we’re all totally obsessed.
How do you arrange performances?
Caley: We arrange performances by emailing venues or promoters that we find on the internet.
Lee: Or we talk to Willy. He books the café. We have a press kit. It’s like a CD, also some pictures of us looking cool, and also it has a CD. Did I already say that? Also bios and any press that we have, which we don’t, until now I guess.
Ashraf: We’re just selling ourselves more or less.
Would you say it’s easy to book performances at Wesleyan?
Caley: Wesleyan’s relatively easy. It’s harder in the real world. Wesleyan crowds are supercool because they’re enthusiastic and friendly.
Lee: They’re also mostly our friends.
Where have you played?
Lee: Well, we’ve played everywhere on campus I guess.
Caley: We played the café, Alpha Delt, Eclectic, MPR…
Lee: Over spring break we sort of went on a tour.
Caley: We like to call it that.
Lee: We played a lot of shows in upstate New York.
Caley: And New York City, and one in New Hampshire.
Lee: Franny tour 2004. I think the first show of the tour, the first thing that happened, was Ashraf tried to grab his mic stand and it fell over and broke. The mic broke.
Ashraf: Somebody yelled, “That’s ominous!” These were, like, high school freshmen.
Lee: It was cool, though. We signed a lot of body parts and CDs.
What was the worst show you ever played?
Ashraf: That’s a good story. In New Hampshire we played at a venue called Curly’s Coffee, which is more or less an empty rented-out space. We played with a bunch of much harder bands with a lot fewer melodies than us. Their fans were a lot more violent.
Lee: There were like four people there.
Four violent people?
Lee: They were violent for the other bands. They were just indifferent for us.
Caley: Or not present.
Lee: Or invisible.
You played to nobody?
Lee: Yeah, but I mean there’s worse than playing to no one.
Ashraf: Actually playing to no one is kind of cool. It’s like practice.
Caley: Cool practice.
Lee: Minus “cool.” At least there wasn’t people throwing shit at us.
Has that ever happened?
Caley: Not to us, but to Lee.
Lee: I used to play in the Queens hardcore scene somehow, and they threw belt buckles at me and, like, plastic bottles. It wasn’t even good stuff that would hurt me. It was like poser trash.
Were you booed off the stage?
Lee: No. They pegged us as an emo band, though, so they brought us napkins to cry on.
What was your best show?
Lee: Outside of Wesleyan? Plattsburgh, NY.
Caley: It’s an hour south of Montreal. It’s far away.
Ashraf: It was a really earthy, dark, vibin’ experience.
Caley: It was like a garage show, really do-it-yourself kind of thing. At this house of like, five guys in their twenties, these bohemian, indie-rock enthusiasts.
Lee: We had some awesome vegan chili, fell in love with the waitress at Little Caesar’s, and talked to this really drunk guy times, like, seventeen. It was just really fun talking to people from far away.
Any plans for the summer?
Lee: We’re going to schedule another tour from August 15th to the 29th.
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