A conversation with David Boyd, Søren Hansen and Louis Vacchio of New Politics. Interview by Ari Romo and Sydney Dahle.
Aggie Radio: What is your guilty pleasure artist?
Vecchio: I listen to a lot of guilty pleasure music. That’s like, a majority of what I listen to.
Boyd: That’s not even guilty pleasure music!
Vecchio: [laughs] I would say I’m a big Phil Collins fan, I don’t know if that’s guilty pleasure or not.
Aggie Radio: Is Tarzan your favorite Disney movie?
Vecchio: Ha, yeah! But seriously, what do I listen to that’s really cheesy that you guys
laugh at me all the time for…that’s everything I listen to.
Boyd: I think you have to compare it to what you normally like.
Vecchio: Kesha! I listen to a lot of Kesha.
Boyd: Exactly!
Hansen: For me, it’s got to be something like Roxette. It’s a Swedish guy. [the three sing what we assume was a snip from a Roxette song and break into laughter] Stuff like that. It’s not necessarily my guilty pleasure.
Vecchio: Michael Bolton?
Hansen: No, I don’t listen to him all that often. You know what, I don’t know. That’s a good question.
Boyd: No, you got it! You said it. For me, it would have to be some pop song that I usually
wouldn’t listen to, but I’m kinda like, “this is really good,” you know?
Vecchio: Like the Backstreet Boys?
Boyd: [singing] Backstreet’s back, alright! [laughter] Yeah, it would be something like that, if there’s a single that’s kinda like, you download it and you listen to it a little bit on replay.
Aggie Radio: Yeah, okay!
Boyd: But I haven’t listened to music in a long time, so I’m really fried.
Aggie Radio: You haven’t listened to music in a long time?
Boyd: No!
Aggie Radio: Are you listening to podcasts? Is that a thing now?
Vecchio: I listen to podcasts. Do we listen to podcasts?
Boyd: Do I listen to podcasts?
Vecchio: I love podcasts!
Hansen: When you’re touring a lot, you don’t necessarily listen to other music because you’re doing it for ten hours a day, The last thing you want to do is go home and put on some music! I need silence! Give me a video game or something! Something stupid I can chill out too.
Boyd: But still, there’s a lot of music out there.
Aggie Radio: When you guys first started playing as a local band, how did traveling work out?
Boyd: In a Fiat!
Aggie Radio: Really?!
Boyd: Honestly! We took out the seats, and we packed it up.
Hansen: No joke.
Boyd: Yeah, my stepbrother drove us. He had a family Fiat, like one of the boxy and really ugly ones that are small and then come out to have a little extra room.
Vecchio: You guys, in Denmark, that’s how you traveled?
Boyd: Yeah! You could press a button and [the seats] would go down so you could take them out. Then we’d fill the drum kits in, you’d basically be in with everything around you like that. [acts out being in a cramped car]
Aggie Radio: I imagine so, those things are pretty small, so props to you guys.
Boyd: Well, it was pretty big, like a minivan, sort of, well, not really. It was smaller than that. It was tiny, but it was made so that you could take out the seats really easy and so you could fit a lot of people in it. Like a typical Italian family. [in Italian accent] We need place for five people! And the cousins, twenty! It needs to fit in a sixteenth century garage!
Hansen: No, that’s actually, legitimately, what his stepbrother sounds like.
Boyd: That’s how he talks!
Hansen: Straight out of Italy. He’s been in Denmark for many years and doesn’t speak a word [of Danish].
Boyd: Yeah, horrible Danish.
Aggie Radio: What do you guys think of supporting local music? What’s the importance of it?
Boyd: Love it.
Hansen: I think it’s super cool and I love that a lot of radio stations now have – even major,
alternative stations – have an hour where they do local music. I think it’s super important and it helps give people in bands a chance, but also just promotes the whole scene of music in that city, and I think that’s just really, really, really important. You’ll see that it’s starting to happen on streaming services too, because there is access to everything. But it’s super cool and it means the worlds to musicians.
Boyd: That’s how you get your start! Even if you open a store, you got to promote your local
musicians and local neighborhood.
Aggie Radio: If you could eat dinner with one musician, dead or alive, who would it be?
Boyd: [Bon Jovi Impression] Dead or alive!
Hansen: [laughs] That’s actually not bad! I’m gonna go with Mozart.
Boyd: Wasn’t Mozart deaf?
Aggie Radio: That was Beethoven.
Boyd: That would be a real boring conversation!
Vecchio: I would say John Bonham from Led Zeppelin.
Boyd: I would probably do like a great-great-great grandfather or something.
Vecchio: Was he a musician?
Boyd: No, why? Oh! Was it a musician? [laughs] That’s fine, he was probably like, [starts
dancing and singing in Danish].
Hansen: We’re all pretty sleep deprived!
