Mountain Rock: A Look Inside Fast Eddy

I was driving down the PCH one sunny day, blasting the radio, when a song came on that instantly caught my attention. The song was “Take A Look” by the hard rock band Fast Eddy. It was catchy, fun, and riddled with punk and garage swagger. I instantly got in contact with the band and was able to chat with lead singer Micah and guitarist Lisandro, both the founding members of Fast Eddy.

Interviewer: It was on XM radio I first heard y’all’s new song. The garage channel

Lisandro: Yeah, dude. We’ve been listening to that for so long, it’s crazy to be on it. My old manager just hit me up and she’s like “Is this your band?” She was one of the first people to show me that on the radio station. It’s cool to be on it now.

Interviewer: It’s a great song and record. The album was released recently this year, right?

Lisandro: Yeah dude. It all happened so fast. It’s fucking weird.

Micah: That was in January.

Interviewer: And what was that like, recording the album “Take A Look”?

Micah: We’ve been recording that for almost four years.

Interviewer: Wow.

Micah: We had to do it in increments because we had to go out to Atlanta to record with out producer and engineer out there. But Denver to Atlanta is about a 20-hour drive, 24-hour if you’re trying to take bathroom breaks (laughs). We were able to record a few songs at a time and it took us a few trips to finally get the record done because all of them are high production songs. And we wanted to focus well on them. So, for each trip, you know, we’d spend a whole week on just three songs. It was a long process because we didn’t have the money to do it all upfront.

Lisandro: Yeah dude, it took a minute. But COVID helped out because it happened in the middle of it. We looked like we were busy during COVID, which I always say is a good thing as a band. And it happened through COVID cause no one was doing shit, no one could travel, but we had already planned to be recording no matter what. So, we had to sit in a hot studio in mass playing in Atlanta in the middle of BLM shit. It was wild, dude.

Micah: We kinda got shafted by COVID as well, because we were going to release the album earlier and we had a couple of tours that got cancelled. But I felt like we were in a stranglehold where we had to release some of the singles that we were saving for the full length. Cause we were like, “fuck, we can’t do anything else right now”. So we had to put out another single because otherwise people are going to lose interest. And by the end of it, we had already released like-

Lisandro: Half the album.

Micah: Like “Fuck!”.

In today’s world of instant gratification and constant distraction, fueled by caffeinated blue light from screens, people need to constantly be engaged and entertained. Like a baby needing to suck on mommy’s titty.

Micah: Yeah man, it’s crazy how difficult people are with music now. Like, we went up a bunch of Spotify followers right after we released the record and since we’ve gone off tour, it dropped. And it’s just because we’re not touring right now. But then we got that Little Steven’s thing on XM radio and I was like “Oh, well maybe that’ll give us a big bump in the Spotify followers or whatever. But who knows, man. They’ll be your monthly listener for a while and then they drop off. Like “You betrayed me man, you left me hanging”.

Lisandro: (laughs) It’s personal, dude.

Micah: (laughs) You stopped listening to me every month. What the fuck?

Micah and Lisandro have known each other for years. The two were in different bands before forming Fast Eddy.

Micah: Lisandro and I actually met at a pizza place and we started playing music together and we were in different bands. But we started writing songs together probably around 12 years ago. Sitting in his house, we were always kinda bummed because we weren’t playing in a band with each other. Eventually, we started hanging out with Devin, who’s our bass player. We were jamming kind of late one night and ran into our (current) drummer who was at that show. But me and Lisandro had known him through the rock and roll community. I didn’t know he played drums but he was a really good guitar player.

But we were like “You just wanna come back to our house and jam?” And we started playing and we wrote one of the songs that we still play to this day. That was about seven or eight years ago.

Lisandro: It kind of started with a different name; we finally found the members and it was really cool to find the four dudes. Me and Micah wanted to streamline the band super hard. And we were like “We’ll be able to do the shit were doing now in like three years”. It’s so much more work than what people expect. Micah and I were also in another serious band before this. So, him and I were on the road a lot and kinda putting this project on the back burner. And as soon as that ended, we took this flame that was already in us and ran with it with this band.

Interviewer: What year was it when you finally got the lineup you have now?

Micah: I think it was 2015.

Fast Eddy hails from Denver, Colorado which has its own vibrant music scene. Micah and Lisandro touch upon the differences of a more localized city like Denver, compared to cities like Los Angeles.

Micah: We’ve actually have had a long history of a really good rock ‘n roll scene out here. There’s some big bands from around the area. Like Earth, Wind, and Fire.

Lisandro: The Senior in Denver is awesome.

Micah: Yeah. We have a lot of bands, a lot of rock ‘n roll bands and we always have. We tour across the East and the West coast. I think we are getting more on the national map now as a music city with Denver.

Interviewer: I’ve noticed cities like Denver and Austin are some cool areas that have a growing music scene. I just moved to LA recently and am surprised at how unorganized the scene is here. Was expecting a better and more together scene.

Lisandro: It’s tough man, it’s tough.

Micah: Yeah, LA sucks.

Lisandro: If you don’t know the right guys and they don’t know you, you’re not going to do shit out there. It took us a few years and we finally know the guys.

Fast Eddy has toured around the United States multiple times. Micah, who’s filling in as the guitarist for another band, is heading to Europe soon. The band hopes to be able to hit outside of the US in the near future.

Interviewer: Are there any specific towns or cities that you’ve played at that you really enjoyed?

Lisandro: Milwaukee. One of the more popular songs on the new album is about Milwaukee. It’s always been a city that’s shown the equal amount of love that we show bands when they come to Denver. We’re always like “Dude, you guys are great, thank you for everything you did here.” When you’re in our town, we got you. And that usually never happens anywhere else. But Milwaukee was one of the first cities to give us that back and continues to do that for us. Same with Austin, Austin is fucking awesome.

Micah: Yeah, really supportive communities in both of those cities. I don’t know, my least favorite place is probably LA.

Lisandro: Even though we played a killer fucking show at a cool venue. And there’s like models asking us who we were, it was still like “This is so fucking weird” you know?

Interviewer: Elaborate how weird it was out there.

Micah: So, I've done some work out there too. I've played guitar with my buddy Danny Dodge, his band. So, he's like flown me out there to play some shows. People are just fricking clicky and weird. And if they find out that you know somebody that they want to know, they'll be really nice to you. But otherwise, they'll just snub you. And the scene doesn't really support itself so much as like people try to step on each other's toes to get.

Lisandro: It's probably how you're saying, it seems really disorganized because it is. Everyone sees each other as competition. So, nobody wants to help each other out. It's weird, even though they want all your contacts, they don't want to help you out.

Micah: We have the exact opposite philosophy in Denver. We realize, like I want all of the other bands in Denver to do well, because then I can put them on our show, and they draw more people. You know what I mean? So, if everybody does well, then we all do well. Like we all do better together.

Community support within music scenes is important for establishing relationships and trust. If a band hits it big out of a city like Denver, they could help but other bands in their circle on the map. One of the most notable examples of this is with Nirvana and the Seattle scene during the early 1990s, helping bands like the Melvins and others.

Both Lisandro and Micah consider Denver home, even though they weren’t born in the city or state of Colorado.

Lisandro: I was born in Mexico. I’ve been here since I was 11-years old. So, all my sickest memories are here in Denver.

Micah: I was born in Austin actually. Austin, Texas. But then I moved up to the mountains. I grew up in the Rockies until I was 18 and then moved to Denver. So, I’ve been in Denver for a long time and it’s my home for sure.

Interviewer: We’re y’all in different bands when you were young? What was your relationship with music like when you were a kid?

Micah: Yeah, my first band was when I was 12 or 13 and it was a Metallica cover band. But Lisandro has been in bands since he was a kid too.

Lisandro: We both grew up super punk rock. So, my first stuff was pretty shitty, but I’ve played in some good bands. I just didn’t know how to play. I played like shit; just cause that’s how you grew up being punk rock. But I have been playing since I was 14-years old and there’s pictures of me holding a guitar or an accordion as a tiny fucking kid. We had a couple of serious bands, but it got a lot more serious when I met Micah.

Interviewer: And we’re anybody in your family musical?

Lisandro: Micah’s family did, it’s awesome

Micah: My dad was kinda on top of the Austin scene in the 70s. He recorded with Christopher Cross and played in his band. He worked with Stevie Ray Vaughn’s band and a couple of others. And my mom was friends with Carol King and helped her on one of her records. And then on my mom’s side, my second cousin is Mike Nesmith from The Monkees. It’s a weird rock and roll family.

Lisandro: It’s really rad.

Micah: Everyone kind of is running away from themselves though in a weird way.

Interviewer: I know we briefly touched upon the music y’all were into but what was the record or band you listened to that really got you into rock music?

Lisandro: Ah, shit. What probably got me to switch from being a super punk rock kid to rock and roll was “Appetite for Destruction”. And to me, that has the perfect amount of punk rock, even though it’s outdated now, and I don’t listen to it as much as I have before. That’s one album that got me into playing guitar and being in a good band, not just a punk band.

Micah: It’s defiantly Ziggy Stardust. I mean, I was always into punk rock since I was a little kid with my cousin and brothers, my older brothers were in a punk band. But when I listened to David Bowie, it just gave me the courage because it was like punk rock, glam, rock n roll, goth, just all over the place. And he’s like wearing all this insane makeup and just being whatever the fuck he wants to be. And I was like, “that’s the most rock n roll thing ever.” And so, I felt comfortable going into that, like wearing makeup for one of our videos. I just aspire to that level of self-confidence and power with rock music. It’s defiantly helped me through a lot of times too.

Throughout my experience going to shows, it’s obvious that a resurgence of rock is underway. The genre has become underground again and is becoming “cool” or “edgy” with younger kids.

Lisandro: Dude, there's been like a resurgence of rock. It's cool to be underground now, you know, instead of being mainstream. So, like all the kids like weird little rock bands that are fucking heavy, really heavy punk bands. So, I see the scene still alive and kicking it just as lively as it was for when me and Michael were little, 14-year-old punk kids where it gets stuff is when you get our age, and you want to play a little bit of a different, more polished rock and roll. The market sits in a weird place. Cause you’re not quite pop where the big labels or the radio would want it. Then you’re not as edgy for a youngster.

Micah: There’s people in our scene that are torn between things like, should we appeal to the heritage rock and roll fans. Or like the boomers before them. And we have a pretty big appeal with that audience. Actually, I look at our Spotify analytics and a lot of our listeners are above the age of 50.

Lisandro: (laughs) No way.

Micah: Yeah. I talk to Teddy at our label Spaghetty Town, and we want to reach the youth, the next generation of people. I just don’t know if that’s really what they’re listening to, I have no idea cause I’m not one.

Fast Eddy’s fusion of hard rock, glam, punk, and blues presents a type of sound that I think is very marketable and appealing to younger audiences. While there are always going to be kids who only seek out the bizarre and ultra-punk, most young audiences don’t have the pallet for music that is abnormally heavy. With streaming, it’s tough for bands to get listeners to discover new music with the vast pool of musicians that are on the platforms.

Lisandro: I think it’s been our most lucrative time ever for music, for Micah and me.

Micah: Yeah, we’re making a lot more money than we were before. But streaming is difficult. The saving grace for the music industry right now is that vinyl is so popular again. So, we can sell that, and we sell vinyl for more than people used to sell CDs for. It’s lucrative in the end.

Lisandro: The tangible things that people hold; they love that shit. It’s cool. We rely a lot on our merch stuff too, just cause people like to have things from the artist. You can see an artist’s whole career with records or tapes, which is really fucking popular too. Collectible stuff, you know?

Micah: That being said, I don’t know if the music industry will ever return to bands like Oasis getting to fly around in helicopters and shit like that. I think that died in the nineties and that was the last generation that got to experience that. And there are people like our friend Nathaniel Rateliff from Denver who does big soul, gospel stuff. White people soul stuff. But, he’s huge and he gets to do stuff like flying around in private jets. But I don’t know if there’s balls to the wall rock and roll shit. I don’t think we’re getting private jets anymore.

Lisandro: Dang!

Micah: Yeah, we missed the boat on that one.

But maybe not. The future of music is unpredictable yet cyclical. Who knows, rock music might return where new bands will be taking over the airwaves and selling out massive studios, selling more records than Drake or someone in that vein.

Interviewer: I know you have a self-titled album that came out a few years ago. What’s different about making that one to the new one?

Micah: I mean, we self-produced that whole album along with our friend, who's an engineer. We were writing together, and we were all kind of in a different state of mind back then, we were just trying to figure out what sound we wanted to, you know? We're like, do we want to be harder, like blues rock? Or do we want to be a little more garage punk? Or do we wanna be more pop, like rock and roll? Or do we want to be just like three chord, fifties rock and roll kind of shit? Luckily, we were able to fucking change up in a positive way, I think, from the sound of the first album, for sure.

Lisandro: I don’t mind some of those songs. I heard some of them the other day and I think they’re tight.

Micah: It's just a little disjointed. And I think we're trying too many ideas into like a shotgun and then it turned into that album, which it's fine. I just think that it's not representative of who we are as a band since then at all. Like, honestly right after that album was released, we started writing different music. I feel like we got our group together after that.

But we collaborate on most of the songs. I would say its 60/40. Because I write some of the songs, some of them I didn’t want to put in the band because they are personal. I’ve put personal songs in another band before this and it fell apart.

Lisandro: We convinced him to finally start throwing some of this into the band because we’re attached for life now.

Micah: “Take A Look” is something that I wrote on a garage band demo. And so those were just my songs that threw into the band, and they wouldn't be what they are without Fast Eddy playing them. And I realized that was a mistake that I made, trying to hold them to myself, and there is no better band to play those songs than Fast Eddy. So that's where they're meant to be.

Interviewer: Are there any types of genres you try to channel in the writing? How does that happen for y’all?

Micah: Well, we write all sorts of different stuff. I think we just write whatever comes to our head, but that comes from a huge variety of influences, a lot of classic rock and roll power, pop punk rock. We love Thin Lizzy, Rolling stones, all the classic kind of cool rock and roll shit. Yeah. Tom Petty, David Bowie. All of that is just where we come from.

And I don't think we're trying to quote or pull directly from any of those influences. I think they just kind of fall into place and we don't try to really define it other than, I think it's easy to describe us as just as a power pop rock and roll band to people just so we don't have to like, get into it more. Cause I don't know how else to explain it.

Lisandro: I always tell people we’re like a modern take of 70s rock and roll.

Interviewer: You can totally get that from listening to the music. It’s hard for bands to walk that fine line of using their influences as inspirations without copying it.

Lisandro: We have a lot of out buddies that are like, “you guys are so brave to release a song that sounds like that.” Like for our like last song “sunflower”, that was one of Micah’s singer songwriter songs. And when I heard it, it had a hip hop beat to it. I was like,” dude, that sounds like a rock and roll song.” He's like, “should we use it?” I was like, “yeah.” And you know, sending it to a few friends of bands that we respect. They're like, “well, you guys are really brave to release stuff that sounds like that. We would never have the balls to do that.”

Even though they just released a record, Fast Eddy is already looking at what their next record could be.

Lisandro: Yeah. I think we're finally going to get to the level this next album we write, where everyone gets to have a part. This last record was mostly from Micah and I and some stuff we had for a while. I think this time around, it's going to be fresh. Everyone's bringing some fresh shit to the table. I'm just really pumped to start writing again. Cause it'll be everybody's full input rather than them playing some shit that we already had written.

Micah: I think we have to get one more tour out there before we have time to write. We haven’t been able to write music for a while. We just got off an East coast tour and are talking about hitting the West coast later in the summer.

Fast Eddy’s new album “Take A Look” is available to stream on all platforms. The band also has a music video for “Take A Look” on YouTube. Make sure to check out their Instagram @fasteddyofficial.