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INTERVIEW | Pop/Folk trio Fried Squid Shares 2019 Plans
Parisian childhood friends Carole, Grace and Lau met back when they were in school. Driven by the same love for music, the three ladies embarked on a terrific human adventure together and formed Fried Squid, a pop-folk-country trio with a unique sound. Though they started with covers of popular French or American songs, Carole (guitar, loop station), Grace (ukulele, bass drum) and Lau (guitar, percussions) quickly developed their own style and their own universe, creating a beautiful mix of harmonies that seem to have swooned the Internet over.
In the wake of their most eventful year so far, we caught up with your soon-to-be favorite octopuses!
Stage Right Secrets | 2018 was such a busy year for you girls! You played several festivals and you also released your EP ‘Long Long Walk’, for which you raised $16,000 online. That’s insane! Tell us about this special project!
Fried Squid | Yeah, 2018 has been so important for us. We worked really hard on the image of the group, but also on the content we wanted to put out there and offer to our audience. We really wanted to step up quality-wise and give our project more credibility. We thus had to surround ourselves with a team of professionals that understood our goals when it came to the recording of the EP and to our visual identity (logo and high-resolution photos). We also needed someone to come up with communication and promotion approaches that we liked and that actually fit the group. None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for the support that our audience gave us on the KissKissBankBank platform. Thanks to their generosity, we were able to spend a month in the studio recording the four tracks of our EP. We had started working on these tracks a few months before so we could perform them live, so people already knew some of them. But having a studio version of these tracks was a whole different story. Our work methods differed a lot, but our producer Greg Canone really helped us and pushed us towards a rendering that we’re really proud of. Being able to listen to songs we wrote on worldwide streaming platforms is such an incredible feeling.
You write and compose all your songs. How would you describe your creative process and your music style?
Each of us is influenced by different sounds but we’ve found a middle ground in folk and country music (especially following our trip to Nashville). When it comes to creating a song, we usually start with a simple folk/acoustic guitar beat. No matter what the final rendering of our song is, whether it ends up pop, country or else, we always start with a guitar. Then we move on to the lyrics. Although we’ve written some songs all together, we usually write separately and then meet to read and work on each other’s stuff. Once we have the lyrics and guitar chords covered, we just have to find the melody, and that’s not always the easiest part. However, sometimes, it just all happens differently and one of us is just going to come up to the others with a melody and lyrics and all we have to do is work together to bring this song to life.
Big Flo & Oli, Kodaline, Hoshi, your “third act” videos have gathered over 3,500 views on Youtube in less than a month. If you could do one today with any artist, alive or dead, who would you pick and why?
It’s true that this concept of “third act,” where we meet the artists after their show and share a musical moment with them, really made waves amongst our followers and the fanbases of the artists we got to enjoy these moments with. We have been equally surprised and overjoyed of the positive impact and the enthusiasm these videos have bought. If we had to choose one act to do this with though… that’s a tough call. Taylor Swift, Aretha Franklin, Ryan Tedder, Charles Aznavour or even Imagine Dragons, there are so many. But at the end of the day, we could all agree on Ed Sheeran. We feel like he’d really adhere to the concept and that it could be a very fun and memorable time because he seems really funny and passionate by the spontaneous side of music. He’s a real source of inspiration for us, through his music but also through his simplicity and his perseverance.
What’s in stores for Fried Squid in 2019?
2019 will once more be a year marked by the new and the official. We filmed our very first music video this summer, and it’ll come out early February. Following that, we’ll get on the road to shoot the second one, which may not be filmed in France this time… We’re also thinking of adding a few more instruments to our scene, in order to bring a new wave of different sounds all the while keeping this balance when we’re on stage. Maybe some new percussions or some new chords. We’re still thinking about it all.
And of course, there are the live shows! We’re opening for Shake Shake Go in Paris early February, and then we’ll head on the road to play at festivals across France this summer. For 2019, that’s already a good schedule for us, but who knows, maybe we’ll find some time to go back to the studio before the end of the year!
This article originally appeared in the January/February 2019 issue of Stage Right Secrets.
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