Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Paste Best of What's Next: Pyramiddd (Starfucker)


Here's my (albeit HEAVILY edited) Artist of the Day piece on Pyramiddd (formerly Starfucker) for the Paste website! Josh Hodges turned out to be much more philosophical than I had expected, having seen the band live once before. He was thoughtful and forthcoming on the phone, which, sadly, is more than you get from a lot of artists.

Artist of the Day:
Best of What's Next: Pyramiddd

As the dance-pop quartet recently re-dubbed Pyramidd knows, tossing the term “fucker” into your band name isn’t always the best idea. Until this fall, the foursome had called itself Starfucker, a name slapped on back when the band was just a drumming-only solo project for multi-instrumentalist Josh Hodges. By the time Hodges had unwittingly accumulated three bandmates and started touring, the name had stuck—but had started becoming a distraction, discouraging booking agents from Oregon to Japan. There was a certain amount of attachment to the name—it was what the band had been known as when it released its self-titled debut LP in 2008 and its follow-up EP, Jupiter, earlier this year—and he band didn’t want to betray itself or the people who had made its career possible so far.

But still. They were called Starfucker.

So in September the band invited invited fans to suggest new names, and in October finally settled on Pyramiddd as its new moniker. After playing the last Starfucker show on Halloween night, the band embarked on its first European tour in November, and plan to return to the U.S. to make a fresh start with its new name. Paste spoke to frontman Hodges about the Starfucker legacy, his plans for Pyramidd, and—unexpectedly—how Eastern philosophy makes for great dance music.

Paste: What have the last couple of years been like for you guys, going from not being known to being known on a national level?
Josh Hodges: I think people think we’re a lot bigger than we actually are. We still play for like ten people in Nashville and places like that, you know? I don’t feel that much different—it’s just that we tour a lot. We’ve done like three national tours in the last two years. We’ve done three or four West Coast runs. It’s really fun, and it’s really disruptive to any kind of normal life (Laughs) that I would have in Portland—that all of us used to have in Portland. But it’s worth it...[Read more]

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