A special treat has been going on this entire month of June.  Every Monday in Costa Mesa at Detroit Bar, The New Limb has been playing a free show along with Stacy Clark and special guests.  They have played three fantastic shows already and are playing their 4th show of the month June 22nd.  This would have been the last show but there is a 5th Monday in this month and Detroit has asked them to stay on and play the 29th as well!  Special events and guests have marked all of the shows every Monday.  The first week I got to play bass for them on a cover of “Purple Haze” by Jimi Hendrix; The second week the band Honeypie accompanied them onstage as guest vocalists on an amazing cover of The Band’s “The Weight.” Birthdays last weeks show special.  Drummer Adam Chavez was one of three birthday boys that night, along with Albert Ching of OC Weekly and Luke Allen of the Orange County Music Awards.  A few shakers, a couple sings-a-longs, a bunch of balloons, and one delicious cake later, the night ended and I personally chalked it up as one of the best shows I’ve ever had the pleasure of witnessing.  Nights like that are one of the things that set The New Limb apart from other local indie bands that frequent the same venues and bars.

I got to sit down with the band which is made up of Dan Perez, Lauren Salamone, and brothers Joey, and Adam Chavez to talk to them about their first ever residency, and other fun crap!

Kyle Deven: “You four are doing a Monday residency at Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa for the month of June. The first three shows you played great sets with covers that included guest musicians from We Are The Pilots and Honeypie, and a birthday celebration! Are there more special things planned for the rest of the month?”

Lauren Salamone: “…We’re gonna try and go all out in any way we can.  The only thing we have set in stone is we have this song called ‘Phil and Marie’ that we’ve never performed.  We’ve only recorded because it needs a cello in it, and it’s just not the easiest song to perform, but we have a cellist and a violinist that are going to play with us hopefully on that night.  We’ve also been talking about doing a pretty long set that night.”

Dan Perez: “It’s going by fast!”

Joey Chavez: “We’ve put a lot of effort into it so I think that’s why it’s feeling like it’s going by fast.  We do stuff for it all week long and then Monday comes and then we’re done, and then it’s like ‘well lets get ready for the next one!’”

KD: “You guys have done a lot of stuff not just for one show individually but for all the shows!  You bake cookies all the time and you decorated your merch table with a theme…”

Adam Chavez: “With the bananas because we have the ‘Banana EP’ that we just came out with and…”

DP: “The videos!  I think the videos might be the best thing.  We’re doing a different one every week.”

KD: “You recorded the ‘Banana EP’ for this residency, how did that all come about?  Why bananas?”

DP: “We had the idea just to do like an EP, just something new to get out there… we wanted something special at Detroit Bar.  Lets just record a couple of acoustic songs and sell it for a buck.  We’re sick of cutting paper out for our first EP ‘Allude To The Sounds’ cause we cut and glue those by hand so I was trying to think of something that would be like different and cool to wrap it.”

LS: “And more green!”

DP: It’s easier to wrap and easier to cut…”

JC: “It smells worse though!”

AC: “And stickier in the CD player.”

DP: “But I was thinking ‘banana leaves, my mom buys those to make food all the time…’ and then we just kinda called it the ‘Banana EP’ just cause we were gonna wrap it in banana leaves.”

LS: “The EP is a fun EP!  Only one song, “Tiger Head” will be on our full length, and all the other songs we were kinda like ‘well what do we wanna do?’ It was really open, and I don’t think any of us had any idea what the final product was going to be.  We just kinda kept playing around in the studio with different stuff.  I love how it just came about!  It just kinda happened!”

JC: “I was expecting it to be way crappier than it turned out.”

DP: “ME TOO!  I thought it was going to be a stupid little acoustic cover EP.”

LS: “Yeah me too!  But we just started going all out.  The cycle wasn’t supposed to be just a piano song it was suppose to be all of us, but we wanted to base it around the piano.  So I tried to record just to start off, but I’m not really good at playing to a click so I was going off the click and messing around and they said ‘oh that’s way better, lets do that!  Why don’t you just play it the whole song!?’  So we did that!”

DP: “She seriously did it in 2 takes!”

KD: “Your live shows can be as visually stimulating as your music.  When it comes to the live shows what is it the four of you are trying to convey?”

AC: “I dunno, none of it makes sense!  None of our stuff makes any sense!”

The entire group bursts into laughter!

AC: “Our music video and our background videos everybody’s like ‘what does it mean?’ Well nothing!  Just enjoy it!  Just look at it!”

JC: “I feel like we are a unit and our personalities gel well, and so I feel like there are common themes and kind of overarching over all of us and how we are together and what we think and the kind of music that we write stylistically and in the videos we try to portray that.  The first video we did for the Detroit Bar shows was the Bike video.  We are people that convey, or live lifestyles that are kinda carefree and so that video conveyed that part of us.  We can be crazy sometimes and…”

AC: “Or weird like the space video, it’s a really random cut and really eerie.  I feel like that definitely comes out in our music sometimes.”

JC: “It’s in us somewhere, so it shows who we are.  Some how in some way.”

KD: “So you mentioned that you wanted to do an EP for the Detroit Bar shows because the album wasn’t going to be ready.  This means there is an album coming, what is going on with that!?”

AC: “We’re budgeting!”

DP: “It’s our first full length… EVER.

JC: “We’re trying to make it the best quality for a good price.”

DP: “I’m the devil’s advocate for keeping it affordable.  That’s my role in the album process.”

AC: “I know all the technical crap, and Joey just floats around.  Joey just dances!”

LS: “Our goal is the end of the year.  I think October would be an awesome time to release it!  The album, maybe title is ‘Sounds The People Hear.’”

DP: “’SOUNDS PEOPLE CAN HEAR!’ That’s why our EP is called ‘Allude To The Sounds.’”

JC: “We planned in advance!”

DP: “We want to have a track called ‘Sounds People Can Hear’ and it will kinda be like a noise transition track.  Then we’re going to have a track towards the end called ‘Sounds People Can Make!’ and it’s just going to be us in the studio just making weird noises.”

Dan and Lauren rub their hands together in demonstration making a sound that would be hard to identify without the visual.

DP: “We talked about this!”

AC: “Joey’s not sold on that idea.”

JC: “We’ll see.”

DP: “NO we’re doing it!”

KD: “So for the album, are most of the songs already written?”

JC: “For sure most of them are written!  I wanna sneak one in there at least, maybe two.”

DP: “’Sounds People Can Hear.’ It’s gonna put us in debt.”

AC: “It’ll be cool.”

So with their Detroit Bar residency coming to an end we’ll all need to find something else to do on Monday night next month!  I’m looking forward to seeing the last couple shows!   If you haven’t seen The New Limb you should stop reading this and go to their myspace right now to look up shows!  Or just come to the Detroit Bar on Mondays for the rest of the month!  Everyone will be there.  This band can’t be stopped, they’ve been planning too far in advance for anything to get in their way.

Photos courtesy of A.J. Abajian.