Indie rockers Finding Fiction are hoping to join the laundry list of bands to break out of the Brooklyn New York scene. Buzzbin caught up with George, Mario and Luke from the band to discuss their writing process, playing house shows and their favorite breakfast foods. Buzzbin: The band has been together since 2008, what has changed in the group’s dynamic since then? Finding Fiction: Just about everything. Finding Fiction’s been going through some changes lately, so it’s definitely having an impact on the sound. We’ve had some friends leave and others join, and each person tends to make it their own. George and I were just saying the other day Finding Fiction seems more of a collective than a band, at this point. Buzzbin: What do you think the band has learned in that time? Finding Fiction: Touring has been a huge learning experience. Lots of organization, emailing and phone calls. But we’re finally learning Google Docs, so look out. Planning a tour is like staging a military campaign, only with less bloodshed and more body odor. Napoleon made it look easy. Of course with his diminutive stature he would have an easier time folding himself into a tour van than our lanky asses. Also, if we wage an unsuccessful pan-continental campaign, we don’t get sent to a pastoral Mediterranean island as punishment. Buzzbin: Where do you see the band going in the future? Finding Fiction: We honestly can’t think past three or so months ahead, so your guess is as good as ours. For now, we’re just glad to be playing. We’re still just chasing our dreams. Sometimes it seems like our dreams are much better runners than us and that they’re covered in slippery grease. But at least it’s bacon grease, so the smell keeps us focused and hungry. Buzzbin: You guys have played all across the country; where is your favorite place to play? Finding Fiction: In general, house parties tend to be more fun than bars or other live venues. It’s usually a more genuine and laid-back atmosphere and vibe. People just wanna have fun and hang out. With bars, you usually have the cloud overhead of having to make x-amount of money for the venue. While a green room resplendent with a fondue fountain, a mechanical bull, and an alphabetized M&M buffet is always a plus, you can’t go wrong with intimate room filled with open minded music junkies looking for a new kind of fix. Thankfully, the latter is most common in our experience. Buzzbin: Coming from Brooklyn, which has tons of bands, how has that shaped or pushed your band? Finding Fiction: As many bands as there may be in this city, we’re still grossly outnumbered by all the music fans. New York is a city that is constantly exfoliating itself and showing new skin. Everyone is always trying to get abreast of the next best thing. We have a potential audience at our doorstep, from the cute barista in the vintage Flaming Lips T-shirt to the grizzled man trying to have a conversation with the subway P.A. Buzzbin: What’s the band’s experience playing to large festival crowds? Finding Fiction: So far we’ve only played a handful of festivals, but the response is always warm. Depending on how they’re organized, some festivals shuffle bands around a lot, so you end up playing a different place than you were originally scheduled to play, but it’s always a good time. Buzzbin: How much material from the upcoming record are you playing out? Finding Fiction: We do most of the new record. Some favorites from the previous, and we also use the live shows to occasionally test new material. When you get in the touring routine of playing shows about every night, you can try some different things out and see what works. The stage really is sort of a musical playground, and given that our audience doesn’t come with too many built in expectations, we can dangle them from the monkey bars, push them down the slide, or just build castles in the sandbox and the experience will always be unique. Buzzbin: If you could create a label for a record store section to place Finding Fiction’s records in, what would it say? Finding Fiction: “As DIY As It Gets! (No, really.. we snuck in this homemade label.. the record store doesn’t even know it’s here.)” – Of course with the fading state of record shops, finding a shelf big enough to fit a label that long may be a challenge. Maybe just putting us as far away from the Katy Perry aisle as possible would suffice. Buzzbin: If you weren’t playing music, what would you be doing? George: I’m going to go with sleazy advertising guy a la Mad Men. Mario: Before this I worked in fancy hotels wearing a penguin tux, sorta like Tyler Durden in Fight Club. So probably that. Minus the peeing in the soup part. Luke: Silently offering my internal organs as an all-you-can-eat smorgasbord to the earthworms. That’s why I have no scruples about eating meat in the meantime. Buzzbin: What influences, if any, has the skateboarding scene had on the band? Finding Fiction: Funny you should ask (and not-so-funny) because Tim, our previous-bassist and beloved friend, just got out of the hospital last week with a concussion from skateboarding. He didn’t remember his name for two days but he’s gonna come to the show tonight and make sure Luke doesn’t fuck-up his bass lines. Luke has a higher center of gravity and a fear of pavement-skull collisions, so we should have our skateboarding woes behind us for the time being. Buzzbin: What is the song writing process like for the band? Finding Fiction: There’s not really one formula for the process. Mario may come with a chord progression or a basic skeletal song structure, or George a little piano or synth lick that we build of off. I will say that if anything, its fairly an organic process. Sometimes we’ll get scientific with it, doing a lot of looping, emailing each other snippets of songs and listen to it about 1000 times over and try everything we can think of. But for the most part, its about seeing what feels good, what works for the song. Everybody brings something different. Buzzbin: The band currently has three records out and a fourth one on the way, has the songwriting process changed at all over the years? Finding Fiction: Definitely, Each time someone changes in the lineup, the dynamic of the music changes. Sometimes that’s subtle, sometimes not. We don’t look at each other in terms of what we play. We all took a different musical journey to get us here and we’re all shaped differently by that experience. So yeah, we try to tap into what each of our strengths are and mesh them all together. Buzzbin: What are you guys listening to now? George: That’s such a hard thing to answer. Off the top of my head, lately I’ve been listening to Florence and the Machine, Blur, Leadbelly, GnR. I connected with a lot of British bands in the ’90s. So Blur was a huge influence for me. I still break out their stuff to listen to almost every week. Mario: I’ve been volunteering lately for WFMU, an independent community radio station in Jersey City, and have got to hear lots of cool new stuff. Lately I’ve been digging on Lame Drivers, an amazing NYC band. Eddie Current Suppression Ring, Todd Rundgren. The new Unknown Mortal Orchestra is pretty cool. Buzzbin: What are the major influences that shape the bands sound? Finding Fiction: Lots of Cookie Crisp Cereal. It’s pretty much our Kryptonite. Finding Fiction will play The Brothers Lounge (11607 detroit ave, Cleveland, 216-226-2767) on September 6th, 2011.