Interview: Strengthen Your Imagination with Rocking Chair Reality Room

Semi-local ex-band kids sit down with Afterglow to talk creation, collaboration, and aspirations.

Written by Ellen Daly

Photo courtesy of @vijayrjhaveri on Instagram

After high school, the boys of Rocking Chair Reality Room refused to let marching band be their glory days and took the next natural step: starting a band of their own. Two years and one global pandemic later, they’ve moved in together and started playing shows in anticipation of their debut album’s release. Here, they talk to Afterglow about what that process has been like, what the actual Rocking Chair Reality Room is, and what it might look like in the future.

Afterglow: Tell me about the band!

Kieran: I think we’re just gonna go ahead and introduce ourselves. I’m Kieran. I play guitar and I sing in the band. I write most of the lyrics.

Matt: I’m Matt. I’m one of the drummers and I usually mix and master for the band, and I’ll be doing a lot of work on this upcoming album.

Nick: I’m Nick. I play drums and write a lot of music as well.

Daniel: I’m Daniel. I’m the bass player. Newly joined.

Vince: I’m Vince. I used to play bass but I’m going to be moving to guitar.

Kieran: I’d say our sound is like rock, punk, like psychedelic rock. You know, garage.

Vince: Neurotic, psychedelic garage rock.

Could you name any bands that influence your music?

Kieran: Yeah, I’d say like Frank Zappa, Thee Oh Sees, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. Herbie Hancock for sure.

Matt: Probably Gorillaz. Huge influence.

Daniel (wearing Gorillaz shirt): Right here, baby!

Nick: Mastodon.

Vince: I like a lot of T. Swift.

Kieran: Mr. Farts. He’s an artist. Mr. Farts and (his song) “Farting Round the House.”

What’s your creative process like?

Matt: Nick and Kieran up until this point have written a lot of the music before we got together, so a lot of material we have already existed. But at this point, we’ll jam, we’ll make some ideas, and if we like it, we’ll stick with it. Improvise, record it. Honestly, we just kind of jam on ideas and refine them over time.

Kieran: We’ll have an idea, like “burger facility,” for example, and on that idea we’ll just play music.

Vince: Kieran and Nick essentially come up with the skeletons of the songs and then they’ll bounce it off the rest of the band and we’ll refine it from there.

Kieran: But we get the core of it out of just jamming. Like, complete just, messing around. Or we’ll write it, like, away from the jam and bring it to everyone and be like, alright, this is kind of what I want to do.

When you were making music during the pandemic, were you imagining playing those songs live?

Kieran: Not at all. We were thinking maybe one day we’ll make a live adaptation of it, but we didn’t write the instruments for a band instrumentation in mind. We just recorded stuff and thought it sounded good. We wrote all our live stuff when we were all together, and at that point the vaccination had been at its peak of like, getting people to not die. So at that point, we booked a show.

What’s it been like starting to play shows together?

Nick: It’s all that I look forward to.

Matt: I, for one, had never played a live show before I joined the band, so it’s definitely been a pretty cool experience. Although in high school, our band played in front of hundreds of people, and I feel like that was a good emulation, so I’m not ever nervous. Personally, I think our first show was probably one of our best for some reason.

Kieran: Best show was French House, for sure. Whenever we played most recently, the crowd was just so into it.

Matt: Lots of energy. We have two drummers, me and Nick, so we’re just naturally really loud, and people really like that. We have a mosh pit at almost every show.

Why do you guys like making music?

Daniel: We all went to the same high school. Me, Nick, Kieran, and Matthew were all in marching band together. And Vince was playing guitar for jazz band at that high school. Music has just been a part of our lives for a really long time. So I feel like it’s kind of hard to escape.

Vince: It’s hard to do literally anything else. 

Matt: I can’t think about doing anything else creatively. I’m a terrible drawer, like this is what I do. The reason I like making music is just to play with other people. It’s just a huge part of the experience in general. Solo stuff is really cool, and it’s impressive, but music is all about connection, and I feel like playing with other people is a really big part of it.

Kieran: Just like, expressing yourself. Being able to say something that’s not in words, and then having other people vibe off of it and understand that emotion or be in that moment with you, creating it together.

What’s the story behind your band name?

Matt: Basically, what I’ve done for a few years now is when someone says something really cool or funny, I’ll write it down in my little song notes, and I’m like, that’s a song name. I honestly have no idea where the name came from — I just thought it was a really cool name. So I wrote it down. And a year or two later, Kieran texted me and was like, “Hey, can I use Rocking Chair Reality Room as a band name?” And I was like, “Oh, yeah. Cool.”

Kieran: I texted them when I was in college and was like “Guys, I want to start a band, like, right now.” Just to start gaining traction, get some stuff up, so that it can have existed throughout time and have gained some minimal level of influence. And then I took that idea of Rocking Chair Reality Room. And my friend Ethan — who’s also involved with the band — and I cleaned out my shed in my backyard and painted the whole thing. And that was the Rocking Chair Reality Room. And then we redid my whole garage, cleaned it out and made it a jam space back in Houston. And that was the Rocking Chair Reality Room. And then we bought this property in Elgin. So it’s just moved around.

That’s fun. I like how it’s a literal room, but also a changing room.

Kieran: Yeah, and we decorate it with the same things. We have this prosthetic leg, and a bunch of paper mache masks we made. We have a red rocking chair.

Do you have ambitions for the next Rocking Chair Reality Room?

Matt: This is like, way, way down the line, maybe years. Hopefully starting a small grassroots label and getting a lot of people together and recording other people and engineering other people’s work. Hopefully giving the smaller artists a bigger voice. And we have a lot of space out here, and a lot of equipment. I think that’s probably the next level, the Rocking Chair Reality Room 3.0 or whatever it is.

Kieran: We have a little room in the back of our house where we do woodwork right now, and we’re trying to turn it into a recording studio. But right now we just record out of our huge, barn-like living room. And we had some friends over the other day to record, just to establish (a) relationship, but we definitely plan on soon having a rate for recording and having bands come out and see if they like our product and what we're laying down.

What plans do you guys have lined up for the near future?

Kieran: Right now I’m designing two T-shirts. I have some funny ideas. I’m gonna keep it a secret — no one’s gonna know until it comes out. I gotta keep it on the lowkey. But shirts are coming. Also we have shows coming up. I think we have three shows in December. We have an album that’s gonna drop between now and December 16, a few videos that are going to come up here and there of just us doing stuff and playing stuff.

Anything else you want to share?

Matt: I guess we can talk a little bit about the album, like what it actually is. If you go to our Spotify right now, a lot of the material on there is Nick and Kieran, and some others helped out, and they’re definitely a little avant garde. They’re pretty fun. But this next album is going to be taking it to the next step. If you’ve ever been to any of our shows, our set is pretty much exactly what’s going to be released for this next album.

Kieran: If anyone has any ideas they want to come up with to strengthen your imagination…

Vince: That is so abstract.

Matt: We have a lot of ideas with the music, a lot of concepts and cool stores, and people like to add onto those. A lot of listeners will say funny things and we’ll just add it onto our stories. So if anyone has anything to add, you never know, you could show up in a song.

Where can readers find out more about Rocking Chair Reality Room?

Kieran: Instagram is the best place to look. We post about all of our shows there and updates on recording and stuff, and probably T-shirts. We’re on Spotify as well, and Apple Music.