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LOS ANGELES, CA-
“…The band opening for The Ready Set was the Brooklyn, NY based duo Daisy Grenade. I had only caught wind of this act the week before, but their music caught my attention and I was excited to see them take the stage.
Daisy Grenade call their music “bubblegrunge” and consists of Dani Nigro and Keaton Whittaker. These two young ladies crossed paths through their work in musical theater, and when their production of American Idiot shut down due to COVID, they decided to make a little bit of music on their own.
Their debut EP, Sophomore Slump, which was released earlier this year, was produced by Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy and Alex Suarez of Cobra Starship and is a very solid debut. Hey… it got me interested in them! Stoking the fire while its hot, Dani and Keaton decided not to wast any time and they got to working on their follow-up EP, Are You Scared Of Me Yet. Coincidentally, the forthcoming EP is produced by The Ready Set.
Their performance was a ton of fun. Clearly, their stage experience is paying off in full as they looked like naturals on stage. You’d think that the room was all there for The Ready Set, but I saw at least a pair of Daisy Grenade T-shirts in the audience. For a brand new band, that ain’t nothing to sneeze at.
If you weren’t familiar Daisy Grenade before the show, and you were there just for The Ready Set, I’m pretty sure were looking up Daisy Grenade’s social media accounts when the evening’s performances were done. When Jordan came on stage to perform Daisy Grenade’s latest single, “Already Dead”, that visual co-sign was all you needed to verify that these young ladies are no passing fancy…”
Prior to Daisy Grenade taking the stage at the Moroccan Lounge, Blurred Culture was able to spend a few minute to chat with Dani and Keaton to talk a bit about forthcoming EP. Check it out below!
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BLURRED CULTURE: So your debut EP Sophomore Slump was released earlier this year, and you have a second EP, tentatively titled “Are You Scared Of Me Yet”, recorded and ready to release. How many tracks is your second EP?
DANI: Five.
BLURRED CULTURE: Was the second EP written in the same headspace as the first EP?
KEATON: It actually wasn’t. Our first EP was a lot more of… There were no co-writes except for maybe “Baby Blackout” written by Pete [Wentz] and his crew. The second EP is all co-written with Jordan and Cameron of The Ready Set. For the second EP, the first song we wrote was a track called “Cold Classic”. And that one kind of came out of like … we were in this like … I don’t know why we started writing… we wanted to write something like scary, kind of like horror themed. So this entire EP is kind of coming out of horror movie-esque. Like tropes.
DANI: A little darker space
KEATON: Yeah, it’s a little bit darker, it’s a lot less like [our debut]. The sound is much different. The second EP is a lot poppier, but still, like very true to us. Lyrically, very true to us. A little brighter feel
BLURRED CULTURE: So, thematically a lot darker with a brighter undertone.
DANI: Yeah, a little bit of juxtaposition there.
Laughter
BLURRED CULTURE: So how did you meet the crew from Ready Set? Was it through networks and relationships?
DANI: Yeah. We work with Pete once and Spencer Smith, of Panic at the Disco. They both work at Crush together. And so they’ve kind of been like mentoring us and guiding us from the beginning when we started. And they set us up with a week-long trip last October, it was our first trip to LA as a project. Just the two of us. And they set us up with a bunch of writing sessions for the week. So, we just had a packed week of writing because we’ve never written with anybody other than the two of us. So they set us up with a bunch of sessions. And the Ready Set was one of them. And we got into the session. We almost didn’t go; we always tell this…
KEATON: It was our last day. We were so tired….
DANI: … But it was a great session, and we just really vibed.
BLURRED CULTURE: It is a good thing you guys stuck around! What percentage were you not going to attend that last Friday session?
DANI: I mean … we really didn’t want to skip it. Because it’s just like, you know, bad etiquette. But we were really tired.
KEATON: I was tapped out.
DANI: I was like, “There’s no fucking way I can write another song today.” We’ve written like six songs that week. And I’m just like, “I’m done. I’m out of ideas.”
KEATON: And then you end up writing another five songs!
DANI: We wrote one song and that trip we just really liked it. And that was it. We only wrote one song on that trip, and later on, we’re like, “We should do that again. That was fun.” And then we had a Zoom session with them, we wrote another song. And then we were like, “Hey, let’s go back.”
KEATON: Go back to LA and just finish that. Then they ask if we wanted to do a full five-song EP. And we were like, yeah.
DANI: And then Jordan texted me and was like, “Do you want to do a TRS feature on a song on the EP?” And I was like, “Yes!”
BLURRED CULTURE: “Already Dead”?
DANI: Yes.
BLURRED CULTURE: You guys have spoken a lot about your experience in musical theater. I just wanted to know whether or not career-wise, that’s something that’s still on both of your radars.
KEATON: It’s kind of tough because of the logistics of doing a show… like a musical theater show… along with this project at this point. It doesn’t really make sense. However, we’re pretty open about it. We still have theater agents, and we still audition and stuff here and there. We’re just much more selective…
DANI: About what we decide to audition for and put ourselves out for, it has to be really perfect, but kind of don’t really take things that would be over like two-ish months out of town. We don’t go in for tours. It would have to kind of be like, New York. And that’s it.
BLURRED CULTURE: How much of your musical theater experience creeps into your songwriting? Music from your first EP had a certain dramatic flare. A lot of dramatic imagery and scenes.
KEATON: I think it informs it a lot. We will talk a lot about how we don’t always necessarily have to write from, like, an actual personal experience we’re having at that moment that we like to kind of…
BLURRED CULTURE: I was gonna ask you whether they were from personal experiences or not.
KEATON: They’re like… elevated. They sometimes can be drawn from a small experience or feeling. And then they’re kind of elevated from there.
DANI: Theatrics.
BLURRED CULTURE: And that’s like the storytelling.
KEATON: So it makes it keeps it interesting, where I’m not constantly, like dumping out like my personal experience. I can kind of like, work them into stuff, use them into things.
BLURRED CULTURE: And so how much of the music is personal?
KEATON: I mean, it’s all personal. But I’m not like word for word using names. It’s like…
DANI: It’s elevated.
KEATON: I think a lot about Pete’s writing. He writes a lot in like fictional universes. And I think that is like really personal stuff. It’s also incredibly beautiful. I think… for us… in what we do… we will often expound on a feeling that I had one time or something. I get like phrases stuck in my head a lot. And I’m like… how can I make that fit into something that I’m feeling like in a “Real Horror Show” kind of way?
BLURRED CULTURE: In what way? Like visual imagery?
KEATON: Yeah. I wrote it after, there was a really bad flood in New York like a hurricane that literally flooded the streets, and I was just having some weird nihilistic experience looking at everyone going to work walking to the subway, while there were cars flipped on the sides of the road, and the people had drowned the night before. And that one’s probably the most personal gets however, it’s incredibly dramatic. It’s a very dramatic interpretation of how I felt, in that way, and I feel like, that’s what writing is, I feel like I can just like, everyday shit that I feel is not interesting enough. Maybe it is, but, so I feel like, yeah, we often expound on like something small.
BLURRED CULTURE: What are you guys hoping for with the second EP?
DANI: I think that there’s a possibility that just because sonically, it is a bit different, like we had mentioned earlier that it might interest, a new group of listeners who maybe lean a little more on the pop side, where maybe Sophomore Slump was like a little grungy for some people. I’m wondering if this will maybe now intrigue people. And then they’ll go back and listen to the other side and be like, “Oh, this is cool, too.” Because some people just click faster with a pop sound or click faster with a garage sound.
KEATON: It’s definitely a different vibe. However, I feel like, it’s still really true to us. I’m hopeful that people will come back and with some of the first EP or whatever, just like get into us in a different way.
BLURRED CULTURE: What’s the rest of your year look like? Are you planning on setting up a full tour?
DANI: We have a couple more gigs around New York that we have lined up into September and stuff like that. But for fall and winter, we’ve kind of got some stuff up in the air.
BLURRED CULTURE: Coming back to LA?
DANI: [winks] Maybe… Potentially.
Follow Daisy Grenade on Twitter, and Instagram.
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