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Raised On TV - Make Time To Make Time - Album |
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On the last day of May this year (2024), the California Rock band with
the funky name Raised On TV released their eight record Make
Time To Make Time, and Keaton Rogers, who formed the band with his
brother Kacey Greenwood in 2016, walked the walk, by making time to make
time to sit down with Riveting Riffs Magazine.
The album opens with “Just Wanted To Tell You,” from whose lines the
album takes its title, a song that will have you dancing from the first
few beats. The brothers Rogers and Greenwood are joined on electric bass
by Blaine Billingsley.
“(The song) is about my wife. The lyrics, particularly the chorus is a
love letter to my wife. It is a sentiment that is good to get across and
to say. It is not strictly on one narrow path the whole time. I wrote
the verses, while we were on the road. I think we were pulled over at a
coffee shop or something and we were taking a minute. I had the chorus
about my wife, and I liked that. I wanted to say that, and it was
truthful. The verses I was still trying to figure out and the words just
came. The verses have a story behind them, but the chorus is about my
wife,” says Keaton Rogers, providing us with some insight about the
song.
He then muses if Raised On TV’s music has a California flavor, “Yes. I
would say in some ways it does. I don’t strive for that, but I feel in
some ways it is unavoidable. I have been told the way I play my guitar
and that our (sound) has a California beachy sound for some of our
stuff, not all of our music. Maybe a psychedelic sound in some ways that
reminds people of California. I don’t know exactly why that is.
Obviously, I grew up here and I am from here, so maybe there is this
thing in our upbringing and our nature that comes out in the art that we
make that we don’t fully understand, but it is there.”
Continuing Keaton Rogers notes, “Our music is eclectic, and it all comes
down to Rock ‘N’ Roll. It definitely is not one style of Rock. It is
Indie Rock or alternative Rock. I write the music for the most part. It
reflects my life and my influences. I go back to The Beatles in some
ways. As a kid they were among my favorites, as they were for so many
people.
My love for The Beatles was the variety of music that they created, all
the different styles and how they were almost fearless in a way and the
styles they took on with how they wrote their songs. They started out in
traditional Rock, and they branched out as they evolved. That is
something that stuck with me and that I have always admired.
With Raised On TV I write from the heart, and I pull from influences and
inspirations. At the end of the day, it is Rock, but (the music) is a
lot more than that. It is music that represents my life and whatever
moods and chapters I am going through. There are all kinds of ups and
downs in there.”
The album was recorded at Whiskey Roads Studio. Well, that has an
interesting story behind it, just like a song from another album, “Mr.
Blue,” does as neither are what they might seem on the surface. More
about that later.
“Whiskey
Roads Studio,
was a house that I rented at Joshua Tree and that we turned into a
studio. It wasn’t an official studio, but that is what we called it,
because Kacey, the drummer, at night would make these things that he
called a Whiskey Road. It was Rocky Road ice cream with whiskey. It was
just really weird and funny. We had a really great time, Kacey and with
my cousin Blaine Billingsley playing bass. He is a great musician and
really knowledgeable about recording.
We got all of our gear together and setup shop. Every day it was about
waking up and getting right to it,” he says, acknowledging that they
engineered the record themselves.
Let’s go back to where this all started.
“I grew up in the San Fernando Valley and pretty well every neighborhood
you can think of in the San Fernando Valley we probably lived there.
There are many valleys, but the San Ferando Valley is the one that
people just call the Valley.
There definitely were a lot of other artistic people in our family. I
grew up around music. My mom took us to a lot of concerts when we were
young, my brother and my sister and me. She took us to Rock shows from a
young age. My dad is also a musician and he taught me some stuff on the
guitar. He got my first guitar for me, and he showed me some chords and
then I took it from there. We definitely grew up around music in Los
Angeles. My mom took us to a lot of the local clubs, and we would go to
the bigger shows at the Hollywood Bowl and places like that. I feel very
fortunate. (Editor’s note: I just feel very jealous – with a smile)
We went to see Green Day when I was in middle school and also, we went
to see The Who and the Foo Fighters,” he says.
It was when Keaton and Kacey were in their twenties that they decided to
form Raised On TV and he explains how that came about, “We are
six years apart, so he was about twenty and I was twenty-six when we
started playing together. I however, had been playing music since I was
in middle school. I was in and out of bands. Sometimes the bands were
serious and sometimes they were just for fun. I played music all through
high school and college. I didn’t get serious about playing in a band
until I was twenty-six or twenty-seven. Kacey had just started playing
the drums and he was eighteen or nineteen years old. We were in
different bands. Both bands broke up at the same time and we thought how
cool it would be if we started our own band together.
That is how Raised On TV started. It was something that we took
seriously, and we wanted to do the best that we could.
Now here we are.”
As for settling on the name Raised On TV, Keaton Rogers says, “At
the time we were three guys that needed a new name for the band. We had
just gone through some changes, so we decided to change our name. We
came up with lists of names and every time a name was proposed, someone
in the band hated it. Raised On TV came about from all of us
growing up in LA, Kacey and I being child actors for a time and also
watching TV when we were kids. That is what created the name. It was
also the one name that we could all agree upon. Maybe not everyone loved
it, but nobody hated it.”
Wait, let’s go back to your time as child actors.
“I did a lot of random things when I was age 10, 11, 12 and 13. I did
commercials and small parts in a few movies. It was nothing too crazy.
There was a movie called Geppetto that was a Pinocchio thing with
Drew Carey. It was a made for TV movie with Drew Carey as Geppetto. Drew
Carey was the nicest guy and I have great memories of being around him
as a kid. That is one of the highlights from back then. Kacey did some
random things too, commercials and it was all across the board really,”
he recalls.
As a songwriter, Keaton Rogers is a machine. The band has pretty well
turned out a new album each year. The music seems to just flow from him.
“For the most part yes. I go through times when it is hard to come up
with stuff and I have writer’s block. I always pick up a guitar at some
point during the day and I always have a notebook with me to jot down
ideas. It always keeps me going. I tell people for me with songwriting
is almost like putting a puzzle together. I am always collecting pieces
from my life. It could be all kinds of things, something serious,
something personal and emotional or it could be something random and
frivolous. I collect these pieces and I put them together through the
songs. When playing the guitar, I love to come up with riffs and chord
progressions. I will record them, so I don’t forget. Some things will
just stick with you, but with the recordings I make sure I remember
everything.
Maybe I have a song that I started, but I am missing one verse and for
whatever reason that one verse I don’t come across the words for it
until a year later or two years later. It can be the same thing with a
piece of music, that song has a great chorus, but it needs a bridge, and
it may take me five years to figure out that bridge. As long as I keep
all of these pieces floating around, I don’t lose anything. It is kind
of random, as to how it gets done or when it gets done. All of that
being said, you get lucky in a way, when you sit down, and you may come
up with a whole song in an hour or a half hour and it all comes out at
once.
I would say generally for me, it is a drawn out, random process in a lot
of ways,” he says.
“Just Wanted To Tell You,” from the Make Time To Make Time, album
is followed by the in your face Punkish Rock song “Without A Care,” that
features thundering guitar riffs, by Keaton Rogers. This album is a
testament to the versatility of his songwriting, as well as the
excellent musicianship of his bandmates, with the more melodic,
mid-tempo songs, “Back In The Sun,” and “The Wind And The Sea.”
Billingsley on bass and Rogers on lead guitar compliment each other
well, and Kacey Greenwood never overshadows, as some drummers do, but
plays nicely in the pocket and lays down a strong foundation for each
song. Whether it is a softer song or an in your face banging Rock song,
Keaton Rogers’ pristine and wonderful vocals are always evident. Two of
the prettier songs from this album complete the record, “Story Without
An End,” and “Take Me Home.” You can preview the album Make Time To
Make Time
here and if you like the music, please take time to purchase it or
if you prefer you can buy individual songs.
Full disclosure, the album Strangers In Pictures is our favorite
album from Raised On TV. With that being said, we wanted Keaton
Rogers to talk about the song, “Around The Sun.”
“For a time, I was working as a music teacher at a middle school here in
LA and I would have my guitar with me a lot of the time. I was on a
break at work, and I started played the main riff of that song, the main
chord progression. I thought it was cool and I remembered and hung on to
it. I started messing with it in the studio and I was (playing) some
keyboard parts on top. I found some cool stuff to add into it that was a
little more subtle. I made a track and showed it to Kacey.
We got some drums going on it. To get to the lyric I made a demo, and I
would play it in my car. I would sing on top of the instrumental demo
until I found words and ideas until I thought it was cool. That is how
it came together. It was a multi-layered process. It started out as a
basic song, while I was at work, at school and then it morphed into a
fully fleshed out song with all of the parts. It was written at the tail
end of the pandemic.
It is totally (autobiographical). The theme of the song, with the lyrics
is about missing being on the road and playing shows. It was about that
feeling during the pandemic and talking about playing as a band. It was
during the pandemic and realizing how important it (touring) was in your
life. We really longed for it and that feeling inspired those words.
The
companion video for “Around The Sun,” is fun and
yes it is very Californian.
Keaton Rogers talks about the video, “It was a super fun, random idea
that I felt wouldn’t be too hard to make. It was super low budget. We
just needed some costumes, and my wife is a costume designer, so she
helped out with that, which is really cool.
This was on Huntington Beach. We chose that, because it is one of
the beaches where you can still legally have bonfires. It is a really
huge beach, where you can get a spot where there are not a lot of people
around. When you are trying to shoot something, it helps to have some
privacy, without getting a permit or something.”
As for the title song, “Strangers In Pictures,” he says, “That came from
an idea that I had in thinking about all of the pictures that we take
throughout our lives and literally how all of these strangers are in the
backgrounds of our most personal moments, whether it be a family trip or
a romantic date. We just accept it.
What does that mean? Does it connect us in some way, without us
thinking about it. Is it something special or of note? I thought that
was kind of interesting. I started that song on keyboards, and it is the
only album that has a lot of keyboards. It was me. I recorded the guitar
after the fact.”
As for the song “Losing My Mind,” he explains, “That is another song
that was inspired by the pandemic. You feel like you are losing your
mind, and you don’t have a grip on anything. You let on everything is
okay, but you know it is just a lie. You do it to get through and to
work it out. Eventually you do.”
You can preview Strangers In Pictures, the album,
here.
In 2019 the band toured extensively in the United States and Canada, “It
was amazing, and it was one of the best summers of our lives. We are
super thankful that it happened, because it was the year before the
pandemic. If we hadn’t done it that summer it would have been several
years, before we were able to do it.
We toured the entire country, and it was our first time getting out to
the east coast. We had been to Canada before, but we had only been to
Vancouver. It was the first time getting out to Toronto and getting to
Ottawa and Montreal. We went to so many cities that we had not been to
before to play music and maybe not even have been to at all. It was our
first time going to Chicago, North Carolina and South Carolina, Florida,
New Orleans, parts of Texas. It was an extensive tour.
It was so much fun, and I think it made us closer as a band. It also put
us face to face with why we do it. We realized we really do love the
experience of traveling and playing music.”
There have been some interesting names for Raised On TV’s albums,
the first two being named Season One and Season Two,
Fernando, a nod to their growing up in the San Fernando Valley, and
then there is the song “Mr. Blue,” from Strangers In Pictures.
Keaton Rogers, wades into the story behind Mr. Blue, carefully gauging
the temperature of our conversation, “That story gets a little racier.
The name Mr. Blue comes from a dildo that belonged to the mother of
someone we knew. We saw it in the bathroom and Kacey, and I jokingly
named it Mr. Blue. The story was funny and lived on. The song isn’t
really about the dildo, but the name was kind of cool I thought. It is
just one of those random songs and I thought the name “Mr. Blue,” was
kind of cool.”
Have there been some surprises along the way, with your music career?
“Whiskey Road was a surprise to all of us. I never thought I would see a
grown man pouring whiskey into his ice cream and then falling in love
with it. (Laughing he says) Mr. Blue was definitely a surprise and we
will never forget Mr. Blue. He is immortal now,” says Keaton Rogers.
Take time to visit Raised On TV’s
website and you can
follow them on Instagram.
#MusicInterviewBands #CaliforniaBands #RaisedOnTV #RivetingRiffsMagazine #RivetingRiffs
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Historically
bands from California, going back to the 1950s, has had a distinct
flavor and we talked about that, before digging deeper into the sound of
Raised On TV, “I would say it still does (have a distinct California
sound), maybe not as much as it once did, if you go back to the Beach
Boys and Surf Rock and The Ventures or the Laurel Canyon scene in the
seventies. I think those times were more distinctly Californian, but I
think if you fast forward to the ‘90s and the early 2000s there was a
lot of Punk music and Rock Punk that was coming out of California. Green
Day was one of the bigger bands. They had a California Punk sound that
still kind of carries on. I would say there is still a California sound,
but it can be hard to put your finger on it sometimes. It is definitely
a thing, and it is definitely real,” he says. 