Words: Miljan Milekić
Back in 2022, I discovered a Maine-based band, Broadwing, and instantly got hooked. Then a duo, they offered a unique blend of pop punk and emo, driven by acoustic guitar and introspective lyrics. As time went by, both their sound palette and lineup expanded, bringing in influences from alternative rock, metal, and hip hop, while staying true to their craft and incredible attention to detail. This April, the trio finally released their debut album, ‘Duck and Cover,’ which was a perfect reason to catch them for an interview.
Hey guys, thanks for catching up with us, and congratulations on the new record! How does it feel to finally unleash it onto the world?
Dave: Thanks for keeping up with us from so early. It feels incredible and really relieving after all that time and energy behind the scenes. It was very scary to release it, but the feedback and reactions we’re getting have been more than we ever could have imagined. We are so grateful for that. We’ve heard these songs for like a year before each of them was released, and even shot videos for most of them before people even knew they existed, so it feels amazing to just have them out in front of people now instead of just in our heads. It’s been great to play shows and finally sing these songs with people in person. We are having so much fun right now, and we’re excited for whatever comes next.
‘Duck And Cover’ seems to have been in the works for quite a while, with ‘Repeat’ released all the way back in 2023. Can you tell me a bit more about the process and why it took so long to bring everything together?
Dave: Yes, it was, which is crazy to think about. We didn’t know ‘Repeat’ was the beginning of an album until after we released it. We got so much love and new fans from it, saying they wanted to hear more from us, so the creation of the album was more of a reaction to that. Before that song, we released a couple of singles that grabbed more attention than any other release we’ve ever done, including prior projects, so that energized us to put more into Broadwing than we ever had before. The release of ‘Repeat’ was probably the first time we had a lot of people we didn’t know at all actively listening to a song of ours. People started showing up to shows and singing every lyric on the release week, which really motivated us to follow that energy with everything we had.
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At that time, we were still learning a lot about what a cycle looks like for a band. We would write and record a single, create video content for it, release it, then go back into the studio and start another single instead of working on multiple songs at once. It was really taxing on time, especially since all of us work full-time jobs – sometimes even two jobs through this process. Also, at that time, we still didn’t have enough original material for longer sets that we were starting to be asked to play, so we decided to take about a year to focus on writing an entire album and shooting video content for all of it. The idea was that after that, we could just focus on playing shows and being with people, instead of chasing the process over and over and getting bogged down. It also allowed us to be a lot more intentional with the story and the songs to be more cohesive.
‘Repeat’ is the first song we wrote that made it on the album because it really ended up feeling like the start of the story of this record. It was the first time we felt like we had our sound and our team dialed in. It was the first time we worked with our producer, Tom Denney, who has become a huge mentor and friend to us over the past couple of years. We had already been working on the song for a bit before we met Tom, but once he got involved, it just clicked, and we finished it in like 48 hours, which was crazy. All the songs on the album are about coming of age and facing a lot of really difficult life challenges on our way from our 20s into our 30s. ‘Repeat’ was the first song speaking to that and had a unique sound we really liked, so it naturally led the way in style, concept, and the sound we wanted to build on.
One thing I instantly noticed about your band is your attention to detail in everything you do – from music, lyrics, videos, and artwork, down to the little things. Considering you handle so much independently, how challenging is it to maintain that standard, especially when things don’t come out exactly the way you imagined?
Dave: Wow, thank you so much. I’m really happy it’s noticed because we do put a lot of vision into the small stuff, and I’m never sure if people pick up on it all or not. Either way, I still do it, so if someone wants to go further down the rabbit hole with us, or connect more pieces, they can. We were pretty aggressive in shooting music videos for every single song on the album that we directed, created all the props for, chose locations, etc. We did everything on our own to try to tie the stories and the songs for people in a lot of different visual ways. I think for me, and probably many musicians, these songs are about things that actually happened in life. When I’m on stage, I’m processing them in real time every time I perform them, so I wanted people who felt connected to them from their own personal stories to have a way to connect deeper to the topics, so I got pretty obsessive with trying to work on easter eggs they could look for if they wanted to.
But you’re right, the workload is huge and can be very taxing. We aren’t a very big band. We all work full-time jobs to fund this ourselves, but don’t have the kind of money to just hire someone for everything we need to create what we’re imagining. We weren’t really willing to compromise or settle on an idea, so we would just make it happen ourselves. Maybe that’s just stubbornness – I’m not sure. We all have individual strengths, and I feel like we have gotten a lot better about knowing what tasks we can handle well internally versus the tasks we need to hire other people for to achieve what we’re going for. In the band, we direct and edit most of our music videos and content – create props, select locations, plan shots, color, and format our graphics. We design our merch, maintain our website, fulfill our own merch orders, build or fix random stuff, and so many other things that fill the cracks. Sometimes it is unrealistic with our bandwidth, working jobs and also doing this virtually every day, but most of the time we can manage it just enough for the next thing. It can definitely be draining at times, but it’s so worth it.
However, I definitely have to say, even though we are pretty independent and do a lot ourselves, we have a ton of incredible support from a lot of amazing people who help us be able to do this all the time. Tom Denney has been incredible in helping us with writing, recording, and brainstorming in general. Ian Urquhart has helped us with video and photo since ‘Repeat,’ and that trip was a trial in itself. Ted Whitten has helped us with mastering, feedback, and technical support on gear and flight fiascos. Our wives and girlfriends are constantly going above and beyond, helping us with merch, music video props, and god knows what else on so many late nights I don’t think they get enough credit for. A lot of other friends have given us places to shoot videos or even flip a car for us, so we are pretty lucky and extremely grateful to have them in our lives like this. Between what we do and what people help us with, we always seem to make it work, even if we have tough weeks sometimes.
You collaborated with quite a few people on the record, from all over the music spectrum. How did you decide who to work with, and was it difficult to tie everything together into an album where nothing feels out of place?
Dave: It’s been really fun working with so many people who all work totally differently, and we want to do it a lot more in the future. We learned a ton, and I think it was a huge part of challenging us to try new things on this album. I think it’s really, really hard as an artist to try not to default to some things you’ve grown up doing on your instrument, or genre, so working with a lot of different people from different spaces was really important to us to try to think outside the box and try to do what we thought was best for the song and story. We met Lolitslea and Grant Kemp through the Unsigned Pop Punk community by watching each other’s music videos on some Twitch live streams, and we thought their sounds would work really well on ‘Same Old Psycle.’ We had grown up seeing Tom Denney perform in A Day To Remember as high schoolers, and we had really good chemistry with him, like instantly, so after making ‘Repeat’ together, we knew we wanted to collaborate on the rest.
For ‘New England Baby,’ we knew we wanted to bring in a rapper for a verse we left open, and for obvious reasons, we 100% wanted them to be a New Englander, but we didn’t know who we wanted right away. We looked at a few different artists in Maine and New England in general, then Zach mentioned Michael Christmas because he had him on one of his playlists already and had been listening to him. We thought his sound would be perfect, so we reached out, and it was really sick that it ended up working out. It was challenging to find people who fit what we were trying to create because it’s really hard to express the idea you have in your head sometimes to someone else outside the project or even the genre, so collaborating in general on things personal can be hard sometimes. But I think, once we found the right people, their sound pushed things into place, and any friction of us challenging each other through the process was kind of what made it special and brought the magic we were looking for.
With the record out for a few weeks now, have you had a chance to get some real reactions? How happy are you with the reactions so far?
Dave: Yes, we’ve gotten a ton of feedback, and it’s been truly incredible. Even a bit overwhelming at times, in a really great way. We are all extremely hard on ourselves and have big imposter syndrome most of the time. We knew we were really proud of what we made, but we didn’t really know how to feel about it until we heard from other people, and it’s been such a big wave of positivity so far; it’s been tough to process at times for us. There have been so many firsts for us in our music careers since the album came out. We have had fans fly in from other states to see us, drive four hours one way to come to a show, or travel to two or three shows in a row out of state. We even saw the first Broadwing tattoos out there – all of which I don’t think any of us were prepared for, or ever thought would be something people did with our music in our lifetime. We are so grateful to have fans that connect with us like this and make it something more together. We have been playing almost every weekend away from home for the past couple of months and still haven’t had time to take it all in. We don’t really know how to even communicate the emotions we’ve been feeling from some of these reactions out there. We just want to say thank you to everyone! We love you!
I would like to touch a little more on what shaped your sound. I remember the first time I heard you guys on ‘I Dnt Wnt 2 B Anyone,’ and it felt like hearing an entire Warped Tour lineup in a single song. Can you tell me more about where you draw your inspiration from?
Dave: I started Broadwing after some hardcore and metalcore projects I was in dissolved, as a way to change it up a bit and mix different influences I hadn’t had a chance to approach before. For a while, it was just an acoustic emo bedroom type of project playing basement house shows around New England, and it’s taken a while to figure out what it was supposed to be. In 2022, Gage, who was an old drummer from a previous hardcore project, moved back to New England, and we wrote that song and ‘This Year’ together after listening to a ton of rap, pop, hyper pop, EDM, and Soundcloud music over the years. I think that was when this really started to change, pulling harder between legacy emo and new production styles and influences.
Zach joined in 2023 and really solidified the project between the three of us with a lot of very similar and very different influences. We all grew up going to Warped Tour as kids and listening to all that ’90s and 2000s emo and pop punk. We all played in metalcore and hardcore bands in the New England scene in high school and into our 20s, and all shared an interest in hip hop too, so I think we draw from a lot of shared history in the same scene and a lot of outside stuff that shifts it a lot. Zach and I are both audio engineers and have time in studios working with other bands. Gage was in the US Marine Band, and both Gage and I are trained classical percussionists in jazz, symphonic, and orchestral, so there’s kind of a wild spread of things pulled into this between history and influences that make it up.
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Looking back at your visuals and videos, there are quite a few nods to skateboarding and skateboarding culture. How involved are you with the skateboarding community, and how much does the skateboarding culture influence you, both personally and creatively?
Dave: Skate culture has been a big part of our lives growing up, but I’d be a poser if I said I was ever a skater, actually, because I suck at tricks in general. I was always more of the friend who sucked really badly at skating, but was at the skatepark all the time hanging out. But it still meant a lot to me. All three of us skated around growing up, so the environment of being at skateparks, snowboarding parks, and playing the shit out of Tony Hawk’s games and Tech Decks was pretty present. We are definitely another one of those bands influenced by the soundtracks of those games and culture.
I remember I was given my first skateboard by a friend – a Walmart board with no griptape on one side that always veered one way, so you constantly had to lean the other way to keep it going straight. As a kid, I was always skating around small towns, getting into trouble, but I wouldn’t consider myself an actual skater compared to all my friends who could for real. Personally, it influenced us in finding friends, and a lot of those friends liked alternative music, so it was a big part of starting that community, and it always gave us places to go, even if we weren’t really doing anything. Just the ability to go somewhere in general. In our 20s, a few of us got longboards and started doing 30 to 40-mile longboard and skateboard trips for full days, and that was a really sick way to spend summer with friends. Plenty of injuries to account for between the two.
You already played shows across New England, but do you have any plans on taking things beyond as well? Any chance of seeing you guys in Canada anytime soon?
Dave: Yes, there are definitely plans to get out more than ever and get to new places. Later this year and next year will be mostly away from home. We just got our first band van a couple of months ago, so we can actually get out further now. We partnered with a booking manager who’s helping us book a lot more shows a lot faster, so that’s what’s next. I think West Canada probably won’t happen for a bit unless something comes up, but here in Maine, you’re legit our neighbor, so we will definitely be up there soon in some parts of East. We plan to hit the Midwest, Southeast, and some other spots in the States sometime, so we will probably add some dates up there soon as well. We just got back from a run of playing our first show in Brooklyn, NYC, Albany, NY, and Plattsburgh, NY on a run with Sparks The Rescue so I guess that was our first official time out of New England with this band, but with the album drop we wanted to make sure we gave plenty of love and time to the home team here in New England before we really hit the road next.
Follow Broadwing:
Website: broadwingmusic.com
Instagram: instagram.com/broadwingmusic
Facebook: facebook.com/BroadWingBand
*Interview edited for length and clarity