Can you elaborate on the origins of Sacerdote?
Tyler Peterson: Well, the drummer and I, Jacob Wolbert, were in a band with Tyler called Giant People for a little over a year. Jacob and I are both music students, and our time commitments were just too much to handle playing in a band last year. And then Tyler started Fire Retarded and this year Jacob and I were like “we need to play more rock and roll. It’s really good for us, and we really just loving playing.” So we got Sacerdote started and Tyler actually offered me to play this show. He was like “do you have a band you want to play?” and I said “Yeah, we’re called Sacerdote!” and then I contacted Jacob and Martin Potter, the bass player, and I was like “hey, we should make some music.” So we wrote a handful of songs in about a month, and here we are today.
Do you feel like being a music student has affected your band at all?
TP: It has its positives and sometimes its negatives, being music students. We definitely came at where all three of us wanted to write music together and all three of us had a pretty good knowledge and base in music theory. But we certainly didn’t want to be a band of just music students, where we pump out the shreddiest, craziest theoretical music. We definitely wanted to be rock and roll. So we kinda came at it from both ends. We didn’t want our training to get in the way of us making live rock music, which is really what we wanted to do. So it certainly helped in the writing process and helped us with what we came up with, but at the same time we definitely didn’t want to use that as a sort of crutch to make our music. We wanted to use some of the power that came from rock and roll.
Could you speak a little bit about your influences? Musical and non musical?
TP: I grew up playing guitar with my dad, who taught me how to play when I was about four. My dad plays a lot of bluegrass and classic country. And then I started playing trombone, when I was in fifth grade, sixth grade, somewhere around there. And then I started listening to a lot of jazz and a lot of funk, but also a lot of indie rock. I played in a lot of bands throughout high school. Then I came to school thinking I wanted to be an orchestral trombone player, and quickly was just turned onto all kinds of new music. And now one of my main focuses in trombone is latin jazz, specifically Cuban music, and other than that I listen to a ton of funk and jazz. One of the coolest things about being in this band is that Jacob listens to a lot of music I listen to as well but we all have our different influences, so does Martin, but we all have a pretty good basis in rock and roll and jazz.
Are there any plans for Sacerdote to record in the future?
TP: Well, we’d certainly like to. Tonight definitely kind of gave us a platform where we were like, “yeah, we’d definitely like to record.” We were thinking maybe later in 2013 doing some recordings, and then putting it out early 2014. There’s nothing concrete at the moment, but it’s likely on the horizon. We want to get these songs well done.
Can you speak about your experience in the Madison underground scene?
TP: The Madison underground is awesome. There are bands like the Hussy, Fire Retarded, Giant People when they played, New Year’s Gang, Dharma Dogs, the DIY punk scene is really awesome. There’s this band called Control that are a little older than us, but—yeah, the music’s awesome. You certainly have to dig a little bit for it. But almost all the house shows I’ve been to have been killer. The Project Lodge, when it had a space, was one of the best spaces in town. It was an all ages venue that gave people a platform to play all the time, so it’s certainly happening around here. The DIY punk scene, a lot of the rock music coming out is awesome, there’s also a plethora of electronic musicians that are budding. The Madison scene is smaller compared to some cities but it’s definitely there and it’s quite vibrant.
What in your opinion is the greatest rock and roll album of all time?
TP: (After a minute of extensive pondering) Purple Rain.