Q&A: A Conversation With Rising Midwest Stars Big Fat Cow
IT’S NO SECRET THAT THE MIDWEST PRODUCES SOME OF THE GREATEST MUSICAL ACTS — and that statement rings true once again with Kansas City–based band Big Fat Cow. The four-piece band, composed of Alex May (bass/vocals), Noah Cassity (lead vocals/guitar), Kole Waters (lead guitar/vocals), and Matthew Chipman (drums), are staking their claim in multiple genres, blending post-country, indie, and Americana to create powerfully evocative soundscapes. They’ve recently released a new EP, Behold The Soil!, which truly showcases their capability and talents as a band.
The band has been seeing an outpour of admiration from every crowd that they perform in front of, from large crowds at local stages and weekend warrior runs to drawing from around the region for a marquee set at PorchFestKC. This strong desire to see the band perform live has led to a 13-show tour in celebration of their new EP, beginning August 22 across the Midwest. The band feels it’s primed to take its next step. The early response to the EP and the excitement around the wide range of venues and partners on their tour stops show they’ve established a real, resonant sound.
Luna sat down with Waters and Cassity to discuss the importance of supporting local music, the creation behind the new EP, and more. Read the full interview below.
LUNA: Everyone always loves a good origin story, so I wanted to ask, how did you all meet?
WATERS: Noah had been playing music on his own for some of the songs that we've put out and my partner was co-workers with him, and he started coming over to record at my house. Eventually it just turned into Noah asking, “Well, do you want to join the band version of this?” Noah and Alex have been friends since they can remember. Matt had played in multiple bands as well, so we knew each other through the grapevine. We're all friends that just came together.
LUNA: What is your guys’ favorite part about being in this band together?
WATERS: We have a pre- and post-practice hangout, and usually we come from the basement, where the studio is at my house, and just hang out in the living room. Sometimes we're playing Mario Kart, watching some music videos, or just talking about anything random. I mean, between the four of us, we're able to just conversate and entertain ourselves. We all kind of feed off each other's sense of humor, so it's a lot of goofiness alongside us while seriously playing music together.
LUNA: From your previous songs that are already out on Spotify, there were many tracks that had a very nostalgic and comforting sound to them. What creative pockets do you pull inspiration from?
CASSITY: I think it's that Midwest and rural fringe kind of thing, where you're trying to not only be of that thread and cloth but you're trying to convey a sense of relativity with one another. I think that's what a lot of the Midwest and or this flyover area, musically with the history it has, is kind of old, and we're pulling from the more religious or home influence, kind of watching the culture trickle in and try to still maintain our kind of familiarity with each other. I think that, especially in the early stuff, it's just a lot of trying to be at home.
LUNA: You guys are based in Kansas City — what’s your take on the importance of supporting local music?
WATERS: At least from my point of view, we've been in it for so long in various bands and projects that, for me, I don't know what else I would be doing otherwise. There’s been consistent engagement for me since high school, and when I went off to college my dad started throwing shows out of his house and [it] became like a DIY spot, which was kind of crazy to come back home for the holidays… There's four shows happening in one week. The crazy thing is that my dad is not really a musician. He started picking up some instruments a while after I started learning and started plucking around, but he came to it after I had expressed interest and loved the show so much. So seeing bands and just the community of live music has just kind of been a part of my whole adult life and prior to that.
LUNA: I know you said that Midwest culture kind of transfers over into your music, but individually or collectively as a band, specifically growing up in Kansas City, do you believe that shapes you as people as well?
CASSITY: I think it does. Obviously, it's a first world and it’s safe here, but it's also quiet, in a way that I don't think a lot of people are looking for you. You're here, but kind of just quietly here. And we're from varying backgrounds of the city, you know? For us coming into this scene was like escaping from a place on the fringe of the city itself and coming in and saying, “Well, I want to bum around and make music and support others.” You come in and the only thing you can do is, if you want to play music, you just have to latch on to something. It's the one place that you could feasibly see as if you just get there and are able to put yourself in a position where you can be of like-minded people and people who will help.
WATERS: There’s definitely a certain amount of Midwestern politeness that we're known for that I think plays into how we've been able to build DIY music communities in Kansas City and in a bunch of other Midwest places. There aren’t as many people as there are in other major cities, so we're all very interconnected. It's always a running joke in Kansas City that if you worked in coffee, music, or a bar, you know half of the music community already without even going to a single show. I'm sure that extends to bigger cities too, but it's so small here that I think it's really influenced the community of where we play with other bands that are just as excited about us as we are about them.
LUNA: Many artists who don’t live in a major city feel like they have to move to one to progress, but many of the greats have stayed in their hometowns. Have you felt any pressure within your career to move to a major city in order to continue pursuing music?
CASSITY: Kole and I have spoken at length about how we feel the community really is … healthy and important, [and] a lot of people's first thing on their mind when it comes to putting bills together and getting people to where they need to be. We're quiet and we believe that we're here doing our thing, and that the people who will notice us will notice us. I think there’s a bit of quiet rage to know you're going to come in, you're going to see some really elegantly soft music, and then you're going to hear a lot of harsh, spiteful reminders that for a lot of you, you're not paying attention. I think people will take note of what they will hear. I think everyone here in the band believes that now it's quiet, but we will be heard for what kind of input we're trying to put into the rest of the country.
WATERS: When it comes to style and individuality here, there is no telling what type of genre you're going to hear us play with. There's some friends of ours in this other band and they couldn't sound more different than us. It’s an angular, noisy, Sonic Youth type. With this type of hardcore in a dusty basement, it's very chaotic. And then we'll play “Patty” at the same show, and we all love it. We contain multitudes together.
LUNA: Your new EP, Behold The Soil!, was released recently. What were some of the highlights from creating it, as well as the creative process behind it?
CASSITY: It’s been a better part of a year working on it, and it was kind of like an on and off kind of thing, because we had so much that we were trying to do with these songs that were the first songs we were learning together when we got together. I think that with how busy our first year and a half was, it kind of was hard to always focus on it, but we knew we were making something that we felt was worth the while, and we've spent this amount of time on it because it's a labor of love. It was kind of a season to season thing, and we were able to incorporate our whole year and a half getting to know one another personally those first couple of years into that one thing. It was a whole tapestry, even though it's three songs.
WATERS: We usually wouldn't take that long to make three songs, but these songs, existing in some form as they do now, when we got the band together, I'm actually thankful for that year of time of us just playing shows and playing these songs. We did a lot of songwriting at the shows where some little thing would change, or one of us would do something a little different, just because the feeling of the night was different. Those slowly shaped the songs together over time. There was so much time put into this record that it’s kind of hard to encapsulate it all, and we have so many more songs to put out beyond this point. I think the biggest part is that we all came together as four songwriters, not just one songwriter and three other people who play instruments. So being able to collaborate and then learn to trust the rest of the bandmates with the art we're making together that is all really close to us, there's something really beautiful about getting to put so much of yourself into something alongside three other people. I'm really thankful to see this come to fruition.
LUNA: You mentioned that you use shows as a way to rework songs before their release. Is that something you tend to do to experiment with crowd reaction?
WATERS: The way that we view the songs has changed over time and it's funny how sometimes the songs seem to write themselves, you know, sort of how sculptors describe that the sculpture is within the big slab, the sculptor is just picking away at it to reveal the sculpture.
