Q&A: With Progressive Rock to Psychedelic Spacey Tones, Guesstimate’s Second Album ‘Unfortunate Prey’ Takes You to Unexplored Territories
CHAOS AND HARMONY ARE POLAR OPPOSITES — and as you can guess, it can be hard for them to coexist within a single space. But what if you can make a blend of swirling melodies of jazz, take some psychedelic undertones, and add the loud energetic vibes of classic rock? It may sound like a lot, but somehow it works — and Guesstimate is no stranger to pushing the boundaries of music to explore new and unfound territories.
Formed a little less than a year ago in New Brunswick, New Jersey, the band is composed of Bobby Shock (vocals/bass/keys), Taylor Garcia (various horns/flute/keys), Andrew Friedman (drums), and Chris Ruzicka (guitar). The members met in the New Brunswick music scene and began living together soon after, forming the band to expand their playing abilities. With different musical backgrounds ranging from jazz, jam bands, prog rock, metal, and classic rock, the band takes influence from bands such as King Crimson, Sun Ra, The Aristocrats, and Gentle Giant, whose music video for “Proclamation” Guesstimate's frontman and bassist was featured in.
In their own words, Guesstimate is “sonic crack — you'll be lucky if you don't get hooked.”
Read below to get to know more about Guesstimate and their new album, Unfortunate Prey.
LUNA: Hey there, guys! Can you tell the Luna audience a little about yourself as a band?
GUESSTIMATE: Yeah! So, we're trying to do a new style of sound in a way, but it's inspired by a lot of older styles. Our main objective is to not be like anyone else. We really just want to push the boundaries of music, which we feel like there's been a lot of kind of stagnation recently. People are afraid to take things to new unexplored territories. Life is complicated. And, you know, emotions are complicated. So music can be complicated, for sure (laughs). We don't think you could put us in one exact genre, but unfortunately, for people to probably find us, we’re going to have to pick one (laughs). But if we have to pick, we would describe ourselves as progressive rock. We also describe ourselves as a cinematic band (laughs). We've been in a band for about a year, but we've known each other as musicians and friends for probably three to four years. We've known each other for a pretty long time and we've all been in different bands before. We all met each other in the New Brunswick music scene, mostly from playing basement shows. We ended up moving in with each other about a couple of years ago, and then the rest is history. We all just started playing a bunch of music together and all of a sudden, two albums later, here we are!
LUNA: Has everyone been doing music for a long time or is it a recent venture?
SHOCK: I think everyone here has been playing for more like 10–15 years, I would say. Most of our lives. I’ve been playing bass since I was 18. A volt bass guitar release button.
FRIEDMAN: I honestly think I've played the shortest amount of time because I took lessons when I was from 13 to 18. I started taking it seriously once I was 18 because that's when I started playing with other musicians. I was like, “Actually, this is really cool! I should start practicing and, you know, not look like a fool in practice.” (Laughs) And we're all various different ages but no matter what age you are, people accomplish so many things regardless. So don't say no, 100%. As long as you're still working, you can wake up in the morning and get out of bed, and you got stuff going on for you.
LUNA: Exactly — totally agree with you guys on that! Congrats on your second album, Unfortunate Prey, which was released in September — tell me about the creative process behind it.
RUZUCKIA: I think everybody would have ideas. [For example,] riff ideas, or some kind of musical idea. And then slowly but surely, over the course of a few months, we've either pieced different people's ideas together or hash them out, and we just use that idea. We like to pull a bunch of ideas from one thing and get a couple of sections on a song or something.
FRIEDMAN: Sometimes it even happens all at once! So one of the benefits of living with each other as a band — we all live with each other, so it’s the fact that you're able to play music with each other all the time. So when we're playing or doing rehearsals, a lot of times songs just come out, and we'll just be jamming and then all of a sudden I have a tendency to try and record everything we do. Because it's one of those things [that in] the moment you will forget (laughs). [We’d think to ourselves,] “Wait a minute. This is crazy! Whoa! What did we just do here?” and then you have a song. So one of our longest songs — I think it was 13 minutes on the album — but … [some of our songs] run, like, 14 to 15 minutes.
SHOCK: Our song “Focused” we pieced together during rehearsal. It [took us] two days in a row because all [the ideas] flooded at once. So sometimes it works like that. Sometimes it takes a couple of days to propose something. But sometimes you don't even realize you're working on two different songs and it ends up being the same song (laughs).
FRIEDMAN: We're even planning a third album at the moment. We're gonna release it in December. We have so many ideas and we have the means of recording. We do all the recording ourselves. We do have really good friends of ours that master our music, but Bobby does all the mixing and that makes things so much easier.
SHOCK: So that makes it very easy for us to do things fast. Because we’re in the same place at the same time.
FRIEDMAN: It adds to what our sound is because we're not really outsourcing. This is truly, even just from the mixing and mastering aspect, who we are. We're very proud of both.
LUNA: You should be! You guys sound great! How would you guys compare your first album to your recent one?
GUESSTIMATE: Yeah! The production is definitely the first difference along with the songwriting too. We think the second album is a lot more composed than the first. The first one is more freeform in a way. We also had different mixing challenges too because in the first album there were some issues with the live record. There were a lot of each other's instruments bleeding into the microphones. So the sounds aren't as isolated. It was kind of tricky to mix that all together. Another issue we had when we did the first album was, It was recorded in this unfinished studio up in the woods in North Jersey, and it was beautiful but we didn't really prepare (laughs). We were kind of expecting to be fed while we were there. But when we weren't — we ate everything too quickly. So it was like… we were just cold and hungry. And maybe that's why the first album seemed darker (laughs).
But also, with the second one, we're just recording in a new space that we haven't really recorded in much. We were recording in the basement in one of our rooms, which can be a little interesting too. In terms of the tones of the album, the first album has a little bit more of a darker, kind of psychedelic spacey tone to it, whereas in our second one, we explore much more bright areas. The cool fact about the albums is that almost everything is one or two takes. Honestly, we only had a max of, like, three takes per person when we were recording this. So we were very in-the-moment kind of people. Bobby has had some experiences in the past with having 30 takes and getting 30 minutes through a song and then you have to redo it. But the beauty of it all is 100% it’s an estimate (laughs).
LUNA: What inspired the album art?
GUESSTIMATE: The first album, that's artwork based off something called the Lorenz attractor, which is this really, really cool mathematical sequence. The whole idea was where, on it, you have no idea what one point it's going to be. It's constantly changing. So we're constantly changing as a band and we have to make a guesstimate to know where it's actually going to be. One of the cool things about Lorenz attractor is it creates something beautiful called the butterfly effect, which has been used in sci-fi movies. Everything you could ever think of — look it up, you'll see it everywhere. And it creates this awesome shape. [It’s crazy how] you can get beautiful artwork out of math. So I actually showed that to our artists at the time and he was really fascinated by it. He created all of that from that idea. Even though the first one we did was live that up in the woods — the second one with the woods cover on it. That was our basement here [in our home.] It’s a picture of us sitting around a flashlight on our basement floor but it made it look like the woods.
LUNA: What or who inspires your sound?
SHOCK: I listened to a lot of different stuff but I'll just throw two of them out there. I'd probably say Rush and Gentle Giant are two bands that are inspirational to me.
GARCIA: For me, it's J Dilla and Sun Ra! Those are some sounds that I contribute to this.
RUZICKA: Kind of along the lines of stuff I've been listening to recently, I'll say Phish and The Aristocrats.
FRIEDMAN: I’d say for me, definitely King Crimson for my all-time favorite bands. Even though I don't really listen to them anymore, Tool was probably one of the bands that turned me into the drummer that I am because I grew up listening to every track and I was like, “I want to learn these songs!” So I’d go to my drum teacher and be like, “Teach me these songs” and he’d be like, “You're not ready.” So I had spent hours on my reel just learning every track I could learn, but I kind of outgrew the band as I got older and I wasn't the biggest fan of their newest releases.
LUNA: “Mr. Majestyk'' and “Root Canal” are the two songs that stuck out to me. Tell me more about the songwriting/production processes behind these two tracks.
SHOCK: “Mr. Majestyk” was mostly inspired lyrically [by] — and the title itself is from — an old Charles Bronson movie from the early ’70s. He's one of my favorite action stars of all time but very kind of underground. I don't know why but it turned out it sounds almost like a primate song. I'm not from the south but I like saying that I got some country twang or something (laughs). “Mr. Majestyk” is kind of more of a random song where it's at least lyrically… it was inspired by action. “Root Canal” … [is] probably the one song that has a very classic song format. We have the verse, chorus bridge, type of a song. I think we kind of refer to it as our classic rock song. Songs people can relate to the most. The irony is it is still an 8-minute song (laughs). Lyrically though, “Root Canal” is about Andrew, because he deals with unexplained chronic facial pain.
FRIEDMAN: Yes, I have this chronic facial pain condition that's still undiagnosed. I have no idea what it is. I've had so many tests, and I actually was getting teeth pulled and I got root canals done. It was an absolute nightmare. It's one of those things where, what do you do when you have pain like that? You try all these medications, you go to all these doctors, and they still can't figure out what's wrong with you. You have one or two choices: you either let that completely suit who you are as an individual or you kind of just give up. Before this band started, I was honestly getting close to that point because I really didn't know what to do. But then I started playing shows, I started performing with these guys, I started just getting back down and rehearsing and playing music all the time. And there were days the pain didn't exist anymore. I had a lightbulb! I was like, “Holy shit, I understand how pain management really can work now.” And the way you do it is by literally just figuring out ways in life to turn off that pain, and music is one of those avenues to do that. So I don't remember the idea of making a song about this topic first or if we just started writing the riffs that kind of just happened together, but I always wanted it to be something very light-hearted because it's been a very trying and dark kind of experience.
SHOCK: Even though the song lyrically is about kind of a dark topic, the song itself is very uplifting, 100%, and also the lyrics are uplifting.
LUNA: Wow, thanks for sharing that. I deal with chronic pain so it definitely feels like a never-ending journey. But the fact you're able to make a lighthearted track about your journey gives hope to those who also struggle with similar problems! What goals do you guys have as a band?
GUESSTIMATE: Definitely want to play at The Garden or Red Rocks. Maybe the first band on the moon? (Laughs) Give us 30 years, we'll probably gonna make it out there (laughs). It would be nice to be able to support ourselves with what we do as a band and not have to work day jobs, which physically and mentally destroy this. We're all very realistic. It's hard to make money off music so that's why we all work full-time. I think the goal of the band is to, hopefully, inspire some people out there with the style of music that we play. I always enjoy it when people tell us, “I like what you do! It made me pick up my guitar again and play.”
We’d say one of the biggest goals over the next year is to just get the music into the hands of the people. One of the hardest things as an artist is navigating the social media nightmare that we have. Bobby runs a lot of our social media, and running [social media] can be so difficult. You have to post at certain times if you want to get all the views. It's rough because you can have an awesome product but if you can't get the product to people, they're not going to even know what it is. This is definitely one of our big goals: just getting our name out there.
LUNA: Any upcoming projects, shows, etc.?
GUESSTIMATE: We almost have a show every weekend, or we've planned it that way lately. We're playing a show in New Brunswick soon and [we're throwing] shows in our house. Our house video is called “The Funny Farm” (laughs). On Oct. 29, we had a Halloween show at the house. The next thing, though, maybe that's worth mentioning is we're doing the Leesta Vall recordings. They're based in Brooklyn and they do live sessions straight onto vinyls! They reached out and wanted to do [the recordings of] “Taylor’s Delay,” from our first album. And we're going to do — depending on how many pre-orders we get — different versions of that song because it's an instrumental jam type of a song. The cool thing about it is if you pre-order one, we're gonna give you a very unique individual version of that song. So for every pre-order, we have to record another version of the song because little over 20 people do. And the beauty of that song is it does have kind of a form … it's different every single time we play intentionally, but there is like a backbone of what it is when they're recording. That'll be out on Nov. 12. We have a lot of shows lined up. Some sporadic stuff, some basement shows in New Brunswick. I think we're playing Pinos in Highland Park in December.
CONNECT WITH GUESSTIMATE
SPOTIFY
-
weekly tunes playlist has been updated! new tracks from @furtradeband, @pecqband, @garryfool & more! check it out! https://t.co/ToFU0R6YGo -
-
RT @oliviaborch: new @LunaCollective out todayyy shot by @alltookev ✨ @P1H_official editorial design by me ! https://t.co/cvSCKsWB5D
-
RT @rlyblonde: @AnnieDirusso for @LunaCollective shot by me #35mm #portra800 https://t.co/0UUJSCBGcH
