Three Cent Cinema are one of my personal favorite Pop Punk bands. The band calls Chicago, Illinois its home and suffers through balancing being full-time students with the hassles of working part-time and being in a band. It has been been a relatively relaxed year for the band who are giving out their 3 newest songs for free. For more info check out the interview below. New merch and pressed CDs will be available soon on Big Cartel.
| Three Cent Cinema - "This Is What I Wanted" EP 1. Sand Is Overrated 2. Stories Old 3. Natrona Heights Hates Us  For starters, who specifically am I talking to, and what do you do in the band? Sonny: Hey Ant, this is Sonny and I write and play guitar for Three Cent Cinema. Zach: I'm Zach and I also play guitar. Over the past year you guys did a two week tour with So Many Ways and recorded a Christmas song, but have stayed relatively low since releasing No Guts, No Glory last year. What have you guys been up to? Sonny: First of all thanks for having us do this Ant, you definitely have been there for us for a while and it really means a lot. Now, it definitely has seemed like a while for all of us, the last couple of months have involved a lot of writing, a lot of talking, and a good deal of planning. Some of it at times worked out and a lot of other times it didn't. From planning splits with bands, to trying to find new places in Chicago to play at, and most importantly how and what direction we were going to go and write in. Zach: Yeah like Sonny said, it's been a while but we've definitely been busy. We're all full-time college students so once Summer ended we had to get back into the swing of school. Then you don't really get a lot done during the holiday season. All of us have had jobs on top of everything as well. Despite all this though, we've been more focused on this band than anything else. We didn't want to rush anything and we're really happy with what we put together. How did the writing / recording process differ from No Guts, No Glory and This Is What I Wanted? Sonny: All of the songs off of No Guts, No Glory, (for the most part) were started and finished by either myself or Zach. For the newest EP, This Is What I Wanted, even though the idea and structure of these songs started with Zach or myself, we all began to work more as a collective, which at times meant taking longer to finish things. But in the end we learned a lot and at the same time it's taken us in an interesting direction. Zach: We've all grown up a lot since No Guts and I think that has shown a little. With Dusty leaving the band we didn't have a screamer or synth so we wanted to focus on better written songs. There's something specific in each song that I love and I think that's because we ground out the writing process so much. Sonny wrote Where I Stand all alone at his computer and I wrote most of Plane Crashes in about 2 hours just sitting in my room. Stories Old took us 3 months to finish as a band. Unfortunately this past Winter the band parted ways with long time synth player and backup vocalist, Dusty. Has this had any impact on the upcoming EP, or even the live performance? Sonny: It's definitely been different, Dusty didn't honestly have much input on writing and we only had a couple synth parts written for the new songs that never ended up making the cut once Dusty left. But as far as live shows go, it is sorta weird not having him on my far right anymore. He always had the best posi-jumps in the band, SUPER AIR hahaha and he always really got the crowd into the music. So Lately, we've had to pick up the slack on that part. Otherwise, we're actually all still pretty good friends with Dusty, I was actually talking to him the other day about this release actually, so maybe he'll see this. HEY DUSTY! LOVE YA DUDE! Haha. Zach: Personally, I felt as a guitarist that I needed to pick up the slack. A lot of synth melodies killed on No Guts, and not having that on this EP meant me and Sonny needed to step up. Dusty didn't contribute too much really to writing but was overall the best dude. Kept everything fun. This Is What I Wanted will be your second 3 song EP in as many years, as a band is it frustrating only releasing 3 songs at a time? Sonny: Personally, not really, the way we're looking at it, it's better that we release 3 songs now than make people wait an extra (insert months here) for a full length. But a full length is what we have our sights set on now and we are starting to work on it immediately. We're looking back at what we did the last couple years and figuring out what we really wanna do. Its really been a growing experience for all of us lately, both on a personal level and as band. Zach: People have such short attention spans as it is, so I'm perfectly fine with writing 3 songs that I think our really good. Plus giving 3 songs away makes me feel better than if we we're giving away a full length haha. I feel like being city dwelling college kids there is a certain affordability to only recording a small amount of songs at a time, did that factor at all into the decision? Sonny: I would be lying if I said anything about this band having money haha. The recording time, the printing of shirts, stickers, and actually pressing of CDs is all coming out of our own pockets. But It's definitely not the reason why we decided to do only 3 songs. Where It does play a factor is in the decision making of where we'd rather spend time on 3 songs we are happy about versus 6 or 7 mediocre ones. I noticed a difference in style from No Guts, No Glory and your Xmas song Home(sick) For Christmas. Which will the upcoming EP sound most similar to? Sonny: I feel like it's got a style within itself but I can totally hear both influences from No Guts, No Glory and Home(sick) For Christmas. That being said, we definitely aren't set on any particular style at this point, you might even say that this latest EP was a learning process and its given us a better feel on what we want to do in the future. You will be offering up This Is What I Wanted for free download, but will you be pressing the copies? If so will they be available to purchase online? Sonny: We will be giving away the songs away for free online and they'll be available at shows and probably in the near future on our Big Cartel. With Memorial Day past, Summer is right around the corner. Have you set up any touring plans yet? If so where can we expect to see you, and who can we expect to see you with? Sonny: We don't have any serious plans about tour right now with all of us having work and trying to figure out the full length is definitely our major priority. We do want to get around the midwest and do some 3 day/night mini-tours. Indiana has been pretty awesome to us specifically. I know you guys are huge supporters of So Many Ways (Tom even did guest vocals for them). Are there any other Chicago area band, or even midwest bands your fans should be checking out? Three Cent Cinema: Go check out Of All The Fallen, Kid Valiant, Trash The Dress, and Track And Field.    |
