iNTERViEWED BY BRiAN LUSH

ROCKWIRED spoke with lead singer and keyboardist CHARLES SADLER of STELLAR VECTOR over the phone. Here is how it went.

You guys have a great CD but I understand that it’s not quite out yet, right?
Right! Not until April 2^nd. Since we’ve gotten the advance copies, we’ve been selling it to our friends. At the moment, we’re just sitting on a box of copies.

What’s going on inside your head with the impeding release of the album?
It’s a weird time to be in this sort of holding pattern. It’s cold in Minnesota at the moment. It’s snowing. It’s like the perfect analogy for where we are at with the band right now. We’re trapped inside and we can’t go anywhere but you really want to. It requires a lot of patience that I’m not sure that I or any musicians really have. This CD has honestly had the longest production cycle that I’ve ever been involved in. I think that we started recording in July and the CD didn’t get finished until about October or maybe even late November. It was a lot of sitting on hands and hoping that the people that you are entrusting with your work are doing what they promised. I go back and listen to it and I can actually enjoy it for the first time. I don’t feel like I need to critique it anymore. It’s enjoyable for me.

I love the name of the band! STELLAR VECTOR sounds like an early eighties videogame.
Yes. That was kind of the idea. I’m a big fan of the old school VECTOR ARCADE games like ASTEROIDS and MAJOR HAVOC which was an ATARI game. That was my all-time favorite. The graphics weren’t all that big but it was a challenge that never ended. It never had to end. Guys would spend forty to seventy two hours on one game.

That era of video games also coincides with early MTV and bands like FLOCK OF SEAGULLS and every other cool new wave band that was on constant rotation. Your band brings a lot of things back to me.
We wanted to create a retro album and I think that the name was totally apropos. I wrote that album around the time of the BUSH and KERRY voting process when we were getting constantly bombarded with ridiculous notions of how KERRY was going to make the country a communist society – like one president could do that. All of these tiny ridiculous jabs to get people to vote for KERRY were ridiculous. There were plenty of reasons to not vote for BUSH. There were perfectly legitimate reasons to not vote for either side as well. It all comes down to personal choice. Everybody jumped on this ridiculous band wagon that the country was going to burn – especially at my workplace – and I was just irritated about it so I started writing about other instances where people have kind of fled from reason and kind of took it from there. The album was sounding more and more like an eighties album so we chose that name to kind of mirror A FLOCK OF SEAGULLS. When you say the name of that band, all that anyone remembers is eighties hair and that eighties sound. That is what they remember. Some people remember the song and some people remember more than one song but mostly they remember the hair and the clothes.

Please don’t hate me for having brought up FLOCK OF SEAGULLS.
Oh no, that was an intentional thing on our part. It was a deliberate attempt by us to get people to associate our sound with that genre. The fact that you brought it up is fine.

Talk about the genesis of the band.
The genesis of the band would have to be the PETER GABRIEL era. That is the area of music where we are heavily influenced. My dad listened to GENESIS records probably up until the time that I was seventeen. DUKE was his favorite and I wasn’t much of a fan of PHIL COLLINS although he is a very talented guy. I just could not get it. It’s a weird thing for me. He’s written some amazing songs but it is usually hit or miss for me. That is kind of the curse of pop music. They like to keep their music tepid and occasionally, there will be poetry that stands out and grabs me and that is what I connect with but for the most part, it’s pretty mundane and repetitive. If it gets too repetitive, I kind of tune out.  But PETER GABRIEL always captured my imagination. His albums always had a light side and a dark side. There was always a double edge to every album that he was ever involved with.

Talk about your band mates. Who are they and what do you think each of them brings to the table both creatively and personality-wise that makes it all work.
JONATHAN FORD is the rhythm guitarist and producer. He is – for the lack of a better word – my shit filter. I write endless amounts of songs and I just bounce them off of him and he decides if the song is “worthy” to work on. Personality-wise, he is the cool calm collected guy that keeps everything under peaceful control. STEVEN AHONEN – our drummer – is the youngest member of the band and the most chaotic and you have MIKE JOHNSON who is our bass player who is definitely the reason why we have those seventies influences because he’s really into that seventies nostalgia. He wears jeans, t-shirts and leather jackets.  He’s got a real sarcastic, straight-faced humor about him. KEVIN HAHN is our lead guitarist. He is a grunge enthusiast. He is really big into PEARL JAM and NIRVANA. And then you have me.

Talk about what drew you to music in the beginning.
I was kind of raised to be a musician. From the age of six to eighteen I had piano lessons and music theory sometimes from professors from the UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA and sometimes from private instructors. My dad tunes pianos and that is my life. I was raised on music for pretty much my entire life. I joined the Navy for a four year stint to try to escape it and realized that I was missing it. So I returned.

How does songwriting happen for you?
I always write songs. Basically, I find myself humming a melody or I’ll hear a rhythm as I’m casually walking down the street or as I’m waiting for a bus. It’ll kind of get louder and louder until I write it. I usually start with the piano and kind of create pockets of music and then put it together as we start deciding what kind of song we want to write.

From the album, what songs stand out for you the most and why?
The first track WILL SANS FEAR and SKIPPING STONE which is the second. He reason for that is because those are the two songs that I never imagined would turn out the way that they did. For m, WILL SANS FEAR started out as a waltz experiment but I kind of gone awry and gave up on it. My guitarist JONATHAN kept me at it. SKIPPING STONE was an attempt at a ballad gone awry. Again, JONATHAN just kept me at it. For me, those two songs stand out because they are examples of me wanting to give up but overcoming an obstacle and following it through to completion.

The music is pretty synth heavy. When you playing live, how easy or difficult is it to transfer the sound that you have on disc to a live situation?
I use all external synths. I don’t use software. It all depends on the size of the stage that we are on. If we have a big enough stage, I bring those things with me and we usually have what is called a MIDI sequencer to play back the stuff that I can’t do with my own two hands. If the stage isn’t big enough, we use the magic of the computer to make the sound happen.

Describe how people have reacted to the band in a live situation.
It’s been positive. People tend o tell us what we sound like based on the stuff that they like as opposed to what they think we liked. I hear interesting comparisons to bands that I’ve heard of but had never gotten attached to, to bands that I haven’t heard of before and it’s been an experience for me. I’ve learned about different and interesting genres and stuff. It’s been a cool ride in that way. We rarely see a room empty.

It would be interesting to see some sort of visual component to go along with it. What are your thoughts?
If we had to do music videos for this album, I think we would try to find RICHARD KERN, if you’re familiar with him.