“Before, we were Alternative Grunge. But then, the first band we heard that was kind of Emo-Poppish-Punk-Indie was Jimmy Eat World,” says Corey Moore of The Flight Station. “That’s when we started changing our musical style.”
Jimmy Eat World opened the boys’ ears to Dashboard Confessional, Sunny Day Real Estate and “mid-range underground” groups like Lovedrug and Copeland. They learned that it was possible to blend hard-hitting, riffy verses with soaring, harmonized choruses, add some synths and a layer of post-production sheen, package the thing, call it a Pop song and sell it.
Moore lays it out plainly: “We kind of want to be Pop, because that’s what record labels want. They want to get a hit song. They don’t want something they can’t sell. And we want the same thing. So we’ve got to write the poppy songs.”
For a non-coastal, Midwestern town with a notoriously parochial attitude and a penchant for going on obsessive jags over swaths of in-vogue bands that operate in one genre, Cincinnati and The Flight Station, with their decidedly lofty major-label-fame-and-fortune goals, don’t always see eye-to-eye — to say the least.
Guitarist/vocalist Alex Wheatley says, “We don’t want to sound like musical prostitutes. But we kind of want to be.”
They celebrate the release of their new music video 8 p.m. Thursday at the Madison Theater with Windsor Drive, Rosemary Device, Walk the Moon and Watson Park.
Read Alex L. Weber's full interview with the band here.
Read C.A. MacConnell's profile of Watson Park here.
