Quick hits: Peter Pants

Name: Peter Pants

Personnel: Lia Braswell plays drums and sings, Nikki Godinez plays the guitar and sings, Greg Shilton plays the bass, and Michael Reyder plays the guitar.

Do you have anything special planned for Pehrspace on Monday?
Lia will be a Christmas tree, Michael Reyder will be my reindeer, Nikki will be an angel and Greg is gonna be Santa’s little elf. We like the holidays.

Peter Pants recently appeared on KXLU's Demolisten

When did Peter Pants start playing?
We started in August after the band was just a little concept during Ostrich Eyes (Nikki and Lia’s all-girl band).

How did you come up with your name?
Lia: Actually, we didn’t. Jessica, the singer of Ostrich Eyes is big on puns so she said that one day and Nikki and I liked it. We knew Jessica was leaving for college in Oakland and we still wanted to play around town while she was gone so we asked Jessica if we could take that name and use it for a “side project.” We were pretty nervous to ask her because we didn’t know how she’d feel that we took the name but she was cool with it.

What’s a musical influence that everyone in the band can pretty much agree on?
Greg: This is a really difficult question for us. It’s all different. I guess we all have our own influences that go into the mix which create our sound.

Lia: Yeah, one of us will just come up with a rhythm or lyrics and just jam out whatever comes to mind. We get so many different comparisons because we don’t have one particular sound or influence in mind. It just comes to us randomly and we just go with the flow.

When you formed the band, did you have a particular sound in mind that you were going for–and, if so, what was that?
Greg: We don’t really have any particular sound that we’re going for, but I remember when I was asked to be in a band with Lia and Nikki they called it “our punk band.” So I was totally down. But we’ve kind of taken our sound in many different directions, while still having punk songs. But we’re not just strictly punk rock.

Lia: When Nikki and I were in Ostrich Eyes we would jam out some songs together and [it was] a lot less garage punk and a bit more soft rock with a lot of tribal drumming. As we played more together, we got used to our individual styles until it sounded like it made sense. We’re just really welcoming to each other’s ideas so there’s never really any conflict about what we come up with.

What was the first song you rehearsed as a band and what was it about?
Lia: Nikki and I made a song up in my car one day in June and I was drumming on the steering wheel as we figured out lyrics and sang it out loud. We threw that aside and officially started with “Hart,” a song Nikki wrote. Once the boys came in, Greg came up with this fast bass line that we jammed along to and it became “Mad Out.” We had no lyrics for it when we played at The Smell for our first show so I decided to write some quick lyrics about these weird dreams I was having about elevators and Pee Wee Herman trying to kill me at a house party.

What was the most recent song that you’ve written and what is that about?
Lia: The last song we actually wrote out lyrics and music for is “Streets or No Streets.” We would play that at shows without lyrics before we recorded it. Nikki and I stayed up super late the night before recording vocals and just switched off lyric writing. I ended up writing the verses about a dude that I was into but the feelings weren’t mutual. Nikki pretty much wrote the chorus about our nights in the valley with friends and what we do on a daily basis.

What upcoming shows are you playing?
We are playing at The Smell on December 30th. It’s Battle Show III and we’re set to battle Traps Ps. The rest of the shows coming up are next month. Our west coast tour kick-off is with Defiance, Ohio and Moses Campbell at The Smell on January 22nd. Our tour dates are still being set up but check our Myspace or Facebook for any new updates on where we’ll be!

Xmas is coming: what’s on your holiday wish list?
From all of us—TOUR MONEY…and an amp…and socks!!!

Get more Peter Pants

See the group this Monday