Daily Inspiration: Meet Griffin Meehan

Today we’d like to introduce you to Griffin Meehan.

Hi Griffin, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
My name is Griffin Meehan, and I represent my band Frat Mouse, a midwest-inspired, west-coast college emo/garage rock band that started in The Valley and is now based Downtown. Frat Mouse started in 2019 as a high school band in the San Fernando Valley, between myself and my close friend Truman Sinclair. We’d hang out on Wednesdays after high school, playing video games and dreaming of living life like our favorite bands, making music, and playing shows around LA. On January 5th, 2020, we dropped our first album, Rat Pack to a fervent response from a small group of devoted listeners, mostly concentrated around the online chat rooms and digital presence of our social media pages. We were really just doing it for fun and ended up playing a few tiny backyard shows before March of 2020. A little after the pandemic began, we picked up our third member, Benjamin Lopez, a talented drummer and close confidant of ours to round out our three-piece.

Fast forwarding through 2022 and 2023, Truman and I both became undergraduate students at USC and LMU, respectively, pouring out our hearts and working on the album, which would eventually become our newest album, Flea House. The whole process was incredibly enlightening for how we would see the future of the band and our relationship, and by its conclusion in late 2023, the album’s namesake student housing became just as much of an artistic contributor as Truman, Ben or I. To celebrate its debut, we played a show at the historic Troubadour in West Hollywood with our close friends Great Big Cow, and managed to completely sell out the release party with friends and fans from all around the city.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
It’s definitely not been a smooth road, and it almost never is for any musician or band trying to promote themselves in an oversaturated market. Beyond that, the pandemic was an incredibly tough time for the music industry, and especially for bands like us who were used to growing our audience and engagement by playing live. Fortunately, our inherited Gen Z digital literacy and social media tidal wave came quite in handy during quarantine, and we were able to grow our audience pretty dramatically with the release of our third album, Plywood, on January 5th, 2021, a holiday we have claimed and dubbed “Frat Mouse Day”. As LA started to open back up again this past year, we were able to play a lot more shows in and around the basin, playing our new songs and putting together our newest (and best!) album, Flea House.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I think that our live experience is far and away the most central part of the band and certainly the most memorable facet of our music for our listeners and fans. Whenever we perform, we make it a policy to give 100% of our effort and emotion to our set because we know that for every ounce of feeling we put in, our friends in the pit return it tenfold. It’s honestly very cathartic, like a meditation. So I’d say that’s definitely the aspect of Frat Mouse that sets us the most apart from some of the other bands we’ve seen, and it’s certainly foundational to the memories people form after they leave our shows. If you’ve been to a few Frat Mouse shows since we started in 2019, you probably have a favorite show or moment that made that particular night special, and that’s something we think is absolutely integral to the band and to our message as a whole.

We’d be interested to hear your thoughts on luck and what role, if any, you feel it’s played for you?
Two-thirds of us were lucky to have been born under the sunny skies of SoCal, and as we grew up we were so incredibly lucky to have been blessed with our friends and family who form our support network. Today, our good luck has kept running in the form of everyone who’s ever tuned into our music or supported our project in any way. Before we go, we’d just like to leave a huge thank you to everyone who’s supported our silly mouse band, from those who’ve stuck around from the very beginning to those who are just joining us now. God bless this beautiful basin and the city within!

Contact Info:

• Website: fratmousemusic.net
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fratmouse/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/frat_mouse
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@fratmouse5224
• SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/fratmouse

Image Credits
Ryan Gomez