Meet Seth Hansen of Kid Carrion in West Hollywood / San Fernando Valley

Today we’d like to introduce you to Seth Hansen.

So, before we jump into specific questions, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
So, I’ve been playing music in bands around California since the better part of 2007 – pretty much ever since college – so at the time of forming Kid Carrion I’d had a good amount of experience playing in bands before, but I had never led a band myself. I had just come back from a year-long stint in San Francisco and had amassed a ton of musical ideas that I wanted to try out on their own, in their own project… so that’s how the basic idea for Kid Carrion began, just by me trying out writing songs on my own.

I got together with George Landress, an amazingly talented audio engineer who had worked on a previous project with me (though I was on drums at the time back then!), and we basically tracked and recorded that entire first EP (Tales of a Modern-Day Slacker) in a week. I played all the instruments – violin, vocals, guitar, bass, and drums – and it was a really exciting thing to be able to hear all of these ideas I’d had in my head and hear them as living breathing things.

After the EP was done, enough friends gave enough positive feedback that the live band was formed! I asked my good friend Josh Rossi (Others) to play guitar, our mutual friend Alan Drut (also of Others) to play bass, and my buddy Christian Day (HQPM) to play drums… that was the original lineup. Eventually Alan got too busy (no hard feelings of course, he’s a beast), so now we have George Rickerl on bass, who had played guitar with me in a previous project called Ruby Tooth… basically I just hit up the most talented musicians I knew and asked if they had time, and miraculously, they all said yes!

I feel like we’re in a really good place now, in regards to writing and playing music together. The energy that the guys all bring to the music really makes the biggest difference in the world, and I couldn’t have ever imagined how good the music sounds now. We’re working on our first full-length, planning tours, rocking shows – it’s all gravy so far!

Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Like I said, Kid Carrion was my first time ever leading a band. I had always been a contributor, and had always been comfortable with sharing my thoughts on songs that other people had written… but it was super different when I got into the “band leader” seat.

It’s funny, at first I didn’t like being called that, because I wanted the band to be equally democratic in how we operated. Now that we’re here, we’re definitely all contributing and writing and having a good time, but it honestly really does help to have someone in the band who has a clear vision, who’s sort of steering the ship. At first, I wasn’t sure if my bandmates would like the vision, so I think that it was hard to assert myself and what I wanted in the beginning. It definitely was a huge communication challenge for me, to not be in rehearsal and be like, “Hey, uh, listen, erm, that guitar part is cool, it’s really great, but like… can we try this thing? Would that be okay?” Josh would be kinda like, “Yeah, duh dude, it’s your song that you wrote, just tell me how to play it and I’m down.”

So now that I’ve gained more confidence with how to articulate my thoughts on a song or a passage, it’s really made everything so much easier. And now that we’re writing new songs, it’s even easier because the vision has become that much more shared.

The other major challenge was me not really knowing how to play guitar that well when the band was first formed – even when I recorded the first EP, I just tuned down to Drop D and barred the bottom three strings, and blammo! Instant chords! – so I would have to plug them into Sibelius or some other program, and it would sound kinda dinky until I brought it to the band. I can play guitar a little better now, but that’s still a bit of a challenge, is trusting what I hear in my head to eventually translate when it’s played by someone who can actually play guitar! Though I can play guitar sliiiiightly better now, so that helps too…

Kid Carrion – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from others?
Well, to sum it up, Kid Carrion is pretty much what we call “slacker punk” – it’s more of an indie/thrash sound with punk sentiments. Lots of melodic lines, lots of harmonies, and of course having a violin thrown into the mix creates a lot of interesting and exciting realms of possibility for solos and weird noises.

My voice is naturally a little lower and stoner-y (being born in the Northwest will do that to ya), so that also adds a bit of the “slacker” element to the “slacker punk” vibe… though I’ve been messing with singing higher, so we’ll see what happens.

The way that we’ve been crafting the songs (and our live sound + performance, to a degree), is the idea of these deeper themes of social anxiety/anger/fears that we have that we feel people can relate to, but then put them into this slightly lighter, thrashier punk context. We love all genres of punk and alternative rock – my personal heroes are the Blood Brothers, Modest Mouse, A Wilhelm Scream, Dead Kennedys, Choking Victim, to name just a few – so there’s a ton of different influences that kinda float around and find their way into the music.

One thing I can say though is that our energy at our live shows is something that we’re very proud of. We always have a blast gettin’ people going, and that’s something that’s consistent in our music, no matter what we’re singing about or ripping solos over!

What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
Honestly, just the amount of support and love that we’ve received as a band, even so young into our existence, makes me so humbled and grateful every day. There’s so many bands in Los Angeles and so many artists that you can go and see on any day of the week, and so many of them are amazing! The fact that we’ve been welcomed into the community and are able to play shows alongside our friends and colleagues is the best feeling in the world, and it strengthens our cause in what we do and why we do it. I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of that.

What I’m saying is, it’s the power of friendship. That’s what I’m proudest of so far. Also that time I crowd-surfed while playing a violin solo. I think there’s video of that somewhere…

Contact Info:

• Website: https://kidcarrion.bandcamp.com/
• Email: [email protected]
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kidcarrion/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kidcarrion/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/kidcarrion
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/35vbotrWs7WYiFAXRQ9G4a

Image Credit:
Valmik Campbell, Darylann Elmi, Jules Tallman-Rogantini

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