A T.A.S.T.E of Local Music…in Boston!

By Thomas Rockford, Video Courtesy of T.A.S.T.E 

Whether they are playing a late night wild party or a mellowed-out, smooth-grooving all ages show, you won’t want to miss out on the T.A.S.T.E experience.  A band that proclaims, “You haven’t heard them until you’ve heard them live,” this four-piece will be sure to have you rocking your hips to the beat.  Despite playing together for a relatively short time, T.A.S.T.E owns the stage and jams like they’ve been playing together for years. With a live show and music that’s only getting better, T.A.S.T.E is getting ready to release more and more music to the world, with the hopes of an eventual full-length album release. 

 Okay, so how did you guys all come together to become T.A.S.T.E?

Erik: Well, Dave and I are both from San Diego, and we’ve both been playing music for about 8 years now, and then I met Lev when I moved out here (Boston).  Then I met James online, through casual encounters (laughing)…no, he was looking for someone to play music with so I was like, yeah, lets play some songs together and then I met him, we hung out, vibed, we were into the same things and just had this similar idea. 

Dave: We actually started playing acoustically first, just doing covers and stuff trying to play where ever we could, like parties and something like that.

James: It was me and Erik first, with acoustic guitar and voice.  Then we were like, “Hey, Dave, why don’t you throw some congas on there?”  Then he played.  Then we were like, “Hey, this is good, why don’t we plug in and actually play out somewhere?!” Then we went down to Providence and that’s when Lev was like, “Can I tag along?” and we were like, “Well, only if you bring your bass.”  He brings his bass, daddys it up, before you know it we’re T.A.S.T.E.

So how did you guys land on the name T.A.S.T.E?

James: I used to always say that “taste” was like my word that I would throw around a lot in college.  So instead of saying “hey are you going out tonight?” like, “Are you gonna taste it up tonight?” or “Oh how was that chick, did you taste it up?” And it just kind of spread and any circle I was a part of, it would be like ‘taste, taste, taste, taste, taste.’

Erik: What kind of beer is that, can I get a ‘taste’?

James: And we threw around a bunch of names that had the word taste in it and then we were like “why don’t we just be TASTE?”

So what inspires you to make music, what drives you guys as a band?

Erik:  Life! Music is just a transcription of life, in a sense.  Music is an emotional thing, and what you do is an emotional package, so if you could put something that you experienced into a song, and if you do it the right way, your hope is that the end user will be able to listen to that and feel the same way.  So if it’s a song about a good time or a bad time or anything, you want to transfer that.  It’s life, so it’s just the constant day-to-day and we love having a good time. So we want to show people a good time.

Dave: When we play live, we think of it more of us playing as a DJ rather than a band. We aren’t there for ourselves; we are there to express, but we’re also there to make everyone else move and just involve them in a party.  So it’s about us getting better, better musicians, better listeners, better party contributors. 

James: I think part of it is to share our love of music to other people, and I think there’s an emotional rush that the individual musician gets from playing.  When I’m singing, I’m in my element; when Lev’s on the bass he’s in his element, but it’s also like you’re sharing something with somebody else.  So people are there to benefit from what we have, but it’s a give and take.

Lev: I think also we kind of inspire ourselves too. We definitely feed off of each other. We’re a family and we play music together and have particular conversations via sound and ways of understanding each other that’s not necessarily as direct and up front.  I think we really take on each other’s good attributes and kind of evolve with each other, and our music is an expression of that, too.  Our friendship is in our music, and we share that with people, and good vibe, and that’s where it all started.

Dave: And if someone else gets amped too, like someone else on stage is super amped, it just gets you amped.  If you’re tight at sports, or you’re at a party, whatever you want to call it, just ampage in general, throughout life.  You see someone else on the street who is amped, and it’s your friend, and you just get amped! You’re just amped on life! We just have to be amped on life when we’re behind our instruments.  And we’re just like, “Waaaahhh!” and we just happen to have a freakin’ instrument in our hands. Yeah, ampage, you can get it from all types of things.

How would you describe your musical sound?

James:  Well, our inspiration comes from a lot of different artists…I think each of us has kind of a different flavor we bring to the table. Whether its Erik pulling from a Reggae side, or Lev in a Funky side, or Dave with, like, a rock and hip hop side…I’m more of, like, a soul-and-R&B, that’s what I listen to.  So it’s just this mash up of various forms and flavors.

Erik: We like to say, “Funky pop that rocks and grooves and fuses reggae to elevate your dance moves.”

So you guys have been playing shows for a little over a year and a half now, can you tell me some of your future goals as a band? What can your listeners and fans expect from you guys in the near future?

Erik: We have a lot of new music coming.  The thing is with our music we’ve never done an album, and since we were a live band first, I think that’s what really sets us apart.  So recording was always something we did because people wanted our music on their iPods, and we still haven’t found the best way to capture what we do live.  Live shows is where it’s at! That’s what we do.  So we have a collection of older recordings, like “Souls No Liar” and some of the newer stuff that’s constantly getting released, and we are about to release six new songs in the next month or so.  There’s a lot of stuff always coming, but there’s no album.

James:  I think as far as eventually putting an album together…hopefully once we kind of catalogue some more songs and keep pumping out new material eventually we’ll get to a place where we can take some time and really solidify out of our catalogue of maybe 30 songs—“These are the ten we want to master and put it on an album.”  But our music keeps getting better and better.

What’s the most exciting and memorable T.A.S.T.E live show moment you guys have had together so far?

Dave: Peterson? Yea I gotta say Peterson. We played this hall at Providence, this giant gymnasium at Providence.

James: We played this event called 210 Nights, and its basically Providence College seniors, there’s 210 [of them], and they always do it the year of graduation. They have this huge blow out party, and we were the entertainment for the night.

Dave: The gymnasium is huuuge!

James:  In their huge gymnasium with about 700-900 people there.

Dave: We should’ve had pro sound, but we just brought our own PA and brought our boy who was running sound with us.  He’s running through the crowd trying to control it and make it sound good, but the drums aren’t miked, and we’re playing in a venue that’s just a gigantic hall.  There are seniors all the way back, everyone’s just going wild, and Corona sponsored it so everyone’s getting faded having a good time. But the view that I had that night was like a quarterback view. They had security guards around the outside of the stage to prevent the crowd from coming around the side…the stage was chest/head high and it was hard to get up on, you really had to hop.  I saw like over five chicks, I’m sitting there playing, and I see girls lining up in a three-point stance, like a football stance, from like 50 ft. away ready to charge the stage in heels.  So they just go, and they ran full speed.  The security guard saw them, but the girls like jumped head first and slid across the stage like a penguin, jumped up and then ran towards James and then just mauled James while he was singing.

Erik: They were grinding on him.

Dave:  And James is trying to stiff arm them and get them away.

James:  The security guards were grabbing girls by the legs…

Dave: And the big security guard, like 250-pound security guard, rolled on stage and had to get the girls off the stage.  He grabbed one of the girls, she turned around and started making out with him, and then they both fell off the stage, onto another security guard.

Lev: I actually snapped an iPhone picture at one point of the dude with a girl over his shoulder.

Dave: Those security guards will never forget that, ever. 

Lev: This friend of ours also went around stamping every girl on the chest with a T.A.S.T.E stamp. 

Dave: Yeah, and then he ended up in the hospital that night.  But that was definitely crazy, the whole thing reminded me of the Beatles when the girls were going at us.

Yeah, you don’t see that anymore.

Dave: They were on a mission to get on stage.  There was also a girl with this giant inflatable cactus whipping people with it.  The floor afterwards was one giant lake of beer and water, and everything.

If you could say one thing to the world, what would it be?

Taste Life, Don’t Waste Life.

Visit www.tasteislife.com to download T.A.S.T.E music for free. Be sure to follow their YouTube channel youtube.com/tasteislife and on Twitter @tasteitup for all T.A.S.T.E news and updates.

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