Today we’d like to introduce you to Zee, Keiko, & Eleanor.
Hi Zee, Keiko, & Eleanor, so excited to have you on the platform. So, before we get into questions about your work-life, maybe you can bring our readers up to speed on your story and how you got to where you are today?
The three of us were drawn together by the music we listened to as teenagers. The bands that united and inspired us did more than just provide us with a soundtrack; they gave us passion and purpose, a reason to create, and, by extension, a reason to be.
When we met, we were all fighting pretty intense battles with mental illness, and the music we shared was what kept us going time and again. Part of that was the act of creation and participation in art, but part of it was also how deeply candid the musicians we loved were about their own struggles. The message was threefold: you’re not alone, it’s worth it to keep fighting, and you can turn all that darkness and ugliness into something beautiful and valuable.
Missouri Surf Club represents our best attempt to turn darkness into beauty, pain into cathartic joy, and loneliness into collective effervescence. In a sense, we wanted to pay it forward — give others the same hope we’d found in the music we listened to.
The first song we wrote together was Ninety Ten, and we consider it a sort of thesis statement for who we are as a band. It’s a perfect microcosm of our signature style: intensely confessional lyricism embedded in music that’s more traditionally associated with lighthearted fun. In Ninety Ten’s case, that’s surf rock, but as we expanded our repertoire, we leaned into elements of pop, dance, and folk. Our efforts culminated in a five-song EP we released in 2015, while we were still in high school, titled “the friends we made along the way.”
Playing live wasn’t an option for us at the time, as we lived across the country from one another and had barely learned how to drive, but we knew we wanted to continue making music (and hoped to do it in a more professional capacity than recording songs in our high school band room). We weren’t quite sure how to move forward with that until Eleanor was invited to take part in a project called “Cynthia” in 2016 — a rock opera that was entirely self-produced by the band that wrote it. After that, we understood that it was possible to just go out and make the art we wanted to make. After many long months of sending project files back and forth on Google Drive and saving up our money, we finally got together in St. Louis in August of 2017 to record our debut album, “Postcards from a Churchyard.”
Our funds were limited enough (and our schedules tight enough, with all of us navigating jobs and school) that we weren’t finished mixing and mastering Postcards until 2019. When we were finally able to release it in May 2019, we knew we’d entered the next phase of our lives: not just as artists, but as three people who had made our teenage selves proud.
Postcards’ reception was everything we could have hoped for and more. We’ve had so many people tell us that it’s helped them through difficult times and given them catharsis as they’ve reached the other side. A friend of Eleanor’s from college got some of the lyrics from “Nothing Gold Can Stay” tattooed as a reminder to live passionately and authentically. In March of 2020, right before everything shut down, we were able to play our first live show since the release of Postcards to an incredible crowd at the Way Out Club. We’re so grateful for every bit of joy we’ve given to the people who’ve listened to our music and come to see us perform, and we can’t wait to share more.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle-free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Making music together from 2,000 miles away has never been easy, and we knew going in that it never would be. That’s part of the reason we chose the name Missouri Surf Club — to represent something that seems improbable, nonsensical, and impractical from the outside, but somehow works. The courage (or, perhaps, the naivete) to face stacked odds with confidence is what forms the root of our story. We do this because it’s hard and a little bit stupid because we want to tell kids like the ones we used to be that they should try to do things that seem hard and a little bit stupid because life is absurd and beautiful and fleeting and passion is worth it.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
We’re a three-piece, multi-instrumentalist band. Everyone sort of fills in where they’re needed during the songwriting process — I think all three of us play bass on at least one song on Postcards. We’re always working to make our process more flexible and collaborative; we don’t really vibe with the idea of having a frontman. The magic of being in a band comes from seeing three simultaneous and distinct takes on a single piece of art come together as one.
We’re also very much self-made and self-produced. The recording, mixing, and mastering of our debut album was funded entirely by us and the community around us. So, I guess we’re collective-made and collective-produced, actually! The point is, though, that we didn’t want to wait for somebody with a bunch of money to get interested in what we were doing to make a record. We wanted to make a record, so we wrote some songs, gathered some funds, called up some friends, and did it. That’s something we’re really proud of, and we hope to set a good example for other up-and-comers that way. Don’t wait for somebody else to legitimize what you’re doing — if you want to make art, go make art!
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
You can literally do whatever you want.
That’s a pretty broad generalization, so let’s specify: if you want to make something, you can and you should. You don’t have to wait for anyone to notice you. You don’t even have to be good. In fact, we’ve found inexperience to be an incredibly valuable thing — you’re more likely to break the rules when you don’t know what they are!
If you’ve got an idea in your head, the only person who needs to believe in it is you. The rest will come. All you have to do is hold steady, think outside the box (like, as far away from it as you can), and ask for help when you need it.
Also: make bad art on purpose. Seriously. Write a bunch of corny, cliche lyrics and set them to a 1-4-5-1 chord progression. Did you do it? Great, now do it again. And again. And again. Now try making something abrasively, unlistenably bad. Totally unstructured and nonsensical with lots of weird noises. Did you do it? Great! Do it again! Keep making weird and bad and ugly and amateurish things, and do it a whole lot. It’s more fun to give yourself permission to suck, and it’ll help way more in the long run than chasing perfection.
Contact Info:
- Email: mosurfclub@gmail.com
- Website: https://missourisurfclub.bandcamp.com/
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/missourisurfclub
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mosurfclub/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/mosurfclub
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/channel/UC7Uxj3JMfmSUrbgBNAyR9hg
- SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/missourisurfclub
Image Credits:
Rosie Ribble
Julian Miller
Damian Farewell
