Sun Daze
Deserted
2021 | Pop, Rock
— track 11: “The Time”
Wes Eisenhauer: I've always looked at what we have here in Sioux Falls as kind of a blank slate. Your ability to have an impact here is so much larger than other well established markets, right? So even back in the days of Soulcrate, we talked about, like, "Should we move to Minneapolis? There's a huge scene up there that we could be a part of." And we kind of all agreed that we could have a much bigger impact by staying here and building something for ourselves. That happened in music, and I'm very deliberate about that with my photography. Your ability to do new things, and to make waves, and to have an impact in a growing city like Sioux Falls is exponential to other places. And also, I say this all the time, but like, if not us, then who? When I say "us" I don't mean me in particular. I take a lot of pride in the fact that if we're not here making things, and making our city better, and pushing the limits, then it won't happen.
Brandon Phrommany: To be honest, I don't really think it matters where you're from. Music is so online-based, people find things online, and if you have a good following, if you reach out to the right people on Spotify, your music can really do well. I mean, it's not so much as playing shows, playing shows is important — but having a good online presence and really marketing your music is even more important. I guess it kind of does matter where you're from in some way, you want to live somewhere where there's a relatively decent music scene. There's already a lot going on in Sioux Falls. We got Paul McCartney. We have a solid music scene here.
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Brandon Phrommany: I've been obsessed with music as long as I can remember. Ever since I was a kid, third grade, I was obsessed with Eminem. That was the first artist I was really into. I would listen to his music while reading his lyrics on my computer. I'd write down his lyrics in notebooks so I could read them for fun later. And then Green Day was a band that I was really, really obsessed with in middle school. I think I owned every Green Day shirt that was available in Sioux Falls. That's when I started playing guitar. In high school, I really liked emo music, and then I started liking more indie rock, like MGMT, bands like Beach House. And then I had a few bands in high school. One band [was] called Cuba Corrosion, we were a post-hardcore band. I don't know if you ever heard of the venue Señor Wiener in Sioux Falls, it was just a hot dog restaurant, but I had my first gig with Cuba Corrosion at Señor Wiener in 2009. We didn't even have a bass player. I was this 15-year-old kid with a Line 6 amp, and yeah, I just knew playing music was for me. That's the show that I was like, "Yeah, I love playing music. I love making music."
Wes Eisenhauer: I'm passionate about making things. [I started making music] quite a bit after high school. I moved to Sioux Falls in eighth grade from Massachusetts and then had my high school years here. I was into the music scene, punk rock scene, skateboarding scene in Sioux Falls. And that kind of shaped my tastes and my style a lot. After high school, me and four friends packed up and moved to Portland, Oregon where I attended culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu. Thought that's what I wanted to do, some sort of restaurant owner. I went through that program and I ended up coming back to Sioux Falls for a four week externship that I had to do. So I came back to Minerva's, actually, which is funny. And that was more of just a convenience thing, to be honest, I had a free place to stay here.
And then, after a little while, I kind of switched gears, and was a little frustrated with the restaurant industry, and I started working for my dad's company, he runs a plumbing company. So I was a construction worker for a decade, we did residential houses. And while I was doing that, I was making music with my brother and longtime collaborator, Corey Gerlach, which would later become our band Soulcrate that had about an 18-year run. And that was my passion. For sure. You know, I would work all day and dream about that, and come home at night and work on music. And we had a good run, we toured the country a couple of times, we put out ten records over the years. As a musician, you kind of got to be everything, especially an indie musician that's doing everything for yourself. But it taught us about how to market ourselves, how to design a poster, how to take a photo, how to organize and execute an event. So I always kind of refer to the Soulcrate music days as my real college education. That's what forced me to just kind of learn it as I go. And that was fun.
[Photography] came out of the music. In 2011, 2012, Soulcrate needed stuff, we needed video, we needed photos. And as a band, we bought a Canon 5D Mark II and a nice lens. I kind of took it over and said, “I want to learn everything about this.” And it just kind of kept snowballing from there. Eventually, I went on my own and started my own company, and it's been good. For a long time, I was operating under Wes Eisenhauer Photography, and it bubbled to be more than that. We launched a new company [in 2020] called Kickturn Studio, which is really just kind of a rebranding evolution. So yeah, that's where most of our time is spent, helping brands and people tell their story in a visually interesting way.
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Wes Eisenhauer: We put a period on the group Soulcrate, but right after we did that, this flood of new music came out of me. Also, near the end of Soulcrate, I almost felt like [I was] in a box, like, "What do we do next? I don't know what to do now." So it was cool to start some new stuff, and to be scared again, and be nervous on stage again. But yeah, it's fun for me now, I'm making more music than I ever have, and it's more fun now, because I'm not relying on it to pay the bills. I can just have fun.
Brandon Phrommany: I got to know Wes late 2018. I saw his band, OK, Parade play at Total Drag, and I just really liked their set. And I was like, "I think you guys need a guitar player." And they were like, "Yeah, maybe man, who knows? We'll hit you up." And then they actually did [laughs]. So I came by to jam, they're like, "Yeah, man. Come play guitar for us." I really enjoyed that because I've been in bands where I was the singer and the guitar player. In OK, Parade I could just focus on playing guitar, just being in the band. We opened for Band of Horses, that was at The District, that was a great show. Anyway, I wouldn't want to say OK, Parade has broken up, but they're on a hiatus. Plus, OK, Parade had a lot of plans going on, but the pandemic hit and they had to put things on hold. And that's when Wes and I just decided to, you know, we're like, "Hey, I have some demos I've been working on, I'd like to see what you could do with them." We would email each other demos back and forth. And then all of a sudden, we were like, "Yeah, let's just drop an EP." So October of 2021 was our first [Sun Daze] EP. Wes and I have similar tastes in music. We both really like bedroom pop, indie rock-style music. So that's the genre we're trying to hit the pocket for. It just started off as us meeting at his studio to write and record songs. The writing process was great because with two people, it was just so easy. Just quick, we would write songs in an hour, or record a song in an hour. And, you know, being in a band can be really fricking stressful. Just coordinating every member to be on the same page, that can be stressful at times. So it was really nice to work with just one person. Wes is like the chef, he's the guy that makes the beats, and I just sort of fill in my ideas when necessary.
Wes Eisenhauer: Brandon would come in and sample and chop up his guitars, and the sound came together.
Brandon Phrommany: Actually, a lot of the guitar is Wes. We help each other. But yeah, he does really like taking on the role as the producer. And I think he does a great job. He comes up with beats where it's like, "I wish I wrote that." I love lo-fi, upbeat guitar melodies, and he's really good at coming up with that sort of stuff. It's fun just brainstorming lyrics too. We never have lyrics already written, for the most part, we always just come up with lyrics on the spot, which is a great exercise, just because it really focuses you to finish. If you put a song on hold for too long it sort of loses its momentum. So it's always a good exercise to try to write or record a song in one sitting. ["The Time"] was one of the early songs on the album. Wes sent me the beat and I recorded my guitar over the beat at my house. And then I sent it back to Wes. And he's like, "Hey, come by the studio, let's record vocals, I have an idea." The premise of the lyrics is just you really can't make up the time. We sort of talked about there are no do-overs. When stuff happens, like when you make a mistake and you want there to be a reset button, there's not a reset button. It's like, "Well shit, I have to go from here." And we wanted it to be catchy, I guess. Melody is very, very important. "You can't make up the time,” I just thought that was catchy. Sometimes, things just happen on the fly. We'll just freestyle.
Corey Gerlach [from Soulcrate], he mixed and mastered [Deserted]. Amazing dude, amazing audio engineer, and he makes really good coffee. A lot of respect for Corey. And he's also my neighbor too, which is cool.
Wes Eisenhauer: So Corey and I started The Breaks [Coffee Roasting Company]. We ended up buying a building in North downtown.
Brandon Phrommany: We make music there, but that's also [Wes’] place of business for him to edit videos and stuff like that.
Wes Eisenhauer: Sometimes when I go into the office, it can be a distraction. I have to close my door because there's someone noodling on a guitar over here, and there's Corey roasting coffee in the other room [laughs]. But I think of our space as like a funhouse. It's our own personal Fantasy Factory of cameras, and skateboarding, and music, and production.
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Wes Eisenhauer: [Brandon and I] quickly wrote, like, 20 songs together, and were like, “This is worthy of more than a digital release.”
Brandon Phrommany: We waited to release the record because we wanted it to be pressed on vinyl, and I don't know if you know, but pressing vinyl can take like six months. So these songs have been done for a while, but anyway, they are timeless [laughs]. [Different Folk Records] has been around for 7 to 10 years, in that pocket. Andy Howe is one of the people that runs it. He's a friend of mine, and also my unofficial manager. He was very eager to help us out with pressing our record to vinyl. Andy is the man. He's a believer in Sioux Falls music. So that's what Different Folk is about, they just want to help bands reach their full potential. Because Sioux Falls could be such a better — I love the music scene here, but it has so much potential. I mean, there's a lot of great talent here. And sometimes it's not being showcased the way it should be. So Different Folk helps bands, musicians, to reach that goal by saying, "Hey, we'll make some records for you to sell," because vinyls are a great collectible.
Wes Eisenhauer: To have a physical, tangible release is an awesome thing. It legitimizes the work a little bit. We worked with a local artist [Les Cotton] who helped us design it. It’s my photography on the cover.
Brandon Phrommany: [Performing live] we just play to a laptop, and we both play guitar. We thought about getting a drummer, but we're pretty happy with the setup we have right now. It's been working out pretty well. The live setup is pretty easy: just two guitars, two mics and a laptop.
It was an honor, not only to play at Total Drag for our record release, but to play the first show back. [Total Drag Records stopped hosting live music from the start of the Pandemic until the Deserted album release show on December 3rd, 2021]. Yeah, it was a really big deal for me, personally. Just so many amazing memories of playing shows, and being a part of shows with so many great bands, and just seeing shows. Bands like Twin Peaks, Dehd, Frankie and the Witch Fingers, I can go on and on, so many — I just love that room, Total Drag has just a great sounding room, believe it or not. I know it's really a record store, but oh my, the acoustics in that place are just shockingly amazing. [Total Drag owners Dan and Liz Nissen] provide a great opportunity for up-and-coming bands, younger bands that want to make their mark or start in the music scene.
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Brandon Phrommany: So for Sun Daze, we're going to record more music because we want to keep our momentum going, for sure. For Juke the Tiger, I'm going to play some more solo shows, making music no matter what, get better at it, and just really just try to push myself just to have fun.
Wes Eisenhauer: I wish that someone had told me when I was a kid that this was possible, what I do now. No one ever told me that this was possible. I thought you had to go get a degree and find a job that you didn't like and just kind of deal with it and raise a family. No one in my life had ever told me you can find something you're passionate about, and you can go out and get it — if you are clever and you just take your time in believing it. So I wish that for my kids more than anything, especially my oldest daughter who's just like me, in the sense that she's super A.D.D., and all over the place, and not a conventional learner. I hope she can find something that just really gets her fired up in her life.
SUN DAZE’S ESSENTIAL SOUTH DAKOTA ALBUMS
Gordo Ji’Bang — Gordo Ji’Bang (2016)
James1stGen — Lola II (2020)
Subrift — Mood Swings (2021)
Off Contact — Lot Lizard (2019)
We All Have Hooks for Hands — The Pretender (2007)
SOURCES
Phrommany, Brandon. Interview. By Jon Bakken. 23 January 2022.
Meyer, John T. “Interview with Wes Eisenhauer | Creating Out of Passion | Leadmore Podcast #42.” YouTube, Leadmore, 25 Mar. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9767LsaC-Ek.
