We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Brian Kinney. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Brian below.
Brian, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?
Our second album Heaven In A Hurry is very important to our band. We started working on it before the pandemic. Seeing all the confusion and radical behavior around us started to get us thinking about cult mentality, the apocalypse, the cycle of nature, and extinction. We would sit outside and talk about tying concepts together to help make sense of the confusion, but also to indulge in it ourselves.
Brian, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My name is Aaron Mook, and I sing and play keys and guitar in the Erie, PA-based indie-rock band, Crooner. I started collaborating with one of our other members, Brian Kinney, in middle school, mostly covering the emo bands we grew up with. Before we ever recorded music together, we spent some time apart after high school, allowing him to explore hip-hop music and music production while I sang and played keys in the Pittsburgh dream-pop band, Flower Crown. Of course, these things have a habit of working themselves out and when the time was right, we rekindled not only our friendship, but our creative relationship, bringing our friend, Teddy Rankin, and my brother, Travis Mook, into the fold.
Since our inception in 2019, Crooner has released two full-length projects and is in the writing and recording stages of our third. Most of what sets our band apart from others is internal — our values, our writing and recording processes, etc. — but we’ve also used the term “nostalgia-pop” to describe our particular blend of indie-pop, desert-rock, and electronic experimentation. This sound really came together on our second album, ‘Heaven in a Hurry,’ and I speak for all of us when I say it’s the record we are all the most proud of being a part of. Anyone interested in our music should just know how much we value each other as friends as well as anyone who gives our music a chance, because at the end of the day, we’re just regular guys with day jobs and lives who happen to love creating music together.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
Crooner’s situation is a little different. We don’t play out, at least not right now. Crooner is a studio project. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, we all come from a background where live shows have created tensions in the bands we’ve performed in, so it’s not a very high priority for us. Secondly, we often use the studio as an instrument to create a specific sound or distort something in a way that could be very difficult to recreate live. To us, each project is like a painting, and while we are becoming interested in reinterpreting our songs for intimate live performances, it currently feels daunting to attempt to bring these tools to a live setting.
Therefore, online engagement is the most important way listeners can support our music. We make music together because we love doing it, not because we’re expecting to make money or achieve any kind of critical praise for it. That being said, every reaction we read to our projects — whether a professional review, an interview like this, a Facebook comment about somebody’s favorite songs, or even a negative blog review — shows that people are engaging with our work, thinking critically, and taking the time to share our work with others on their feed.
What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?
It’s funny, I think most of our goals and missions are the same things that we mentioned setting us apart earlier. Maybe they don’t set us apart — theoretically, they shouldn’t — but those things are just a reaction to past negative experiences we’ve had creating and performing music with other people. Things like setting ego aside, listening to each other, valuing our friendship before our art, and creating a space where everyone feels comfortable speaking up about their ideas and concerns are our top priorities. We feel these things pave the way for creating the best record possible, so while that may be our ultimate goal, we put all of our stock in the steps it takes to get there. And we feel more creatives should operate this way, too. It’s time to tear down the myth that friction or unhealthy environments automatically breed the most interesting art.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://croonerpa.bandcamp.com/album/heaven-in-a-hurry
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/croonerband/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/croonerband/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/croonerpa
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@crooner8289