We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful SCOBY. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with SCOBY below.
SCOBY, appreciate you joining us today. Can you share a story about the kindest thing someone has done for you and why it mattered so much or was so meaningful to you?
Holden: I would say the kindest thing anyone has ever done was everyone in SCOBY being accepting of me and giving me a shot in the band. I went to see them play one of their last shows of the school year, and I knew that they had some members graduating. After the show, I walked up to Dianna, introduced myself, and told her I played bass. Come August, I was getting ready for a three-hour-long gig and had to learn about 50 songs in 2 weeks. It was still really fun and being in SCOBY has been one of the best experiences in my life.
Cooper: I don’t know how much they really know it but I was in one of the lowest points of my life before joining up with the band. I’ve always had trouble approaching people and making friends, so the transition to college hit me like a truck. I isolated myself sometimes to an unhealthy degree and when you compound that with the end of a 3 year long relationship things weren’t going very well. But just after that point, I think around a week later, was when I first met Joey (the previous bassist) at a school event I helped play music for and he offered to have me come play with everyone. When in that sort of mental state I was in the value of having something to look forward to cannot be overstated. Getting to play with these people this year have been some of the best experiences in all of my time in college so far, and has helped pull me in ways I can’t put into words.
Dianna: In the beginning of sharing the “fronting” of the band, I was pretty unsure of my performance identity, especially in my vocal delivery. I would overthink about my technique all the time, because I’ve never taken any classical training. I’m still critical of my vocal takes, but when I was first starting, I couldn’t even bear listening to my recorded voice, and I would throw out tons of songs and projects because of it. I remember at one of my first gigs in the band, at a small costume contest hosted by one of our friend’s student orgs, a girl came up to me and said “if I had your voice, I would never stop singing”. I think just that little comment alone, which I know she did not have to make, inspired just that little seed of self-love that I needed to keep working on myself as a musician and follow through with my own creative projects, especially for the band.
Jane: When we played for Wakeville, I distinctly remember being super nervous to perform. It was one of our biggest shows at the time and it was in front of a lot of people I knew personally, whose opinions I care about. We were in the middle of our set and had a lot of people crowded at the front. When we played Mantra, a song with a lot of moving parts for me (Changing settings on keys and singing at the same time, as well as a solo near the end), I remember looking up during the middle to see everybody in the front just dancing and getting into it like crazy. I think one guy did a stank face on my solo. It’s a simple thing but having people enjoy your music in a live context feels so nice, especially since Mantra is a song I wrote most of and it’s very close to my heart.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
Daniel: So SCOBY stands for Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast and it’s what kombucha is made from. The name came from our drummer’s mom, Annamae, who had made a batch of kombucha around the time I started jamming w Doug in his backyard during the Covid times of 2020-2021. We played one really scuffed gig in my sister’s off campus housing basement that year w pure covers.
But since then we’ve grown, both in scope and members. Jane Alexander joined as Doug’s friend from high school and member of their previous band together, Uncle Sparky. Then Nehemya joined as our bassist.
Finally, we played at Campus Gas as part of the Wake Radio fall concert 2021, and saw Dianna perform as well. We were kind of taken aback at how great her performance was and asked her literally on site to please join our band. She said yes. Thank God.
We played a couple decent gigs around campus, with the highlight being the Ultimate Frisbee club party. But then the band started falling apart a little.
I left to study abroad, leaving a gap where a lead guitarist should be. Luckily, the rest of the band found a grad student, named Ananata, that filled in for a semester.
Then when I got back, Nehemya suddenly was super busy with work in his Computer Science degree, so he had to step away from practices and gigs. But he still helped write and record our first set of original songs, including Devilbeat, IOU, and The Anxious Things I Said. But we needed someone to play these songs live.
Miraculously, in about three days notice, a friend of the band, Joey de la Viesca, swooped in and perfectly covered bass duty at a series of increasingly important gigs! It was some serious hero shit. And we kept building momentum.
After playing Wakeville, a student run arts fest, recording a Tiny Desk Songwriting Contest video with Wake Studious, along with a full Couch Concert with the OGB, and finally putting out our first EP, “That Will Be The End”, on Spotify and Apple Music, SCOBY felt real. Considering our roots, it’s incredible to think that we are turning the corner on production for a full-length album set to release next year. And we only were able to continue to these milestones with the help of friends and new ideas and people that picked up the slack when obstacles got in the way.
In this spirit, after Joey, Nehemya, and I had to leave the band after graduation, Holden Barnes and Cooper Jordan are the new foundations of SCOBY, taking our sound to new heights and places while old members have been scattered across the globe for work and the real world.
But in a way, we seem to thrive as a strange mass of ideas and bits, tied together by a group chat and our love of music. Who knows what kind of iteration will appear next. But hopefully with continued work and luck, along with support from our few, but proud fans, we can grow into our selves and make our mark on the NC music scene.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
Dianna: I think what shocks a lot of people when they learn about the band is just how much of an unlikely project it is. We are a group of college (and recently graduated) students, and in comparison to many of our peer bands, we are operating on an incredibly tight budget. A lot of folks spend money up front on gear– large PAs and cabinets, mixers, professional instruments– but we have always managed to make due with just enough.
One of our biggest goals as a group, especially as one that was likely to have an impending expiry date with us graduating, was to put our music out into the world. For most groups, that starts with securing studio space, hiring an engineer. Our EP that came out this summer, “That Will Be The End”, was actually recorded entirely on GarageBand, with each of us recording our individual parts. This often meant finding times over the course of weeks to meet up with each other to account for class schedules and even physical separation– some of us were sending recordings from overseas! We couldn’t have finished the project without the help of Luke Demers, who actually approached us and offered to mix/master the project after playing a local open mic. Our own Jane Alexander created the cover art and Spotify reels, with pictures from our friend Katie Fox. We often contemplated our methods, and it definitely made some processes longer and harder than they could have been if we had sunk some money into the conventional process. I think it is incredible that we stuck it out and put a product into the world despite the confounding circumstances between us and the external pressures to record traditionally. It definitely allowed for us to push past some preconceived notions of what music production is supposed to look like solidified for us that if you want to create something, there is always a way to create it.
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
Dianna: We actually didn’t focus much attention on our social media until this last summer when we started releasing music. I think we all collectively realized that there is a true power behind marketing campaigns, regardless of scale, that separates streamed music from non-streamed. I kind of undertook the task of creating hype around our first single, “devilbeat”. Luckily, it was pretty easy to garner local support due to our proximity to Wake campus, but the challenge would be getting the song out to the music community at large. Honestly, I kind of just threw everything to the wall– with Instagram (and Facebook to an extent), I tried to tailor posts to our local fanbase, including things like inside jokes and more direct promo. For Tiktok, I started by following bands that were doing similar things to us and taking inspiration from their posts. I learned very quickly that making alliances, especially with bands that share similar sounds and fanbases, is a key to building wider support. And they were genuine connections! I would send them direct messages or leave them comments as if I was just a fan supporting their work (which I was!) I think a magical thing about local music from any scene is the altruistic drive we have as musicians to help each other out and hype each other up. To this day, I think some of those connections we made with other bands, especially across the state, helped us secure both future gigs and friendships.
After “devilbeat”’s release, it became clear that the key to social media isn’t necessarily quality (although it is important), but consistency. I treated future releases as though every post would reach at least one more person, which at the end of the day, is what you want to strengthen your audience. In the future, I would definitely put more effort into creating a posting schedule at least a month out of the release so people are aware of the project well in advance!
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @scobytheband
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100093523904821&sk=music
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-cxxefYe8Ut97wdYq1Gi9Q
- Other: SPOTIFY: https://open.spotify.com/artist/0Y9QWqEuEg8xfieBlQTkmf?si=Ch-Kyn5PRpaF9kje0lg5sQ BANDCAMP: https://scoby.bandcamp.com/track/devilbeat
Image Credits
Katie Fox Dianna LaTerra Jane Alexander