Family of the Year band member Sebastian Keefe

Family of the Year is, as I say to band member Sebastian Keefe while I am interviewing him, kind of like the offspring of a merger between the "royal" Tanenbaums and the Addams family. Well, aesthetically, that is. Musically speaking, their sound is more Wes Anderson mellow than weirdly spooky-kooky. They specifically make happy music, which seems to be pretty rare, for some reason; the only other band I can name off the top of my head that makes a concerted effort to do so is fun.—whom I have interviewed for this website and whom we discuss in this interview. We touch on numerous other topics as well: the genesis of the band, the themes of the album, and the way in which the band has been a "self-fulfilling prophecy". Enjoy.

Hey, Sebastian. How are you?
Hi! I’m good, thank you. How are you?

I’m good! So let’s talk about Family Of The Year’s album Songbook.
Yeah, sounds good. I want to tell you that I’m kind of in the middle of nowhere visiting my family, so in the event that I get cut off I’ll try to call you right back… But, yeah, let’s go.

[laughs] Okay, well, first of all, I’d love to know how the group came together.
Well, Joe and Vanessa—Joe is my older brother, and he and Vanessa started the group. They wrote the music that is on Songbook over the course of a year and a half before they were even planning on putting a group together. They were just kind of making it as a project in their apartments, basically, and in borrowed rehearsal studios. Then they decided they wanted to put a band together, so Joe basically enlisted myself and Jamesy because we’d all been in bands together for years, and then the group grew and added Christina and Meredith to the mix.

According to the pictures on your MySpace and on your website, you guys have this really cool aesthetic… I obviously get the idea of this weird, perhaps somewhat reclusive family. It seems kind of like Royal Tanenbaums-meets-Addams Family.
[laughs] Well, we’re certainly interested in just being an eclectic group that reflects our personalities, that’s for sure. We definitely have—it’s a very organic story, an organic evolution of just two people falling in love and writing music together and adding in their best friends to form this group, and we’re kind of like this nomadic family where we travel around in an RV and go on these adventures together. Now we all live in a really cool, funky old house on a hill, which is somewhat Addams Family-like. [laughs] Yeah, we all live together. Yeah, I can see the comparisons!

It would make so much sense if you guys were crafting a narrative about the family your name is supposed to represent. Like, this story with different characters and family members.
Well, I feel like the thing is… and I might be completely wrong about this. [laughter] But I feel like the term “self-fulfilling prophecy” sort of applies here. We’d never planned, but sort of became, what we wanted to become? We kind of became what the music was. The music that Joe and Vanessa wrote—they wrote a very large catalogue of music and basically went through it; there was really a very large music catalogue to go through, and we decided what we wanted to perform as a band and what we wanted to release, so the album and our live shows kind of evolved around what we wanted to become as a band. It was never really… basically, since the music was written before the group was actually formed as a whole, we kind of followed the music and kind of became what the music wanted us to do.

That makes sense. The music on the album all flows together really beautifully, and the song titles are so great. I mean, do you know how the specific songs on the album were chosen?
Yeah, the process was… like I said, there really was a catalogue with about 40 or 50 songs. However, there was an overall feeling we wanted to get across, which was kind of like excitement and youthfulness and playfulness and not just one person discovering themselves but a couple discovering each other, which kind of evoked a larger idea of people discovering themselves and new relationships. And we just had a good time doing it. We didn’t want to put out a downer record, you know? There’s a lot of music out there that’s so very serious and negative right now, and that’s not to say it’s not something very serious, and we do take it very seriously, but… I guess we take being happy very seriously. [laughs]

Well, there’s nothing wrong with that.
No, absolutely. It’s a quite eclectic album; so I’ve heard from a lot of people, and I agree, and it was kind of a group effort to put it together in some way that made sense, rather than having it be all over the place. But it kind of does go into a few different movements, like discovery and happiness and sadness. It was definitely designed in a specific way, actually, with a lot of help from our manager Emily, because it was really important to have an objective opinion on all the music.

Yeah. It definitely has a very unique sound, and… it’s just refreshing. It’s not something you’ve heard a million times before. Like you said, it’s fun. [laughs] It’s not downer music. Like you said, people don’t make much music that isn’t these days.
Yeah, exactly. [laughs]

Have you heard of this band called fun.? They also go out of their way to make happier music.
No! There’s a band called fun.?

Uh-huh.
Wow. No, I’ve never heard of them!

They also are very big on making non-downer music. You know what—can I play a clip from one of their songs through the phone for you?
Wow, that sounds awesome. Absolutely; go ahead. What’s their story? Where are they from?

Well, the lead singer used to lead this band called the Format, and the other members were in other bands… I know the Format dissolved; I don’t know whether the other members’ bands dissolved, but they kind of all came together—here’s a good one. [plays ‘At Least I’m Not As Sad (As I Used To Be)’] Um, so, yeah, there you go.
[laughs] It’s so interesting-sounding! It sounds like maybe if the Beach Boys rescored The Wizard of Oz or something.

Yeah, that’s kind of how I put it: if mellow retro-pop and Broadway had a baby!
[laughs] Yeah, exactly. That’s crazy. Oh, wow, I must definitely check them out. They sound awesome.

Well, I think there need to be more artists and bands that champion upbeat music nowadays. All the movies and plays are depressing; there should be something out there that makes you feel happy!
Yeah, and makes you feel like, “You know what? You might be in your mid-twenties, but you can still feel like a kid once in a while.”

If you'd like to learn more about Family of the Year, which you hopefully do, you should check out their website or their MySpace.