Family Force 5 promises to ‘work hard to make something people will like’

By SHELBY PENDOWSKI

Updated: December 5, 2012, 5:39 PM

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It started with three brothers and turned into a five-man brotherhood.

Family Force 5, from Atlanta, Ga., is made up of Solomon “Soul Glow Activatur” Olds, Jacob “Crouton” Olds, Joshua “Fatty” Olds, Derek “Chap Stique” Mount and Nathan “Nadaddy” Currin.

The band released their first album, “Business up Front, Party in the Back,” in 2006 and has continued to grow since.

They’ve released four more albums that have been featured in films such as Tim Burton’s “Alice in Wonderland,” the album “Punk Goes Pop 3” and have performed on numerous tours, including Van’s Warp Tour.

“There is an old blues guitarist that’s very famous and someone said, ‘What’s it feel like to be an overnight sensation?’ and he was like ‘Well, oh yeah I was an overnight sensation, but you don’t realize that night was eight years long,’” said lead guitarist Chap Stique. “Our band has been traveling around for really, for seven to eight years … we have been sleeping on a lot of floors and playing in a lot of basements and, you know, eating tuna fish sandwiches, trying to make it happen. So we are really just excited to play music for a living.”

Family Force 5 is known for its unique sound and performances. Chap Stique said the band’s sound is “some mean dancey weird electronic beat.”

For the holiday season, they crossed that weird sound with classics for the album “Christmas Pageant,” which includes original songs as well as some holiday favorites. To go with that album, they’re headlining the Christmas Pageant tour and stopping by The Intersection in Grand Rapids on Dec. 10.

“We are excited about it,” Chap Stique said. “We have all kinds of Christmas gizmos ready, we are gonna have some cool outfits and a little bit of snow and some cool lighting.”

He said the set list has been made and there’s some fun Christmas songs that they’ll be playing, and “we even have a few packages of goodies that we are going to throw to the crowd during our show.”

They aren’t holding any holiday tradition back from this tour, as they’ll be dressed in Charles Dickens style garb with Santa, reindeer and elves to accompany them.

The band, in preparation for the show, has been practicing tricks for the stage.

“We spin our guitars around our heads and try, and we have been practicing our splits so we can jump up and do some cool ninja kicks and stuff,” Chap Stique said.

But they wouldn’t be able to keep doing their crazy stage antics without the support of their fans.

Chap Stique said the fans are one of the most important things to the band, and they love to keep everyone involved.

Family Force 5 recently learned that their music video for “Cray Button” received the most comments on MTV.com.

“We have had a couple of videos on MTV.com lately, that people are talking about,” Chap Stique said. “We are a very visual band and the thing we, I, love about those videos – there is ‘Wobble’ and ‘Zombie’ and ‘Cray Button’ – is the fans” Chap Stique said.

The band tries to involve the fans as much as possible in the production of music videos through social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter.

“We made all these videos this year with our fans, and we decided to have them be a part of the videos,” Chap Stique said. “So a lot of the people you see in there are not just normal extras, there are actually some of our fans from Facebook and Twitter and from our shows. And we had them all dressed up like in costume and dress up with us and dress up like zombies and bite us and basically dance with us in our video.”

During their time on tour, the band will not only be performing their Christmas album, but also producing a new album.

“That is the main objective of this tour for us,” Chap Stique said. “We brought one of our friends on as a producer, that has made a lot of our music in the past with us. We are certainly going to go and put on a good show, but before and after the show the whole time we are gonna be writing and recording.”

On top of touring and producing, Chap Stique said the band will be working on a new music video for the song “Crank it like a Chainsaw” as well as posting music to their YouTube channel.

“We are just all over that place, we draw inspiration from a lot of different things, movies to songs to video games to pictures to conversations we over hear,” he said. “We really get really bored if we play something that is similar, so we challenge each other to write better stuff and newer stuff.”

The band has produced their albums and singles in a variety of ways Chap Stique said, but the new one will mostly be them in the back of the bus, making noise until the album is complete.

The inspiration for songs can come from anywhere, Chap Stique said.

“Like the other day I was walking home from the bus stop and it literally just popped in my head out of no where, and I pulled out my phone immediately,” Chap Stique said. “You never know, I think it is important to force yourself to be creative, but sometimes inspiration just comes out of no where when you are not expecting it.”

The changing inspiration keeps their sound different, unique and interesting, he said.

“We just gotta keep growing and I don’t know what direction we will end up in. We have been all over the place with our sound and it has been really fun,” Chip Stique said. “We will have to see what direction it goes next, but I promise you, we will work hard to make something the people will like.”

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Published December 5, 2012 A&E, PageOne