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Indie-folk band coming to Pruis talks new album, creative beginnings

What: PigPen Theatre Co.

Where: Pruis Hall

When: Thursday, September 17; 7:30 p.m.

Cost: Ball State students: $5 advanced, $10 at the door; 18 and under: $5; Adults: $17 advanced, $22 at the door

The latest act coming to Pruis Hall is more than just a band. PigPen Theatre Co. began creating plays as a group in 2007. Now, two indie-folk albums and one EP into their music career, this group of seven men are touring the United States with their newest release “Whole Sun.” They'll be performing at Ball State on Sept. 17. The Daily News talked to members Alex Falberg and Ben Ferguson.

How/why did you make the transition from playwrights to "full-fledged" band with an album?

BF:

We all have such a great appreciation of music. We started playing music together. The idea came to us that we could take the music we were writing outside of our shows. That excited us. We’re trying to do a little bit of everything. We try to make movies, theatre, and certainly music. It just seemed like a natural thing that excited all of us.

AF:

The main reason I think we started is people were demanding, rather asking, us where to make the music. When we recorded the first album, we did fundraising on Kickstarter. When we recorded the album, it was a year after we got out of school. We discovered how the power of recorded music could be shared. Many people can share it across different platforms. Playing live music is a very different endeavor than performing a theatrical production. One of them is there are fewer questions that one has to be ask with one than the other. It’s a little easier to tour as a band. It’s a little bit more universal.

How is the tour going so far? What's the best part of touring?

BF:

It’s great! It’s always very exciting for us to go to a place. You see cross-pollination between the people who know us as a band and as a theatre company. And have all of these people who’ve seen us at our theatre shows and say ‘Oh I didn’t know you guys did that’ or vice versa. That’s what’s really exciting for us to get people who normally wouldn’t go to a concert, but would go to a theatre show. But they come and see a concert, just because they like our shows.

AF:

Definitely, Ben. The best part of touring is meeting all of the people that you meet in different cities. We had this amazing Instagram journal. We would take a picture of each sound engineer that we played with. The sound engineers are the unsung heroes of a lot of these. They really felt like they were appreciated and we got to keep track of the people that we worked with. Every sound engineer is different. It was very interesting to see how certain sound engineers do our track, because we didn’t tour with our own guy. We get to really experience what each sound engineer hears us as. It’s such a different show every time.

BF:

We see ourselves as very social people. It’s always very exciting to travel, but you’re only there for a couple of hours. Most of the people you get to meet are the sound engineers, so we like to make as much time and opportunity just to meet anyone who is working with us or at the show.

How did you begin the process of creating "Whole Sun"? What were you hoping to accomplish with it?

AF:

There’s a couple different ways of looking at it. We didn’t start out as musicians, although some of us played music in school, we came together as a theatre company. You look at it from the perspective from where we began; it’s changed a lot.

The work we put into it began when we started playing music. There’s so much to put into it, and we’re still growing. The process for this specific album, I guess, the first song that we shared with one another happened when we were in Chicago. We were doing a play in Chicago called “The Old Man and the Old Moon.” We were there for about four or five months. We all lived in a big house in the suburbs next to this big outdoor music festival called Ravinia. The music festival was off-season, but the festival actually houses their big musicians in the house that we were staying in. Somehow we got lucky we were staying all in this big house, we found out that Tony Bennett stayed in this house. You might say we were meant to work on some of our own music. We started some simple rounds of our first tunes.

Finally, we got to a point where we’re like ‘Okay we’re ready to do a fundraiser. Well, a Kickstarter campaign.’ We organized whom we were going to be working with. The original Kickstarter was $5,000 and we ended up with $9,000. We were ecstatic about that. Then the Kickstarter for “Whole Sun” started by asking for $20,000 and we ended up with close to $50,000. Which all goes into expenses for the album and the expenses for the kick-starter itself. We’ve been very fortunate that people have come and actually liked our stuff.

How do you get inspiration for your songs?

BF:

This album “Whole Sun” is a little different than “Bremen.” With “Bremen,” we wrote it basically because we had written a lot of different songs for theatre shows. We picked our favorite ones that we thought could stand alone as a song and built them up from there. The inspiration for writing those songs came from the actual play, where "Whole Sun" was a little different. All of the songs from “Whole Sun” were written independently outside of theatre. They were just songs that we wrote for the sake of a song. A lot of the ones are about where we were in our personal lives and how we felt when we were growing up a little bit. Also, trying to write the music outside of school and outside of theatre. It kind of depends on what kind of songs we are writing. If I say ‘I’ve got a verse and a chorus. What do you guys think?’ The song will sort of emerge.

What future projects are you currently working on?

AF:

We’re attempting to adapt our own play “The Old Man and the Old Moon” into a kid’s book. I’m really excited about that. It’s taken us a long time to gather our thoughts into how that translates and how that adaption works. There are a lot of givens when you see a performance. The seven of us play all the parts on stage. One of us plays a really, really old man and one of us plays the eight year old boy. We switch back and forth between roles. There’s a lot of different kinds of make believe that happen when you go see a show. It’s a different sort of make believe than when you are reading a book. We’re still tinkering around with how that play translates.

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