Local bands swap songs for Musical Chairs

For Carrboro’s Nightsound Studios, Musical Chairs isn’t just a party game — it’s an indication of the great bands that the local music scene encompasses.

More specifically, it’s a new compilation available for free download that features fifteen local artists and bands covering each other’s songs.

The initial concept was straightforward.

“We were talking about who we would like to work with in the area,” said Erika Libero, executive co-producer of Musical Chairs and a rehearsals manager and assistant at Nightsound. “We started listing off our favorite bands. We wanted to showcase these local bands as a way of promoting local music.”

Musical Chairs was funded through donations on Kickstarter.com, a website that lets supporters donate to causes of their choice. This allowed the studio to release the compilation for free.

“We wanted to get it out to as many people as possible,” Libero said.

“We didn’t want to charge money for it. If we came up with a good idea, and most people out there think it’s a good idea, then we could kind of join forces.”

From there, the idea snowballed into a large-scale endeavour featuring genre-spanning acts, from Durham alt-country outfit Luego to Chapel Hill pop-punk group I Was Totally Destroying It. This diversity was an integral — and intended — part of the process.

“In this whole area, there are a lot of bands, but they’re all really different — different genres, different age groups, different social groups,” Libero said. “We wanted to promote the variety of music in this area and capture it.”

For Josh Kimbrough, one third of Chapel Hill group Butterflies, which covered Erie Choir’s “Seaside Arms,” one of the biggest challenges was adapting another band’s work.

“That was hard,” he said. “The hardest part was to really delve into the lyrics and be kind of honest to the lyrics.”

And in an area where many musicians count peers as influences, choosing material from another band’s catalog was an additional challenge.

But the best part of Kimbrough’s experience was his interactions with fellow artists.

“The bands have been coming together and meeting and talking. The whole project has been a nice excuse to get friendly with other bands and get to know other bands,” he said.

Kimbrough also found the experience taught him about the dynamics of his own band.

“It was a real exercise in inter-band communication, because we had a very limited amount of time in the studio,” he said.

“It was only one song but we really had to pull together as a band.”

As fans download the record, Libero hopes that people will take notice of the range and sense of community so inherent in the area’s music scene.

For her, the goal is to perpetuate local music and foster connections between the musicians and fans who comprise it.

“People came from all different genres, but they can all celebrate this same music scene. It’s possible that their fans could cross-pollinate. They’re all music people — they like songs, they like performing,” she said.

“It was really rewarding to see all the musicians talk to each other through Nightsound. We got all these people together and a party and it was like, ‘Hey — meet each other.’”

Contact the Diversions Editor at dive@unc.edu.