If, for whatever reason, you ever found yourself in need of a band who can give you disco funk, Americana, reggae-rock, and a killer rearrangement of Blinding Lights all set to the backdrop of a warm summer Chicago night, Skip Class And The Dropouts have you covered (and then some!)
I was fortunate enough to stumble my way into a lovely little conversation with lead vocalist Danny Jay to give him a quick interrogation about this spectacular live band from Illinois.
After some initial chit-chat and a comparison of weather between the gulf coast (it’s already in the 90’s) and Nashville, the Music City itself (where it is a lovely and temperate 75), we were got ourselves settled in to all about music, songwriting, and doing the things that make you happy.
So you’re in Nashville, and everybody else is in Chicago, is that sort of your permanent situation?
I wanted to come down here - this year, at least - to really focus on my songwriting, but we had a long talk with the band and I was like, “By no means am I going to leave the band behind or anything.” We’re still pushing forward, we actually have two songs in the pipeline right now, and then I’ll be going back up to Chicago here and there. We’ll do shows and whatever each time I go back up, so they're still doing things up there while I’m doing things down here.
Okay cool! Were you guys all sort of from the same area to start with, or what brought you guys together? Was that a local scene or…?
Generally we’re from the same area. The drummer, Dan [Reynolds], is from New York, and then I met him in L.A. when I lived out there. We crossed paths for a while. We never really hung out, but we knew each other and then I moved back to chicago in 2017, and we linked up there. So we’ve been in three bands together since then.
Oh, that’s fun!
Yeah, he’s a great drummer! And then we kinda just recruited people through the Chicago music scene, so that got the other three guys in the band.
You said you’re there in Nashville to work on songwriting- what is y’all’s process? Do you write lyrics first and then put music to them or is it that somebody has a riff or even a drumline, and you say “hey look at this” and somebody just pings off of that?
It varies, but I would say probably 90% of what we’ve done so far is coming from me. And I’m not trying to gas myself up or anything! But the rest of the guys aren’t as much into the songwriting process. They’re better musicians than I am! So, I come with the songs and I'm like “Hey guys, this is what came from my brain, what do you think?” and then they’ll put a lot of their own touches on it. Chad [Aul], the guitarist, does have some songwriting in his background. We actually recorded and released one of his songs as well, so that’s cool.
It’s just mostly coming from me because I like to write alone, which is not how people do things down here [in Nashville]- I'm having to adjust to that, but I just like to put things out. I'll write everything and then I'll kind of present it to the band and then we’ll maybe change some things, we’ll add some different parts. That’s our process, generally.
I wanted to ask about musical inspirations, because as I'm listening to your music, I'm noticing there’s a huge difference between “Money” and “Sauce”. They’re two vastly different songs! And I remember when I first listened to “Sauce” I really enjoyed it! It's a funky sort of feeling, it's really cool! And then I listened to “Money” and I was like “hang on! Wait, this is the same band, right?! Are these the same guys?!”
Yeah! That has been sort of like my achilles heel for my whole career. Honestly, I can't stand still. I’m musically ADHD. I like some rock, I like some pop. I mean “Money” was- I just wanted to write a song that had that rockabilly kind of Americana vibe and it had no home. That’s the crazy thing! A lot of songs you just write and hope that they get a home one day. The band really liked it, and they said “Well, we can cut that and we can make it our own thing,” and added the piano that I didn't have. That’s my favorite song to play live with the band.
“Sauce” is fun, I mean it’s got a very disco-y 70’s pop vibe to it and that is also- that was actually a different song! It was a different version of “Sauce” that we kind of remade that had more of an EDM vibe to it and we made it our own. Things are a little all over the place and that has been mostly- sort of an issue? Because people are like “I don't know what you guys are!” That’s been [basically] every band of mine! I wish I could just stick to one genre but I can't. It just doesn’t work for me.
No, I think it’s fun to have that, and it also helps you in the long run, right? ‘Cause you're not getting stuck in that box of “Oh you’re this band this is the music that you make”, people just like to grow and move, and sometimes they just want to make something different every now and then, and that’s okay. I really like that.
Thank you so much!
Where was “Money” done? Is that an actual diner, or was it sort of one that you can rent out and it looks like a diner but it’s not a functional diner?
That was last summer, and I actually was just Googling “50’s style diners in Chicago,” and what I got was that place [Bettie’s Chicago]. What they do is just baking classes. It’s not a real diner and they’re not really looking to shoot anything there either, but I contacted her and I was like ”Hey we're a band, we wanna shoot a music video with kind of a 50’s style vibe, can we do that? We probably just need 2 hours,” and she was like “That’s fine, I just need to sort of be there to supervise,” but she was just hanging in the back just letting us do our thing.
2 hours?!
We paid her for 2 hours, yeah! We knew the swing dancers, they’re friends of ours that sort of ended up choreographing, and the videographer is also a homie who’s done a bunch of videos for us and he’s amazing. He’s gone on tour with different EDM artists and what not. So 2 hours was all we needed and we had time to spare in the end!
That’s impressive!
Thank you!
I was in a music video in L.A. and it was like 9 hours I think, so it surprises me that you guys only took 2 hours! Especially at that level. There’s a lot going on in there!
There is a lot going on. “Sauce” was the same way!
We rented an actual roller skating rink on the South Side and they’ve had stuff filmed there before so they had set rates. We’re like “We’ll be in by 8 out by 10.” We knew the roller derby girls too and they hooked it up and they were the best! They came and did their thing. Everybody was a friend. Actors and all that stuff were just homies and we shot it in two hours also.
That was one of my questions! I wanted to ask about the roller derby girls, like who are they, how did you find them?
I went to highschool with one of them, and she’s been super cool! I asked her because Chad had this idea to have some sort of conflict in the video. We wanted to make it a little more interesting and so we thought “What if we had our friend Anouck [Ferrat, the girl skating by herself in the video]- what if we had her being sort of bullied by these roller derby girls?” And then we’re like “We know some roller derby girls!” so she got her whole team [Chicago Knockout Roller Derby] to show up.
That’s so fun!
She really hooked it up, it was awesome!
Did you know how to skate beforehand? Or was that on the fly?
I feel like I had done it before but everybody was super sloppy, y‘know? It kinda was like you're drunk and don't know what’s going on
I was gonna ask: how many times did you guys fall over while you were trying to do that?
Probably a good handful, but we also got pushed over by the derby girls! They almost got us beaten up, it was just hilarious.
It was a really fun watch. Especially the guy on the keytar.
Yeah! Max [Mauer]! He’s our newest member. He plays keys, he’s amazing.
He was going to town on it! He knew what he was doing.
Yeah, he was great. The keytar was perfect, and yeah, we had an amazing time, it was super fun.
It looked like a lot of fun, which I always love. You can tell a band is having fun with what they’re doing. There are people who play music and it looks like a job and then then there are people who look like they’re having fun.
100% yeah.
So, speaking of playing live, what is your favorite local venue?
I’m just getting used to Nashville. I’ve been to a couple different places and it’s been more like song writer’s rounds. I will say there’s a place called the Commodore Lounge which is actually in a Holiday Inn here, it’s relatively well known. There’s a place called Electric Jane that’s around Broadway and all that stuff, and that’s cool too!
For Chicago? We like Boat Drinks, which is a place like right on the water, and it’s close to Soldier Field - where the Bears play - and when it’s in season there’s a lot of people going to games. It’s right on the water. It’s kind of a summer place, because everybody’s out and the weather is good. There’s a stage with a tree in the middle and they light it up. They have live music almost every night in the summer and it’s just navy piers over there, they light off fireworks, it’s a really beautiful area.
You said you were in a band before- had you been in a recording studio before things with Skip Class?
Oh my God, yeah! I’ve been recording since probably middle school, I would say? Like starting off we got really lucky. I was in a band- I think it was 7th grade. It started with some guys from middle school, and the drummer's dad worked at like the major studio in Chicago as an engineer so they took us in to do two different eps with that band.
That’s so cool!
Yeah! It was a major thing that we got to be in this major studio as like 12 year olds with our high voices and everything, it was so much fun.
I’ve been in so many awesome different studios and I’ve been lucky in Chicago, L.A., Nashville, New york.
So… since we’re talking about studios… How much am I allowed to ask about new music? I always wanna know about what we can look forward to.
No go for it! Ask away!
So with Skip Class we have 2 new songs coming out. One is like 99% done, we just have to make a couple changes on it, but everything is recorded. It’s mixed, and all of that stuff. It’s called Bad Guys Finish First, and we’re super pumped about it. Then we have another song called Love Cannon, which is kinda goofy, as you can imagine by the name. It’s really fun and I like both of them a lot. They’re just very different grooves.
Bad Guys Finish First is a little bit more rock. I would say it’s our “heaviest” song we have - [half whispered] it’s not heavy - but you know? We’re not a heavy band, so it’s a little bit more on that side, whereas Love Cannon is more sort of funky and groovy.
So those will be- probably before summer we’ll have those released and then we also have a live album from our last show we did together in the Chicago area. There’s a venue called Space. It’s a really cool place, and we recorded that last show, so we’re still making some tweaks and then we should also have that out on Spotify.
I think we do have some video from that [as well] that’s gonna correspond with the show itself with the audio, so we’ll release that stuff on YouTube and TikTok and all that, so those are kind of the three major things we’ve got going on with that, and then my Indy stuff my solo project. I'll probably be releasing some stuff by summer.
Okay, so one of my, one of my favorite questions that I attempt to ask everyone - specifically because I got my first guitar when I was 15/16. I could not tell you for the life of me what it was. What is your first instrument? Either: what did you play first or do you remember what your first guitar was?
So it was - I will admit I am kinda weird when it comes to this. I think I’d put myself as a songwriter, singer, musician [top to bottom]. I’ve never cared about that. People would ask me about gear, and I’m like- honestly man, I have a guitar. It works. I have an amp. It works. That’s all I need. All I know is I was 13 and I believe it was for either Hanukkah or my birthday and it was a Fender Bullet. It was either red and white or black and white, and that's what got me into guitar. It ended up just being more of a tool for my songwriting. Because I’ve never fancied myself as a guitar player or a guitarist. Like, I’m okay enough to play what I sing.
Yeah, I'm a guitar player in that I can play guitar.
Yes, exactly - I mean the guys in the band, like I said, they’re way better musicians. You can find a guitar player on the street who’s better [than me]. I just think it’s more so- I can play my open chords, I can play my barre chords, I can solo a little bit, that’s all I need. I don’t care to get too much better in that, I focus a lot more on my songwriting, but that was my first instrument. I did recently buy a $700 acoustic but I really don’t care too much about the brand, I just go by the sound and if it sounds good to me, I’m good. That’s all that matters, honestly.
When it comes to sound- or vibe, I guess, what is your personal description of the band? I can get stuff from a PR team, or interviews from other people, or reviews from other people – but I wanna know what your personal description is of the band.
So we call ourselves ‘eclectic rock’ and I think ultimately what it comes down to is that it’s pop music played by a rock band. My personal description of it is like if you put Phish and Maroon 5 in a room and they started jamming together that’s kind of what you would get with us.
Do you guys have a favorite cover that you do?
I do!!! So, my favorite song the band does - and they hate it, they don't want to play it, we’ve gone several shows now without us playing it - is Smashmouth “All Star”. And I’ll tell you why [...], it was like a coming of age song for me, but, I’ve played it with different bands and every single time we play it, without fail, everyone 30 and up just gets out of their seat and they're like “Yeah!!” People just go crazy for that song and it's such a good last song for the show. It's just guaranteed to get people up, and the rest of the band is like “No we’re not playing that song, we’ll do some other stuff.”
And we do have a lot of fun covers we play! I like “Leroy Brown” by Jim Croce, or we actually do “Jump in the Line” by Harry Belafonte. It’s pretty eclectic what we do, across the board,
So y’all really are all over the place with that.
All over the place, and that gets people dancing too.
I love that it's so varied because [as someone attending] you’re not going in and only getting one thing. It’s cool that you guys shift so much. Those are very different songs!
Totally different. We’ll go from MoTown to very recent pop music and I think we’re just trying to give people the most, and the widest spectrum of music to hit everybody in that crowd. We’ll do The Weeknd, maybe an Ed Sheeran song, then we’ll go all the way back to the 50’s and do something like “My Girl” or we’ll do an 80s mashup of Whitney Houston and a few other songs. We’ll do some classic rock stuff for sure, and we do a lot of 90’s stuff that we grew up with but yeah, it’s all across the board. and usually you look in the crowd and you’ll see someone dancing for any of those songs.
You can spot them.
Yeah, we try to hit everybody and honestly the live show is what we do. That's our bread and butter more so than everyone else.
There's a lot of people I’ve noticed where a recording is really good but you can tell when they’re truly meant to be a live musician.
For sure. I mean- I think a band like Phish - I appreciate the aspect that they are a live band - and they won't play the same song in a set or multiple sets and they just change it so much.
Our drummer, Dan, is really big on that. He’s like “Let's pick one song in the set to go total apeshit on.” We’ll go to outer space and come back. We’ll do “Come Together” [The Beatles] . That's a fun one too. We really jam that out and change it and we’ll do this whole solo and jam session. So you’ll go and you’ll see us and you’ll know “Sauce” or “Money” and we play it a little bit different than it is on the record or we’ll play a cover that's vastly different than really what it is. We change the key, we’ll change the tempo, we jam in the middle, like we’ll do different things with it.
It’s that aspect of live bands that's really fun. You hear it on a record but then you hear it live and it's just a different sound. It's also a different feeling almost.
For sure, yeah, and I think it's great for everybody because the band is- I mean just from experience especially like last year, I dunno we did like 25 gigs. And, that doesn't sound like a lot but it kinda was. We were just starting to get tired of some of the stuff so we started adding new songs, doing old ones we didn't play as much but switching things up like that is also fun for the band too.
We’ve talked about how you guys flip through genres, was that the plan? To sort of swing through genres? Was it always a spontaneous thing or was it something you were like “Wouldn't it be cool if we did this”
So there’s another band that- like my original band is called Shytown [...], and Dan has been in that band also but it was with a different lead singer. We actually had this thing where we’re doing genre EPs. So we were releasing things like a rock genre, a pop genre, a dance [etc] because we had so much music. Again, because we’re all sort of ADHD. It’s been the same issue as for Skip Class, so I would say no.
I would say it's just like- we wanted to kind of do the funky-rock, but then - and we were doing that with our first EP - we had like two or three songs on that EP that were [that genre]. But then “Money” came around and we’re thinking “Man, this is really cool too! We kinda wanna do this even though it doesn't fit.” Then our other song that Chad wrote is called “Social Therapy” and that's way slower and has this sort of a reggae-rock vibe. I don't think anything was conscious. It was just that these are the songs we feel like are in our general wheelhouse and we really like them so let's just do ‘em. Let's record them and put them out.
Have that freedom! Go for it!
Yeah! Like you were saying, we didn't want to get painted in any kind of a corner of “Oh this is totally their sound and it's very niche, they are this funk-rock band.” Like when you hear the Chili Peppers, you know it’s them. They have that very specific sound, which is awesome! I thought it was cool that- yeah! It was kinda inadvertently done, but [I also] thought it would be cool where it’s- you might know it's me singing but you're like… is that Skip Class? Because that sounds a little different than the last two songs.
Absolutely! I played “Sauce” and then “Money” for my mom and she was confused. Ahs goes, “Did it shuffle?”, and I’m like “It shuffled in the playlist, but it didn’t shuffle bands. It’s the same guys!” It was fun.
That’s cool though! I mean, I think we’re just kinda going with it and if it's too confusing for people, oh well, y’know? We just wanna put out good music.
What is it? “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it?” I think at the end of the day, what it comes down to is the age-old “if you're having fun and you’re enjoying it, people will pick up on that.”
Yeah, and I agree.
So long as you guys are having fun, that shows. Like with the music videos! It shows that you’re having fun. It doesn’t read as ‘this is a music video that we are shooting for our job as a band’. It reads like ‘we’re in a roller rink and this is crazy and we’re just going for it.’
That's how we want the live shows to come off especially. We have so much fun on stage. It's always a good time. We’re jammin’, we’re soloing, we’re playing off each other. I’m dancin’ up there, I’m running around. We want it to be a good time. It should be that kind of high energy that you can feel and we want it to reverberate into the crowd so that people are also feeling that energy and giving it back to us.
There’s so much bad in the world and there's a lot of music that reflects that. I think our thing was that we’re gonna be that little safe haven fun place people can go. If you’re feeling beaten down by the world's issues - come to a Skip Class show and forget about it for two hours and have a good time. We don't wanna be too heavy. Most of our vibe is just upbeat and fun and we want people to dance to it.
I love that. There’s always going to be something [bad in the world] and I think there’s always a situation where there’s a need for comfort. It’s a beautiful thing that you have that forethought going into it. You guys know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
That’s our whole thing. Playing good music live, bringing live music back, bringing the rock band back, y’know?
Absolutely! I think with that we covered everything that I had and more. Thank you for meeting with me, it was an absolute pleasure, and I’m looking forward to hearing the new stuff and seeing where you guys go and hopefully at some point you can meander your way around and I’ll catch you somewhere.
We’d love to come down there [Austin, Texas]!
I will say you guys would do really well, but I’m not biased or anything, at all. I just think you’d do well in Austin.
Well, we’d love to. I’m pretty close to setting up a show here at a rock venue in East Nashville, in late June. so maybe I can try to convince everybody to get something in Austin too.
There you go! I won’t hold you to it, but I'll kinda hold you to it just a little.
Okay, fair enough!
If “Sauce” and “Money” have taught us anything, it’s that the only thing you can truly expect from our boys is a good time. Hopefully we’ll catch them in another filmed-in-2-hours (I still can’t get over this!) music video featuring more dancers and friends. With new songs on the horizon, and the promise of some solid summer jams, the guys are more than ready to impress!
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