This Band Made A Song After Borat
Space Heater makes jazz fusion that’s unique to North Carolina.
Hey everyone,
This week we’re doing something special. Introducing Asheville Week, a week full of interviews with top artists in Asheville’s thriving music scene.
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With that, enjoy the read!
Let’s be honest: we take ourselves way too seriously. We live our lives putting on a different face for different people. This is how I act at work, this is how I act with my friends.
But a jazz fusion band in Asheville has a message for us all: stop taking yourself too seriously.
Space Heater is a group of four featuring Andy Loebs at drums, Alex Brown at sax, Jake Pugh at bass, and Devin LeCroy at keys. They have a unique flavor in both their approach to music and how they perform it. Despite most of their tracks not having vocals, they still manage to make goofy titles, create allusions to Arthur and Shrek, and even pass out gummy worms at some of their shows.
If you’re like me, you, too feel as if the pandemic has caught us with our pants down. We went from wearing suits to sweatpants in a matter of days.
One can argue that Space Heater is the antithesis to this. Why were we so serious before, when nowadays there’s not too much to be serious about?
Just have a good time and heat up some space.
Noah: How did Space Heater get started?
Andy: Space Heater started in early 2017, I had written some songs and wanted to get a band together to play them. So I asked Devin — and former members Landon George and Jake Toedtman — to help me play those tunes. Colin Barrett joined on guitar shortly after and we played with that lineup for around a year.
Jake: I was living in the house Space Heater was started in but I didn’t actually end up playing in the band till a year or so later.
Alex: So I randomly moved in downstairs, into the house they (Andy, Jake, and Devin) currently live in. It’s laid out with three rooms upstairs, two proper rooms downstairs, and one fairly small office sized room downstairs.
I knew one of the guys who lived downstairs from working at The Mothlight, and I was in a pinch and needed a cheap room, so I moved into the small room, and just by chance Andy, Jake, and Devin were moving in upstairs at the same time as me. I had maybe seen them around town before or at The Mothlight but otherwise didn’t really know them.
But I hit it off with them, and fast forward it eventually came out that I play the saxophone, this is after Space Heater had been around a for a year. I hadn’t played it since high school really, not properly, but they were super into me playing with them, so I gradually started practicing with them and eventually played my first proper show with the band at Hopscotch Music Festival, I think.
Andy: Devin and I grew up in the same small town and have been playing music together since middle school. I met Jake in 2013 and we had played in the band Wizardskin for a few years with our bud Carmelo.
This band was more or less born as a means to play music that was challenging for me but also a platform to goof off and have fun.
Noah: What is it like to have the majority of the band living together? What challenges and advantages do you experience because of that?
Devin: It feels like things work much more smoothly, especially for scheduling practices and bouncing ideas off each other. The last year of the band has just been the four of us, and things have felt super productive.
Alex: Yeah, I definitely miss living with everyone. It was great.
Jake: We are all very close. Not a lot of tension between us, living together absolutely works in our favor.
Alex: I think before [being] band mates we’re all friends in the first place, which is something we [might] take for granted. I don’t really think of us as band mates, more just friends or whatever. That sounds corny but it’s pretty true.
Noah: After listening to tracks such as Important Task, I can’t imagine some of your music without the saxophone. Can you explain how Alex joining and playing sax has impacted the band’s music from what it was going to be before to today?
Andy: When Alex joined the band it took our sound further into the jazz fusion territory. We had been wanting some woodwinds in our music since the very beginning so it worked out perfectly. We are all interested in bringing in as many sounds as possible so having a very natural sounding instrument like that blended really well with everything else.
Jake: When we learned [that] Alex could shred on the saxophone, we had no choice. Then after hearing his computer compositions we started learning his tunes and they meshed perfectly. Outside of being an amazing player, Alex is also a powerful composer.
Alex: I feel the music was a lot more cartoon-y and prog-y before I was in it, which like, some of it still is, but I think the songs started glancing more in the direction of jazz fusion once I joined and a saxophone was added to the arsenal.
Devin: Yeah, and I feel like for the newer music we’ve been playing, the sax is a crucial voice.
Noah: Seeing that much of your music is instrumental, how do you go about naming each track?
Devin: The group chat is our main inspiration.
Alex: I think for the most part we don’t, which is to say, we have some really bad song names. Or at least the ones I wrote. Like Spray Tan, what the fuck does that mean.
Jake: All over the place! Important Task was named because of the tension of the song and how it builds. It is alternatively named Crucial Mission or Main Objective.
Alex: Oh and That’s Cheese is named after a Borat skit.
Jake: It is always fun to try and personify a mood.
Andy: The song Brain’s Moving in on My Dessert Turf is a reference to an episode in Arthur.
Noah: It’s no secret that in the mainstream, most famous artists have vocals as the feature of their music. What are the challenges and advantages of being primarily an instrumental based band?
Jake: We sometimes try and sing, you may actually hear some auto-tune on our next album.
Andy: We all listen to a lot of instrumental music and to us it feels very normal to not have vocals on most of the songs.
We also do a lot of skits and banter at our shows and that usually fills the void of vocals in our songs.
Jake: In some ways vocals are really intimidating for us. I think it’s an area we want to explore more and figure out how to naturally incorporate them in our future music.
Alex: I feel like on our newer material sax and synth lines usually take the place of vocals. I think it also allows us, to some degree, to be more technical with our songwriting and structures and rhythms because they’re not anchored to vocal melodies. It also provides a bit of a challenge to make our songs interesting because, yeah, people are used to vocals being the primary focus of a song. But in some ways that’s liberating. And also I don’t think any of us are 100% confident in our vocals but definitely not something we’re closed off to. It just hasn’t happened really, except for a couple songs.
Devin: We do play live with bands that are more vocal centric, and I don’t think we’ve ever felt out of place in those settings, which is nice.
Noah: Are most of the bands that you play live with vocal heavy bands? And would you say that distinguishes your music from the likes of others?
Andy: Absolutely, I feel like it leaves more open to interpretation and makes it more about mood and feeling without us having to spell it out.
Devin: I feel that usually is the case, but not always. It’s hard to know what people are listening to or connecting with the most about a band live, and I know vocals are a great thing to relate to for a lot of people. We’re having fun with conveying a silly idea with sound, and we’ve felt very welcome in a mostly vocal driven music scene.
Alex: We also usually take a lot of time to talk and banter on stage, which gives our shows some level of ‘vocals’ even if it’s not part of the music proper. There’s usually still a good bit of vocal engagement at our shows.
Noah: Earlier in the interview you mentioned that you might incorporate auto-tune in your new album. In the new album, what are some of the differences and similarities between it and that of your other EP’s?
Andy: We’re currently in the mixing stages of a new album called Music Planet which feels like our best music yet.
This album has a scaled down lineup and that gave the four of us some more room to experiment. It’s a lot tighter and honed in, with a much more jazz fusion sound. Our friend Mike Johnson who recorded and mixed it has a piano in his studio and we utilized that on a lot of the songs, too.
Alex: I’m so excited for it to be done, I’m really proud of it. We put in a lot of work, all of us, both recording and just learning the songs generally.
And shout out to Mike Johnson for putting up with us in the studio while also providing indispensable nudges of creativity and advice.
Jake: This is definitely the most involved music Alex and I have been on with Space Heater, and in that way I feel a lot more connected to it. We have really settled in with this one.
Devin: We definitely tried to retain the spirit of our previous releases, but let loose a little more on filling space with sounds that maybe didn’t happen live.
Alex: Yeah, there’s a lot of toppings and spices on the album that aren’t really possible to do live. It’s definitely a studio heavy album.
Noah: What was Mike Johnson’s influence on your new album? And what have you learned from someone like him?
Devin: “Mike is the man.” — Bobby Briggs.
Alex: With me at least he definitely provided feedback on certain solo takes — things like “you should definitely take it in x direction, like you started to do earlier,” etc. I specifically remember that during the sax solo on Tuesday night. Also he’s just really patient. And yeah, the man.
Devin: Mike Johnson gave us so much support on this new album, and on Sales Event, too. Both times this band has recorded with him were total blessings.
Jake: Mike is a really special person. He is simultaneously one of the most intelligent and humble individuals I’ve ever met. He’s so good at bringing his deep knowledge to my level.
Extremely respectful and empathetic. It’s actually crazy that such an angel walks among us and lets us in his studio.
We’d never been in a studio like his before, his influence is really on every track. I consider Mike an extremely important part of our recorded music.
Noah: Can you elaborate on an example of a suggestion he made that really impacted one of your songs?
Jake: He’s actually the one responsible for the auto-tune on Music Planet.
Noah: How often before the pandemic did Space Heater perform live? What are some of the most memorable performances you’ve done?
Alex: We played quite a lot, I think Andy has the official count probably. Definitely feels like there were months where we played like five to six shows.
And damn, memorable shows — there are so many. Hopscotch 2018 for sure, that was the first show with both Jake and I there. Then the first show after we became a four piece band, we didn’t have enough new material worked out for a proper set so we did a play about goats, kind of modeled after Three Billy Goats Gruff. Full set was a play with dialogue and jingles about three goats trying to retrieve their password from Netflix headquarters but they’re stopped by a troll — Andy — who forces them to answer security questions and Captcha and shit. We had no idea how people were going to react, it was like midnight but by the end the room was packed and most people were sitting down listening super intently and were into it and entertained. That was one of my favorite shows.
That was at Static Age I think.
Andy: For the most part we had been playing anywhere from one to four times a month in Asheville at places like The Mothlight, Static Age Records, and Fleetwood’s.
Some of my favorite show memories are when we did a 20 minute adaptation of Three Billy Goats Gruff, or eating a sandwich and then an entire bag of gummy worms in front of the biggest crowd we’ve ever played in front of.
There was one show that was a birthday party for some friends and I made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for anyone who wanted one. We really like passing out snacks.
Jake: Playing Hopscotch and wandering a music festival together while all staying at same Airbnb is was actually life changing. We dream of touring when it is finally possible again. We came up with so much stupid shit when we were all together that there would be no way we could conjure up otherwise.
Andy: Breaking up the set with gags and snacks helps me feel way more comfy on stage and more like its us just hanging out.
Devin: We played one show, that was our second birthday as a band, and it was also the day Open Road by The Rippingtons was released, so we had a little celebration for that, too. We played a song from the album on a Bluetooth speaker inside Alex’s saxophone.
The Rippingtons featuring Russ Freeman are a fave band around here.
Noah: Your shows sound incredibly unique in the sense that, well, who eats a whole bag of gummy worms live in front of an audience? We love it.
Do you come up with these show features beforehand or is this all improvised?
Andy: A combination of both for sure. We like to let things happen in the moment and leave room to explore, but sometimes we plan out what kind of snacks and when we’ll eat them.
Alex: Its kind of both, depends on where the show is and what the crowd is like. The play was completely planned obviously but sometimes we go off topic pretty hardcore between songs and have to ‘get back into the zone’ of playing a show if we goof off too hard.
Photos by Mike Holmes. Interview edited for clarity and concision.