Southernmost Gravy: Starting Up
What were you doing at the age of 14? Was it releasing your first album? Was it releasing a second album? Was it getting ready to start recording a third? Yeah, me neither. But for Southernmost Gravy’s Ben Adams, it’s a no brainer. At just 14 years old and onto his first year of high school, he is already elbow deep in the world of electronic dance music, dazzling people twice his age and embarking on a unique psychedelic-EDM fusion. With Starting Up released at the start of the year and then What Am I Thinking in August, he’s already built a nice catalogue for himself and is challenging the ceiling of what a kid his age can do. And with help of bassist Eli Brickey, drummer Eomer Stringham and guitarist Sean Mortensen (and yes, they are all roughly 14, too), they’ve come together to make a blooming quartet of EDM-esque psychedelia, making even someone like me in their mid-20s wonder what the youth has instore for the future of music.
Sitting down with Ben, I ask him how he’s gotten so much done at such a young age? “ I don’t know,” he answers. “I think we started the band in like March and what got us a lot of attention in the Utah music scene was when we played at BYU. We played at BYU for Battle of the Bands. We got second place there.”
On the process that makes Southernmost Gravy, it starts with Ben: he works at home on a mixing software, finding and recording unique sounds and then putting them all together. “It can even be just like me banging on a piece of glass or whatever, if that makes sense,” he says. “And then I just input that sound into my production software.” I ask him where the inspiration for his sound comes from, who he’s been listening to. “Pretty much EDM, dance artists such as AGR… Marshmallow… those people. That’s where most of my music inspiration comes from to make the music that we make now.”
When it comes to performing, Ben notes he’s had to make few compromises when considering the difference between a track is recorded versus played live. “We tried to make the songs all the same [as the tracks on spotify],” Ben says. “But after it got kind of boring for us, and I think for the audience too. That’s when we changed [it] … Just adding variety, making it totally different on some parts of the song. Adding solos.” And that is when he says the band begins to stumble into something a bit more stripped down and raw.
Ben then mentions a few (socially-distanced) shows he and the band are excited for and how he is excited to see how people react to the latest album, but... “The third album is what I’m most excited for,” he says with a smile, “We’re working with a bunch of different Utah artists for each of the different songs. It’s gonna be like a big, huge collaboration project. Yeah, we’re working with bands such as Brother., Suit Up Soldier.” And it will be the first time he gets away from a computer to work on an album, the first time he’ll work with musicians and microphones at a larger capacity. “We’re going up to a studio, up in Salt Lake. That’s where we're going to be recording one of our first instrument… songs.”
Southernmost Gravy’s album What Am I Thinking is out now. Go follow the band on the various social media platforms. Ben is always posting about new shows and a few giveaways the band does from time to time.
