Arts This Week: Hotel Fiction
Author: Sage Tanguay
Sara Bastianelli: For Arts This Week, we chatted with Jess Thompson and Jade Long from Hotel Fiction. You can see Hotel Fiction at the Southern Cafe Music Hall on Friday, September 13th.
SB: I asked Jade and Jess about the creation of Hotel Fiction and how it has
grown in the past five years.
Jade Long: We met in college in our sophomore year through friends, and we kind of always played music with our lives, and we’re really passionate about it. So when we met, it just felt like we finally met someone else that had the same passions and music taste. And so we kind of just hit it off and started playing together every day, pretty much, until we slowly started a band and slowly started playing out more slowly started recording music. Yeah, now we’re here. We just released our third project, and we’re going on our biggest tour yet in like two days, which is crazy.
Jess Thompson: I think we’ve grown a lot as artists. I mean, we continue to follow our tastes and, like, try to make music that lives up to what we hear in our heads. And I think we’ve been kind of closing that gap slowly, of like, what we want to hear and what we can create. I think we’ve become a bit more rock, I would say, like we’ve gone further in the rock direction, but we’ve also gone further in the pop direction in certain ways. So it’s just been cool to like have all these different types of music that we like, and then keep further exploring them.
JL: Every day we like read each other better musically. We’ve always done that, but our musical connection just continues to get stronger.
JT: I think writing is pretty much the most sacred and special part about being in a band and making music together, and it’s also the hardest connection to foster and to find, because everyone has different tastes, everyone has different feelings, different levels of vulnerability. So like to connect in that way was really special. And not only to connect in that way, but to make music that I felt like was the exact kind of music I wanted to be making. That’s hard to do. It was very, very quick for us to become best friends, and that was just special too, to be with someone that would tell me their feelings and like that. I felt like I could share my feelings with.
SB: Can you introduce the rest of the band that will be playing with you on Friday night.
JL: We have Aaron Daugherty, he plays guitar and synth for us. We have Aidan Hill on the bass and Gideon Johnston on the drums.
JT: We started as a four piece band, so at some point we were getting ready to tour, and we were like, Wait, this is our first tour. Pretty much maybe we could be a five piece synth parts, guitar parts. It was really cool to start playing with another guitarist. Gideon is the younger brother of our friend Elijah Johnston, who I believe is playing the Charlottesville show, if I’m not mistaken, and that’s kind of fun. But we were friends with Elijah in college, and Gideon played in his band, and so he was 17 when he first started playing with us, and we were like 20 or 21 and then Aidan is just our friend from the scene. When we were looking for a bassist, Aidan was just kind of like the no brainer choice and play with us, and now he’s become a huge part of this band. All of them have.
JL: I feel like we’ve gotten really good at playing with the band. I think it was kind of an adjustment, you know, to just learn how everyone plays now we’re just kind of a unit. It gives me such purpose to tour and to play music every night that I feel like I’m doing something that I love, and it makes shows just so much better, doing it with my best friends.
SB: They also discussed their process of making their newest album, Staring at the Sun.
JL: It was a pretty long process. We started a lot of the songs in college. Maybe Girl in My Head was the first one on the album that we wrote, and Hollywood, I think, was the second one. And those kind of started way before the rest of the album, because we wrote those and recorded them and decided that they didn’t fit on Enjoy Your Stay, our last project. And so after those two were written, we kind of wanted to make more music, and had been writing some and, yeah, just wanted to get back into the studio and start recording our new stuff. The album kind of started to come together after Watching my Life Go By. Was written and recorded, and it started to feel like an album. And then it was still only like seven songs, and we decided that we needed to write a few more. And so we added Ghost of Me and Staring at the Sun, and I think that’s when the album really felt like it. And yeah, all those songs were really strange processes, because I don’t think a single one of them was start to finish the song is done. They all really kind of were their own beasts to create in a very fun way, and also became very different in the recording process as well.
JT: But I think live, in general, a lot of the songs on the new album just have a really good energy that I do think is felt in the album, but I think comes across live in an even better way, just because, like, we’re all moving with the music, how we feel it.
SB: You can support Hotel Fiction at the Southern Cafe and Music Hall on September 13th.
JL: Go directly to our website, hotelfiction.com all our tickets for all our tour dates are right there. Make sure to buy directly from our website, because there’s some scalpers out there.
Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more at pvcc.edu
