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This interview took place with Pepper drummer Yesod Williams on May 17 before they went out and burned through a great set at the House of Blues in Boston, MA. Topics of potential interest include Hawaii, playing live and Night Marchers.
PL: State something interesting about yourself.
YW: I'm from a small town in Hawaii called Kailua, and being here to play a show in Boston right now is pretty interesting to me. It blows me away. Besides that, I like Spam.
PL: Why do you think you're able to play with so many different styled artists?
YW: Probably, speaking of being from Hawaii, because we're from Hawaii. Hawaii is a super melting pot of shit: culture, music, everything, and that kind of reflects on our music, as we put them all together and make them our own. I think we can dabble in so many different genres that we can play with Snoop Dogg or the Kottonmouth Kings or 311 or the Bob Marley festival or things like that.
PL: Being from Hawaii, how hard was it to get music there?
YW: It was super tough. We've been listening to Pennywise since we were 12 or 13 years old. We first heard about them through surfing videos, since, obviously surfing is huge in Hawaii. We get these surf videos that come from Southern California and thats where we first hear about NOFX, Pennywise, The Offspring; all that second or third generation of punk rock or whatever you want to call it. It was still tough to get the CDs. Honolulu was a half hour flight away. To get the CDs, you had to fly there. It was cool though. Kind of like the thrill of the hunt.
PL: Thats cool. I've never flown somewhere to specifically go record shopping.
YW: There wasn't the internet or anything like that, so I'd talk my mom into going for something else and then stop by the record store.
PL: Do you approach playing live any differently than going in the studio?
YW: It think its inevitably different. Going in the studio, you're trying to capture the feeling that you have on stage, where I think playing live is kind of a no brainer, where you're doing everything other than kill yourself on stage to entertain the people that have paid their hard earned money to see you. There's more, I don't know if you want to call it pressure in the studio where you're trying to write a good song and come up with a good performance because its getting recorded. But then on top of it, not thinking too much about it because you want to get that vibe down on record where it still has that energy and doesn't have that, for lack of a better term, plastic performance. I think its definitely different.
PL: Did you do anything different with Kona Gold?
YW: Our only goal was to play the whole album of Kona Town. We don't play a whole album live. We jump around and never end up playing a whole album at a show. Our main goal was to make sure we played all those songs, and a couple of them we haven't played in years, so we had to brush up on a few of them, which was cool. Songs like "Face Plant" we haven't played live since we released the album, so the fact that we had to do that, we brushed up on them and now we play them all the time. Its almost like we have new songs.
PL: What goals as a band do you still have to accomplish?
YW: I think just to still be doing this years and years and years from now. Personally, less touring in the future would be awesome. We've been doing about 200 shows a year for the past eight years now. It gets rough at times. You always miss your loved ones and not being home, so thats a goal. Another one is to keep getting better and progressing. We've been a band for about 12 years and I think the reason we're still a band is because of progress. Its been a steady climb. And nothing has happened real quick. Just always progress and never be stagnant and keep making music thats different. We never want to release the same album twice. I think longevity and progress in a nutshell, and I think we've achieved it, but we never sit back and say we've accomplished it. We're always keeping that carrot in front of our heads.
PL: How do you define success?
YW: Being retired back in Kona.
PL: What three bands would you say have had the biggest influence on Pepper?
YW: NOFX, UB40 and Red Hot Chili Peppers.
PL: Whats a little known fact about Hawaii?
YW: Have you heard of Night Marchers?
PL: No.
YW: Hawaii is super spiritual. There's many Gods. There's the God of the Volcano and the God of War. There's these tiny ghost type guys that are called Night Marchers. I haven't seen them personally, but I've got friends that have. If you camp at the beach, sometimes you hear the beat of this drum coming, and as legend has it, you can't look them in the eye, or else you'll be screwed. A lot of it sounds funny, but you can feel it when you're there, especially on an island where we're from. You definitely get chicken skin, full of goose bumps because there's definitely a science fiction sort of way.
PL: Is there anything else you want to say?
YW: We love Beantown because there's a special in the air every time we come here.