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Wailing City Spotlight: Interview With Ben Parent of Superbald
Published January 24, 2024
Interview by Meghan Killimade
Superbald recently got back together after a fairly long hiatus – welcome back! Talk about the time off and what inspired you guys to start playing music together again!
First of all, thanks to Wailing City for the interest in the band! Superbald is stoked to be playing again.
We hadn’t played seriously in about 10 years, but Steve Elci (Superbald singer/bass player) and I have continued to play and write together in other capacities over the years. Last summer, Steve joined Nancy Parent (of the Rivergods) and myself at an acoustic show for a few numbers, and we broke out a few Superbald tunes just for fun. And while the songs were great, we realized they needed the full electric trio to be Superbald songs! So we got in touch with Trevor (Superbald drummer), who was thankfully still interested in rocking. And things just progressed from there.
Wailing City Spotlight: Interview With Emmanuel Thresher of Xenos
Tell us about Xenos - who’s in the band, what’s the instrumentation and how did the band come together?
The band came together a little over a year ago after I got back into playing the Cretan lute after not playing it for a while. I had played for a couple years in my early teens, but then switched to guitar and never looked back. So after picking it back up, I had the idea to put a band together to play a more modern style of Cretan folk music, inspired by contemporary Greek bands. Jeffrey May, a good friend and multi-instrumentalist, jumped in to play keyboards and recommended the battle-hardened J Curland to play drums. We played as a trio for a bit until a few months later my brother Alexios LaBonne joined us on bass, and we've been playing as a quartet ever since.