mxdwn’s artist of the year, King Falcon, is a band consisting of Michael Rubin and James Terranova. While the two are the creative energy for the project, they are in the works of adding a new drummer and a possible rhythm guitarist. Their sound is a mix of indie and classic rock with inspirations like Steely Dan, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd with Tame Impala modern elements added in. The groups debut self-titled album, King Falcon, is 11 tracks of spirited melodies and meaningful lyrics. It was produced by Marshall Altman and mixed by Mark Needham known for working with The Killers, Imagine Dragons and Fleetwood Mac.
mxdwn had the absolute pleasure of interviewing Michael Rubin whose fun and down-to-earth energy matches the first single that was released from the record, “Cadillac.” He shared with us the creative process behind the album and songs, his inspirations and going from a Guitar Hero enthusiast and School of Rock student to the ride of his life as a signed and touring musician.
mxdwn: Where did the decision come from to blend indie rock and classic rock for your debut album? Is this the main style you intend to carry throughout the future of the band?
Michael Rubin: Yeah, so I think that’s kind of the plan. I mean, I don’t think we’re going to change a whole lot, but I could tell you that I kind of grew up listening to what most people would call dad rock. So, like [Led] Zeppelin, [Pink] Floyd, my favorite band of all time is Steely Dan, and they’re like the king of dad rock. I grew up with all that stuff, so that’s kind of like the language that I speak, but it’s a little bit dated. So, I think adding kind of the modern element is what makes it sound indie. If you listen to our music, especially with the guitar playing and the songwriting, I think you’ll hear a lot of the familiar stuff from the ’60s and ’70s. But again, there’s modern production and if you average all of those things out, I think that’s kind of just what indie rock is, so I think that’s how we got there. Because it’s funny, we get compared to bands like The Strokes, Black Keys, like White Stripes, and I think all those bands are cool, but they’re not bands that I grew up listening to, so I think it wasn’t sort of intentional. I think that we all just kind of happened to listen to the same influences and then we ended up making something modern and that’s kind of how the genre got to be.
mxdwn: Yeah, I can definitely hear those influences in there. That’s awesome. Would you say that those are some of your biggest influences in those scenes? Or who are they if there are more, and how did they inspire your sound?
MR: Well, I mean, definitely a lot of different inspiration from a lot of different places. I can tell you that my playlist is kind of all over the place. I’ve actually been really into Freddie Gibbs recently, and he’s a rapper. So, I mean, totally kind of on the opposite side of what we listen to, but I think that anybody who’s a great lyricist, there’s a lot of stuff that you can kind of take from, and that’s definitely not specific to any genre. Like I said, in our genre, I think the bands that we sound like are The Strokes and The Black Keys and The White Stripes, but I think that my own personal influences are more Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, Zeppelin, actually the only modern influence that I think I really have is Tame Impala and that’s because I got into them when I was in college. I’m a huge Tame Impala fan. I think Kevin Parker is like a genius. Yeah, I love that guy.
mxdwn: I totally agree. That’s a great influence, I can definitely kind of hear that in your music too. How was working with Marshall Altman and Mark Needham?
MR: Marshall is a whizz, man. He works so quickly and he moves very confidently number one, around in the studio, but also through the song. I think the biggest strength of having a producer is, as an artist you’re kind of always attached to things that you make, so whether it be a macaroni sculpture or like the David sculpture, you made it so you always think it’s good. Having a good producer is having somebody who could tell you, yeah, that’s working, or no, that’s not working, and the cool thing about Marshall is when he says it works, you can really trust him. Obviously he thought all the stuff on the record worked and we thought it was really cool. The other side too is when he says no, you can kind of trust that that’s based on a whole lot of experience and sometimes it’s a good no, it’s a helpful no. Mark Needham mixed the record and I actually was kind of hoping that he would be the guy who mixed the record, particularly because we have one song on the record, which is my favorite song on the record, it’s “On Your Soul,” and for me, that one sonically is kind of inspired by “When You Were Young” by The Killers and Mark mixed that song. It’s really cool for me to have a song that I was inspired by that is actually mixed by the same guy.
mxdwn: That is really cool. Wow, that’s awesome. Does the bird imagery mean anything to you? I saw that you first were in the band, The Inoculated Canaries and now King Falcon. Is there a deeper meaning behind the band name?
MR: I’m so glad that you asked because you are the first person who caught onto that. Usually, like I mention that, and then you’re the first person who actually figured it out, so kudos to you. No, I don’t have any particular relationship with birds, but it was one of those things where we had that first band name, which by the way is a horrendous band name. I picked it when I was very young, and what happened was we kind of got some momentum, like we were on the radio, we did some touring and people knew us as the band with that weird name that you can’t spell or pronounce. So, we kind of didn’t really want to change it because people knew us anyway. Somebody heard us one day and he was like, you guys are killer. I would love to get you a record deal, but the name is horrific {laughs}. So, we changed the, well, we didn’t really change the name, we kind of started a new band, but two of the members were the same. The other two guys, we’re still very good friends with, they just didn’t really want to do it anymore, so James and I started King Falcon. The reason we changed it to falcon is because when we started The Canaries, we were very young and we were like, alright, now we need like a cool bird. What’s a cool bird? How about like an eagle? Like nah, it’s a little bit too metal-y. Falcon! It’s like a cool alt-rock animal. King Falcon was like the first or second name that we came up with for the project. Then I think we went through another 4-5,000 before we were like, you know, King Falcon was pretty good. Let’s go back to that one.
mxdwn: That’s awesome. I love it.
MR: And it works out because if anybody does look through, they’ll see that both bands are birds, and I just think that if you have the ability to do it, why not? It was just like a good opportunity.
mxdwn: No, for sure. How did the decision come along to add your drummer Tom Diognardi to King Falcon and move James to Bass?
MR: So, we can actually, we can cover that really quick. This is very new. Tom has actually left the band.
mxdwn: Oh, okay.
MR: We’re in the middle of looking for a new drummer, but that’s all good. We’ve got a couple people on the table, but really what happened was James wanted to move to bass because he is a tech guy, meaning he wanted to be able to work on the lights, to be able to work on the tracks. Being behind a drum set is a little confining and putting him on bass kind of allows him the space to do more of that, which is what his real strength is. Like James engineered the record and James also built our, like I said, our light show and all the tracks, so he kind of figured that he would shine more in a tech position and hey, the bass player has a little bit less to do than the drummer and it comes down to that.
mxdwn: Yeah, I get it. Can you share any of the drummers that you have on the table?
MR: Right now, he’s not a permanent member of the band, but he’s playing with us and he’ll be playing with us on January 27th, a very good friend of mine named Dave Roach. He’s a killer drummer and he’s a little bit older. He is a more seasoned guy. My favorite thing about him is that when he plays he just like flips the sticks around. I don’t know how he does it man, like he never drops them and he always just like butters it back there, and has been a friend of mine for a while. Really good dude. We do have a couple drummers that we’re thinking about in Nashville and we’ve got some plans and things, so we’re figuring it out. I think we may even have a rhythm guitarist, so we’ll see. Definitely big, big changes to come in the future, but really the creative core of the band has always been me and James. It will always be that way because James and I have been making music together since we were like 13 so we’re very accustomed to making music just the two of us. That’s kind of how King Falcon started anyway. I mean “Shake! Shake! Shake!” and “When The Party Is Over” were both just me and James, so we are technically the only two original members of the band and we’re still here.
mxdwn: Well, that’s great and you guys make amazing music together. Is there a reason behind releasing “Cadillac” from this album first then “Ready Set Go” and “Rabbit Gets The Gun?”
MR: So, I wish I could tell you that there was a great reason {laughs}. Ultimately, the order of the releases kind of came down to the label, but I will tell you that “Cadillac” is a very special song to me just because I feel like of all the songs on the record, that’s the one that most reflects me as a person. Number one, because it’s kind of fun and I think I’m kind of fun to hang out with sometimes, but also it’s a song about cars and it’s just like a really simple song, doesn’t take itself too seriously. That’s my favorite kind of thing. I’m a huge car guy, love old cars, and that song is actually about my best friend’s Cadillac. He has a 1957 Cadillac El Dorado, and I had heard about it for years, but I’d never seen it. Then one day he finally took it out and we got the thing running and there we are driving down the street with no plates, no registration, nothing, but it didn’t matter because it’s a 1950s Cadillac. It was bright red, it has big fins and it’s 19 feet long, and as I was driving this, I was just thinking about, I don’t know, going on this wild police chase and all the different kind of fantastical ideas that you have when you’re driving this car you look in the rear view mirror and you see all that, you know, Cadillac behind you. So, that song was just like really personal for me. Also, I wrote it during COVID and I started with just the bass part from that song and I just kind of sat there listening to the bass part every single day for like three weeks building a song around it. So that one, even though it’s the simplest, it kind of took me the longest to write. That’s the one song that was really kind of all me, like every other song was collaborative with James and some with Tom and some with writers, but “Cadillac,” I have the demo on my laptop, I made it on Garage Band and it’s pretty much exactly the same as the final version.
mxdwn: That song is very fun, and I can just tell by talking to you, you’re probably very fun to hang out with. That actually kind of answers my next question, but if you want to add anything to it, I was going to ask if you could tell me a little bit about the theme behind the song “Cadillac.”
MR: Yeah. I mean that’s really it. The cool thing about the music video is that the car in the music video is the actual car that the song is about, and the guy that you see driving it in the beginning is my actual best friend who owns the car.
mxdwn: Wow. That’s super cool.
MR: Yeah, if you watch the video, that’s really the car it’s about and that’s really the guy who owns it, so that’s just a little fun fact.
mxdwn: That’s cool, nice. “Set Me Free” might be one of my favorite songs off this album.
MR: Oh, thank you.
mxdwn: Of course, what was your inspiration for this song musically? Can you speak to the creative process behind it?
MR: Sure. That one really was kind of just about the ride of being a musician. I mean, you are on the ride of a lifetime and you’re getting by on a lifeline. I mean, this is not like a job that pays a whole lot of money, and it’s not very glamorous a lot of the time. I mean, obviously it seems that way, but you know, it’s only the few moments that you’re on stage. A lot of the time, it’s really just kind of dealing with a whole lot of stuff that you don’t want to deal with, and carrying gear and driving the van. But all of that is worth it in those few moments that you are playing in a state that is not your home state and there’s, you know, 200-300 people out there who are really excited to see you, that’s when you’re like, man, this really is once in a lifetime, right? So that song is just about our journey as musicians and I mean, it’s a story that’s been told before, but it’s our… it’s our take on it. I think everybody has their own different perspective on it, and that’s ours.
mxdwn: Awesome. I can totally see how it can be perceived as glamorous, but there’s definitely aspects that, you know, other folks do not see that definitely cannot be glamorous.
MR: It’s not all throwing televisions and stuff, it’s like a lot of talking to lawyers and doing shit that you don’t really want to do.
mxdwn: Yeah, exactly. You’re definitely not the first artist to say that as well, so I believe it. Is there a specific reference behind “Soul Sucker” as far as the lyrics go?
MR: Oh, yes. I love saying this at our shows, that song’s about Jeff Bezos.
mxdwn: I love it.
MR: We were sitting around, like let’s write a song about the dude from Amazon. Just like this big evil dark overlord who like, you know, controls your life. It kind of… it expanded into a bit about just like working at any job and hating that job and finding yourself at a point where you’re like, man, I’ve invested a lot of time, my life into this and no matter how much money I get paid, I’ll never get that back. It’s about a few different things, but the inspiration for that song was the dark evil overlord Jeff Bezos.
mxdwn: That’s hilarious. That’s too good. “My Name Is” is probably another one of my favorites off the album. Can you share what it was like to make and record that song and where it came from?
MR: Sure. That one has kind of a cool story. We wrote that one with Marshall and we wrote that one at Marshall’s studio in Nashville. What’s cool about that song is, I think that song more than any of the others, really has a Nashville sound to it. I mean, it has blues guitar, it’s kind of swampy. “My Name Is,” I will say that I have to give Marshall credit for coming up with the title and kind of the theme on that one. That was really just about like all of our shared experience with music. Not the experience of playing music, but just in music itself, listening to music, experiencing music. The punchline that you never get to in the song is that my name is music, you know? So, all of these different things are like peripheral ways to describe music, basically. It can be anything that you make it, so that’s kind of what the song is about. Sonically, sound wise, that song really has the most amount of you know, southern bluesy-ness to it. I think a lot of that is because we did most of the writing for that one in Nashville. It was funny, we also wrote “Ready Set Go” in Nashville. I’m not sure if you have this one on there, but “Ready Set Go,” was written in Nashville and that song is about New York. I always tell everybody, sometimes you have to leave home to write a song about home.
mxdwn: Yeah, that makes sense. That’s super interesting, and probably that bluesy element is why I like it so much, but yeah, that’s awesome. I didn’t have a question about “Ready Set Go,” so I’m happy to hear you just added that in there.
MR: I’ll just make one {laughs}.
mxdwn: That’s totally fine. That’s great. I love it {laughs}. So, “Go On” seems like the perfect song to be the closer for an album. Was it made specifically to be the last song?
MR: I don’t know that it was made specifically to be the last song. I think it was like the second or third to the last song that we wrote, so it just kind of ended up being later, but that one felt very final. As we were listening to it, like we listened to the album in sort of a bunch of different arrangements of songs, like different orders, and every time we got to “Go On” it was really hard to listen to something afterward. That song had a very final feeling to it, especially. So something cool about that, at the beginning of the song and at the end of the song, particularly at the end of the song, there’s a kick drum sound and the way that we got that kick drum sound, it’s actually the door of the studio getting slammed really hard and we put a microphone in front of it. So, the very last thing that you hear on the record do-do-do-do-do-do, door slam, it’s actually the door of our studio slamming. It kind of, in a symbolic way, it’s just like, there you go. You’ve come into the world and you’ve heard everything that we’ve made, and then like, that’s it. The door’s closed, studio’s out, like lights are off. That’s it. It felt very final in that way. Also, the nature of the song- I kind of got inspired to write the song when I was watching “The Sopranos” for the first time, which was like, I should have watched it a long time ago, but I just saw it a couple years ago for the first time. There’s the episode, hopefully you’ve seen it because it’s definitely a big spoiler here, but there’s the episode where Adriana gets killed, and it came as a result of… really a bunch of things. But earlier in the episode, it’s like her and Tony are driving back from wherever and they like flip the car and then a bunch of stuff happens, and that scene, that whole kind of sequence, is what brought the first lyric like ‘on this road alone just trying to get home’ you know? And that sort of unleashes this whole story of like, you’re never really going to get there because all this other shit happened. It’s sort of about that “Sopranos” episode, but it’s bigger than that. Just like our generation is, I always feel like we have to kind of catch up, you know what I mean? Like if you came here and you bought a house for $87 in 1950, life was just way different then. Now, our generation feels like no matter how fast you run, you’re kind of running to stay in place, so there’s a few different meanings there. To sum it up, the original idea for the song was inspired by a “Sopranos” episode, but as we were making it and kind of listening to it, it became a bigger thing, which was more about wanting to stay in place and that’s “Go On.”
mxdwn: Gotcha. That’s very interesting. It definitely feels, like you were saying, like it has a finality to it. It makes a great last song, I think. What do the songs released in 2022, “Shake! Shake! Shake!” and “When The Party Is Over” mean to you and the band? How did they help launch the band?
MR: So, “Shake! Shake! Shake!” was the very first King Falcon song that we ever wrote. We didn’t even have any demos before. I mean, we were like, okay, King Falcon cool, we have a name. What does King Falcon sound like? We had a big job on our plate, which was… we had to kind of pick what our introduction to everybody was going to be and what this project was going to be about and what it was going sound like. “Shake! Shake! Shake!” was really our first dip into modernizing The Inoculated Canaries. The Inoculated Canaries had long songs and a lot of different parts. We were like, okay, we want something that’s all hook, no fat, just meat, like right to the good stuff, and it’s going to be something totally different. If you listen to the entire Inoculated Canaries catalog, I don’t sing in falsetto once. There’s not one song in falsetto, and the very first King Falcon song, the chorus has a falsetto note, so just making everything as different as we can. We really differentiated the sound. That’s kind of how “Shake! Shake! Shake!” happened. “When The Party Is Over,” that’s a pretty deep one I think, for me. That one originally had a different set of lyrics. It was about… I had a student, well it was a family member of a student, but close enough to be a student, who overdosed on heroin and died. The original lyrics were about that, and the song was way darker. I remember we sent that one out to our A&R guy and he heard it and he was like, this is great, but it’s really dark, you kind of have to lighten it a little bit. Then COVID hit and we sort of rewrote the song about COVID, but the chorus was the same. Where do we go when the party’s over? And it just sort of lined up and that’s the song that got us our record deal.
mxdwn: Gotcha, interesting. I’m so sorry to hear about your friend though.
MR: Yeah, it’s tough man. He was young. He was 15.
mxdwn: Oh, wow. I’m so sorry. That’s so tough.
MR: So, I mean the chorus, where do we go when the party’s over- he overdosed at a party and everybody thought that he just kind of passed out, so they just left him there. So, the chorus went, where do we go when the party’s over, is like, well now the party’s over and everybody has to deal with the aftermath of this. That was the original chorus but again, that’s pretty heavy. So, we switched it when COVID happened to be like, hey, where do we go now that this, like we’ve all been having a big party of life and now, that’s over because of COVID, so it was a little bit lighter and a little bit more of an easier message to digest. But for me, I always remember the original one.
mxdwn: Yeah. I don’t blame you. I get that. Heroin’s a tough one, I’m so sorry about that.
MR: Thanks.
mxdwn: How does it feel to know that you’ve come so far from playing Guitar Hero and enrolling in the School of Rock to being signed to a label and touring? What are you most looking forward to in the future of the band?
MR: It’s crazy. It’s funny because when I was, you know, when you’re standing in front of your TV playing Guitar Hero, you’re thinking that, oh, as soon as I get to the point where I sign a record deal I’ll feel like a rock star, and now I’m getting to the point where we have a manager, we’ve got a record deal, we’ve got a record out, and I’m kind of still waiting for the point where I really feel like a rock star. But I think that’s more a matter of you really become aware of just how much work everything is and the movies don’t do it justice. It’s not like you sign something and then you get famous overnight because everybody loves your song so much or whatever, and that kind of fame is usually very fleeting anyway. It’s a lot of work, but it’s all worth it in those few moments that like… I’ll tell you, we played a show in Omaha, Nebraska, and there was a kid that came out to that show. He told us after the show that he made his dad drive four hours, they were somewhere else in Nebraska, because he saw us doing “Ready Set Go” on like TikTok, and he wanted to hear that song live. That was the first moment where I was like, okay, all of this stupid crap that I do is totally worth it, you know, that’s really the stuff. When I was playing Guitar Hero, I thought it was going to be, you know, getting an endorsement and getting whatever, but like, none of that stuff matters. The only thing that really matters is like when you play a show and you have an interaction with somebody like that, that’s real.
mxdwn: It is. That’s awesome.
All photos by Aldi Victoria
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