The Florists Q & A
By Tosin Faseemo
The Florists is a Minneapolis rock band composed of three UMN alums. Luke Michaels plays the bass and synth, Jo Kellen sings and plays the guitar, and Jared Hemming plays the drums. Read on to learn about the band’s unique perspective on live performances.
Q: How did you all meet?
Jo: Jared and I met doing stand-up comedy when we were students at the University of Minnesota. I knew Jared worked at Radio K. I just thought he was very cool, and we ended up winding our way into a jam session.
Jared: We knew right away it was going to be a silly band. I met Luke at Radio K. I DJed after him, so we would hang out at the end of his shift. I noticed that he had picked out “Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain” by Pavement, and I thought that was really rad. We got to talking about Pavement, and we were like, “We’ve gotta jam sometime!”
Jo: Then my first time meeting Luke was at the first Florists rehearsal. I had no idea ‘til we were playing music together.
Q: How did you guys decide on your band name?
Jo: I had wanted to name a band that since I was 15. I don’t know why. I think it’s funny when bands are named after occupations, or things that feel unintuitive.
Jared: I also just imagine an alternate universe version of us, like a sitcom version, where we all own a flower shop that’s also called The Florists.
Q: Like, where you each own your own flower shop?
Jared: No, we all own one collectively. And it’s about our hijinks running a flower shop. But then our secret identity is that we’re a rock band.
Q: On that topic, genre-wise, would you position yourselves as a rock band? Or are you more fluid with genre?
Jared: Quack punk?
Luke: Definitely a lot of honking.
Jared: Queer jock?
Jo: Yeah, queer jock. I usually open shows by saying, “we’re a rock band called The Florists.” I’ve just done that out of habit, but I would say we play rock music, but a lot of people find us difficult to categorize. We can be very heavy and noisy and wild one minute, and play a soft, melodic ballad the next. So I’d say the most consistent one would be noise pop. We’re a weird band with pop sensibilities.
Luke: We all like pop music a lot. Our tastes come through in the music in a really interesting way that has made it evolve from being a simple rock band. We all love a lot of different music and I think that shows in the music that we play. It samples a lot of different genres. But we are a rock band at its core.
Q: I’ve been to one of your live performances, and it was super crazy and fun! It was almost sort of theatrical. Is that intentional?
Jo: Yeah, absolutely. I think that a big premise that we have as performers and artists, is that the line between the performer and the audience should be blurred, and that acknowledging the performance of your own personality is a really fraught and interesting topic for art. We’ve had other stuff. We’ve had tap dancers on stage, we’ve done skits, we’ll do choreographed dances. We’re all trying to push those boundaries.
Jared: We have a character called Clancy the Pig.
Jo: I think that when we decide we’re done playing rock music, y’know, sometime in 2025, we’ll probably just all move to LA together and write a sitcom based on our life as a rock band.
Luke: To me, I feel like there’s nothing more boring than just watching a rock band stand still on stage. I think showing energy from the stage is essential if you’re expecting any energy from the audience, and interaction is such a huge part of that. I’ve always held onto that idea, that I’d someday play in a band that was more than just a simple rock band. The energy that we give off on stage is all based on our passion to see something exciting.
Jo: Yeah, it sucks to watch people who think they’re cool. I hate that. What makes someone cool is not their ability to follow a trend or their ability to project an image. It’s their ability to be themselves without apologizing. A lot of the band has been about us personally figuring out how to be Jo, Jared, and Luke onstage.
Q: When it comes to going to the studio and recording your music, how do you approach that? I feel like a lot of your performance has to do with interacting with people, so how is that different than when you go to the studio?
Jared: We’re working on a new album for 2020. One thing that was really great is, we were able to go on a 2019 summer tour in early August. We were on the road for two weeks playing the set every night, and then we immediately went to the studio a day after coming home and were able to record all the songs with a live feel. We had really played the crap out of them, so they were ready to be birthed into the world.
Jo: As you get to know a song better, you play faster. This is the first record that we have where there are only three songs that are over three minutes long. It’s all super fast and probably a little more punk than we intended. But I think that we all are perfectionists too, so when we come into the studio it’s really important to have the craft of the song down pat. So I think that was a part of the thinking behind touring all of the songs and then playing them in the studio. We try to capture what the live show sounds like. We track live; we don’t try to do multi-tracking. We do all of the instruments live, and then we do the vocals in the next take.
Luke: On top of that, the studio gives us so much more of an opportunity to... expand on our sound in a way that makes the records more interesting.
Q: When it comes to writing songs, what is that like? Is it more collaborative?
Jo: It depends. Usually, somebody is kind of coming in with an idea. Depending on who has what idea on which instrument they want to play, we build from there. We improvise a lot in rehearsal; somebody might land on some exciting melody that they want to explore. We’ll just intuitively write around it and play around it. Occasionally, that turns into a really awesome song. So it’s a mix; it’s all collaborative.
Luke: No one’s ever writing for someone else’s part. We all write what we play, so if I’m playing guitar, I probably wrote that guitar part.
Jared: I think, to some degree, when you’re working solo, you can get bogged down with your own ideas. When you have an idea that you bring to two other people who play completely different than you do, that song becomes a new thing. It becomes something that each one of us has a stake in emotionally.
Q: Does the fact that you all went to the U influence how you’ve been able to build up your band in Minneapolis?
Jared: Yeah, it was a really great built-in audience, because you’re instantly connected to so many fellow U people.
Jo: House shows, shows in Como, and Radio K, which is awesome. Then that stretches out too; we’ve had our music on The Current, we’ve had our music on college radio stations all over the country. It all starts there. It all starts from us throwing a show in Luke’s basement. That whole community is full of people who are just trying things.
Jared: I think I joined Radio K and The Minnesota Daily just to meet people that would form a band with me, and it worked out.
Q: Who is your greatest artistic inspiration?
Jo: Definitely John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats. His lyrics are really important to me; I write a lot of lyrics for this band. I love using words in both this way of thinking about how the words are going to activate a live crowd, and also in a traditional poetic way, where you’re constructing sentences that seem to access a catharsis that feels true. And I think that guy is the master of that.
Luke: It’s just hard to say one, because there are guitarists that I grew up listening to, like Kurt Vile and George Harrison, that really formed the way that I play guitar, but I wouldn’t say hold the same influence over what I do now. Deli Girls, Dreamcrusher, Prison Religion, all really cool New York bands and acts that are redefining punk music in a way that I think is much needed. It’s kind of strange how antiquated punk music can sound sometimes. When people breathe new life into it, whether it be with new instruments or a new way of approaching the music, that is some of the most inspiring stuff to me.
Jared: I love Dave Grohl because the man drums, but then turns out he can sing. I’m a big fan of Prince. He played all the instruments on his own records. I think that's really cool, and that adaptability is something that's really important to me.