The brothers olds - guitarist/keyboardist/vocalist Solomon "Soul Glow Activator," drummer/vocalist Jasob "Crouton," and bassist/vocalist Joshua "Fatty" - have conceived a pretty tight light outfit. Calling themselves Family Force 5, the trio of Atlanta, Georgia-born siblings have rolled together funk, punk, R&B, hip hop, and straight up pop to create what they call crunk rock, a dance-'til-you-drop style of rhythmic music leaning heavily on old Beastie Boys, Prince, and James Brown. Their debut album titled Business Up Front/Party In the Back delivers this contagious groove on tracks like "Replace Me" and "Lose Urself" and reveals not only this wild party atmosphere but also the intriguing fact that these boys can play. The tracks are locked in and dive and soar on great sweet beds of 808 drums and popping bass.
Solomon explained the concept of FF5 to Ultimate-Guitar recently. He also told us that his brothers and remaining musical posse (Nathan "Nadaddy" Currin on turntables/keyboards and Derek "Chap Stique" Mount on guitar) are Christians and what they play is a decidedly different brand of religious music. While Christians tend to be overzealous and quite honestly, overbearing, in their beliefs, the guitar player was a down-home, good 'ol boy with his head screwed on tightly and not a sermon in sight. Read on as he preaches the Olds testament gospel?
Ultimate-Guitar: I'm intrigued by the concept of the band. Is this a musical idea that gradually morphed over time? You looked at your influences and thought, "This is where we should go"? Or was this something that was hatched overnight?
Solomon Olds: I think it's a little bit of both, man. I mean, whenever you set out to go, "Let's program this music to make it sound like many sounds and blah, blah, blah," you just kind of blow it out. I mean, we get that a lot. They're like, "Man, this is really weird music" or "This is really different, from left-field." So it's just not that way. It's just that's how it comes out. You know what I'm saying? It's our interpretation of all the influences we've ever had, and somehow blend them all and stuff. We draw from a lot of different stuff and we love all that stuff. We were like, "Why can't we just roll it all into one?" There's a few bands that tried to do that, but can't. I mean, it sounds like they're trying too hard. We wanted to make sure that it didn't sound like we were trying too hard, and that itsounded very natural and it sounded really cool and together.
Who are some of these bands that you think tread in this territory?
Successfully or unsuccessfully?
Well, I don't want you to bash anybody, but I'm curious as to what your take is on it. Who do you think attempted this but didn't quite pull it off?
As far as national acts, I wouldn't know. There's just a lot of acts that we've played with over the four years as being locals and stuff in Atlanta and stuff. They would do the rap thing and then they would do the rock thing and try to put the electronica and stuff together. It just didn't mesh well for some reason. I don't know why it didn't. Maybe they couldn't find the cohesiveness or whatever. I don't know, that might be a George Bush word. It just didn't gel. It just sounded like it was that trying to be something else. Like I could tell you a good example of what did, like bands that do pull that off and are huge influences for us. Like The Beastie Boys, they pull it off. They were able to totally be ghetto rap during the 80's and then they had their kind of punk rock phase during the 90's and stuff. They blended it very, very well. Same thing with Rage Against the Machine. They're a huge influence on us. And they were able to take this really, really funky rhythm and mesh it with kind of Public Enemy style kind of rap. But at the same time, be really angry with their guitars and doing all the really crazy synthesizer stuff that's not really synthesizers. It's guitars. Those are bands that do that kind of stuff now on an electric side of things like The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk. Those bands, they've got these sounds that are just stankin' on their own and they've morphed into their own thing. That's kind of what happened with us. But sometimes it's sad to see bands that we'll play with that try to do that, but it doesn't come off as?.I don't know, it's just something about it. Maybe it's because there's three brothers in this band and we all know how to work together and we all kind of think alike or whatever. I don't know what it is, but for some reason kids dig it. So we're gonna keep doing it.
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| "Guitar's my first love, but my mistress is definitely keyboards." |
Do you get a chance to talk with some of these bands that you tour with? Will they ask you about your music and how you did it?
We'll play with a band like that and they'll be like, "Man, you know?" Most of the time, it's in their beginning stages, so I don't want to like bash on them too hard. You know what I mean? But they didn't quite figure it out. And it took us a minute to figure how to pull it off live. Because we were like, "How are we gonna do this live, you know? There's a lot of stuff going on." But we finally did and we got a DJ. My best friend from college, I got him to be my DJ/keyboardist.
What's his name?
His name is, his stage name is Nadaddy. His gangster, Atlanta name, that's what I like to call it. But yeah, we pulled it off live and we were able to do that. And then my brother plays the drums. And for some reason, like ever since we made him play drums, we used to make him like practice to like Prince. For some reason, he locked up incredibly to the groove and that's hard to do. There's a lot of drummers that are incredible technical drummers and can do fills all day. But my brother for some reason is a pocket drummer and he locked up incredibly with whatever grooves that we programmed. That's really impressive. To me, it's real cool with to work with in the studio.
And then your other brother plays bass, correct?
Yeah, he plays the bass, and I play the guitar, and I've got another guitar player.
That's the first thing that I picked up on, was how tight the rhythm section really was. For you guys to pull this kind of stuff off live, the drums have to just be perfect. Will songs get borne from rhythmic figures and grooves?
Like are you asking how the band creates our songs?
Yeah, I guess I am.
I do primarily the first-off songwriting stuff. You know, I love guitars and so I'll just put like a simple beat that I've got on the computer in our little sampler or something and play it through a speaker or whatever. And use the acoustic guitar, which is always tuned down to D.
The drop D tuning is a big part of the FF5 sound?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It definitely is. Sometimes I get a drop C and stuff. And we try to come up with something that either will go off of a guitar riff or I'll have a lyrical concept or a hook melody. For some reason, I get all my hook melodies in the shower. I don't know why. I take a shower and I'm like, "I've got it! I've got it!" Then I'll put on a beat or whatever, and most of the time I've got the format laid out in my head. I mean, it comes off of that and it comes off of jamming. Like during sound checks and stuff, we'll just jam on like some really funky thing that I'll start with my Telly. And then my brother will start playing the beat and then my other brother will come in with the bass. And then Nadaddy will come in with the synthesizers and then my other guitar player will start like a kind of weird lead on top of it. So it comes from all different directions and stuff. There never has been like a "this is how we write a song and if anybody strays away from it they will pay the ultimate price."
You mentioned a Telly as part of your guitar setup. Can you describe why you use the Telly as this sort of funk instrument? And also, could you address the other guitars you used on the new album?
Oh, yeah, yeah. The Telecaster, I just love the real bitey sound of it and stuff. I don't know, it's such a personal guitar. You could play really, really funky like Prince, like really spanky kind of this real funky chicken pickin' kind of stuff with the guitar. But at the same time, if you want to crank it up through like a Mesa Boogie, which our sound is, then we'll put that on there. We'll do a couple of tracks of that guitar and then we'll do a Paul Reed Smith. We'll do a couple of tracks with that. And then just put some kind of crappy sounding guitar in there, too, to bring out some other texture. Like I've got this old, not as a crappy but like a cheesier tone, I've got this Ovation Breadwinner and it just, it just sounds weird. It looked cool as heck. It's a great-looking guitar, but it just sounds weird. The cool thing is, if you match that up with these different guitars and stuff, you get those different textures. So you get a full audio spectrum on your guitar sound and stuff. But we used a Telly, and that Ovation Breadwinner. We used a Paul Reed Smith and then I used my Explorer, my old Explorer that I got on the record.
What year is that Explorer?
It's an '84 and it's like a NAMM version of the Explorer. Because everybody's like, "Oh, you painted all these stripes on there." And I was like, "No, this came from the factory." I saw it online one day. I was like surfing around on the Internet and I was like, "That is hideous looking. I've gotta get it." It had this Van Halen looking stripes on it and I had to get it. I called up about it and they were like, "Yeah, it's $1,200 bucks." And I was like, "Ah, whatever. I can't afford it now." I come in like nine months later because nobody's gonna buy it. And so I got them down to like $600 bucks and they sold it to me. I plugged it in and, man, it just sounded, it's a monster, dude. It sounds huge. The kids love it because they're like, "Oh man, look how cool it looks!" It's vintage and part of the 80's metal heritage.
And what about the Telly?
It's a '52 Reissue American.
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| "In our sound, which we call "crunk punk" punk rock, you've got a Roland TR 808 drum machine kind of thing." |
And what kind of acoustics do you play?
We play Taylor.
What kind of Mesa Boogie do you use?
Dual and Triple Rectifiers. They're really great amps. They're versatile; they're ten times as loud as Marshalls. But at the same time, I love the sound of a Marshall. We did a lot of that on the record. And then we did this like, for the verse in the "Kountry Gentleman," we did like my Telly through like these cigarette pack amps. They're like little cigarette packs and they've got like maybe a one-inch speaker on it, and it just sounds, like you know, ratty. To get that kind of tone, we did it through there. On "Kountry Gentleman," one of the huge octave lines that we put under there for the guitar, we ran it through an old, old Fender Tweed, like, little combo amp and it was huge. More than anything that we could get out of a Marshall that was in the studio. And we were like, "Golly, this little amp is killer!"
That's the Jimmy Page theory of using mike placement rather than big speaker cabinets to create a huge guitar sound.
There's people that are like purists and they're like, "All I have to have is a Marshall and my Les Paul." And there's great tones of great records that sounded like that. But if there's something different that you want to do, I mean you know, that's why we do some stuff direct and that's why we use some different miking techniques. Like we did this last track on our record called "Replace Me" and we recorded those freaking guitars in the van. We used a guitar plug-in called Amplitube. And then did a couple tracks of Mesa right when we got home and it ended up sounding like some of the best guitars, I think, on our whole record.
Are those the huge guitars after the chorus?
Yeah, the "twah-duh-duh?" Yeah, we did a couple tracks of Amplitube and then two tracks of Paul Reed Smith through the Triple Rectifier, and it just sounded huge. Then when we went to do the lead stuff with my guitar player, we did like a chorus pedal just going crazy nuts. Then he had that going first and then he went through a (DigiTech) WH1 whammy pedal, the original one, doing all the lead stuff with that.
Those are all those weird sounds on the solo section?
Yeah, yeah. Like the "RAAAHH!!" The real weird phased-out sound and stuff. He put it on Detune. We did some weird chorus, real slow chorus, and then we put the whammy on Detune, the real, real deep Detune. And he did a couple dive bombs with the pedal, too.
What kind of guitar does Derek play?
He plays the Paul Reed Smith.
That chorus on "Replace Me" is kind of a straightforward rock chorus. Would you agree with that?
Yeah, yeah. It's definitely what we were aiming for. It was the last song that we recorded on the album. We recorded it back in December of last year. The record company, they were a little afraid of it. They were like, "Man, this sounds like your second record or something." It's very different at the same time. But I was like, "Look, you know what? If it is, then it will be the intro to the next record." But it ended up being a great song for us. Everybody loves it live and it just landed on Madden 2007 The Game. That's like the top-selling game that gamers can get. And it might even become a single. So we're excited about it. We came up with a riff and I was like, "Man, this is so like old-school Judas Priest sounding." It's got this old-school vibe, but new tone to it. And it worked all at the same time. It was like we were trying to put Judas Priest, The Cure, and, I don't know, OutKast together at the same time. And somehow it worked. Kids seem to love it.
On a track like "Love Addict" there are the big guitars and then it goes into that breakdown and there are those weird effects on the vocals and stuff. Tell me how a track like that would have been built.
Well, I built that off of a, basically?As sure as hip-hop is, you'll always have, especially in our sound, which we call it "crunk punk" punk rock, you've got an (Roland TR) 808 drum machine kind of thing. So I programmed a simple, simple beat on the 808. And then I started messing around. I had this riff idea with the guitar. So I take the 808 and let the loop play, and I started off with that riff in drop D. And I was like, "This riff is so stinking simple and so Cro-Magnon man to me." It translates to kids and, you know, the more simple we started writing our songs, the more kids got into it. I was like, "You know, I'm just gonna make these songs as simple as I can make them." So we started off with that and I started playing this acoustic with it. I got the form down, did the breakdown how it was, and then we started looking for tone on the guitars. And you know, we started writing all the lyrics and stuff and having all that. But then we were looking around for guitar tones. And we tracked a Paul Reed Smith on it like screaming through a Mesa Boogie. And for some reason I was like, "This just doesn't sound right." Like the Mesa on all our other songs, it sounded great. But for some reason, this song, I don't know, it just didn't have the grit that I wanted it to.
We had two tracks of that so what ended up in the mix was just one track of it. So I took the Breadwinner and I did these single lines direct through this really old pedal called the Roland BG Pedal, before they came Boss. And it's this just nasty little crappy pedal that has so much noise in it. It just sounded like death becomes whatever. It sounded like a little monster coming out of there and it sounded cool. So I paired that up with the Mesa, and it just had that really hard, harsh overdrive. But at the same time it's warm and fat and stuff. So I was like, "Wow!" I put a synthesizer beneath it that had the same grit and grain about it, and it came off really well. And I was like, "Wow, this thing's really cool."
What kind of keyboard?
It's like a Juno 6, uh, Juno 60, kind of in that Roland family.
You also play keyboards?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do pretty much all the keyboards on the record and I do all the programming on the record. Most of the guitar riffs are all made by me and then I get my guitar player to play them and stuff.
Do you ever compose on keyboard? Like chord changes or that kind of thing?
I mean, I'm all right at keyboards and stuff. Guitar's my first love, but my mistress is definitely keyboards. You know what I'm saying? 'Cause I love the way synthesizers sound and stuff. So I guess I've got equal love for both parts. I'll compose a couple of things on keyboards and stuff, but most of the time I'm doing stuff on guitar because I just know that that's what our sound is and that's where it lies. The guts of Family Force 5 is in the guitar sound.
What about a song like "Use Yourself"? Is that a bass guitar or is that a bass keyboard?
That's a bass guitar, the slap bass part. That part is actually a sample that had been cut up a lot. It was like this sample of The Stooges playing like crazy and stuff. And I was like, "Maybe if I just chopped it down a little bit." We did that and then we put another synthesizer bass on top of it. It ended up sounding really, really cool.
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| "It's our interpretation of the influences we've ever had, and somehow blend them all." |
That guitar in the chorus, it's like "the Good, the Bad and the Ugly type of a tone." That Italian Spaghetti Western thing.
We were working with Butch Walker, and he played all the guitars on that. And I was like, "Look, this is how I want it played and stuff." You know, I was like, "I want the melody to be played, but I want it to be played almost like a Depeche Mode-kind-of-sounding tone, where it's all low." Instead of playing way, way up high, it almost had that Spaghetti Western vibe about it. Because you've got "Personal Jesus" by Depeche Mode, and it's got that toney vibe. The lick going, "doing-diddle-did?" We wanted to kind of go for that and he nailed it. He played a 335 screaming through a Twin. And that's all it was.
Who produced the album?
Me and about three guys. Me and Butch Walker did the three tracks that he did. Me and another guy named Jim Barber, who worked on Ryan Adams and Courtney Love's record. And then me and my partner up in Nashville, a guy named Joe Baldridge, we worked on the majority of the rest of the record. I just found him, and he's a guy that I've known forever and the record company liked him. It was cool 'cause they were like, "Well, should we get a bigger name and blah, blah, blah?" He's the man. All the singles that they're wanting to use is all the ones that he and I did. It's really cool.
"Put Your Hands Up" is more of like a keyboard track?
Yeah, there is a lot of keyboards. We started that song off as like a really, really heavy kind of thing. But for some reason, Butch Walker, he produced that track, and it just wasn't gelling. I kept playing on his little Wurlitzer out in the studio and he's like, "Why don't we just use that thing in there and whatever?" So we started it off with that little Wurlitzer and it kind of built up around that. My brother started playing a real funky beat and he wanted the drums real dry. He put like a wallet on top of the snare to make it really stinking crack. And then we had like two days left, so I had to like go home and think about a riff that I could do on top of it that wouldn't get in the way of the little Wurlitzer. Because it's a very syncopated riff. So I went home and I was just like, "Man, keep it simple still." So I dropped down to C and did a simple, simple line, and put a synthesizer bass underneath it, too. And a big bass underneath it, too, to give it that big bottom end. And it ended up working. It's a hilarious track and all the sounds, we fell in love with everything. There's those great guitars and then there's the, we call it the teen wolf synth, the one that's like "nnhhh."
Were you listening to records by Prince and Beastie Boys to hear how those guitar players were playing? To hear how the actual guitar parts were orchestrated?
Yeah, I mean me and my brothers, I mean growing up in Atlanta, we come from a very, very rhythmic background. My dad was like a smooth jazz, R&B musician through the 80s so me and my brothers are schooled on black music from about 1971 to 1984. We've got a pretty good musical knowledge of funk and R&B because that's all my parents listened to. That's like where our roots lie. And then we discovered rock n' roll around 14 to 15 with Nirvana and Foo Fighters and stuff. We'd listen to a ton of music. It wasn't just like us being metalheads or us just being rap kids. We listened to everything. My dad taught us well. He made us listen to that at the same time, but we were really huge Beatles fans at the same time when we were little. We loved the Beatles' tracks, the way it worked. They're just perfect little three-minute songs that are just, the guitar parts are amazing and the solos, they're all really simple. And we wanted to keep it that way. I don't know if this band could ever pull off what Rush does. You know what I'm saying? It's a very simple, rhythmic band, where the rhythm is the leader. And that's what's so prominent in black music, especially Prince, Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine. Tom Morello is like a huge, that's my guitar guy. Yeah, and Jimmy Page. Those are my guys. People are like, "Who are your guys that you listen to as far as guitar?" It's like those two guys are the biggest influence on me. Their riffs are so sick and powerful and so heavy. I don't know. I'd love to meet any one of those guys. Or Prince. I'd probably fall over from that.
You mentioned your dad earlier. Your dad was a Christian artist and had records out. Were you there when he would record? Did you go into the studio with him?
Yeah, I had musical interest at the age of 6. So anytime my dad was in the studio, if I wanted to be there or not, I had to be there. As a little kid, it was interesting. But then you know, when I got like 12 or 13, it became really interesting. I was like, "Wow! What are you doing down there? I wanna see." And then we started working on a project when we were little as young kids. Like a Bobby Brown, hip-hop act, me and my brothers. Yeah, so we pursued that and played in front of big crowds and stuff. That's kind of how we got our live feet under us. And then we discovered right about that time, Nirvana came out and the huge grunge explosion and stuff. That stuff was cool because kids my age that are now making music and stuff, they could all play that. The cool thing about Nirvana was that it was simple enough that kids could play it. And so me and my friends would go down to their garage and jam out. Then me and my brothers started, you know, playing with different stuff. We bought a mini-disc player I think one time, right when they first came out. My dad had one. And that's when I started taking all his old records that I constantly listened to and burned them onto mini-disc and play them for my brother for him to jam out. We'd just jam on top of like Controversy by Prince or something like that. You know, not playing the same parts, but doing the best that we can to stay in the same key. Because all of it is was in one, so we were like, "Let's play all these really funky things around it." My brothers, they got CDS and stuff, but I was into records I think. I didn't buy my CD player until I was like 17 or 18. I just listened to old vinyl the whole time. I'd go down to Wax and Stax down in Atlanta, Georgia, and whatever album came out that I liked, I made sure I got it on wax. I don't know, there's something about it.
What does your dad think about what his sons are doing now?
At first he didn't understand it, just musically. He was like, "Man, that's a lot of ideas in one thing. You know?" I was like, "You're right it is. But you know, it's something we want to do." We fought about it for a little bit when we first started out and stuff. Because it's right as we're moving out of our dad's house and him being a musician and having a little success under his belt. He was totally not for it until his studio friends?I was working on a project with him, just like engineering one of his projects like at 19 or 18. And it was just when we first started kind of writing all this kind of stuff. His colleagues were there, like a drummer and producer and stuff. I was like, "While my dad is going to get iced tea, can I run my project by you guys? Just to see what you think?" And they loved it. They were like, "Man, this is incredible. What is this?" I'm like, "I don't know. It's just something that we're doing and it comes out this way. You know what I'm saying?" Then he started to get it slowly. Then we started playing live and he saw that kids are getting into it. Once we started pressing demo CDs, it wasn't just kids that were getting it, it was older generations getting it, too. So I mean, we'll have a demographic of like 13-year-old people all the way up to 35-year-old people that'll say, "Hey man, I love your music." It's a wide demographic to have and we're blessed that it's not just 13 to 18. We do have a young crowd, but we still have a lot of kids that go, "Man, I can't find any music that me and my parents listen to. And for some reason, they like your stuff." We like that because we feel the same way about OutKast. Like in Atlanta, everybody loves OutKast. And it seems like all over the world everybody loves them, it's not just kids, college-aged, it's everybody. Everybody can relate to that for some reason. It has that rhythmic funk quality, but at the same time, you can rock out like it's gonna appeal to the Judas Priest fans with the mullet. You know what I'm saying?
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| "We have a demographic of 13-year-old people all the way up to 35-year-olds that like our stuff." |
Talking about loud guitar music, FF5 is part of the Warped tour?
Yeah, we just went into the Warped Tour like about a week ago, so we're very excited about that. Maverick (the band's label) was very excited. We just saw our first tour bus yesterday. We've been riding in a van all our life, so we've never ridden in a tour bus. So yesterday we got to see it and we were like, "Oh, this is great!"
Who are some of the bands on the Warped Tour with you?
Man, to be honest, I haven't even seen it. But I'm sure it's gonna be like Reliant K., I think it's gonna be like Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Further Sees Forever, you know, a bunch of punk bands.
Musically, do you feel a connection with those kinds of bands?
We do really good with the punk crowd because?I mean this is how I describe it. Two weeks ago we played with Hoobastank, right? And we did this thing called CD USA and it was a live television thing. And people, they call us rock or punk or whatever. They just kind of give us whatever label they wanna give to us. And Hoobastank comes on, and to me, they're straight-up rock and stuff. And then we went on, and the show and the way it looked and the way it sounded, was a little bit more raw and edgier than Hoobastank. It had a more punk quality to it. So we call it crunk punk now. So it's very party-oriented, very rhythmic stuff, but at the same time, it's got all the contingents of punk rock about it. Punk is definitely a sound as it's a culture now. It's not just The Ramones and The Sex Pistols. It's the whole attitude and the way you play stuff.
The attitude and focus of the band is centered on a Christian ethic. Christian acts tend to let their listeners know that they are a Christian act. Why do you think that is?
The way we say it, people ask us if we are a Christian band and stuff. And I say, "Look, we're Christian guys that play rock n' roll." We're not trying to force our faith on anybody. It is a big part of our lives and it comes out in our music, too. But in the real scheme of things, people really don't care. They want to listen to good music. My problem is, a lot of Christian music is horrible. I'm not very attracted to it. But for some reason, the bands that have come out of the Christian music scene that we tended to like, always seemed to go pop. They end up being those pop bands like Switchfoot. Me and my brothers, we went and saw P.O.D. seven years ago and we were like the only five kids standing in the concert hall there watching this band. And then P.O.D. blows up and it's because they're Christian guys, but they make real music. You know what I'm saying? And it's good music. I think there's a movement of these Christian-based kids that you're gonna have because there's a ton, like Emery, Sixpence None the Richer, Switchfoot, Under Oath. I mean those guys are kicking butt right now. A lot of those kinds of bands that we play with are way better than the bands that I see that are in the whatever, secular market.
When you're on the Warped Tour and you see the people drinking and doing their thing, you can still appreciate that they can be part of an audience for FF5?
Yeah, I mean, when they find out that we're Christians and stuff, it's really cool. And for Christians to embrace us and stuff, that's really cool. But at the same time, we played clubs. That's all we ever play and stuff. So it's not a huge thing to us to see people partying it up. That's an everyday thing that we see. We necessarily don't go that route with whatever we do, but you know, people wanna have a good time, they can have a good time. But at the same time, we're not, you know, encouraging that. We're just encouraging that we're playing great music, and if they want to dance and get crazy to it or whatever they want to do, it's whatever. We love all kinds of people. I don't care if they're Christians or they're not Christians. They're people to me.
2006 © Steven Rosen
/ my profile 
