Saint Motel

With a sound as blistering as a parking lot on the hottest day of summer and a tireless devotion to the gods of rock and roll, Saint Motel are an explosive, cinematic, indie-pop band, with an intriguing blend of mischief and sincerity. Breaking out with "Puzzle Pieces," brand new single "At Least I Have Nothing," and a boundary pushing, explosive live show, Saint Motel are moving full speed ahead with their light hearted melodies and roll around on the floor excitement.

After high school, A/J Jackson decided to study film to discover new ways of creative expression, at the same time knowing full well that music was the closest thing to his heart. At film school, he soon met guitarist A Sharp, and the two friends began discovering structural parallels between movies and songs and began to explore them. A Sharp, who had been classically trained both by pedigree???having a classical guitar mentor in both his father and grandfather???and by education, learning to play flamenco in the caves of Granada, Spain. He wanted to immerse himself in something besides notes and chords and training, and so the two met amid film screenings and lectures about light and sound.

The rest of the band came together easily, if not somewhat by chance. The two film students found bass player Dak, a former buddhist monk, working as the sushi chef at their local sushi bar, where he overheard them discussing their search for a bassist. They found out that he'd been in a rock and roll band back in Thailand, and enlisted immediately. Drummer Greg Erwin gave up a professional career in motorcycle racing, and moved to LA to pursue careers in music and stunt work. Having first learned about music from bagpipe sessions with his grandfather, he ended up meeting the band at one of their first Los Angeles shows.

Saint Motel is one of those bands so dedicated, they're willing to try everything???and anything-- once. Looking to transport listeners to the same sweaty, shaking, dangerous place they found at the punk shows of their adolescence, they do things like practice entirely in darkness and try and maintain eye contact with one another through entire sets. Their shows are filled with thrills for the senses including a video piano that is connected to various live cameras planted on stage and others wirelessly roaming around the venue.

As a songwriter, Jackson pulls from a variety of sources. When it came time to build "Puzzle Pieces" into a Saint Motel tune, Jackson recalled a conversation with a photographer friend, about a model with perfect features but an anything but perfect face. "She had the most beautiful lips and beautiful eyes and her nose was perfect but they didn't fit together on her face???I just thought that was magic." Reflecting this everyday magic in sweeping melodies and raucous performance is exactly what the band is all about. "Sometimes our shows are more ruthless than they need to be for the type of music that we play," Jackson says, "but that's exactly how we want it."