 Backroads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008. Name Kitchee Boogie. I live out in Pennington, Minnesota, and Kitchee Lake is right a mile away from me, and Kitchee Creek is right behind my house, and that's kind of how it came up with the name. Kitchee in Ojibwe means big, and so we're a big boogie band, Kitchee Boogie. And how did you guys become a band, like how did you guys meet each other? Me and Isaiah were roommates back in college, and we had a band back then called Anomaly that we started, and that went on for years here in the area, and I met Steve through Mutual Friends a long time ago, and me and Steve started jamming together at jam sessions and stuff, and then we eventually, after playing with different people, we formed this group that we've been doing now for, I don't know, probably like six years, and Isaiah joined us as a drummer two years ago. Most of the time we've been a four piece with different guys coming and going, and this summer we've been a three piece, and the songs are kind of set up that you can play with three people or with ten people if we can find a horn section, you know? We also started out playing covers, a lot of covers, but Shane has a lot of music that he had sketches of music and stuff that he had written and some finished pieces, and so we just kind of decided to not do many covers anymore, and so we started writing our own songs, Shane brought his stuff in, and with the band we got together, and we took pieces from other songs and stuff like that, so that's how our kitschy boogie became because we wanted to do our own music. Some of the songs come out of like jam sessions and stuff like that, oh that sounds cool, we recorded it, and then I will show up the next week saying, okay this is what we did and this is some words I have or something like that, and you know we've tried to encourage everybody to help out and write songs and stuff like that, we have so much material that we just can't wait to get it all down. Writing songs and being creative is what we like to do, so I bring in kind of an outline of an idea a lot of the time, not always, sometimes it's other members of course, and then these guys help me fill in because it's a group effort. You guys kind of have a blend of all different kinds of genres, how would you guys describe the kitschy boogie sound? We like a variety of music and we bring that to the table, I mean a lot of it is just could be called straight up rock and roll, but that even has different meanings to different people and to us rock and roll has bits of funk and blues and country and folk and whatever else you want to throw in there. We like playing different sounds because there's different people in the audience, it's big boogie. It's hard to put us in a real category, we'd be one of those bands that in the old days, old days, when you go to the record store, when there were one, and they had all the bins, you know they'd have a hard time finding which bin to put it in. Come to say our show, you're going to see something new, expect that, you know that's what we shoot for is not necessarily improv on the stage every night, but we don't want to play the same thing every time. So you're going to get a little bit of a different feel, this tempo is a little different, but genuinely the song is going to be in the same range as usual, but you're going to see something different and that's what we're shooting for. That's what kitschy boogie is, we are an original band and we like playing music that we wrote and it's a little tougher in the bar scene and that kind of thing where a lot of bars like to have, you know either a country band or a band that plays at the top 40s and stuff, but we like playing around music, bringing it to people and hopefully they'll enjoy it. We're always trying to come up with new stuff, if you heard our band three years ago, we're maybe playing a couple of those songs, doesn't mean they're not still in our repertoire, but we're always trying new things because some things work and some things don't. And once folks come to see us or hear our recordings a few times they start to recognize the songs and then of course that's how anything grows, you know, but with us expect us, if you see us six months later we better have three more songs because that's what we're trying to do. Roads is made possible by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money by the vote of the people November 4th, 2008.