 Hey everybody, welcome to Saturday Night Special. I'm here with Andrew. What's your last name Andrew? Yan Kowsky. Yan Kowsky from the band Zemmi Libre. We also have, tell us who the other guys are that we're about to see pretty soon. Yeah, we have David Butts with us on keyboards. We've Phil Mantis on bass. We have Andy on drums. We have Tim Washburn on guitar. I know Andrew Yan Kowsky. I say and I play guitar. So we're about to see Zemmi Libre playing some songs. We're going to come back after that. Talk about each song as we go. But Andrew, let's talk about how the band started. Like where were you guys from? Are you guys all from Maine? We all live in Maine now. I'm from Portland originally. Phil is from South Portland. Dave is from Hollywood, Florida. Andy is from White Plains, New York. And Tim is from South Shore, Massachusetts. So you guys met up kind of, or there was an interesting story in 2015. That's where you guys got. 2015, yeah. So it's been seven years. So originally Dave put out a Craigslist ad looking for a new band. He'd had a band named the Beat Horizon that he worked with for a while. I actually had played with the Beat Horizon with him since 2010. And we kind of split up after that for a little while. We all, our adults have kids and kind of move in our own way. So 2015 kind of get a call from Dave and say, Hey man, I'm putting this band together. I need somebody to write some lyrics and sing some songs. And here we are. Yeah, it was a kind of fortuitous. You guys had all played in a lot of different bands, but then you got together. And like what was, did you guys all have similar viewpoints of what the styles you like to play were? I think we all kind of were going at it as far as what are you guys writing? And we all liked what we were writing separately, bringing it together and kind of turn into an Afrobeat, Sky, Rock, or anything. We don't like to generalize ourselves, but we tend to, you know, just love what we do. Yeah, like a fusion of music. So the band is Zemi Libre, correct? So I had asked you before, like how did you come up with this name, Zemi Libre? Yeah, so before I joined the band, the guys put their, their ideas into a hat, they picked a name out of the hat and Zemi Libre became the name of the band. So Zemi is Czechoslovakian for Earth and Libre is freedom for Spanish and French. So we kind of want to mix the whole world together and we love everybody and everything and everybody's equal. I think I had said that a lot of times when you guys show up as Zemi Libre people are kind of like, who are these guys? They think it's going to be like, well, they have a hard time figuring out what our name is. It's like, remember the drink Zima? Yes. So Zima was this clear alcoholic drink back in the day in the 90s. Kind of like Pepsi clear used to be for, you know, kids that don't drink and so we get called Zima Libre a lot. You know, I'm a Leo, I'm a lion and you know, what do they call you? Zebra? You never know. My name is Andrew. They call me Anthony sometimes. Right. My last name is Yan Kowski and they throw it all around. Weird Al Yan Kowski, they think. Right. So let's talk a little bit about like making a new album because this new album, what's the name of the new album? We don't have one yet. It's a, it's a, it's directed towards a Scott Punk essentially and a little bit of reggae and we get generalized a lot as a reggae band. We do a lot of reggae fest, we love reggae music, but we're not necessarily a reggae band. We're a bunch of dudes from East Coast and, you know, we didn't grow up in Jamaica and I think that the genre of reggae needs to be authentic. And for us, I just love the music and I love to incorporate that in our music. So we do a lot of ska, which is, you know, part of reggae's origination. And for us, it's like I might wake up and write a love song. I might wake up and write an acoustic song. Dave might wake up and write an Afrobeat song. Andy might wake up and write a reggae song or Tim might write a funk song and then Phil's got the bass lines dropped or anything to do. Thank you, Andrew. We're going to be right back. We're going to hear a couple of songs and we're going to talk about those couple of songs and then we'll play a few more songs and then we'll go back again. So thanks a lot. That's great. Thank you. Let's have our Channel 5 resume grade. Thank you all for having us. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. We're back talking to Andrew and the guys in Zemmi Liberia back there doing their thing. So we're taking a little intermission from the songs and we're going to talk a little bit about some of the songs so we learn a little bit more about it. So let's talk about the first song that we listened to before, Andrew, called Soul Sniper. Like, who wrote that? What's it about? Tell me about it. Yeah, so Dave brought, I think, the bass of that song to us. I had the name for it and we were all like, man, that name's perfect. So usually if I didn't write the song and the guys bring me a song, I like to ask them what the song's about or what they have in their head. Especially what the title is. And so for me Soul Sniper was about basically a person in power that you're trying to take out. At the time, you know, I think that song was written in 2018. So some of us are political, some of us are not. So we tend not to write political music, but we might put something in the background. So a lot of us, if you listen to the lyrics, you know, he's waiting in the tower. He's looking at the man in power. You know, he's got that red light on his head. You know, what's going to happen to your neck? And it's not about any individual person. It's just about how people see other people in power, not in power. It could go one way or the other. And let's quickly go through a couple of the other songs and just talk about them too. I think the second song that you guys played was called What? Yeah, so What came from Tim. Tim's over there, so I'm looking at him. What? So originally, he came up with this funk song and said the name was What. So What became the lyrics of, you know, what you wait in there, standing there, wasting my time, you know? And so we all kind of collectively in the background, you know, What at each other. And before the end of the song, you'll hear me start yelling What, you know? So it's just something that's kind of what we like to do. Yeah, and I know there's one song called Rewind. Yeah, so that's actually an Andy song. Forever, we're all like, you know, please bring songs in. We want you guys to all, you know, do your thing. And Andy is actually our second drummer, although he's our permanent drummer. Our original drummer, Chris, was awesome. He decided to go a different way and we found Andy again through Craigslist ad. He moved here from White Plains, New York. We got very lucky. He's in another band called West Meets West out of New York. It's a national band that actually signed by a European band. And we got lucky to kind of steal him away while COVID happened. So yeah, we love what he's done. And it actually expanded our mind a little bit more into more psychedelic reggae and adding more delays to some of the stuff and getting a little bit more authenticated. And I think we were going to talk about one more of the songs. And then we're going to jump back into the last couple of songs. Tuillo? Yeah, so Tuillo is essentially you and I. My wife's from Puerto Rico. She speaks Spanish first language. And for me, that song, I can't remember who came up with the riff. Was it Dave? Was it me? Oh, okay. Apparently I came up with the riff. And for me, Tuillo was essentially watching people coming into another land and taking over. And that land had been destroyed. But people that had been destroyed or watching Tuillo, you and I coming in to kind of save them. Not as any religious figure, not as any hero figure, but as two people in the distance that you're kind of watching come in and you have hope finally. You've been kind of waiting for forever in this demolished state. And Tuillo, you and I came in and tried to help and save. Yeah. You never know what we might come up with. Exactly, exactly. There's a lot of things. So without further ado, let's go back into seeing the guys play a little bit more. And we'll come back. We'll just talk about the last couple of songs. But it should be a good time. Thanks a lot. Thank you. Thank you so much Channel 5 Portland. This is a brand new song for you called Take Me Alive. Coming out soon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Back with Zemi Libre. We're going to talk about the last couple of songs that they just played. I think the first one to take me alive is actually... Yeah, that's right. Take Me Alive is our brand new song. Okay. As we were writing our COVID album, the initiative, Dave and I sat in my house in Harperswell and we did a whole bunch of extra songs. And one night he was probably two in the morning. He gave me my guitar and said, just play me something. So he turned on the recorder and next thing you know, I started playing this Take Me Alive song. So that was about what, almost two years ago. Recently we were just, I was kind of regurgitating some songs and we started rehearsing again. Thank goodness. We kind of took the song out and all of a sudden we were just like, the song is great. We love it. For us to be like, oh, the song is kind of cool and let's push it so quickly. It was kind of like, you know, we have a lot of back burner songs that are great. I will say that. It's a good feeling to have, to have a back bench of songs that are good too. It's cool. But to be able to have the whole band be like, all right, we're pushing this one forward. It was great. And you know, you can't take me alive, but time's going to take me alive as we're getting older and we're having kids and we're not having kids. We have dog families and we have wives and everything. It's like, you know, you can't take me alive, but as I'm getting older, I'm just going to allow time to take me alive. Okay. Okay. So kind of philosophical song. Yeah. You know, sometimes you got to bring out your emotions and kind of think a little deeper to how, you know, you feel intuitively, you know, without having to dig too deep. Yeah. Yeah. I get it. And then there's another song you guys play, the Pretty Boy. What should we know about that song? So Pretty Boy is a Dave song. I like to call it a Dave song because I think Dave's played that song in every band that he's played in since either the late 90s or early 2000s. I love this song. I played this song with him in another band that we played in called The Beat Horizon. It always has a different feel with each band. It has different lyrics, but now it's what I call it's permanent. Zeme Libre has finalized his song. You found that all of the ingredients are in the mix at this point. Yeah. If he has another band and plays a song, you know, this is actually going to be on our next album coming up. It will be. So we're actually going to record it. Yeah. And we're not going to let him move it along. So look for the album coming up. And we should be able to hear this album maybe by next fall or something. Yeah. I hope so. We tend to kind of bust them out. We're going to go to the studio. We have a main music mill that we're going to be dealing with. We're Andy Works and Brunswick. Brunswick, right. We do with Katie and Music Studios in Portland, which we probably won't be there this time, but we love those guys down there. Cool. Aval Adams has been recording us for years down there. Yeah. But we're looking forward to getting back into the main music mill and it's close to my house. So instead of having to come to Portland, I get to drive, you know, 10 minutes to the recording studio rather than 45 down here. You're the guy that's closer too. So I know there's two more songs that I wanted to talk about. Scorn was one of them. Yeah, for sure. So Scorn has some awesome meaning. So I, you know, we all have Xs, right? Sometimes we all just don't like the Xs at the end of the scene. So Scorn is essentially my evil dealing with the person that I don't want to deal with anymore. I'm a pretty kindhearted person. Sometimes you got to let it loose, right? So this was like my one angry song that I chose to write. He got his revenge in lyrics, not in any way else. You got to do what you got to do. Exactly. And the last song I think that you had played was Wash Them Out. What's that song? So Wash Them Out again is going to be on our next record as well. It's another song we've kind of had in the back burners for a little bit. But as we've all played it together, we found different parts that work really well. And so playing it live, it's kind of become a really fun, exciting tune. We play a lot of mellow, not mellow, but reggae shows. So people are just hanging out at that check-in and check-in and having a good time. So we like to kind of switch that up. We like to kind of play mellow for a second and then hit your eight in the face. I want to thank Zebbey Libre for coming down here to the Portland Club. I want to thank the Portland Club for letting us play here. It was a good time. I hope you guys all enjoyed it. Have a great Saturday night. Take care. Thanks so much. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go.