Getting to Know… Motel Breakfast | Interview 🎤

For the 165^th interview in our Getting to Know… series, we get some awesome insight from Midwestern band, Motel Breakfast. 

“We know we are not reinventing the wheel. However, we also know that the five of us coming together in a performance has a certain intangible chemistry…”  Cool 🎙 Motel Breakfast, cool! Prior to that, the esteemed band that highlights our 165^th Q&A characterize themselves as “five dudes playing rock (or rock-adjacent) music, writing songs that reflect how we experience and process the world.”  Intriguing by all means. As always, the interview experience proves to be quite rewarding as we get the scoop from this compelling fivesome (🎙 Conor Brennan, 🎙 Jim Drenovsky, 🎙 Mick O’Donnell, 🎙 Jesse Nasadowski, and 🎙 Drue deVente).  So, without further ado, here is 🎤 Getting to Know… Motel Breakfast: Interview No. 165.

Starting things off right, for those who may not be familiar with Motel Breakfast, what would you say makes your band distinct or unique? How do you rock the audience’s socks off?

🎤 Well, let’s start off with what’s not unique. Motel Breakfast is five dudes playing rock (or rock-adjacent) music, writing songs that reflect how we experience and process the world. We know we are not reinventing the wheel. However, we also know that the five of us coming together in a performance has a certain intangible chemistry, and the music feels exciting and energetic when we are making it as a unit. That energy comes across in our live shows especially, where we are confident, we can win people over from the engagement displayed with each other and the crowd. Our recorded output, especially on the two releases from 2020 (💿 Motel Breakfast and 💿 Left on Deming), has really started to embody that chemistry and reflect our performances well.

Okay, let’s explore some juicy backstories. How did Motel Breakfast form and what were some of the goals or the visions you had as a band early on?

🎤 We’ve had a few different iterations while forming. Mick and I [Jim] started playing together as a two-piece in 2014 when we were both finishing high school. Over the next couple years, we added Jesse and Conor to the group, and in the back half of 2017 we named ourselves “Motel Breakfast”. We recorded the first few songs we’d written for a debut EP that came out in December of 2017, and then spent the next couple years setting up shows as much as we could across the Midwest. Drue played with us for a few shows on bass in 2018 before he officially joined the band in the summer of that year, rounding out our five members.

The original goal was just to play music with our friends as much as we could. Once we had found that first unit of friends to make music with, then the aim was to record and release a project of our own – since not a lot of original music was being made in our neighborhood at the time, we were focused primarily on proving to people that we were more than just another bar band playing covers.

Let’s talk more about goals. Have your goals or your perspectives changed since first starting out? What do your aspirations or goals look like now?

🎤 The big thing that has kept our musical goals growing is the continued embrace and support we’ve gotten from fans and peers. With each step along the way we seem to get more buy-in from listeners; people have continued listening in larger numbers and buying tickets in greater numbers, and that reassures us more than anything that we are making good work. The primary goal now is promoting ourselves better so more people can hear us. The big hurdle to cross at this stage is marketing.

Everybody is influenced by somebody else. Who would you consider some of your biggest musical influences and how are they influential?

🎤 The five members of the band all have pretty wide-ranging personal tastes, so I won’t pretend to speak for anyone else. But for myself, I would point to specific writers, lead singers, and front men as people I look to as major influences. Bruce Springsteen, Jeff Tweedy, Leonard Cohen, Adrianne Lenker, and Justin Vernon, to name a few.

Ah, the fun stuff. What’s your craziest tour story or the wackiest thing that’s happened during a performance? Feel free to be creative.

🎤 The very first thing that comes to my mind – we shaved a guy’s head in the middle of a house show about 2 years ago. That was pretty wild. He had shoulder length hair and was a buddy of our guitar player Mick. He sat down in front of us, and about 5 or 6 different people took turns shaving off all that hair while Conor and myself played an acoustic version of 🎵 “Hey Ya” by OutKast. There are some pretty cool photos of it that exist somewhere.’

Up until this point in your career, what would you describe as your favorite song you’ve recorded or performed live? What makes that song special?

🎤 That’s tough to answer, because I have different personal favorites for songs we’ve recorded, songs we’ve written, and songs we’ve performed. I’ll go with 🎵 “Let Me Burn” though, which is the final song off of our debut album and is our closer when we play our live sets. It is a blast to play, melodramatic in the best way. I get to put down a guitar and only work on the performance of singing too, which is pretty fun for me with a song like that. It’s a song that has a different sort of electricity to it, and we know we’ve got the crowd in the palm of our hand when performing it. That’s a pretty cool feeling. 

Is there anything else awesome, cool, or left of center the world should know about you? Secret talents or surprising tidbits?

🎤 I am certified as a level 2 Ham Radio operator. Mick is forklift certified. Conor is a certified indoor pool inspector.

Closing this thing out, what is Motel Breakfast currently working on, promoting that you can share with us or want us to know about? We love secrets, but there’s no pressure.

🎤 We are preparing ourselves for the day live music can return! We only played 4 shows in support of our debut album before everything shut down. And then about 6 months into the pandemic we released an EP of new material called Left on Deming. So, we’ve got to get in front of people and perform all that new music. Keep an eye out for us when shows kick into gear once again.

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[📷: Motel Breakfast, Brent Faulkner, The Musical Hype]