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Hopewell formed in Hopewell Junction, NY, during high school, in fact. For the sake of a date, call it 1995. Their shows have become legendary, bringing back 70's epic rock style in the vein of Led Zeppelin and the Who. Though they ve toured the world (and plan to tour all around the US, UK and Japan once again with their latest release), we find it sweet that Hopewell's favorite places to play are still The Bowery Ballroom in NYC or Spaceland in LA.What's your funniest audition story? İLike that bass player guy who came in with all your songs charted out in a notebook, which looked promising, then he whips out this BC Rich pointy looking bass and straps it on so high that the bass is hitting his Adam's apple, oh yeah and he can't really play bass either.
Hmm...we don't audition too much..We have had people send us headshots in response to Craig's List postings. They are usually amazing and contain hairstyles that involve blow dryers.What was the strangest/most interesting thing to happen to the band?
Hopewell's history has been a collection of WTF moments..once we played a Creperie in Sacramento, we have been strip searched at borders, we've been chased out of people's houses in the early morning by angry husbands wielding shotguns (Youngstown, Ohio). Once our drummer Jay fell down five flights of stairs and was in critical condition about a month before a sold out Bowery Ballroom show. Much to our relief he survived but he had partial amnesia and couldn't taste or smell anything. He had to relearn all the material in about a week.If you could meet any musical hero living or dead, who would it be and what would you say to this person?
A musical hero? Captain Beefheart? Patty Smith? Yoko Ono? I would probably just make small talk about sandwiches or İgas prices.How does the new album differ from your last? İAre you planning on touring all summer? (you mentioned UK as well)?
The new record is the sound of a band that has survived. It's practically joyous compared to our last, which was the sound of a band eating itself... it has a feeling of secular transcendence... most of the material was developed on the road. We worked on removing the separation between the band and the audience, it was almost like we tried to collaborate with the people at the shows. We tried to bring this energy into the recording.