Moving Stills aim beyond "Troposphere"

For those paying attention to the modest music scene in Commerce, the past few months have been fairly eventful for four A&M-Commerce students. Graduate student Matt Plummer, his cousin and freshman Ryan Plummer, senior theatre major and English minor Kasey Thompson, and junior computer science major Jonathan Moore currently comprise The Moving Stills, a band quickly growing in the Commerce community.

Matt said he and Ryan have been playing guitar together for years, and only recently began looking to expand.

"Ryan and I have been playing since we were 13 or so," Matt said, "and we didn't call it a band, really we just kind of did it for fun. "This past summer, about July, we brought Kasey on, and that solidified it more so as a band where we would write songs, record and hopefully perform. We used a lot of her poetry to start to write music and put it along with a lot of the instrumental stuff Ryan and I had written, because neither of us really felt the need to sing, nor the ability to sing."

This is where Thompson, who already had pages of poetry put together, came into the picture. Matt said she was "a perfect fit" for vocalist.

"It wasn't really like, ‘Hey, we want you to sing for our band,'" she said. "One night, I came over and they asked if I had stuff written down. I started laughing when I found this real sexy poem that I wrote. I said no, and he was like ‘No, let me see it.' That's how that happened, and the band was formed."

The trio acted quickly to create their first song.

"We wrote the music for ‘Troposphere' while she was on the way there," Ryan said.

Thompson said she wrote the poem that the song is based on after a long relationship had ended.

"One of my things is I'm afraid of thunderstorms," she said, "and I wanted someone to be with me and make the thunderstorm happy."

Soon after that, The Moving Stills played "Troposphere" at Cowhill Express Coffee Co.'s Songwriter's Showcase, which is hosted by local radio station 88.9 KETR.

"The response was pretty awesome," Matt said about the band's first song. "Matt Meinke of KETR took the recording and put it on the radio. He got a lot of requests for it and more information on the band. We ended up sending him our actual recording of it and he's been playing that on the radio for almost the past two or three months. He said it's the most talked about song on the rotation of 88.9 right now."

Thompson said the genre of the band could fall into the category "folk indie-rock." Matt said the type of music they develop has changed from song to song.

"We started out solely acoustic," he said, "but we like to add a lot of different things. Right now, we're working on a song that is predominantly acoustic in the beginning, but we're adding electric guitar and piano. I'd say it's more like an acoustic rock kind of thing. We take the songs one at a time. We don't look at it as ‘We play this instrument, so it has to be included in the song.' We pick out what each song needs."

That's one reason Moore was brought into the group.

"I've been in music ever since I learned to play guitar," he said. "Right now, I don't even play piano, but we're adding piano to it, so I'm slowly picking it up. I'm just doing whatever I can to push the band to the next edge."

Matt said the different ideas come from each of the band members' individual tastes.

"I think we all have our personal ones," he said, "and that makes it kind of cool. We all have our own distinct likes and interests music wise. We have our disagreements, but when it goes really well, we're unstoppable."

The difficult part, according to Matt, is coming up with a creation that everyone can follow.

"The hardest thing we're finding right now is sticking to the format, I guess," he said. "We don't necessarily have to stick to the format, but we're trying to make them make sense rather than just talking over music."

The band members interact frequently outside of rehearsals, as Moore and Ryan both play at the Baptist Student Ministry, and Matt and Thompson are involved in theatre. Matt said a lot of the work is done with collaboration outside of a group practice.

"We've been pretty well received so far," he said. "I like to know what people think whether it's good or bad, but that doesn't necessarily put a hindrance on what we do as a group. We know what we like, and we know we're going to put our best foot forward with lyrics and the music because we spend a lot of time working on it. The fact you can put so much into something and have it mean something to other people too, it's really a cool feeling."

"The Moving Stills" currently have a Facebook page (Facebook.com/themovingstills) and music available to purchase online. Matt said they are looking to take an extra step.

"Our main focus right now is getting together a five or six song set for our first recording we're going to get out there," he said. "We'll start sending demos to venues and things like that. Between the lot of us, we have a lot of connections in the local music area and abroad, so the possibilities and capabilities are there."