What’s in a Name? For White Denim, Not Much

The guys of Austin garage band White Denim know their name is gloriously terrible if not a little misleading. But that's par for the course, given that none of the guys are actually from Austin. Nor have the guys ever really recorded in a garage (their first three records were tracked in drummer Josh Block's Airstream trailer). Their music is a throw back to ‘70s psychedelic rock, though it often colors outside the lines on both the edgier and softer side of the spectrum.

Initially, a blending of members from two Austin-based bands in 2005, White Denim bassist Steve Terebecki said he and his band mates didn't actually think they'd be together for as long as they have. They've since caught on, released albums rather prolifically, quit their day jobs about four years ago and are living "month to month."  The group briefly worked with online and UK-based labels before signing in 2009 to Downtown Records, which released the band's fifth full-length album D and fifth EP Takes Place in Your Work Place last year.

College Times is based in Tempe, which is where White Denim kicked off its For D tour at the Sail Inn.

Yeah! Yeah, that place is great.

Yeah! But what's crazy is you guys are returning less than a year later to play Gammage [Auditorium], which is, like, 50 times (it's actually only 13x) the capacity of the Sail Inn.

[Laughs] Yeah, we could never do that on our own.

Did Wilco handpick you guys to go out with them or was it a label arrangement?

We played with them at the Sasquatch Festival in Washington and they saw us there and we met them after we played and a couple months later we got the offer. […] But we didn't really have anything to do with it.

I know you've said you didn't listen to mainstream music while growing up, so what was your guilty pleasure?

I feel like I mainly consumed all the music my dad listened to – he had really great taste in music – up until the seventh grade. [chuckles] I decided to discover my own music and I got really into the Smashing Pumpkins, Stone Temple Pilots and Soundgarden. So, that was like the first thing I listened to all the time that was mainstream.

That's not too bad. It could've been Hanson or something.

Yeah, it could've been Hanson. I've always liked really terrible music, too. But just never really mediocre music, you know what I'm saying? Like, Insane Clown Posse. I've always been a huge fan of them because they're so bad on like the next level kind of thing.

Could you be a closeted Juggalo?

Well, I've talked with a few people about going to the Gathering of the Juggalos. You know that festival that happens every summer? I've talked about going there. I think I will one day. There's a documentary called "American Juggalo." It's on Vimeo.

So, who came up with the name White Denim?

I think that goes back to the question that we didn't expect to be a band this long. We were in another band called Parque Touch before this and the singer moved to Russia, so we were like "We should come up with another name." We were all coming up with the worst names we could think for a band and the other ones were Totally Revolution and Crazy Sexy Rainbow and White Denim. We sort of, in a way, drew them from a hat and we were just like, "Oh God, White Denim is pretty bad but we're just gonna go with it." We've been stuck with it but we've kind of grown to love it. […] It's weird to think how things would have been different if we had been called Totally Revolution or Crazy Sexy Rainbow. We always joke about other band names, but they're all terrible. I think we're just gonna stay with White Denim.

White Denim has a unique sound, but it still changes with every release. Is it intentional that every record seems so removed from the one before it?

No, I think the thing is – I'm not completely sure, but this is sort of the theory – all four of us listen to any music that we can find and enjoy all that music. So, I think we want to try all of that music, styles and genres together. For the most part, [we've] played rock and roll and those kinds of styles […] but we want to use White Denim as a vehicle to explore all those different avenues in music. Until we've covered rap and metal and all of ‘em, it'll continue to be different on every record. Our default seems to be Southern rock, though.

What's your musical background?

I started playing violin in fifth grade and then I went to college for music compositions for three semesters because I didn't think it was interesting or the school wasn't right for me. I think my dad having that crazy record collection was definitely a big part of me wanting to play a bunch of different instruments. I play a bunch of different instruments pretty avidly instead of one really well.