Rebecca Docter: What made you guys decide to move from Jackson to Nashville?
Samuel Williams: Absolutely nothing. We lost a couple of rhythm guitar players, decided to stick it out as a four piece and we’d been living in the Mississippi delta for like a year or two and it was between Nashville, Chicago and Atlanta. Chicago’s too cold, Atlanta’s too hot and Nashville’s in the middle, so honestly, weather was the only thing that went into it.
RD: Dear Bo Jackson just came out on Kings of Leon’s label, Serpents and Snakes. How did you guys get hooked up with KOL?
Cyle Barnes: Seth Riddle [manager of Kings of Leon’s record label] was helping them with their label and we were on tour with The Meat Puppets, and Seth Riddle came to that show, and after that he just started talking to us and the ball just started rolling—they’ve been really great since the beginning.
RD: How did you get the name “The Weeks”?
SW: We started practicing in Cane’s bedroom and I guess at some point he had stolen or found a street sign that said “Weeks Place” and we had been a band for about six days, we had our first show, so we had to have a band name and that was on the wall, so we just picked it and eight years later [we still have it].
RD: How have you progressed as a band from the early days of “Comeback Cadillac” to “Dear Bo Jackson”?
SW: I think when we started, we just wanted to be fucking loud and fast, and then over time we sort of, I don’t know, we like taking ourselves out of the box a lot and either write in new ways, you know like different people write songs, write all together, write on different instruments, and I think that’s just sort of led to, I don’t know, we take a lot more time in the composition of things rather than like, “these are the chords, play it loud and play it fast.”
CB: We were also fifteen when we first started so like, it was inevitable that we would grow a little bit, but also like we’ve been together since then so hopefully all of our, everything that’s happened to one of us has happened to all of us, most of the time that’s the case, so we’ve all just kind of grown together.
SW: Since we’ve been together for so long, we all grow at the same pace too, so nobody’s like gone off to India and gotten some crazy experience that makes them go a different direction.
Cain Barnes: Definitely The Band, Thin Lizzy, Bruce Springsteen.
SW: A lot of it comes from bands that we grew up listening to like from Jackson. That’s always stuck with it.
RD: How has being from Mississippi influenced you as artists?
SW: Honestly, it goes back to those band like, you know, growing up in Jackson there’s not a lot of national touring acts that come through town, so you have to have your own surrogate versions of it. That was pretty much what we did every weekend since we were like thirteen years old and so we were in the best music town ever. So we got to watch them, see how they do it, paid their dues, then when everybody sort of broke up, we sort of stepped right in. They provided a nice little blueprint for it. So many bands get caught up in this “we’ve got to make it big and we’ve got to make it big fast,” but growing up in Mississippi, fast is not something that you grow up with, so it’s just like, you take things slow and you do it the right way.
RD: I saw that you guys got noticed on some British magazines?
SW: It’s funny to see, I guess it’s like the size of Texas, so it’s funny to be able to play almost every region of the country in about twelve days. That’s a country you can take by storm quickly just because it’s so accessible and it’s so quick, whereas here, everything’s so far apart.
RD: Who are you guys excited so see at Voodoo?
SW: I want to see The Cure!
CB: We played ACL just recent and as we had to leave to go back to Mississippi the day after, we’re riding out on a golf cart to our van and The Cure’s playing on stage as we’re riding behind it. We’re counting that we saw them at that festival. Even though we didn’t really get to seem them, we got to hear them.