Butterfly Bones expanding in Bay Area scene

By Aitor Zabalegui

To senior Joe Gray, "A song is an organic being. It's always changing, evolving. That's how you have to treat it."

Gray is the drummer of Butterfly Bones, and this is how he and his band approached the recording process of their first Extended Play, "Sticky Laughter."

"The loops are usually set, but the rest of it, all the fills and layers, is take to take. It just happens," Gray said.

"Sticky Laughter," which came out in January, marked the first recording for Gray, long-time friend Reese Donahue and their two other bandmates.

Growing up in Lafayette, La., the two have known each other since the sixth grade.

Two years before their meeting, Donahue found himself bedridden for the summer after a tubing accident left his ribs mostly crushed, with only a guitar to keep him company.

The debacle soon unveiled itself to be a good bit of bad luck, however, as Donahue was inspired and stricken with a powerful desire to pursue music.

Gray and Donahue formed a band in high school, and they were influenced by bands such as 311 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. "It made sense back then, because that's the kind of stuff we listened to, but looking back on it now, we've come a long way," said Gray.

The two then moved on to start a group called Meet the Great Concealer, which gained some attention in the Lafayette music scene. Gray recalled his second band as "Butterfly Bones in chrysalis. At the time I started getting into Sigur Rós and all that airy sound, lots of space."

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Gray and Donahue moved to the Bay Area to pursue their music careers while in college.

At UC Berkeley, they met Austin Fraser, a bassist who was born in Los Angeles.

Butterfly Bones was formed after the group found keyboardist Steve Lance, who was relatively successful in his own band. They proceeded to cut an EP, buy a bus and hit the lower West Coast on a summer tour.

When asked to describe his band's sound, Gray said, "I want to say Animal Collective, but they're really all over the place. It's like a mix of Animal Collective's vocals, Sigur Rós' spacey-ness and a tinge of Flaming Lips."

This may seem like a difficult concept to grasp, but after listening to the colorful instrumental landscape of tracks like "Geneva in Morning Sun" and the reverb-laden "The Echoing Aquatic" from "Sticky Laughter," Gray's description becomes oddly clear.

The band's summer tour was a success, according to Gray, with the band playing "several great shows with audience size varying from venue to venue."

The band was sometimes a victim of their bill, playing with "these awful hard-core bands with names like Plastic Revolution and Sunset Revolver, and then we come on and of course the crowd was not digging our sound," said Gray.

Gray also recalls an eventful stop on the tour, which led to the band being asked to leave Santa Cruz.

After realizing that they did not have any Madonna music to listen to for their "Margarita Madonna Night," the band was thrilled to hear the aged sex symbol over the speakers during a stroll on the boardwalk.

Subsequently, they were told to leave the premises by security guards claiming they were "not allowed to dance on the boardwalk."

Not to be discouraged, the band continued their shenanigans in their bus in a residential neighborhood, only to be asked politely to leave the Santa Cruz County by local police.

Now that the band is in the process of laying down tracks for a forthcoming EP, Gray feels optimistic about the direction the group is heading in.

"We're trying to get famous before we get out of college so we don't have to get real jobs," he admitted.

To help the band reach their goals, Butterfly Bones will be performing in the area on Friday, Nov. 14 at 10 p.m. at DaSilva's Bronco.

The band also has a Web site: myspace.com/thebutterflybones.

Contact Aitor Zabalegui at azabalegui@scu.edu.