Our annual Her Campus Night Out is tonight! Formerly Girl’s Night Out (but totally open to guys, too!), the event will feature live music from Pittsburgh-based band, Ferdinand the Bull this year. We’re super excited to have them perform for us and think you should all to be as excited as we are, so I sat down with the band to chat about who they are and what they do.
I met up with them for the interview at a gig at The Underground, an on-campus eatery at CMU. I slid into a booth just in time to see the band perform their favorite closer, “Hotel Yorba” by The White Stripes, executed with all of the enthusiasm of the original.
The band has four members: Nick Snyder (guitar and vocals), a junior Communications major at Pitt; Evan Altieri (banjo and vocals), also a junior at Pitt, majoring in Psychology and Communications; Dan Radin aka “Danager” (cello and vocals), a former Pitt student now in graduate school at CMU; and Mike Dice (bass), who studied music at Penn State and returned home to Pittsburgh after graduation.
Although the band technically originated in Pittsburgh, its roots are in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, where Nick and Evan went to high school together. Nick explains, “One summer I just decided like ‘Hey, Evan, let’s record some songs.’ ‘Cause I dunno I had been writing and stuff. And Evan and I wrote a six-song EP.”
Nick recounts the first time he and Evan played in public together, while visiting Vermont. “We played a couple songs. It was actually Evan’s first show ever playing an open mic night there.”
Evan chimes in. “Yeah, I was freaking out. It was awful.”
The band, as it exists now, only came together in the past year; despite this, the group’s on-and-off-stage chemistry is charming and instantly apparent. They spend several minutes attempting to explain the process by which the band was formed.
“We met on Tinder. Usually I swipe left on stuff like this, but there was something about their profile,” says Mike.
“It was cause there was three of us.”
“Yeah, I decided to swipe right, and here we are.”
“Long story short, Dan and I met at a frat, and Evan and I went to high school together, and Dan and Mike met at a party, and we all became lovers,” says Nick.
Their musical influences include the Head and the Heart, Avett Brothers, The Lumineers, The Strokes, Bruce Springsteen, Edward Sharpe, Jack White, Mumford and Sons, Dispatch, and Elliot Smith.
Given this diverse range of influences as well as their relatively recent beginnings, they haven’t quite decided on a genre. I learned this the hard way when I asked them to describe their sound…
“Acoustic rock, like indie folk kind of stuff.”
“Nah.”
“He hates the word “folk.”
“We are indie technically.”
“I’d say it’s quasi-folk.”
“It’s acoustic.”
“You can tell us what we fall into.”
“Yeah, we’re not trying to label ourselves just yet.”
To be fair, Dan, the band’s cellist, adds a dimension to their sound that transcends standard acoustic genres. “We’ve gotten a lot of like, strange looks with the cello, cause there’s not a lot of bands have cellos and stuff, but everybody thinks it’s like a really interesting thing,” Nick says.
Also a subject of curiosity has been the name of the band, inspired by the children’s book The Story of Ferdinand.
“The reason that Ferdinand the Bull was so significant to Evan was because Elliot Smith has a tattoo of Ferdinand the Bull,” Nick says. “But, um, yeah, the name… Basically, you know, when bands come together they’re like ‘What do we call ourselves?’ We went through a million things, and had some really, really bad names. So eventually I said to Evan, ‘What about Ferdinand the Bull?’ Because we had talked about it before.”
“It’s funny ‘cause we all grew up in our respective homes and we all read the kids’ book growing up. And it’s a well-known kids’ book but it’s not that well-known,” adds Dan.
The band is already enjoying incredible success given the short time they’ve been together, having played major Pittsburgh venues such as the Smiling Moose, Stage AE, Altar Bar, Mr. Smalls, and the AVA Lounge. They are now consistently playing one to two shows a week.
“If someone emails us and we’re open that day, we will come, hell or high water, play that day,” says Dan, whose managing and booking prowess has earned him the nickname Danager. “We’ve been playing for a while now and we’re getting to the point where we’re not having to go out and seek shows anymore. Maybe it’s our acoustic sound, maybe it’s cause Evan’s a good-looking dude. But people will email us and they’ll be like ‘Hey, we need we need a band for this event, or we need an opener for this night.’”
As for their goals as a band, they’re all committed to continuing to make and share their music.
“We’ll be recording another EP shortly, and after that we’ll be recording an album. We’d like to schedule some gigs outside of Pittsburgh, and do a little tour, and see how it goes.”
“I think our goal, at some point, is to make a good living doing this.”
If you’re in the Pittsburgh area, you can see Ferdinand the Bull at Peter’s Pub on October 23rd for Her Campus Night Out, at the Smiling Moose on October 27th with indie folk band Streets of Laredo, and at Thrill Mill on November 5th. For details about these and more upcoming shows, you can check out their Facebook page.
Image credit: From band (photographers: Nicholas Eisley, Angela Ryu).