This week, I got the opportunity to sit down with the guys in Buffalo Buffalo to talk about their music, new EP, and future plans. The band is comprised of Graham Crainshaw (guitar/lead vocals), John Cyr (drums), and Paul Chapman (bass/vocals). The guys have described their musical style as post-hardcore with some pop thrown in for good measure. They have listed Fugazi, mewithoutYou, Pedro the Lion, and Captain Geech and the Shrimp Shack Shooters as their major influences, and after very careful deliberation, named Sunny Day Real Estate as the band they wish they could play a show with. The rest of the interview can be found below.
Her Campus (HC): Where does your name, Buffalo Buffalo, come from?
Graham Crainshaw (GC): The word “buffalo” can be used as an adjective, a verb, and a noun. So you can string it together in a sentence over and over and over again and it makes grammatical sense.
Paul Chapman (PC): You have to say it like three times, right?
GC: Well, yeah, at least three times to be grammatically correct.
PC: And up to 16 times in a row.
GC: Yeah, something like that. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but that’s where it comes from.
PC: So ours in grammatically incorrect.
GC: Right, our band name in grammatically incorrect, but it stems from a grammatically correct sentence.
HC: Can you guys talk about the new EP you just released?
GC: Well, it’s a collection of five songs that we wrote probably a year, year and a half, ago; sometime like that. We demoed some of those songs in October and released those, along with two other songs, on tape and CD, and we took our five favorite songs and just rerecorded them in a studio in Gainesville called Goldentone Studios with this guy named Rob McGregor who has recorded Hot Water Music and Against Me!.
PC: A bunch of Gainesville bands.
GC: Renegade State Records put out the CD for us, Spirit Cat put out a tape for us, and we self-funded a 10 inch.
HC: What’s your favorite part about performing?
John Cyr (JC): I like the adrenaline rush. I mean especially if the crowd is really into it. I think I particularly play better if the crowd’s into it. It’s pretty exhilarating.
GC: I feel the same way, especially if we’re playing, like, really close to people; like there are people all crowded around us. We played a couple of shows like that on tour, and those shows were the most fun. Everybody’s energy fed off of each other. Feeling that is really fun.
PC: I like the moment when a group of people realizes that they like something and get something that you’re doing and they’re on the same page and they weren’t, like, necessarily expecting that, you know? Yeah, that’s cool, and volume.
HC: Speaking of your tour – how did that go?
GC: It went really well. It was our first tour ever, and it was just super fun. We went all the way up to Boston and back, we booked it ourselves, played in front of a lot of people, learned a ton, met a bunch of really cool people, had I think the greatest sandwich of all time in Philadelphia.
HC: Is this something you are interested in pursuing full-time?
GC: Yeah! John’s shaking his head no.
PC: Drummers are expendable.
JC: I have the van though.
GC: He does own the van.
PC: I have another van. We’re good.
GC: We definitely want to tour more. Up until probably mid-summer we’re going to try to do more out-of-town stuff, like just weekend runs to maybe as far as New Orleans, but not a whole lot farther. Hopefully, in the second half of the summer we’ll do a little more of an extended tour. I don’t know if we’ll go quite as far as Boston. We haven’t really talked about it a whole lot.
You can check out Buffalo Buffalo for yourself, which I really recommend you do, on April 7th at the Liberty Bar in Tallahassee with Sorry Jack Sad Face and I Anthem. Their music and information can be found on their Bandcamp and on their Facebook.