Talk It Out with Jodi Leib
Whipping the Vote with The Whips
9:30 Club, Washington, D.C., 2004
Photo by Jodi Leib
Jodi: I'm Talking It Out at the 9:30 Club with The Whips, a fantastic Washington D.C. eclectic, rock-punk band. How would you describe yourselves?
Matt: We like to describe ourselves as Hot Rock.
Jodi: Hot Rock, right on! Tell me, what's the D.C. Hot Rock music scene like right now?
Matt: Well, actually the D.C. scene is really cool right now. There's a lot of really good bands. There's us, The Whips, Thee Snuff Project, Wooly Mammoth, People Chasing People, The Frequency. There's a lot of really good rock bands and they're very eclectic. A lot of really good rock bands in D.C. right now, almost as good as it was in the early 90's.
Jodi: Where do you get the music from?
Matt: From the heart...and the soul...I mean, where else?
Jodi: Well, it certainly moves you. Your moves are very swanky cool.
Matt: Oh, well thank you very much. Thank you.
Jodi: You've got to see The Whips! The Whips are....my favorite new word is FAST. Sometimes I start my own words, not that I started the word fast by any stretch, but I wanted to say, you guys are really fast! Like, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants fast.
Matt: We're definitely fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants. That's a very good phrase to describe us. Fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants.
Trip: I just want to say, like, your favorite LP, that one part that you really, really love in the song, that's like all of our songs are built on those really amazing parts. When you're going crazy in your home and in your stereo, and you're rockin' out to your favorite albums, we're trying to capsulize that energy with all of our hot rock songs.
Arika: All of us are in our 30s, and we've all been in lots of bands before, and done lots of touring. We all genuinely really love each other and play together extremely well. That's why it works so well. We're not trying to do anything except rock. All of take it back to our teens, like sitting in our bedrooms listening to Van Halen and Led Zepplin, and....
Matt: And the Bad Brains!
Arika: And the Bad Brains, all through our lives.