Live music and touring are on lockdown right now and fans as well as artists are going through withdrawals. We wanted to come up with something fun to help bridge that distance between fans and artists right now. What we came up with is something called The Lockdown Lowdown and it’s a Q&A session with fun questions for artists to answer. They’re not your typical interview questions, so it gives you a peek inside of the artists themselves. We’re big music nerds here at I’m Music Magazine and we love learning things like this about the artists that we love. We’re pretty sure that you’ll get a kick out of these, so we hope you’ll take the time to read them. In this installment, we spoke with Yoni Avittan and Ran Aronson, collectively known as The Dodies!
How have you been doing during the pandemic and how are you spending your time?
The closure began right when we started releasing our singles and working on videos for our debut album. So since we were stuck at home we came up with the idea of personally drawing a bunch of cartoons and making a stop motion video out of them for our song “Alien.” It took two months to draw, a lot of tears and arguments but it’s looking great and it’ll be out soon.
Have you been working on new music?
We’ve got a storage of new music waiting to be recorded and published. We always get excited when talking about how great the new songs sound.
What are five albums that changed your life?
Radiohead – OK computer, Nirvana – In Utero, Soundgarden – Superunkown, Green Day – Dookie, Muse – Origin of Symmetry
Name five artists that influenced you as a musician.
Nirvana, Radiohead, Placebo, Bloc party, Green Day
What are your five favorite live alums?
Green Day – Bullet in a Bible
Muse – HAARP
Rage Against the Machine – Live At the Grand Oplympic Auditorium
Tame Impala – Live Versions
IDLES – A Beautiful Thing – Live at Le Bataclan
Life on the road; what are five of your craziest/funniest/scariest tour stories?
– We witnessed a guy get run over on his bike after our show at night. the driver ran away and the biker got help immediately.
– We saw a punk band of old porn stars play at the Rainbow bar after our show at the Viper room. It was one part of a weird night.
– People from “high places in the industry” came to our show in New York and they all stood shaded in the back of the club wearing suits. We nearly pissed our pants during the show.
– We played at a children festival – talking about kindergarten age – and the kids were headbanging to our songs.
– We were having a conversation with our sound guy after a show, when a hobo passed by, punched him in the face and took off. that was another part of the same weird night with the porn stars punk band.
What are your five favorite movies?
Yoni:
1 . Spirited Away
2. Princes Mononoke
3. Titanic
4. 500 Days of Summer.
5. The Departed
Ran:
1. Toy Story – All of ’em
3. 1917
2. Nightcrawler
4 . Whiplash
5. The Blues Brothers
What’s the best and worst advice you ever heard?
“ – Be an Asshole” – bad advice from a failing Israeli musician
“ -The world won’t crumble if you say ‘no’ to a person who is asking you for too much” – good advice from Bumblefoot.
What’s the strangest thing you ever autographed?
A suspiciously strange looking boob
If music was over today and you had to go into professional wrestling, what would your wrestling name be?
Yoni – El Punko
Ran – I just googled “What’s my wrestler name”, answered a quiz and got “Cabbage Face”. Seems very appropriate.