Jon Johnson from Touch The Buffalo opens up about the band’s influences on ‘Bodhicitta’, and more!
S] Hello!! How are you today?
T] I am doing great today! It’s a hot sunny Spring Day in Virginia.
S] What is motivating the band right now, outside of music – think specific people, and places – even movies, for example?
T] Hmm. Well, every once in a while I see an interview with 50 Cent, and he drops some wisdom for artists coming up, and that helps me a lot.
Right now we’re just driven by a desire to be heard. We believe in our music, and the power music has to energize people. So we’re just going to keep doing that. But here are some of our media indulgences at the moment:
TV: Blood of Zeus, Conan O’Brien must Go Scissor 7, Demon Slayer, Evil (on Netflix, 20% chance of nightmare fuel), The Bear
Video Games: Zelda Skyward Sword, Final Fantasy 7 – 10, Call of Duty
S] What would you say the biggest challenges you face as a band are?
T] Being discovered. People don’t usually go to see bands they’ve never heard of before. But, our experience is that people who see us play become fans. We won a battle of the bands. And we played a show where a girl in the crowd with cerebral palsy stood up in her wheel chair to dance to our set. My faith in our sound is unshakeable, but we’re not selling out shows yet.
S] What is your message for people who support the band, and will continue to do so?
T] Thank you for sticking by us. We’re putting the work in to build a movement, we’re grateful for all the support. We’re going to spend the rest of the year promoting this EP. The EP showed a softer more finessed side to our sound, but our next album will return with the heaviness. We hope you like it.
S] What are the main themes running through ‘Bodhicitta’?
T] We were going for a lot with Bodhicitta. First, stylistically the songs change from song to song, with different emotions and energy. This plays to the EP’s title, Bodhicitta, which is actually a buddist term that means “a mind aimed at awakening.” We wanted to capture a wide array of authentic emotions with introspective lyrics.
We started writing the EP at the start of the pandemic, and we wanted to capture the human feelings of that moment in time. “This City’s Burning” captures the chaos of anyone who lived through a wildfire, a war zone or a riot. “In Six Heads About It” describes the madness of a potent love slipping through your hands. “The Carpenter and the Nurse” Is a song about surrendering to a potent love. And Hope’s Song is about death, but keeping loved ones alive in our thoughts.
S] How do you feel about the band’s success so far?
T] We’ve been a band for 7 years, I do wish we were further along. We have 16 songs from an album and two EPs we’ve released. We have 6 official music videos. We’ve played in several festivals, some big some small, we’ve won a battle of the bands, we’ve gotten some radio airplay. I’m not sure what else we should do honestly.
S] I’m really interested in the band’s visuals – you take a raw approach to them in found footage and phone clips etc, is that intentional?
T] The found footage style for In Six Heads About It, was inspired by the song “Blur” by MØ. I think there is a lyric video for that song, with a home video feel, and I loved it. And I had happened to take a lot of great footage on my phone over the pandemic, and I selected footage with great colors, and lined them up in an energetically interesting way. So that is the story behind that video. The other videos for the EP are animated though.
S] Is there anything else that you’d like to plug before we finish up?
T] For now, if anyone hasn’t heard our EP Bodhicitta yet, all the music videos for the EP have been compiled into a single long music video that you can check out right here:
And if you want to check out our merch you can visit touchthebuffalo.threadless.com
S] Thanks for the time!
T] Thank you for the interview!
