The Moxies Interview

The Moxies have only been a band since 2011, but they play like they've been working on music together for years. We sat down with the two members that make up The Moxies, Marco Ciofani and Kevin Werfield, and talked with them about their music.

Right now, they say they're working on new stuff "all the time," trying to get a sound together for their first album.

"To put out an album," Marco says, "especially your first album, you want it to be just, like, a brick. For example, you guys are familiar with Jet? "Get Born" was awesome, you had "Cold Hard Bitch," you had "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" - those two songs alone are just great. People just fell for that album, right? Once you get a good first album then people will be like "well, first album was great, let's get their second stuff" then you can kind of experiment and do different things."

"The first five years of your music career is to make a perfect album. You can't get recognized off of a good sixth album, you know?" says Kevin.

They definitely have this southern, bluesy, ice cream parlor kind of feel to their music, a mix of genres, and you can hear that they've listened to a lot as inspiration.

Marco says they listen to "motown, punk, blues, electric blues, chess records in chicago in the 50s. Classic rock when we were younger was like the greatest thing ever, but once you get older you start finding your niche. Soul, like James Brown, Otis Redding, Ray Charles. As far as country goes, it's just Johnny Cash." He says this while pointing to a huge Johnny Cash poster in their living room.

While on the subject of inspirations, they started talking about their "biggest inspiration," Jack White, who they saw at Third Man Records when they were recently in Nashville, where they played a show at 12th and Porter.

"We just turned our heads and he was three feet away," they said. They'd gone to visit Third Man Records, Jack White's label, not expecting him to actually be there.

Their own studio experience was recorded at The Jungle near Cleveland. "Playing a live show is one thing, and studio is completely different," says Marco.

"Yeah, it's about precision," adds Kevin.

Since they've recorded what they wrote there, though, they've been working on new stuff. "We'll just go down, and don't really even say anything to each other, we just start playing something until it forms," says Kevin about writing music.

"A great way to get inspired or start writing a song is to just jam and mess around until you find something that sounds good," adds Marco. "Once we get to that point we drop it and I just play it through my head, I'll just be nodding during work."

"Yeah," says Kevin, "We've worked on songs for like three months at a time, or we can start from scratch and have a song done by the end of the day."

If you want to hear some of what they've recorded and worked on, they have shows coming up over the next few months. You can find out dates and info on their Facebook.