almost monday is celebrating their rise to the top of the Alternative charts, taking their hit, "can't slow down," to number one after years of the trio playing together. Last week the band joined Megan Holiday in the studio to talk about their early days of playing bar mitzvahs and weddings, and how it helped lead to their success today.
LISTEN NOW: almost monday with Megan Holiday
"I think it was when we were like 15, maybe a little earlier," Luke Fabry shares of when the band first got together. "Me and Dawson have been friends for a long time, and Dawson coincidentally at the same time met Cole out surfing. Cliche San Diego story, but it's a good one and it's a real one."
"We just started playing songs in the back of a garage, and we never really recorded music until a couple of years later. We just threw songs together so we could play live and invite all our friends, texting our high school buddies and trying to get our friends to MC the night. It was a good time, very DIY."
From high school shows to ceremony entertainment, almost monday dove into covers of everything from Smash Mouth to The Office theme. "We'd get asked [to] play a wedding or a bar mitzvah, and the set's 2 hours, you know, and we barely wrote 4 songs," reveals Luke. "So you know, what do you do? You play covers."
From barely making it through Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" to their hit "can't slow down," Dawson Daugherty explains how the song came to be. "It's one of those songs that, wasn't like, how some artists will be like, 'oh, we wrote this song and it was like this, like we know this is something special.' We wrote that song like at the end of the day and like wrote just the chorus and then it was just sitting for a few weeks, and then Luke brought it like, 'oh, we should finish this song.'"
"It's one of those songs that totally could have not gotten finished, and for whatever reason, Luke kind of brought it up and we're like, 'OK, like let's just write a verse and like try to like flesh it out,' and it's, yeah, it's just funny. I guess it's like a testament to just like try to finish your songs because you don't really know. What it could be."
To hear more from almost monday, check out the full interview above.