High Dive cooks up pop-punk

For High Dive’s three musicians, life is a balance of work, friends and musical projects.

They’ve performed their pop-punk tunes around Bloomington at house shows and in local venues. Now, they plan to record a full-length album in the first week of October.
Shortly before they record, the band will perform at the WIUX fall kickoff show with Ivory Wave and Eric Ayotte. The free show begins at 9:30 p.m. Sept. 29 at The Bishop.

Toby Foster, performing vocals and guitar, formed High Dive with bass player Ryan Woods of the band Defiance, Ohio and drummer Nick Romy of Community Currency. All three musicians are involved with a number of other projects and bands.

High Dive’s members work at the Owlery, a local vegetarian restaurant co-owned by Woods and Foster. The band first practiced together about nine months ago, just before the restaurant’s opening.

Between lunch and dinner hours, the Indiana Daily Student met with High Dive inside the brightly painted, artwork-laden walls of
the Owlery.

IDS What’s your motivation behind the new band?

FOSTER For me, it’s been a while since I’ve been in a loud band. I had some songs I wanted to play.

ROMY I don’t get to play drums very often, so that’s pretty different for me.

WOODS Defiance, Ohio is pretty spread out right now, so I wanted to do something in town that was somewhat similar in style, in writing.

IDS What influences your music?

WOODs Right now, we’re all working a lot and the songs seem to come very directly from our experiences right now in Bloomington. ... It’s natural in both how the music comes together and what the lyric content is. I think it’s very much tied to our everyday, so there isn’t a lot of time to stop and think about what we’re doing.

IDS Would you say what you’re doing is Bloomington-oriented, then?

FOSTER Maybe you wouldn’t think that, necessarily — I think we’re all really connected to living here, and a lot of things come from that.

ROMY We just write about our personal experiences, and currently, it happens to be here and what we’re doing.

WOODS I think that Bloomington has a very special sort of interaction, so I think in that way it is very specific to here.

IDS Any local bands you would recommend?

WOODS Dylan Sizemore — he plays music by himself, and he’s really good. He’s a new guy who just moved to town.

ROMY It’s really easy to find great music in this town — you can stumble on it even if you’re not looking for it.

IDS What do you think about notions or descriptions of punk as simplistic?

ROMY I think the setup of our band might be more simplistic than other setups ... but it’s unfair to generalize punk music. It can be (simplistic), but there are also a lot of really amazing punk bands that exist now and have existed that are incredibly intricate musically and thematically and everything.

FOSTER Maybe ‘straightforward’ would be a better word for what I try to do.

WOODS I think, also, when you get in a conversation about what punk is, punk can be a style of music. But for myself, punk is much more about the ethics of how music is produced, and so someone can be playing solo music on an acoustic guitar, and it can be extremely classically played, and they can still be a punk band.

IDS Any advice for musicians getting started?

WOODS Just to enjoy playing with friends and not focus too much on end goals. I think, sometimes, people get in bands, and they want to see what they can do and where they can go and maybe don’t focus enough on their own personal interactions.

ROMY Just enjoy it. Do it because you love it.