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Feeling Left Out - Acoustic Duo Powerhouse

Meet Joe and Bill, two guys from North Jersey who will get you right in the gut with their emotional, driving songs. I spent a half hour with them talking about rock, writing, and recording.

Check out their music..
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Acoustic Guitar Riff from 'Enough About Me'

Alternate Tuning:

Listen to 'Enough About Me'

Their first demo released on Double Kick Records, Running On Empty, was recorded in April of 2001, only a few months after we formed. Our next ep, Mr. Everything I'm Not, was recorded a few months later in September. It is currently in nationwide distribution and has almost sold out of it's initial pressing.

Their newest release on Double Kick Records, Wish Me Luck was recorded in September of 2002, almost a year to the day of Mr. Everything I'm Not. As a band they've gone through some new experiences between both recording sessions. While still dwelling in the past a bit, Joe has shifted the theme of his lyrics a full 180 degrees. They've grown individually and collectively and this growth is evident on Wish Me Luck.

FLO has played punk rock shows with bands like Autopilot Off, Hey Mercedes, and The Rocking Horse Winner as well as quiet acoustic shows with the likes of Dashboard Confessional. They also showcase their own shows, usually at colleges/coffeehouses where they are the only band playing. So check them out if they're in your area!

Access Rock: Wish Me Luck sounds really good! Your Songwriting has become more focused and melodic. How do you think this happened?

F.L.O.: On our first album, Running On Empty, I really didn't have a focus. We were just writing stuff. I was at the tail end of a relationship at that time so the lyrics were just kind of whatever I had written down. Once that relationship ended, we grew a lot more as a band. I started writing a lot more lyrics. Our second CD, Mr. Everything I'm Not, has a theme going through it and the new one, Wish Me Luck counters that theme because I'm past all of that stuff. I just go with whatever is happening with my life exactly at that moment. Mr. Everything I'm Not was right after the breakup of my last relationship so I wrote all of that stuff about it. Now with Wish Me luck, I'm in a new relationship and [I have] all of that stuff behind me, so I focus on that for the time being. Tonight we are actually writing newer stuff so we're constantly growing as a band and we try to challenge ourselves.

Access Rock: After you guys had been playing together for a while, do you think you were writing in terms of what you heard in your head as far as where the band was going?

F.L.O.: Kind of. Bill and I were in a band a while ago called After The Fact, and that's when we started writing together. that band died and we were like, 'What are we going to do to start writing again', so we started this band, Feeling Left Out. It kind of took on a life of it's own about a year into it. We thought that we should turn it into a full time band and really start writing. In the beginning, we didn't even look at it as a band. Once kids started writing us these huge emails saying Mr. Everything I'm Not really helped them through this really rough time in their life, that made us look at it a little differently, and we figured that we should put a little more time into it.

Access Rock: How does your writing process work exactly?

F.L.O.: Usually, I will have a song completely written and I'll just start playing it and Bill will add on to it. Now, we have like seven new songs that we're working on..Bill brought new stuff, I brought new stuff. I was like, 'I want to write a song on a keyboard', so I got a keyboard and starting writing and Bill would write his parts to it. So, stuff is already written, or we just sit here and we just start writing.

F.L.O.(Bill): Yah, it's pretty much what Joe said. A lot of it comes out of Joe and then I work off of that. Joe brings out the best in me. Sometimes we'll have a whole song done, I'll write some parts to it and he'll say, 'I even got another part that will sound cool with this.' It's a give and take thing. Pretty much all of the lyrics are from Joe. I had some lyrics on the very first album we did. I wrote lyrics for part of the song and Joe filled in all of the gaps.

Access Rock: There are two songs, 'Amanda's Poem' and 'Keep Me Company', which harmonically took your writing in a new direction. Tell me first about where the jazz harmonies came from in 'Amanda's Poem', then tell me about the key changes in 'Keep Me Company'.

F.L.O.: I don't even know. We'll just start writing stuff..I don't really know where it comes from. I've been playing guitar a little over six years now. I took lessons for a full year when I was sixteen and after a while my teacher said, "Go find a band because I'm just going to bore you with the other stuff." I started playing with Bill in a band called After The Fact. That's where I really started writing my own stuff. Ever since then, I never really stopped. Half the stuff I play, I don't even know where it's coming from. It's just there. A lot of times I surprise myself with these funky rhythms that I come up with. It's weird, but it's kind-of cool. In Keep Me Company, I do a modulation at the end. I just said, 'That could sound really cool, let's drop it down half a step' and it worked. A lot of it is just trial and error. We'll just play something and it will sound really cool, and they we'll be like, 'Ah, man do you remember how to do that?' Another thing that I wanted to add to the last part is [Bill] has new stuff written, I have a lot of new stuff written. There are a lot of parts that Bill writes that I want to give him credit for. He'll come to the table with a riff, and we'll write a complete song around it. He did Gravy Fries which is probably one of our most popular songs. He wrote the Verse to that and I wrote the stuff around it. On the new one, Unspoken Word, he wrote the Verse to that and then we wrote a whole song around it. It seems like those songs that Bill starts are probably the most powerful that we're doing. We were both in another band called Welcome Home Travis, and they just broke up last week. Because of that, it's going to open up a whole new door for Feeling Left Out. Now we can actually give 100% of our time into writing. I think the next CD is going to be off the wall!

Access Rock: Do you see yourselves becoming a full-fledged band?

F.L.O.: That's the goal. We'd really love to but Bill works full time as a computer guy and I'm going to school. We have a tour coming up in March and we we're splitting time going on tour with F.L.O and Welcome Home Travis. Now, when ever we have time, we're going to be gone. In March we go to Florida, in the summer we're going out to the Midwest, and in January we're planning a west coast tour. So, we're doing as much as we can right now and if we ever get the opportunity to go out and do this full time then we're definitely going to take it. We'll see what label can actually help us out with it.

Access Rock: Why did you choose to put just six songs on Wish Me Luck?

F.L.O.: The last two CD's were six songs long. I just started working with my brother..we're going to open up a studio in our house. We won't have to work around a budget and a time constraint. I think the six songs on Wish Me Luck could have been a little better if we had another two weeks to work on it. We did it in four days. If we had weeks or even months, we would get to do more songs and the songs would be that much better.

Access Rock: I think that's debatable because there is a spontaneous element to the CD that you wouldn't be able to get if you hashed and rehashed it.

F.L.O.: Yah, on a lot of it we worked for ten or twelve hour days. As soon as we got there we started recording and we wouldn't stop until we left. We knew we had to do six songs in four days..all of the music, vocals, and mixing. If we had more money, we would have definitely done more songs, but for the time being that was all that we could do.

Access Rock: Do you feel that emo is an apt description of your duo?

F.L.O.(Bill): I don't know if you can call us emo. I like to call us acoustic rock. I would say that there is a lot of emotion in our songs, but I'd still like to classify it as acoustic rock.

Access Rock: I'm trying to get used to all of these new genre titles.

F.L.O.: When you think of emo, it's a certain group of kids that are listening to it. We play to a much broader fan base than that. I don't think you can classify the music as emo because that almost limits you to who is listening. We have parents that come and listen to us, it's not just one group of kids. Why don't you say we're acoustic rock, everybody can dig that! We have hard-core punk kids that come to our shows and they would never say that they went to an emo show.

Access Rock: Something must have happened when you started recording at Nada Recording Studios! The guitars sound so alive and present! How were they recorded?

F.L.O.: The very first CD we did, Running On Empty, that was all done one take, both of us at the same time with a microphone in front of each guitar. Then we went to Nada for Mr. Everything I'm Not. For that one we had our older guitars, also.

Access Rock: Older guitars?

F.L.O.: Joe and I both had these Yamaha's..garbage guitars. A Yamaha P.O.S. Edition we like to call them. After we decided that this was going to be a full time thing, we both started buying equipment. We got really nice guitars and I think the new CD reflects that.

Access Rock: What did you get?

F.L.O.: We both got Taylors.

Access Rock: Yah. You can hear it.

F.L.O.: You think so?

Access Rock: Yah, the guitars sound brilliant! For Wish Me Luck, did you track the two guitars live?

F.L.O.: Joe laid down his tracks first then I came in and laid down my tracks on top of his. We miked the guitars and also plugged them in direct.

Access Rock: Did you do any overdubs?

F.L.O.: Besides the slide guitar and keyboard, no.

Access Rock: How do you work out the guitar harmony lines?

F.L.O.: Usually I'll have a line, octaves or whatever, and I'll just keep looping it and Bill will come up with something, or vice versa. We just keep playing it until it works. Whatever happens happens and when it sounds good we try to remember it and then it becomes a part of the song.

Access Rock: You probably have the tape rolling as well, right?

F.L.O.: We actually never do that. But now that I just started the studio with my brother, it will be easier to do. The studio is just down the hall from our practice room. We'll practice and if we come up with something good, we'll just walk twenty feet away and record it. We're going to do a lot more demos now. I'm looking forward to the next few months.

Access Rock: Yah. Is this going to be a Pro Tools set up?

F.L.O.: Yah..we just got this sweet vocal mic and he's getting all of these programs for it. We've got a lot of ideas..I don't know if we're going to do a full length [album] here, but we're at least going to demo like twenty songs so we can see what they sound like.

Access Rock: Did you feel that solos weren't needed on this album, or not needed on any of your stuff?

F.L.O.: We were actually listening to Guns And Roses the other day, and the song Patience came on. Slash did this sick acoustic solo and I said, 'I gotta do a friggin acoustic solo!' So, I think a solo will work it's way in to one of the new songs.

Access Rock: Yah, I think guitar solos are starting to come back a bit, and when it's called for, it's a great thing.

F.L.O.: I can't even do great solos so to do it on every song wouldn't be cool. If I sat down and wrote something, then I would.

Access Rock: I really like that slide solo you did on Enough About Me.

F.L.O.: Before we started recording that song, the engineer said that something needs to go over that section of the song. He suggested the slide. So, he broke out one of his Les Pauls and I sat there and messed around with it for a while. I got a feel for it then we just did it.

Access Rock: You hadn't played slide guitar before?

F.L.O.: No. I bought one years ago, but I never really sat down and used it.

Access Rock: Do you think people are starving now for more melodically interesting music?

F.L.O.: I would love to see the bands that we listen to break. Some of the bands that we listen to now like Mock Orange are so musically intense that it makes you either want to pick up a guitar and play or put the guitar down and never play again because they are just so good. I would love to play that type of music and have people connect with it. It deserves do be heard.

Access Rock: What other bands have influenced your guitar playing?

F.L.O.: There is this one guy who I have liked for years. His name is Eric Johnson. He is just a crazy solo guitar guy. Eric Clapton is awesome. Pearl Jam really inspired me to pick up a guitar and play. Once I started playing it was NOFX and the fast punk type of stuff. Also, bands like Mock Orange, Sunny Day Real Estate, Hot Water Music..let me give you to Bill.

F.L.O.(Bill): Back when I was first starting out in the scene, it was Tom from Big League. He used to palm mute really fast, so watching him was always amazing.

Access Rock: The kind of guitar interplay that you guys have reminds me of some of the other emo bands..little harmonies and arpeggios. Does this come from some of the bands you are talking about?

F.L.O.: Mock Orange plays a lot of stuff like that. You don't really hear it in acoustic bands and I think that Joe and I listen to that and bring that style into what we do. The kind of music we play sounds a little bit different than an acoustic band playing regular chords!