Hailing from Southern California I would like to introduce to you Spud Davenport and Charlie Recksieck, a singer songwriter duo who have gotten together to form “Leaders in the Clubhouse”. Their clever lyrics have been put together with catchy melodies that will have you toe tapping in no time! Their debut album “Won” consists of 10 tracks, 9 of which are original songs!
First of all, I am dying to know, who came up with the name of the band and is it anything to do with Golf?
I'm a part-time golfer myself (have a dirty golf rap song called "On The Green" with my other band The Bigfellas) and it's just an expression I use or probably abuse in normal conversation. Spud and I were going back and forth on who liked which name, both of us lobbying for the one(s) we wanted. We had one that we liked best up to that point and I said so far it was "the leader in the clubhouse". Spud was the smart one to spot that when I said it, he said that's the name of the band! "Leaders In The Clubhouse". We agreed and it was time to get websites, Twitter handles, business cards, etc.
Tell me how you both get together and who come up with the idea for a “Fun Rock” band and Is this the genre you would use to describe your music?
We had both met playing small venues in San Diego as solo acts, and in other bands. For starters, Spud was not like most musicians in that he could introduce himself, look you in the eye, shake your hand. You know, not a freak -- which sometimes is asking a lot when it comes to a musician. And while everybody else was so serious about their music, we both love Randy Newman and love something funny being in songs instead of sad journal entries set to a boring acoustic strum.
So we built on that and wanted to start writing songs together. Co-writing can be a blast in the right situation & we felt like we had something. "Fun rock" describes us pretty well. I believe Spud was talking once to a music supervisor named Rebecca Rienks who liked his or our stuff and she dropped a phrase like that. Again, it was Spud who spotted it with his eyes open and said "fun rock", yes and that's what we're trying to do.
How long have you both been writing together?
I believe it's about 3 years now. We had our first writing session and I started mowing through about 12 chords while we were talking, he started humming a melody and we loved it. I'd had the potential title of "She Gets Loud" on my potential title whiteboard, we put the pieces together and the song wrote itself. After a good first session, we got greedy for doing it more.
Can you both give me some insight as to your musical backgrounds?
Spud has been a drummer for years in Bay Area, then Los Angeles where he had success, label interest, song in big movie. Typical band stuff came and went, it turned into a tougher grind like happens to so many bands, he moved to San Diego and put music away for a while. But he just couldn't stop and got on my radar in San Diego.
As for me, I've listened to music about an average of 10 hours a day ever since I was 10, I'm not kidding. And really just about every genre. I played piano growing up, didn't really have bands. Just busking in Colorado a little after college, never really thinking of myself playing in public. For years I couldn't understand why bands I'd heard of were so unprolific, and often just mediocre. I figured I need to try to make music myself if I wanted the right to complain. And I wanted to see what I could come up with musically (that's still my main impetus).
Just then my friend Tim from New York was moving here and we had to start a band for fun, we met Shay and the three of us were just having a blast. We'd all have done it for free just in a basement if we had to ... sometimes I feel like I need people to hear it or promote it only so it would justify the time I would spend on it anyway.
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