Part rock show, part club bangers, 100% sweaty satisfaction, Savoy is ready to take over your iPod and your Saturday night. Members Ben Eberdt, Mike Kelly and Gray Smith have been making music together since their college days in Boulder, Colorado (I even lived with Mr. Kelly for an epic Summer) but they have come a long way from jamming on traditional instruments and are now paving their own way in the world of live music.
Savoy incorporates live PA with live drums and a whole lot of lasers (done live of course) for the “sole purpose of bringing electronic music to the rock main stage” and they have done just that performing for massive crowds at Electric Zoo and the Electric Daisy Carnival. You don’t watch Savoy shows, you experience them, along with thousands of other in-the-know cool kids who dance for hours to their high-energy, obsession-inducing tracks.
I had the chance to talk to Ben Eberdt right before he traveled to Colorado to play sold out shows at The Fox Theatre and the Ogden Theatre about the future of Savoy and how it feels to play with Denver’s “Most Fuckable Rockstar.”
Clubplanet: What was your favorite show to play this past summer?
Ben Eberdt: The three biggest shows that we played: The Electric Daisy Carnival in LA, Global Dance Festival at Redrocks Amphitheater and Electric Zoo in New York City. They were so much fun to play! If I had to pick one I’d say EDC LA. We played the biggest crowd we have every played to. It was a great weekend. We played right before Afroajack and got to meet all these cool people. It was a really fun weekend.
Clubplanet: How does the EDC crowd compare to Red Rocks?
Ben Eberdt: LA is pretty crazy; they are on the extreme end of the spectrum. Colorado is getting there but not quite as intense as LA. New York was totally different. The rave scene was not anything like in LA. It was an older crowd, and not so many candy ravers. I like the LA crowd though, it’s really fun.
Clubplanet: Is Savoy showing the West Coast some love anytime soon?
Ben Eberdt: We were out there in September and we just played in Santa Barbara. We are working on getting out there again soon.
Clubplanet: Any desire to go abroad and play?
Ben Eberdt: That has definitely been one of our goals, to go to Europe and play music every night. It is up there on our list next year.
Clubplanet: What genre would you say Savoy is?
Ben Eberdt: We have gone through so many changes in our style. Nothing as drastic as it was when we went from playing guitars to being producers, but we are a healthy mix of electro-house and starting to get into more progressive house and dub-house. It’s all under the umbrella of house but we definitely try to make it more rockish when we play live, that’s always been one of our goals.
Clubplanet: You definitely have a Euro vibe.
Ben Eberdt: We try to get as many international styles from different countries as we can and incorporate in our own style.
Clubplanet: Savoy’s motto is to represent electronic music on a rock stage.
Ben Eberdt: Right that’s why we incorporate a live drummer. If we play a DJ set in a nightclub it would be a different style. If it’s live in a venue it will have a harder edge. We definitely have a lot of housy or for lack of a better word “clubby” tracks, but we try to work in some of our electro-rock as well to keep the crowd rocking.
Clubplanet: Tell me about the process of recording your last album, Nothing for Nothing.
Ben Eberdt: The last album we put together very quickly, we learned a lot and it was fun to make. We had been playing the songs out a little before we released them, so we knew what worked well live. We had a good idea of what we wanted to put out. We went to nice studios to do the mixing and we learned about mastering your own tracks. We learned the whole process start to finish.
Some of the songs we released had a little more of a harder edge, some were softer. Our style has evolved and I think our next release will be a little different. That album was a representation of how we would perform a live show with a drummer, where as our upcoming release focuses on production techniques and club geared tracks.
Clubplanet: How is NY treating you guys?
Ben Eberdt: It has been great. To tell you the truth we have been gone as much as we have been here flying out on the weekends. But there is so much going on; there are so many killer shows but I’m always out of town. You just never know what’s going to happen. I went to a record party with A-Trak and Treasure Fingers and it was at the Brooklyn Bowl, this bowling alley slash super tight venue (we are playing a show there December 17th). And A-Trak was celebrating his record label, Fool’s Gold’s, third anniversary, and all of sudden Kanye comes out with A-Trak and plays a set from his new album. It was a complete surprise performance and they brought the house down. Things like that you’re not going to get in Boulder. It was amazing.
Clubplanet: I have to ask about Gray being named Denver’s Most Fuckable Rock Star! Do you give you him a lot of crap for that?
Ben Eberdt: It's hilarious. When we found out it was his birthday and our manager called us and said “hey we have a surprise for you”! He’s the only one in the band that’s single right now, so he is pretty proud of it. We will see how it works out for him in Denver.
Click here to download the Savoy remix of "We No Speak Americano."