Get To Know: The Carnegies

Ahead of The Carnegies’ performance at First Avenue’s Best New Bands of 2018 in the First Avenue Mainroom on Friday, January 4, we got to ask them a few questions. Read what they had to say below:

Emily Csuy: This past summer, The Carnegies played at Electric Fetus for the record store’s 50th anniversary. What is one of the most exciting music discoveries you’ve made at a record store?

The Carnegies: One of the most amazing discoveries we’ve made at a record store is realizing how much money we’ve spent and how broke we are. But a find that our manager/friend Jacob found for us at the Fetus was a hard-to-find CD of Keith Richards’s Honeymoon Tapes…there’s no question if you’re buying it when you find something like that. Plus playing the Electric Fetus 50th Anniversary in-store performance was a blast and honor!

EC: What is one of your favorite local places to play and why?

TC: Our favorite local venues would have to be two places, one being the 331 Club. It’s really happening there. The energy from the audience is what we drive off of and there’s always that energy there. The people who run it are awesome which makes all the difference. 7th St Entry is our favorite as well, all the reasons of having great people and the best sound guys there. All the same reasons as the 331. We’re honored to play there every time.

EC: What was one of the most memorable shows you attended in 2018?

TC: One of the most memorable shows we attended in 2018 would be Peter Asher of Peter & Gordon and Jeremy Clyde of Chad & Jeremy together at the Dakota Jazz Club. Their stories were just as great as their music. We got to witness Peter Asher mess up a guitar solo and everyone applauded as he said “f$@:$& hell” and owned it. We got to meet them after too.

EC: Did you learn anything new during the creation of your upcoming music video for “In the Night”?

TC: If we learned anything new during the making of the “In the Night” video, it’s that some of the best things happen when you improvise with your ideas—that applying to both the directors and the subjects. We all went with the next thing that came into someone’s head. Dan and Henry, our directors, were great and they helped feed the energy and gave us suggestions. It was amazing working with them.

EC: Is there anyone you hope to collaborate with in the future?

TC: If there’s anyone we’d love to collaborate with in the future it would be Curtiss A. We already kind of got the chance to do that for the John Lennon Tribute show. We joined him on stage for a song. We’ve attended the John Lennon Tribute at First Ave for about 5 years now and we’re always blown away.

Blog by Emily Csuy (Graphic Design Intern)