On Saturday, June 22, I got to sit down with The Strike for an interview. They’re a three-piece band from California and heavily inspired by the ’80s. I can’t say I blame them – the ’80s are one of my favorite decades for media, especially the movies. I love “The Breakfast Club,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off,” and “Heathers.” It was a great time for music and film. They sound exactly like a band would from the ’80s in this year, I mean this as a compliment. It’s fitting for them, vocally and sound-wise. I love that they had a saxophone on stage. I’m a sucker for artists that bring uncommon instruments into their music. Despite playing one of the taller stages on the grounds, vocalist Chris Crabb made sure the audience was having a good time between songs.

ME: Hey everyone, ready? 

BAND: Yes, yeah, alright. 

ME: So, if you just want to introduce yourselves and what your role is with the band.

CHRIS: Uh, yeah, I’m Chris and I am the lead singer in the band. 

DAVID: I’m David and I play guitar and keyboards in the band. And bass. 

JAY: I’m Jay and I play the drums in the band.

ME: How did you guys meet? Tell me about how The Strike came to life. 

JAY: Sure, Chris and I, we went to college together back in, you know, 2012, 2013 when we graduated, and Chris was starting the band there in Utah. So, uh, we played tons of shows, grew the band, traveled around.

And then, eventually, as things grew, we wanted to take it to L.A. Chris grew up in Pasadena, California. I’m from Orange County, so we’ve always wanted to go back to California, back where kind of our roots, our families are. So we took the band back to LA and then kind of found David living in L.A, playing with different artists, and we became great friends, and that’s kind of how the three of us came to be. We started writing music together. We were roommates for a bit in L.A and we had a really great friendship and workflow, and we liked all the stuff we were making, so we kind of made it official.

And that’s how it came to be. 

ME: So, how long have you guys been a band? 

CHRIS: Our first album came out in 2017. Um, the band had been around a little bit before that, but I kind of marked that day in 2017 as sort of like the first year of the band.

ME: So, you did just release a new album recently. What’s your favorite track off of it and why? 

CHRIS: Favorite track off the new album? Man, I like a couple. I like, “Just Like Paradise,” and I also I like “Reckless” a lot, too. Those, those have become two of my favorites from the album.

What about you guys? 

DAVID: I like this power ballad that we have at the end of the album called “Until The Lights Go Out.” That’s a fun one. It kind of ticks all the 80’s boxes of having a key change and an epic guitar solo. And it’s also lyrically a very heartfelt song, and I love that part of it, too.

I also like this song called “Heroes of the Heart” that is I think, an under loved track on the album, but I’m a fan of that one and just feels a little different than some of our other songs, and I think it has a cool pulse to it. And, um yeah. I’m a fan. 

ME: Will you be playing that song? 

DAVID: Unfortunately, not. Not tonight. But hey, if enough people recommend or ask for it, request it. We could bring it back and put it in the set. I love that. 

JAY: Yeah, the songs, that kind of changes from time to time or whatever phase I’m in, but I like “The Getaway.” I like “Reckless.” Um, “Kids of the Last Days,” yeah.

ME: Who does your songwriting? What does the creative process look like? 

CHRIS: Well, the three of us, kind of, have complementary strengths. Jay and David are really talented producers and musicians and my strengths are more in lyrics and writing melodies.

And so a song can be written a number of different ways. Either Jay or David will come up with an idea, a musical idea, and I’ll kind of put a melody on top of it, as well as lyrics. Or sometimes it will happen in reverse ,where I’ll kind of come up with an idea for like a melody and lyrics sitting at my piano, and I’ll bring it to them.

And then we’ll build the song from there, so that’s typically how the songwriting across this goes. 

ME: If you could tour or open for anyone, who would it be? Why?

CHRIS: If we could tour open for anyone…

ME: You can all answer if you have different answers. 

CHRIS: No, no? Well, we opened a few.

Several months ago, we opened for Journey. And that was sort of like a huge thing for me. I’ve always loved them a lot and kind of as a singer, my singing style is kind of like high male tenor vocals, and so that’s like why Journey is sort of, like, always what I aspired to be.

When I was young, I was like, I want to be like the front man, like Steve Perry, or something like that, you know.  So that was a really cool thing, but what about you guys? 

DAVID: Yeah, honestly, for me, it would be similar in that ‘80s space. Like, I’d love to open for Toto. Or someone like that Tears for Fears, you know? I think that’d be really fun. Yeah, same as well. 

JAY: What’s been said before, I mean, I think any, like The Killers would be awesome, too. 

ME: What inspires your music? 

JAY: I mean, everything. I mean, a lot of times, I just think, like, why do you get into music?

Like, when you’re young, it’s fun. It’s an outlet, and so for me, when I’m creating song ideas for The Strike, it’s usually on a day where I have a chunk of time that’s free, and I want to go back to those feelings that I had when I was young and just started music, and it’s starting the fresh musical idea and getting lost in that.

And like, just being inspired from how it makes you feel, you know, like creating something new, creating something that you like, that you can listen to on a loop that feels kind of magical, and then wanting to share that with other people. 

CHRIS: Yeah, kind of similar.

I mean, everyone’s been in a position where they listen to a song, and they just like, really connect with it. And from a very young age, I just felt very drawn to it and wanted to be a part of it. Wanted to be around music and so that’s obviously what kind of drives me is wanting to feel that connection with other people at a show, or when people message us and say, like, hey, this song that you guys made, you know, it helped me through a hard time, or we use this song like for the first dance of the wedding or something like that, it’s just… It’s an unbelievable feeling, and for me as a songwriter, lyrically, I always try to be mindful of keeping notes on my phone or as I’m just going about my life.

I’ll have an idea of like, you know, what it means to be a human. What it means to just live life, and I’ll jot down something. And then I’ll come back to it later when it’s time to write something and reference that. People can connect with that when they hear it so…

DAVID: You nailed it man. 

ME: Any last notes, secrets you want to share? 

CHRIS: Notes or secrets? Oh man, I don’t think so. I guess, just shamelessly plug ourselves.

ME: No music, no tours? 

CHRIS: But yeah, we’re going on tour next month, July 25. We’re going on tour with The Fray.

That’ll be a month-long national tour. Yeah, then we have a song coming out next month. Our song, “The Getaway,” we’re doing a feature with the country artist named Mitchell Tenpenny, and we’re pretty excited about that as well. 

JAY: Yeah, we gotta we got a couple other alternate versions, like an acoustic release, another remix from a really cool band that we like and then, yeah, the tour. I had something else to say, but I just blanked. But yeah. We got new music in the works, of course, so that’s always exciting. So, yeah, a lot of stuff coming up.

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