Voight’s LeBaron represents the musical efforts and collaboration of local musicians Stirling Hostetter and Joey McNally, both of whom are Bradley scene veterans. With a rotating cast of collaborators, the musical duo has released two projects (Voight’s LeBaron I and II respectively) in the past year and have more in the works. It’s rock in the most unapologetic sense, refusing to be defined and deeply influenced by whatever the pair finds interesting at that particular time. By having each song take a new angle on a familiar sound, doing the homework for this interview was exciting and enjoyable. I really dig these guys and think you all will too.

R: So where did it all get started for this band?

S: This is a band that came to fruition when we agreed to play a show that we had no material for and the band didn’t exist. Joey was contacted to play the Brave Sounds Halloween show with Sadface Killer, but because of missing personnel they couldn’t make it. So we threw together a group to play the slot and it stuck. We recorded what we wrote for that show and decided to run with it.

R: And what is the sound of what you wrote and recorded? Could you define it?

J: The terminology that we have settled on is that it is “Krunglecore”

R: (laughing) Ok so what is that supposed to mean?

J: It’s sort of just a nonsense word we use to describe it because there isn’t really a defined “sound” for this music. 

S: We use this as an outlet to make whatever kind of music we want to make at that given time. So you can hear a major difference between the first EP and the LP we recently put out. And there will be even more of a difference on the third project.

J: That first EP, Voight’s I has a lot of surf punk adjacent influence on it. Lot’s of fast and sloppy stuff that we were bringing in from previous bands we’ve played in.

S: On the second album though we definitely tried to clean that sound up. I know at the time we recorded that one I was listening to a lot of prog rock stuff and I tried to bring in guitar tones from that. And every song largely starts with guitar so where we end up in the song is typically dominated by that sound.

R: So what was the recording process like on Voight’s II? What was going on creatively?

S: It was kind of a mash of songs that were already written and just needed to be worked out and recorded. We brought in some that I had done with Jack (who plays drums on Voight’s II) and some that Joey had and we just picked out a week in the summer and made it happen.

R: You mentioned a third project, tell me about that.

J: It’s in the very early stages, we actually just had a discussion about what kind of music each of us have ready that could be part of that.

S: We’re also working on bringing in a drummer remotely. We want a really fresh clean drum track that we can build the sound of the third album off of.

J: What we do next, from a writing standpoint is taking these ideas for songs and crafting some really fleshed out instrumentals from them.

R: Could you go a bit more into detail on the writing process? Where are these ideas coming from and how do they become songs?

J: I think the MO so far has been Stirling will have a batch of riffs that he’s been working on between projects, and he brings those in to me and we sit down and build grooves around that, we come up with the bridge together, and then we have the basic structure of a song. There are, of course, variations on that process. Like the song Painting Aphids on Voight’s II was written entirely by Stirling and Jack.

With everything we’ve done so far, we start out with just instrumentals, then we sit down at a later date and put vocals over those tracks. That’s where things get really interesting for me because it’s the part where we get to decide what each song is. When we work out those instrumentals, there’s never any sort of statement we’re trying to make from a lyrical standpoint

So we have this instrumental and it’s like, “what do we do with this?”. We pull inspiration from poetry, movies we watched, what we were eating that day, really anything that happens to be on our minds. We just pick something like that and go down this strange neurotic rabbit hole on that and get weird with it.

S: All of our songs are written in one sitting. So there’s this nice condense cohesive feel to them, the feeling of how we were writing it. We don’t sit around and ponder every note and every word, we just let it flow out and lay it down. So every song is a nice little look into what we were doing and feeling creatively at that exact moment of writing.

J: On Voight’s II especially we were writing vocals as we were recording them. So it becomes this direct from page to microphone stream. There wasn’t time for things to sit and wonder “does this make sense?”, it was more like hey that’s good someone go up to the mic and sing that section of the song and it kind of just happens and then whatever we get at the end of the session there and that’s the song.

R: Before we close up here I do want to ask you the question that’s been on my mind the whole time I’ve been prepping for this. So the band name is of course a Seinfeld reference, do you two have favorite episodes?

S: Oh wow it’s hard to choose, I mean there’s like dozens of perfect episodes in that show’s fun. Obviously the episode with Voight’s LeBaron was important to us. That one has always really done it for me.

J: The most classic for me has got to be the two-parter with Keith Hernandez. I was also really into the Big Salad episode.

R: So where did the name come from? Did you just like that episode?

S: It actually came from a Seinfeld trivia event at a bar where another team had taken it for their name. I thought it was great and a week later when we were trying to think of a band name for this it just stuck out to me. So yeah, credit to those people for having the best team name at a Seinfeld trivia night.

These guys were great to talk to and I loved getting in their heads and learning about how they make their music. Make sure to check out their two existing projects on Bandcamp https://voightslebaron.bandcamp.com/ and Spotify. Here’s a video of Voight’s LeBaron playing Gutpunch off of Voight’s I the Brave Sounds Halloween event from 2019.