The band life: an interview with local band member and U student Jonathan Kraemer

After attending my first basement rock concert in Como, I’ve been intrigued by the underground scene in the area. It just so happened that my friend Jonathan is the bassist for the local band Let’s Be Kids, trying to break onto that very scene, so I thought I’d sit down with him and get to know a little bit about the emerging band experience.

Jonathan is a junior from Stillwater, Minnesota studying entrepreneurship. He was part of three different bands since seventh grade

How would you describe your sound, the Let’s Be Kids sound?

I would say it falls along the lines of like the underground indie scene, very raw, and just unproduced pretty much.

What is the name of your current band and where did it come from? What was the naming transition like?

The transition from our previous band PoolHouse to Let’s be Kids, especially looking back on our old career starting in seventh grade going until now where we’re juniors in college, that’s a long time. And we wanted to reminisce on some of the lower-key aspects of being in a band when it wasn’t so business-minded just along with life itself. It’s about going to a simpler time and listening to music and enjoying it for what it is. 

What are some of your personal largest musical influences and your group as well, where do they draw from? And then how do these collective influences manifest in your music?

My personal influences come from a lot of classic rock stuff specifically Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and then collectively the three of us in the band now really are fans of the bands’ Mister West, Lapdogs, The Happy Children. And because of our shared interest in, and love of those underground indie bands that's the direction we’ve taken with our music. So it's just lucky that we’ve all really fallen in love with these musicians and that sound. That's the sound we’re chasing.

That’s awesome! So what's the name of the first song you put out?

Jonathan:  Don't Let Me Go

What are some of your favorite groups in the local scene and what do they mean to you? Do you have any connections to them?
Yeah, Mister West, The Happy Children, Early Eyes, and Lapdogs. Lapdogs and Mister West have a crazy drummer we knew from high school and Mister West, the singer who started that band we know from high school. So we kind of got a little bit of exposure, playing against them in the Battle of the Bands and with The Happy Children, we’ve all been following them for so long. Being where they are is what's driving us for sure.

What are some of the challenges of being an emerging band? What do you face trying to put yourselves out there? Well for one, specifically in our case, our guitarists goes to a different college. So it's hard to practice regularly. Especially now, one of the biggest challenges is just playing shows. We don't have the material to play a full set yet and we don't have exposure playing on the scene we want to play. So that's the biggest hurdle.

What are your goals for the band, immediate and then long-term?

Immediate goals? Have enough original material to play house shows. Long-term goals? Probably playing like Seventh Street Entry and some of the more non-self promoted venues. Kind of the next step out of the house scene.

What can people expect from future releases relative to this one current release?

So the Don’t Let Me Go sound is a sound of the past. We’ve definitely switched gears on what our sound is going to be, to a more raw indie sound.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.