The Pauses brand of rock is angular and quirky, and we wouldn't want it any other way

It wasn’t the first Kickstarter campaign but the second. It wasn’t their first try at a band but this latest. For the members of The Pauses, achieving their musical goals has been a stop and start (over) affair.

But now with their proper debut in hand (thanks to that second fan-supported campaign) entitled A Cautionary Tale, both Jason Kupfer and Tierney Tough insist they’re ready for the work ahead of them — garnering your attention amid the maelstrom of musical options. While new music videos and unique promotional twists might work to some degree, The Pauses’ brand of rock, both quirky and angular, should be enough to craft a buzz all its own.

SSv: As a new band getting ready to release a debut album, I’d love to focus on the amount of work you have to do today as a new musician.

Jason Kupfer: Yeah, it’s interesting. You would know probably even more than we would. The way it seems to be working in terms of promoting yourselves is so different than when we were raised. Back then it was a lot more radio where music was force fed to you and you learned what was new and out there. But now it’s on the band to get their music out there on the blogs and it’s more about word-of-mouth than it is some sort of musical entity telling you what the new thing is.

Tierney Tough: Yeah, it’s not even label based anymore. You’re on your own and fending for yourself. The Internet is your source and you just have to search and search and search for things now. Before everything was in your face and MTV was a huge thing for us growing up, because you’d wake up and you had these great videos and great music that was on at the time. Now it’s about the search.

Jason: Sometimes I wonder if I would have even enjoyed that band if I would have had the options that I have now, without the availability of being able to find whatever you want. You really have the discernment now to listen to what you want, whereas before it was, ‘Here are the three new bands you can listen to this month and I have to pick from one of them. So you have so many options nowadays that you have to push your band much harder to get attention. It’s good and bad.

SSv: Yes, it’s not just about making the music anymore, but about finding your own entrepreneurial spirit. Were you ready for that?

Jason: I think we enjoy that side of it just as much as the music.

Tierney: Yeah, definitely.

Jason: We have a lot of fun finding ways to promote ourselves or finding unique ways to let people know about us. You have to promote yourself. You have to send out e-mails. So it’s about finding out how to have fun with those things so it’s not just the same old approach. There’s a lot of times where we’re doing that stuff where we think, ‘Man, this would be a lot easier if we had someone full-time who could do this for us.’ But that’s a luxury we don’t have right now, so we have to pick up the flack. But it’s not as much of a chore as it is for some other bands.

SSv: Tell me about the Kickstarter project that birthed A Cautionary Tale.

Jason: It’s funny because we actually did one awhile back. We did our first Kickstarter campaign and it was really a barebones thing. We put it out there with just an image and a brief summary of what we were doing. We didn’t promote it and so it made nothing.

Tierney: Yeah, our original goal was $4,500 for the whole thing, which we didn’t end up doing for the second Kickstarter, because after that, we gave up on Kickstarter. We were intimidated by it. It’s scary because if you don’t meet your goal, then you don’t make anything. You can work so hard and yet you’re waiting to see if you’re going to make anything. So we tried some fundraising shows and tried to make it ourselves. Jason and I saved a lot of our money to make the record, too.

We noticed some other people were doing Kickstarters that had these really fun visuals and videos and stuff. Maybe it was a bit of a time crunch too where we only had so much time to make so much money before hitting the studio, so we made up the idea to do the handcrafted video with these little people for Kickstarter. I have all kinds of crafts around and Jason works in a production studio, so we had access to cameras and editing software. We just had fun with it and made this video to help with it.

Jason: Yeah, it was all about the video. We made that in one day. We were thinking that it might help, but because Kickstarter dug it, they blogged about it and tweeted on it. People really responded to it. I think the magic trick on Kickstarter is to make a video for it and they can promote it from there. The entire album didn’t rest on Kickstarter. We would have figured out something, but if we hadn’t done Kickstarter, then we would have pushed it back a while until we could make the album.

SSv: So it’s working not only to have your music listened to but even to get it made in the first place.

Jason: Yeah, but we’ve made albums in the past and we’ve done all of the work ourselves from a financial standpoint in previous bands. But we really wanted to take this a lot more seriously. We really wanted to give ourselves a deadline so we’re not just overworking it in some friend’s studio where we’re to the point where it would take a year to record it.

Tierney: Also for the first album, we thought it was important to make a good impression with the packaging and recording and the whole presentation. It was really important to us to do that. So we didn’t record it at home so we could do that.

SSv: You mentioned the previous bands you were in. What became important for you as the three of you came together on this round?

Jason: I think the most important thing besides a musical chemistry is just having that friendship. We were close with the band members that we were with before, but you would inevitably get to this tension and it would uproot the band. Tierney and I were in a previous band for a number of years and you’d go on this tour and come back and there was this unspoken rule that it was the end of the band. [Laughs] We always found that we were always interested in making music together, so we just kept at that.

Tierney: We have an interesting way of working and it takes an understanding. It’s not that it’s complicated, but we have a tight chemistry together and it’s hard for people to understand it. We went through some member changes to get where we are, and then we found Nathan, who fits perfectly in understanding what we’re doing. He may fight a little bit on composition, but he gets the intricacy of the music and our craziness.

Jason: Yeah, when Nathan came into the band, a lot of the material was already written. So it was him just figuring out how to make his own mark with it. Now that we’re past that, a lot of the new material is band oriented and he’s much more a part of it now. I think the earlier part was a struggle to get in on it. That’s definitely key to feel comfortable with people and trust the people that you’re working with.

Tierney: Yeah, I think there’s an unspoken language with us. I can be completely comfortable. I have this small little part that I can write that I’ve never shown to anyone, but I can send it to Jason and am totally confident that he’s going to flesh it out into this awesome arrangement or find another part for it. There’s no questioning it. He will just know what to do with it and that’s it. We don’t have to talk as much as others.

SSv: You think that was intimidating for Nathan to walk into?

Tierney: I think that’s been intimidating for everyone I’ve ever worked with. We forget to communicate, too. We’ve had this working relationship but now it’s at a point where we’re all pretty equal.

Jason: Being in a band is almost like being in this weird polygamist relationship. It’s weird because we’ll have this conversation about old band history in front of Nathan and it’s almost like this inside joke that he’s not involved with it.

SSv: The release is almost here, so what does the next stretch run look like for you?

Jason: The release is in a week.

Tierney: Yeah, we are heading to South by Southwest with the album for the first time ever. I’ve never even been to Austin before. That’s the plan to just tour and promote it as much as possible and work on some new material when we can. We have a song coming out on a Jason Noble benefit comp that our friend Gordon Withers is putting out. We just hope that we get some good feedback from it all and that we can continue to do more things.