A Look Into The Minds of Ever Green; An Ever Green Interview

Conducted By: Cameron Green

Transcribed by: Sophia Shull

A live Ever Green performance. Check out their website for more information and awesome photos!

Bel Air, Maryland’s very own Ever Green decided to sit down with The Setlist on November 20th, 2024 and answer all of our burning questions. These questions were carefully curated by our own members to ask vocalist and bassist Pete Pridegon, guitarist Ross Rooker, and drummer Calvin Sandler. They discussed their formation, favorite music inspiration, and song writing process. 

How would you describe your sound?

Calvin: We like to emulate like a 70’s classic rock kind of thing. We’ve covered a lot of Rush and Led Zeppelin, if that says a lot about our sound.

Ross: Yeah, I think with our sound too, we’re not always trying to sound old. I feel like a lot of the stuff we end up making sounds newer. The stuff we cover doesn’t always emulate how we sound. I think we strive for a classic rock sound, but it doesn't always come out that way. 

Pete: I’d say we try to be more of the old stuff, but with an angst to it. 

Where do you write your music?

Ross: I have a barn on my property and we turned it into our headquarters. That’s where we practice and even record now. We bought some recording gear and all that. 

What do you guys have set up in the barn?

Ross: We’ve got a drum kit, a PA system, and when we record, we use a Scarlett 18i8, it’s the one with nine inputs. We use SM57’s for recording guitars. For vocals, we use the CMK23, just kind of a basic setup, but it gets the job done. 

Pete: And a foosball table. 

Ross: And a foosball table! And there’s a fridge, which is nice. 

What is the furthest distance you’ve traveled to play a show or go to an event?

Calvin: L.A.

Pete: 2,500 miles.

Ross: Yeah, California was definitely the farthest. 

Calvin: We were playing at the Whiskey a Go Go, so it was like a five hour plane ride.

Wow that’s awesome, how did playing at the Whiskey a Go Go come about?

Ross: It’s hard to get people to respond, and when I got a response from California, I was like, “Okay we’re definitely gonna make this work.” I’ll email places, and they [Whiskey a Go Go] actually responded, which surprised me, but then we just put it all together. It took a month of planning, but then we signed a contract, they gave us a date, and we were out there. 

How long have you guys known each other?

Pete: Well, we all went to middle and high school together and we were all in the same grade, so we all just kind of knew each other. Even if it wasn’t personally, we all kind of knew each other through the grapevine since sixth grade. 

Ross: I think we all knew each other in middle school, but I think it wasn’t until like freshman or sophomore year.

Calvin: We just all felt like, you could kind of feel the energy from a distance. It’s like we’ve got our eye in the sky.

What made you sit down and form the band?

Ross: At school they were doing a tailgate and asking people to do live music, and we were kinda like “Okay let’s make that happen.” That’s what made us do it, and then after that we just kept doing it.

Pete: It was almost like a band for hire, and it stuck. We did have a fourth member, but he’s not with us because he’s in West Virginia. When he comes back from breaks, we play with him! He’s not gone, he’s still in our Instagram bio

Are you planning to release anything new soon?

Pete: Not like super soon, but right now we’re working to finish up our first album, and it’ll be out sometime in the first half of next year.

Ross: Hopefully the beginning of, but we’ll see! Sometimes we procrastinate a little too much.

Calvin: We’ve got a new song going right now, it’s pretty good.

Cool, anything you could tell us about it?

Calvin: Oh, no.

Pete: It’s just different. Not different from what we do, but it just strays away from our normal sound, which is cool.

For your song writing process, do you guys like to write instrumentals first, or lyrics first?

All: Instrumentals first.

Pete: Usually lyrics come last.

What do you guys like to write about?

Pete: That’s kind of a hard question because it really depends on how the music sounds. For example, one of our songs is called Permafrost, and the only reason I called it that was because the guitar riff sounded icy. It’s weird to explain, but it was a cold riff, and that’s how it came to me. 

Ever Green shredding it! Photo Credits: Ever Green

What inspiration do you take from, outside of music?

Calvin: I can’t say as a drummer. It’s really just drummers that I’m taking inspiration from. 

Ross: I’ll like, stare at the moon sometimes. It sounds kind of weird but then I’ll just play the guitar. I’m not necessarily trying to write anything, but I just think it’s cool and spooky maybe, but I can’t think of anything like movies per say. 

When it comes to original songs, are there any that inspire you, lyrically or otherwise?

Ross: For our one song Hit and Run, I was watching a Rolling Stones interview they just did and one of them said that word and I thought, “Oh, that’d be a cool song name.” 

Pete: This isn’t a religious thing, but the Bible has some really good lines in it. If you ever need any lyrical material, open to any page of the Bible and you can find something good. 

Ross: I think the one song has Harry Potter references, Basilisk.

Pete: Oh, okay I didn’t get that from Harry Potter actually, I’ve never seen or read Harry Potter, but, the basilisk is in a lot of different things. I wrote that more based on the actual folklore of the creature, not any modern representation of it.

How long did it take before you individually felt music ready?

Calvin: To be honest, even playing our first show, I was like “This isn’t really good enough,” but after our second show, I was like “Yeah.” So after I joined the band, which would have been nine years.

Ross: The time we played the tailgate I think we practiced for three days, which was also a problem. That didn’t go as good as we wanted, but, I think it also depends on what kind of music you’re trying to play, especially from a guitar standpoint. If you wanted to play Iron Maiden, that’s pretty intricate. If you’re playing Nirvana, that takes time, but it’s a lot harder to play Iron Maiden parts than Nirvana parts. It all depends on what you’re trying to achieve. 

Pete: Bass was not my first instrument, I was a percussionist. The first time I ever picked up a bass was the first time I performed with it. My sister was playing a song at an open mic night, and she needed a bass player. Granted, it was a really easy song with only four notes the entire time, but I wasn’t ready, I was forced to be ready. After that, I didn’t perform until I was sixteen.

How have family and friends influenced your taste in music and are there any albums that inspire you?

Pete: Growing up, it was always what my sister was listening to because I hung out with her a lot. Initially, she got into The Beatles and I was like “Okay, well now I’m listening to The Beatles.” It became stuff like Led Zeppelin and Guns and Roses, and then turned into heavier stuff like Cannibal Corpse and Dance Gavin Dance. The first band I found on my own was Rush, and they’re still my favorite. A song that impacted me was Rush’s 2112. I was always fascinated with really long songs, and that one’s twenty minutes.

Ross: For me, it’s pretty similar. My sister, who’s older than me, was into it too, but my dad always had on the Rolling Stones and stuff like that, so growing up I was always listening to that. When I was in middle school, I watched the movie Hook, and they sing Smells Like Teen Spirit. I remember watching that and thinking “What is that song?” and I really got into grunge. Then, I put on Appetite for Destruction by Guns and Roses and I was like “Woah.” I just started learning all those songs, locked myself in my room and played that album. 

Calvin: When I was a little kid, the first things that I got into were from my mom and dad. From my mom, it was whatever she was playing in the kitchen off her iPod. There was a lot on there, Michael Jackson, Justin Timberlake, Baby Come Back. My dad was in multiple bands before I was born, and he had a few CDs of stuff he made, which sounds kind of like what we make now. Slowly, I kinda leaned more into that side of things. 

Pete: Something we lightly butt heads about to this day is that we all come from rock, but different sides of it. Some of us want to play a certain song on our setlist, but we’ll be like “Well that wouldn’t make sense.” Really, there’s not many songs we’ve been initially into, like I wasn’t super into Guns and Roses, but since I’ve played with Ross, I’ve thought it’s really cool. 

Ross: Yeah, our first setlist ranged from like, Weezer to King Crimson. At a high school event. 

Listen to Ever Green’s new EP Hit and Run! Credits: Ever Green

How do you guys solve issues?

Pete: I feel like we don’t solve it, we just don’t talk about it until it goes away. Really healthy stuff.

Ross: I’ll notice it'll go silent, but then it usually works out. If we’re butting heads on something stupid, it usually goes away or we laugh about it.

Pete: We’re not really arguing, it’s just more of “I don’t really want to do this.” Sometimes we’ll say nothing at all. 

Ross: Yeah, sometimes songwise there’s one song that he [Calvin] refuses to play so we always joke that we’ll start our own project.

Calvin: It’s called the Doomer Song, and it’s really bad. They keep thinking that it’s really good and I’m trying to convince them that it’s bad. 

Ross: That’s an example that you saw first hand. Usually, nobody is that offended.

Pete: We’re not out to get each other, we’re all friends, we want everything to go smoothly, so we keep on chugging. 

One more thing, I want to circle back to what your writing process is like. When you’re sitting down to write a song, is it collaborative?

Calvin: It usually starts out with Ross, he’ll have a riff, and then we just build off of that. What comes next is the baseline, and I’m trying to make the beat based off of that. Then comes the structure of the song, how long we make the intro, how long is the riff, how we transition into this part.

Ross: Some of our songs literally come together by accident. Me and him [Pete] hit the same note together and we were like “Woah what's that note?” and we both went off that. I don’t even know if there was a process on that, it just kinda got put together right there. Some songs we can make in one time. The current song we’ve been working on has taken like a week now. 

Pete: If we’re not coming in with riffs that we thought of on our own, usually we start jamming and improvising. Once you play long enough, a really cool idea will come out and we’ll circle back on that. We’ve had two or three songs come from jams. 

Ross: I feel like a lot of this stuff happens when we’re all practicing.

Pete: We’ve never had someone like Ross write an entire song on his own, it’s usually someone plants a seed and we see where it goes.