PeaceTreaty – Strangers

By: Jamie  Steinberg

Q) How would you describe your sound?

A) Well, we actually have been switching gears on our “sound.” We kind of want to stick towards the general big sound. I hate the term “big room” because I am not a fan of sub-genres, but we do make high energy music. Lately we have been going towards more melodic stuff, but we still try to incorporate the “wow effect” of the big sounding songs. To me, I just make house music because that is what I started off as when I first got into it. If I had to describe it, it would be high energy electronic music.

Q) What is the feel and vibe for your song “Strangers?”

A) “Strangers” is definitely in that realm. It’s actually a track that we were working on for a while now. It’s been a couple of years. Our buddies actually wrote some of it with us and we were back and forth with them a while ago and it actually needed a lot of work. At the time, we had the raw vocals and some kind of melody ideas. Then, we kind of put it on the back burner. Recently, we decided to bring it back and when we started working on it we felt the vocals had a lot of powerful messages in them, especially in the sense of listening to it when you are in a club. It is talking about being in a place with people you don’t know and reaching out to the people around you and experiencing new things. We wanted to give it a festival vibe where you would hear it in a large mass of people and really relate to it.

Q) Last year your Adventure Club bootleg of “Wonder” got such incredible well received radio support. How did that make you feel?

A) It felt great because it was towards a period where we were deciding what to release and what to work on. I did the bootleg myself a while ago and I showed Josh [Anaya]. I told him that the Adventure Club guys had been really cool with us and had been supporting us since day one, which is crazy to me. I asked him if we should release the song for free because they would be cool with it. We fixed it up, tweaked it and sent it to them. They were stoked with it. So, it was kind of cool because we had no idea it was going to do what it did. We were just going to release it as a free track. The other day Leighton [James]  just texted us a video of them playing it. It was just cool to see they are still playing it live and people are still listening to it.

Q) What is your process like for creating a track?

A) Usually, we start with a beat with a rhythm. Some people start with the musicality first. I think it works better for us to work with rhythm, drums and sound. Then, we start incorporating different musical elements. If we have vocals, we’ll definitely work around that. It’s a lot easier these days to work with a vocal than without. These days the trend in a lot of electronic music is going towards the pop realm and has vocals. So, if you have vocals then definitely tracks should revolve around that. But if there is no vocal then we like to start off with a good rhythm, something that gets us in the groove in the studio. Then, we start adding things on top of that and working around it.

Q) Who is someone you would love to collaborate with in the future?

A) I’ve answered this question before and I think Josh would agree that the artist we would love to collaborate with is Kaskade. He’s such a nice dude and always replies to our emails. He let us bootleg his last track. Some people will say “no” or won’t even give you the time of day that aren’t nearly as big as he is. He still has the time to do that and obviously his talents are exceptional. That would be the artist we would both love to collaborate with.

Q) What can fans expect from a live PeaceTreaty show?

A) When we perform live, we definitely like to do the high energy stuff. To me, it’s all about being on stage and really giving people what they want. Usually when we play a show it is a big crowd and we like to give 110% on stage and twist it up. We will do a hip-hop track and even a dubstep track. It’s cool to see fans’ reactions when we do a left turn in our set like that.

Q) What do you really want to be sure fans know about “Strangers?”

A) To me, “Strangers” was an experiment in the progressive world. We haven’t really released too many vocal driven progressive tracks except for “In Time.” That was definitely an experiment, too. A lot of our fans at that time were really confused by it because we got big kind of by releasing Dutch house music and that kind of stuff. We kind of veered away from that because we are artists and just like everyone else we are constantly growing and trying to push ourselves to new limits. We want to make music that kind of speaks to more people than just a Dutch “banger.” “Strangers” is more bringing that back. We want people to know that it is definitely a vocal driven track and it’s a message to really hit the heartstrings. Our whole thing is bringing people together through music. That’s what we want to do with our next few releases to have people thinking, “Wow. This music is actually speaking to me.”

Q) You are a part of social media. Why is that such an important way to connect with your fans?

A) It is huge because fans reach out all the time on social media and it is getting so big these days. It was never like that before. You would reach out to fans and mostly do it when you met them at shows. So now when we post music or post something funny and fans reach out to you it is really cool to see how they feel about things. If you are constantly getting support from your fans it motivates you more in the studio. If we’re getting tweets coming in from random fans saying they love our new song it is just going to motivate us more to get in the studio and keep writing more music.

Q) What can fans do to help support your music?

A) Just keep listening to it. Obviously, we want to promote people buying our music, but I don’t really care about that. I just want kids to go out there and listen to it, stream it and go to the shows. Support other artists, too! It’s crazy when I see some fans being negative to other artists. I like when fans reach out with a positive vibe and are open to hearing other music. To me, I’m trying to get our music across all platforms for people who don’t really know who we are to be, “Oh wow! I really like this music,” and our old fans come back and say, “Well, it’s not the old style, but it is good.”

Q) What would you like to say to everyone who is a fan and supporter of you and your work?

A) We wouldn’t be doing this without them. That’s how it is with all genres of music. The fans are number one. Without them none of this would be possible. I’m constantly grateful. Every morning I wake up I am thankful I get to do this for my fans. Even if it is one fan or a million fans, it’s the same. I’m just extremely grateful to have them out there to listen to our music.

ALL QUESTIONS ANSWERED BY ANGELO PATINO-PATRONI