Money & King Returns Home to Vienna for Aug. 30 Concert

Acoustic guitarist James Sparber and Branden Goldstein, on drums, grew up playing in bands together in their hometown of Vienna.

After ten years living on different coasts, Sparber in Brooklyn and Goldstein in Los Angeles, the two friends reunited in New York in 2010 and formed Money & King with bassist, backup singer and Seattle native, John Loggins.

They spent two years refining their sound  by playing live shows in New York and New Jersey.  Then, the band began work on their first full-length album, Across The Cul-De-Sac, an eclectic collection of ‘60s- and ‘70s-influenced indie-Americana songs driven by Sparber and Goldstein's signature emphasis on interesting melodies and vocal harmonizing.

Patch sat down with Sparber and Goldstein to discuss their band and their upcoming show at Jammin' Java August 30.

Patch:  How does it feel to be coming back to Vienna to play together?

Sparber:  It feels good. We’ve been trying to set this up for a while now. My family is still in Vienna, and Brandon’s brother’s family is in Leesburg, plus we have a lot of friends still in the area. Also, when we were growing up there weren’t really any venues there so we always went to Arlington or DC for shows. We’re glad that Jammin Java has become such a great space, and that kids now can go to shows in their own town.

Goldstein:  Being in Vienna brings back great memories, especially since I rarely have the opportunity to go there anymore given that my parents moved to Williamsburg, VA a while back and my brother and his family live in Leesburg. I’m excited to see some old friends at the show too.

Patch:  What year did you graduate from high school and which high school did you attend?

Sparber:   Brandon went to Marshall and graduated class of ‘94. I went to Madison (Go Warhawks!) and would’ve been class of ‘93 but left early for college.

Goldstein:  I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I actually skipped school on more than one occasion to walk the halls of Madison with friends in between their classes. I think I secretly wished I went there and not Marshall. No offence to Marshall or my friends who went there with me. I have great Marshall memories, especially of playing in the concert and jazz bands there and the musical director at the time, Mr. Stokes.

Patch:  What was the name of your band in high school when you played together?

Sparber:  Our band, like a lot of high school bands, went through many names, but was mainly called The Proles. I believe that came from Brandon reading George Orwell’s 1984 (and is funny in retrospect since we were the farthest thing from the proletariat—I don’t think we knew what it meant).

Patch:  Did you do many local performances in high school?

Sparber:  We played a few parties, but our big shows were playing at an actual club in Manassas called Bender’s Arena. They had a pro sound system, smoke machines, and strobe lights—very exciting when you are sixteen-years-old.

Patch:  How did you get the name of your first album?

Sparber:  The album title comes from a line in the last song on our album which is called “Tales from Vienna Woods”. It’s a song about growing up in Vienna and going to the swim club (sort of).

Patch:  Are you working on a second album yet?

Sparber:  We have a number of songs in the works for our second album. Two are currently in our set, “Magical” and “Midtown”. We just filmed a live video for the latter which is up now on Wreckroom.tv.
We are planning to start production on the album in the fall.

Patch:  How has your music evolved as Money & King?

Sparber:  We started this band with a long conversation about the kind of music that we wanted to play together. Unusually, we’ve actually stuck fairly closely to those original ideas. I think the way we’ve evolved has been through the very talented players that we’ve been lucky enough to have in the band.

Patch:  How has your music evolved since you played together in high school?

Sparber:  Well, we do a lot fewer Violent Femmes and Pixies covers.

Goldstein:  Like most other high school rock bands, we were mainly just getting used to playing our instruments in a band setting and learning to play our favorite bands’ songs...and laughing uncontrollably throughout the process. We did have some original songs that I have really good memories of, but many of them now seem like a bunch of parts strung together in the key of The Cure, or the key of R.E.M. (though there are plenty of great songs written that way). It’s hard for a band or any of its members to develop much of a real musical identity in that setting. I don’t feel like I really started becoming who I am as a musician, or at least as a songwriter, until I moved to LA after college. By that point, James and I had already gone in some very different musical, not to mention geographical, directions. I think that the projects we were in separately in New York and LA were very indicative of those cities. As a result, the songs we bring to the table now tend to be pretty different stylistically. As James has joked before, he writes the after-dinner music and I write the sunshine jams. And it’s kind of true, but somehow it all fits together in this band. I would guess that that is not only because of our shared musical histories and mutual obsessions with the songwriting and recordings of the 60’s and 70’s, but also because we have a great band that doesn’t necessarily always look to the past for guidance. They help create the through-lines across our songs, and hopefully the end result is something all its own.

Check out Money & King at Jammin Java, 227 Maple Ave. E., Vienna on Friday at 10 p.m.