What’s not to love about a boy and girl-fronted Boston indie outfit with screamingly good vocals, rock n’ roll uniforms and choruses you couldn’t get the hell out of your head if you tried?  Aloud is one such band, and we here at TeaParty Boston have had the distinct pleasure of seeing them perform twice this summer.  Aloud played The Luxury’s CD release at the Paradise back in July, which continues to be one of the most talked about Boston events of 2009, and Jessie and I recently caught up with them after their sound check at TT the Bear’s Place before their high-impact show on August 6th with The Lights Out.  Henry Beguiristain and Jen de la Osa, the pair behind all things Aloud, left Miami for Boston nearly ten years ago in order to capitalize on their artistic enthusiasm and mutual appreciation for meticulously crafted lyrics and songwriting.  They haven’t looked back since.  With a handful of self-released albums behind them and a new record in the works, the duo will continue to write and rock side by side as a Boston band.

Both Jen and Henry will be participating in Boston Band Crush’s One Night Band tomorrow, August 29th, and they’ll be just two members of a 40-person roster of some of the areas most prolific musicians.  The trademark belts and yells of Jen and Henry are reason enough to go alone, so head Downstairs at the Middle East to see these black-and-white-and-red all over rock stars do what they do best.

-Hilary Hughes

THE OPENING ACT: ALOUD AND THE TEAPARTY TEN

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Jen: Cheerios! Multigrain!

Henry: I normally hate cereal because my dad would feed me Corn Pops every day, but the blander the better, I guess.  I’ll do Trix.  I’ll turn tricks for Trix.  What?

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles”, or Mouth from “The Goonies”?

H: Since John Hughes died, in memoriam, I will refrain from punching Long Duk Dong in the face.

J: Yeah.  Let’s go for one of the Goonies.  I’m like the only person I know who hates that movie, so I’ll punch ‘em ALL in the face.

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

J: A can opener.

H: A wok!  It’s a funny word.  And it’s useful.

You go to bed, wake up, walk into the bathroom to brush your teeth, and you look in the mirror and you realize that you’ve turned into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

J: That stoner, bass-playing girl Janice is pretty cool.

H: Which is the one that hangs out with Beeker all the time?  Bunson?  I’d be Bunson Honeydew.  I can kind of do his voice.

Say you have a crazy night, you black out, and you wake up feeling like crap the next morning and you realize… you got a tattoo.  When you were under the influence of SOMEthing.  What’d you get inked?

H: I don’t have any tattoos and I don’t plan on getting any tattoos, so I’d probably get something really dumb.  It would be “MASTER SHAKE” on my ass, as a joke, and then I’ll sober up in the morning and be like “…….Fuuuuuuuuck.”

J: Instantly, I kind of thought of the Superman logo for some reason.  Or maybe “Faulkner”. I’d get something equally stupid.  Actually, you know what I’d get?  I’d get the logo from Fan the Fury.

Would you rather be a rodeo clown or a sumo wrestler?

J: Rodeo clown!

H: Yeah, a rodeo clown.  I saw a King of the Hill episode where Bobby was a rodeo clown and it was really funny.

If you were a particular style of facial hair, what would you be?

H: I would be any kind of facial hair because I’m incapable of growing it.  It’s all patchy and then I look like Billy Corgan on a good day.

J: A pedophile mustache.  Haaaaaaa.

If you were a type of cheese, which cheese would you be?

J: Camembert.  Or MANCHEGO!

H: Cheddar is awesome.

What’s your favorite word?

H: Appalling.

J: Putrid.  That’s also a great word.

What’s your quintessential “I’M GONNA DANCE AROUND MY APARTMENT IN MY SKIVVIES AND LOVE LIFE!” song?

H: “Immigrant Song.” That song can go well with anything.  My backup choice would be “Thriller”.

J: It would have to be anything by Diana Ross and the Supremes.  “Love Child” would probably be my go-to track.  And I’ve been caught dancing and singing to this song like a foolish idiot to this song with my sister.

THE MAIN EVENT: THE ALOUD TPB INTERVIEW

Hi, Aloud!  Can we get some background info for the record?

J: I’m Jen de la Osa, and I’m 27.

H: I’m Henry, and I’m also 27.

Are you from here originally?

J: Miami, actually.

So, what brought you guys to Boston?

H: Miami sucks!

J: (Laughs) Yeah! Miami brought us to Boston.  There’s no scene there.  We were kind of like the black sheep, period.  Whatever we were into, nobody was into, or not into it enough.  It was like, “Oh yeah, the Beatles are alright, but I love Limp Bizkit.” Fuck!

H: We actually went on tour, when was that, this past February?  We went to play Miami for the first time in nine years, trying to book the gig and find bands and all that stuff.  It was such a hassle and a reminder, like, “Right. We made a good decision in leaving.”  We did find an excellent band there called Ex Norwegian, though.

J: There was no scene and we felt like outsiders the whole time we were living there.  We didn’t really connect with any of it.  Miami is the kind of place that sort of strangles art in general.  That’s why everybody moves to Miami Beach.

H: Yeah, we also got a lot of unsolicited musical advice which I just looooved (laughs).

What kind of musical advice are we talkin’?

H: “You guys should play more reggaeton.  You know, good music!” (Laughs).  We were actually down in Fort Lauderdale this past weekend and it was funny because my parents had the radio on, and it’s like in a time freeze right now.  The playlist hasn’t changed in fifteen years.  I’m hearing the same things I heard in high school down there, which was great then, but not so much now.

How did you guys meet?  Were you friends first, and how did you come to make music together?  What’s Aloud’s back-story?

J: I was living under a bridge in Miami and Henry gave me some change and that’s how we met. (Laughs)

H: Our grandmothers knew each other-

J: – On the island. [Cuba.]  Our families have known each other from a long way back.  They all came over from Havana to Miami.  I didn’t meet Henry until my sophomore year in high school: His grandmother was at my grandparents’ fortieth anniversary, and my grandfather always made me play Beatles songs for him on the piano, and he always loved hearing “Ob-la-di Ob-la-da” so I had to play it for him, and then his grandmother heard that and was like, “Oh! That grandson of ours loves Beatles tunes!” And it was just like, “YES! Someone else digs this!”

H: It was a miracle, too, because I was obsessed with the Beatles for so long.  I would just spend hours listening to stuff over and over again learning it.  My grandmother was just like, “When are you gonna get a haircut?  When are you gonna be a doctor?”  She’s still that way actually… But anyway, she met Jen and she was playing that song, “Twist and Shout” and “Hey Jude”.

J: I was going through my Oasis phase then, too, which was huge.  That band, to me, is like, everything about being in a band.  They’re the band’s band.   So then Henry and I played “Don’t Look Back in Anger.”

H: Starting from there, we just started hanging out and learning Oasis songs.  That was just a solid month of just, “Oh! Do you know ___?” “Yeah, yeah…”

J: What impressed me the most is I knew these tunes and I played them, and Henry didn’t know them and he’d just play along to them.  It was just like, “Whoa, you fooled me!  You’re actually a great guitar player.”

H: Bullshittin’ my way through and still doing it! (Laughs)

Henry, do you have relative pitch or something?

J: Henry’s got a great fuckin’ ear.

H: It’s annoying.

J: He can tell you the key of a tune and what the chords are.

H: Yeah.  The phone’s dial tone is like, C# or something.

In terms of playing music, before you met, when did your musical educations start? Jen, you had mentioned that you were playing piano, and Henry, you were on the guitar…

J: It was all really- I was into music since forever and I’ve been singing in the shower since I was a little kid.  I always know the lyrics to songs and it would always infuriate me when my mother would screw up the lyrics to a song when we were singing in the car and I’d be like, “THAT’S THE RIGHT FUCKIN’ LYRIC!” Actually, I wouldn’t say “fuckin’” as I was like, three years old…

H: “It’s KISS THE SKY, not KISS THIS GUY!”

J: So, there was always music everywhere.  My grandma used to teach piano.  I used to pick it all up by ear and then I started taking lessons, and I was like, “I need a guitar!  I need to be in a rock band!”  I got my first guitar when I was thirteen after begging and begging and begging.  It was like, out of a Sears catalog or something, and the guitar didn’t even have a brand name.  The first song I learned on it was “Wonderwall” and I took those three chords and I just wrote songs based along those chords.  So, I started doing that, and of course when you start writing you write thirty songs in a week because you suck, so, you know, it’s great because it’s that first romance with music and lyrics, like when you’re sitting in class and you should really be paying attention to an algebra problem, but you’re like, “I’ve got this idea and I’m writing in my notebook and it has nothing to do with what’s happening in front of me but it’s what I wanna do right now!”  It’s an amazing thing that no one can ever take away from you.

H: I don’t know why, but I was in a physics class, and this was around the time we started playing, and I was struggling in that class because I spent most of the time writing lyrics.  It was a weird sort of crossroads because, like, the first show we played together, my longtime girlfriend dumped me, so it was like, “I have a band!  I have something to write songs about now!”  and I wrote thirty of the shittiest songs.  We’re still friends which is even weirder, and she’s asked me many times, like, “Can I see them?” and I’m like, “FUCK NO. Nobody can.”

J: She’s our merch girl now!

H: Even stranger – we’re going to her wedding this year, and out of pure serendipity it lands on the same day of me and Jen’s first gig and the day she dumped me. And it’s her wedding day.

J: Anyways, we had a four-track tape machine, so we used to do our recordings and we had like, you know, a band that was just the two of us, so we had a five song EP… we were sixteen and seventeen and we had all these ideas that we just wanted to get out.  We started writing together after we put out that first recording of ours, I guess it’s sort of like a thing we did-

H: It just started out like that when we’d exchange songs and ideas, and eventually it was just like –I don’t know why it took us as long as it did for us to start writing together.  We’re dumb.  Also, the whole two-singer thing worked out that way.

J: Well, Henry didn’t sing before, and I was just kind of like, “You should sing!  Let’s split these songs up and just do this!”  And now we do.

Back to the Boston thing: There are a lot of different places to go after Miami that are also very, very different from Miami.  Why did Boston become Aloud’s new home?

J: A shot in the dark!

H: It kind of was.  We were like, “Well, we could go to New York, but New York is expensive so let’s go to Boston.”  It kind of made sense.

J: When we started seriously talking about it, it was that sort of thing, but the way it actually happened, though?  We threw a party and we were playing at this party, and the place was a mess, and we were looking at this mess, and the sun was rising, and I think there was a globe somewhere in the room, so I was looking at it and the idea of leaving was probably popping in my mind.  My whole deal before I met Henry was that I was going to leave the country: I was going to go to London and get a band over there and do that, because I was a child and I thought it was cool.  So, I thought, “Well, England seems far… and I have to get a passport… but NEW England, I don’t need a passport, and it’s closer… Boston?  Sure!  That works out.”  I just remember turning to him surrounded by this mess, with the sun coming up, and I asked him, “Hey, you wanna go to Boston?”  And he said, “Yes.”

H: Sleep deprivation will do that to you. (Laughs)   I’m glad we came here, though.  With all the traveling we’ve done, Boston, per capita, just has the best bands and stuff with just like, local talent.  We picked a good city to cut our teeth on.

Where did you guys first settle in the city, when you moved here back in 2001?

H: It was on the corner of Beacon and Park Drive off the Fenway, Audubon Circle.  It was a cool little one-bedroom apartment, and we were writing songs every week-

J: That was awesome, actually.  When we first came up, just like, we’re by ourselves, we’re in our apartment, we’re adults now!  We could just sit around all day and play guitar and sing and whatever, and so you just write.  We’d write about two songs per week, one of his, one of mine, we’d do, we’d finish those up and that’s actually how we met our manager Annie.  The way we got out of Miami with support, financial and otherwise, was because we told them we’d go to school, so we went to Berklee for a semester before dropping out, and it was during the summer so it was pretty ‘lax anyway.

H: We met Annie there because she had this thing called the Songwriter’s Forum, and we’d pop by and basically it became a thing every week where she’d be like, “Oh, Jen and Henry!  You guys should write another song.”  It got us into the habit of writing songs every week and we got rid of most of them but it was good exercise.

J: The thing is, it hooked us up with Annie, which is great.  She’s one of the first people we knew in town and now she’s our manager.

We’ve talked about the Beatles and Oasis, but who else has helped cultivate you as a musician, influence wise?

H: U2, The Who, The Clash-

J: The Clash!  The Clash, The Clash, The Clash!  Fan the Fury was like that Dirty Pretty Things record – I could tell you tracks and which songs I got inspiration from.  The Arcade Fire’s records?  That band blows me away!  Such a good band.

H: Yeah.  I like music. (Laughs)

In terms of creative process, you mentioned that you both would write songs each week, but how has that evolved now that it’s just the two of you?  Is it more collaborative and do other people contribute to Aloud’s creative process?

J: It’s a little weird because we had two guys who were with us for five or six years, whatever it was, for a very long time.  Once me and Henry started writing together we had those tunes, they were our songs, and you know, we had these songs and with the two guys who stayed with us for a long time, we did the second record with them they would help with arrangements and everything but the meat and bones of it was all ours.  With Fan the Fury we tried to bring them into the process earlier.  Certain songs where people- one of them made a big effort and made a big difference in the song, but the time we brought it in, but by the time we’re charged we’ve got the verse and stuff.  When we’d sit to actually solidify the parts, it would still be Henry and me in the corner doing that.

H: Basically, since the end of last year we put the record out and did a couple of tours, and each one of them sort of dropped out and lost interest, so that’s where we’re at now and we’re just kind of working on some new stuff in the studio and we’re going backwards with it: We’ll write the song, but instead of having parts we’ll just have the chords ready and once we go into the studio we’ll put down a vocal and something basic and add drums after it.  Before, it was like, “Drums on all the songs!  Bass on all the songs!”  Now, it’s flowing a little freer.

J: It’s a little more creative, too.  To me, a song is what you sing and the chords.  It’s the melody and it’s the chords.  That’s the song at the end of the day.  So, we’re just trying to put that down first.  Anything else comes on after, and we have to sit in the studio and think about what it’s gonna sound like rather than work with the band in the space.

H: Although since the song is so bare bones, every song we bring into the studio, I’m like, “This could be a dance track if we wanted it to be!”  It can be anything.

I feel like when people get really creative in the studio sometimes that the recorded product doesn’t necessarily it to the stage all the time.

H: We’re still trying to figure it out as we haven’t performed any of the new songs yet.

J: We’ve only gone in and done two tracks.  We’ve been writing since the beginning of the year, and we will have something out fairly soon, but we’re still kind of doing that.  We’re gonna record again at the end of the month and then go back in September to do some serious work.

H: We’re gonna stop dickin’ around!  (Laughs)

Are you recording the album in Boston?

J: We are, actually!  It’s the first time we’re doing in Boston, as all the other records were done when we were out of town- we did Fan the Fury in New York and Leave Your Light On in Connecticut.

Where are you recording?

H: We’re working with Dan Jaskevich, he’s worked with Ryan Lee and Hallelujah the Hills, I think he recorded some Bon Savants stuff, too.  He has an immaculately put together studio in Somerville.  It’s really cool because we have a really good process now – we have the Beatles thing in common.  I know it comes up a lot and everybody names the fucking Beatles as an influence, but-

J: The Beatles are a band about the songs.  Period.  That’s the most important thing in the world.  With them it’s not about wanking off on your guitar; it’s about the song.  That’s what’s so great, and what you can do with it in the studio?  That’s the really artsy, creative bit of it.

H: It’s not about emulating the Beatles sonically; it’s the attitude.  So, the guy who engineered most of the Beatles’ sessions wrote a book, and it was more intense in following the studio stuff, so we have this new understanding of doing a lot with a little space.

J: With Dan, we just get along really well, so it’s kind of like the easiest relationship we’ve had with someone we’ve worked with in the studio.  It’s a great relief and it’s easy and it really is a lot of fun.

What Boston bands are you guys currently listening to?

J: Hallelujah the Hills, man.  That band… they’re so very good.

H: There are so many great bands here.  The Motion Sick, The Bon Savants, Hallelujah the Hills, Gene Dante and the Future Starlets, The Luxury… and Harris.  RIP, Harris.  We’ve sort of stolen Rob from Harris as our drummer and we’re borrowing Matt [Girard] of The Motion Sick for bass. Sorryyyyy.  That’s how it goes right now for Aloud.

J: We like playing with Rob and Matt and so far they’re on for all of the gigs we’ve got, including CMJ.

H: We like Televandals and The Lights Out, too.  We were actually introduced to Nico when we first moved up here before I knew he was in Televandals.  Stellar guy, stellar band.  After about a year of hearing about them I finally listened to Passion Pit and I was kind of like, “Meh?”  Not really my thing.  I heard they got nominated for a VMA though, and you know what?  Good fuckin’ job, guys.  That’s great.  Seriously!

What are your favorite Boston venues?  If you had to pick a venue for an important Aloud event, like a CD release or something, which venue would you love to have it at?

H: I guess I’d say Great Scott because we’ve had three CD releases there.  It’s a good room.  We love the Middle East and TT’s.

J: We had a blast playing the Paradise Rock Club last month for The Luxury’s CD release, too.

When it comes to the Aloud catalog, do you have any songs that you feel particularly connected to or that you love playing live?

H: I mean, it’s weird; obviously, you feel connected to all of them because you wrote ‘em, but basically the stuff on Fan the Fury is my favorite hands down as it’s the nearest and dearest material.  Just writing the lyrics on that, I felt like we were really, really focused.  “Release” is one of my favorites.  On Leave Your Light On, it was like, being in a different place, singing them every night… meh…

J: I love the last three songs in our set.  The big rock trinity at the end: “You’ve Got Me Wrong”, “Battle of Love”, and “Ants.”  It’s always there when the energy kicks up again, especially like during “Battle of Love”, I can’t help kicking my heels and that sort of thing and moving around from one side of the stage to another.  That’s an immediate physical reaction onstage.

Real quick: The wardrobe.  How did the black and white and red come about?

H: I don’t know!  We just like it.  I went to Catholic high school and I can put a tie on in two seconds, but for years I was never wearing a tie.

J: When we put out the record we were kind of like, “Okay, well, rock and roll primary colors: Black, white and red.”  I had this red leather jacket and it was in so many shots because it was my go-to jacket and it just looked fuckin’ cool!  I picked up a white belt, and we just started putting things together and again, I started grabbing shirts and painting things on them.  Like, this shirt: The title of a book of poetry by José Martí is written on it, and then we were messing around with the sheriff badges and stuff…

What’s the name of the Martí book, in Spanish?

J: I don’t know it in Spanish, but it’s “Come, Come, My Boiling Blood”.  It’s a collection of poetry.

H: Back in the day, this is like, 2004, we just had the Beatles at Shea Stadium thing, and we did that six months longer than we should’ve.  I fuckin’ hated it.  Again, Catholic school.  Now, it’s less uniform-y and it’s more fun.

J: The record is themed, and it was made and put out during the election year, and it’s about this almost militant feeling, so with the clothes, I mean, we do the all light for all the big shows.

Have you ever got any “Hey! Y’all look like the White Stripes!”-type comments?

H: Well, no… although my hair was long and I wore the hat and I was trying to grow facial hair.

J: He looked JUST like Jack White.

H: Yeah, if someone would say that I’d just shrug.

J: Well, so now, we do all black for all the other shows with accents of red.

H: Also, I really like this vest that I’m wearing.  Marshalls!  $15! Fuck it!  I’m gonna wear this thing to sleep!

J: Yeah.  Marshall’s is the only place where I could find white jeans.  The search for white clothes… You would think there would be white shirts and stuff… (laughs)