With the year coming to a close, musician Eric Victorino couldn’t be happier, stating that this year could “eat his shit”. His Bay Area electro pop music collective with Giovanni Giusti, The Limousines have been rapidly growing in popularity after having beginnings over iChat and Myspace, have endured an incredible amount of change this year including “Indiana Jones style boobytraps” thrown at them from the industry.  Fortunately, with the year’s end, a new EP – Scrapbook (MAKEYOUSICK/OCB&N) out, and a newfound musical independence from the industry, The Limousines are heading for 2010 balls out and ready to take charge.

GreenShoelace: So why the Scrapbook EP?  What triggered the idea of doing the EP and having those particular tracks on it? You could have easily left them as demos.

Eric Victorino: We’re working on a batch of new music, either a new EP or a full length and we realized that nobody has ever had a chance to blast those songs in their car or a big ole stereo – not in full quality I mean, when we got the test pressing of the vinyl and listened on our record player it was like hearing the songs for the first time – All i was used to was MP3s, plus these songs were the first few we worked on together and to think that years later they’d just be files sitting in a myspace player was sad. So we took a lot of care in putting the package together, to show people how we cherish these songs if for nothing but their sentimental value to us, they’re how we got started.

GSL: Right, and the psychical release being on vinyl, why vinyl instead of a CD?

Eric: Well if you want music to be portable you have the most portable thing in possible in an mp3 – and if you want it to be something you can hold in your hand and really absorb I think vinyl is great for that – it’s heavy and there’s a lot of room for artwork – a CD is just kinda in between… we thought it would be fun to skip the CD for this EP, for now anyway.

GSL: The EP’s artwork is incredible, what’s the story behind it?

Eric: The photos are all from the families of the people involved… Giovanni’s mom and dad are on the cover, that’s his mom’s memory of the day the pic was taken written there in the corner – all the other photos are of my family, my wife when she was a kid and our friend Kayvon’s family photos – Kayvon [Siadat] started MAKEYOUSICK , which is the label who put out the vinyl.

GSL: I find it extremely refreshing, to not have to see a band’s face all over the record, but rather within the music inside it. Why did you go with the photos instead of you and Gio with windblown hair?

Eric: Well the lyric in the song Scrapbook goes “the years gone by are captured in a scrapbook that I made, I’ll scribble details of my memories in the corners of each page” – so, the chance to put packaging together that fits the lyrics so well without coming off cheesy was enough to edge out the windblown glamour shots.

GSL: So with the artwork, and the songs that started The Limos, you also hand numbered the records, and sent out polariods and signed them. The band also has a lot of interaction with your fans, why did you guys decide to add these personal touches? It feels as though the interaction between you and the fans is very important, why so?

Eric: Well we’ve never put up any walls between ourselves and the people who listen to our music – we started on myspace like a million other bands – we used to just put demos and random little ideas up in our player for anyone to download, letting them in on the songwriting and production processes – as for the EP project, we took polaroids to send out with the first 50 pre-orders just to add to the package – we know people could get the music for free so it’s nice to give the people who support you with money a little more for their buck – wish we could have done polaroids for all 500 but that would have been really expensive. so it is important that we show fans how much we appreciate them, and while we might be pulling back a little bit socially we want to let them know we love them.

GSL:  So, moving on, what’s next for The Limousines? What’s in store for 2010?

Eric: Of course we never know what the next year holds – just hope it doesn’t suck like 2009 did, this has been the hardest year of my life i think. I know we’ll get some new music out there, either an EP or full length album – we’re part of Noise Pop this year and I’m hoping we’ll be at SXSW if we find a good party to play…I know there’s going to probably be a time next year when anyone without a drummer or guitars or a bass player will be a joke, like there will be this big Nirvana moment and all electro bands will be vaporized by the rock  so we’ll see what happens to us in that electropacalypse.

You can buy the Scrapbook EP HERE or on iTunes. Be sure to catch them as a part of San Francisco’s Noise Pop Festival, February 25th with Wallpaper at Slims.

For more information about The Limousines visit thelimousines.com

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Interview