This weekend I sat down and talked with the Newark (OH) based Irish folk/punk/rock band Brave the Sea. They recently released an album titled A Pirate's Life, which you can find on Spotify, CD Baby, and Apple music. The members are Vito Gambill (vocals), Matt Toskin (vocals, mandolin, guitar), Will John (accordion, vocals), Ryan Boggs (bass, vocals), and Matt Bibler (guitar).

How did you all meet each other?

Ryan: Comic shop.

Toskin: We're all huge nerds.

Vito: We went to school together, me and Matt.

Toskin: Yeah, me and Vito went to school together, and the rest of us met playing Magic: The Gathering.

What made you want to form a band?

Toskin: I was sitting on the couch one day with my little brother, and there was a Pittsburgh Pirates game on, and they played that song from Peter Pan, "A Pirate's Life." He was like, "It'd be cool if Flogging Molly did a cover of that," and I was like, "You know what? I'll do it." I put together a punk rock version of it, wrote some of my own lyrics, and reached out to Matt Bibler, and Will eventually, to start the band, and see if they wanted to play some Irish punk rock. We started as like a Flogging Molly and Dropkick Murphys cover band. When we got enough of our own original material together, we realized that we were more than just a cover band. We could keep building off this.

Above: Matt Toskin

What inspires you to write music?

Vito: The writing process usually begins with "Hey. I wrote something." "Oh, cool. That sounds fun." Then Matt will shred something on the mandolin, if you can shred on a mandolin. I'm not sure. He'll do something, and then I'll sing a melody line behind it, or he'll come up to me, and I'll sing on top of it. Then the rest of the band just kind of jumps in, and we eventually get "Well, there's another song. I guess."

Toskin: Usually we can tell lyrically...after we've written the structure of the song whether it's gonna be a pirate song, or a drinking song, or a none of the above kind of song. We don't want to be just a pirate band even though that's kind of our focus. I don't think we should try to shoehorn that into every song.

Will: The other songs happen when somebody's late to something.

When you were coming up with this album, was it difficult to come up with songs for it? It sounds like you had a fairly easy time spinning out stuff.

Toskin: We wrote this album, and while we were recording it, we wrote like five more songs that aren't on the album. So writing songs is not an issue.

Bibler: It's almost an issue because we write too many songs. We'll be in the middle of working on one song, and we'll start another one, and the process keeps going. Now, I want us to get back in the studio and work on our next album, but we gotta give it some time.

Above: Vito Gambill

Is there a song on the album you think speaks to the band best as a whole?

Will: Obviously, "A Pirate's Life" sums us up in general.

Vito: I'm gonna say "Drinking Problems," just because "A Pirate's Life" feels a bit too obvious, like "Oh, that's exactly what they are," but "Drinking Problems" brings in more of the other aspect of the music we try to write, so I think that's a better representation of what we do.

Ryan: I'm gonna say "A Pirate's Life." It's to the point. It's quick. It's the name of our album and used to be the name of our band. It's like our modus operandi.

Toskin: I'm gonna have to go with "Lost at Sea," because I think that it blends the punk, the rock, the Celtic, and lyrically it also blends pirate, but it also doesn't shoehorn you into thinking it's actually a pirate song.

Bibler: It's hard for me, but I'd probably pick "Barbosa" because it's got the whole pirate theme to it, but it's got a lot of the metal/punk aspects that I really love about playing guitar.

Do you have one you like the best to play live?

Ryan: I love playing "Black Spot" live.

Bibler: If I had to pick one that was more fun to play live, it'd be "Black Spot" just because it's got a lot more parts to it. You kind of have to go all over the guitar neck, and for me, that's fun song to play on guitar.

Toskin: Album songs, my favorite song to play live is either "Drinking Problems" or "Bonnie Clyde" because we do a lot of goofy stuff when we play "Bonnie [Clyde]" live. We really ham up those pauses that are in the song.

Vito: I'd also have to agree and say "Bonnie Clyde" to play live overall, because it's so much fun, and it's such a different song musically then anything else we have...It's a lot more fun for me to do because all I do is sing.

Will: Probably "Coming Home" for me is the most fun to play. I'm the busiest on that.

Above: Ryan Boggs

What do you like the best about playing live and being part of a band?

Bibler: The reactions.

Vito: That's a good one. I was gonna say being a god.

Toskin: That's the singer, everybody.

Vito: Matt said it pretty square. The reaction from the crowd, whether it's three people or whether it's 30 people. If we can get someone up and dancing and moving, and having a good time, and even singing along, then we made it.

Bibler: I think people are thrown off by us, because we come out on stage and we're dressed as pirates, and people don't know what to expect. An accordion, and then [Matt] has the mandolin, and they're like "Whoa! What's going on here?" Then we start playing, and they're bobbing their heads and start dancing. We had people come up to us at the last show. They were blown away by us completely, and said they'd never heard anything like that, and they've been to a lot of local shows. So we're making an impact, and I don't think there's too many bands around our area that sound like we do.

Toskin: I'd have to say just being on stage and entertaining people. That's my favorite part. I'm generally really introverted when it comes to social interaction, but once I get on stage I'm just being a goofy...goober.

Vito: Yeah!

Toskin: I'm just up there dancing and having a good time. That's a lot of fun for me, and I know that a lot of people in the crowd also see that.

Bibler: And having people message us and tell us that our music matters, like we have people that have tattoos now...and having people say that our music really makes a difference in their lives is kind of a warming experience, I guess is what you'd say.

Ryan: It's really reaffirming that we're doing some good stuff.

What are some goals you have for the group going forward?

Bibler: Hm. We gotta find a new singer.

Vito: * laughter as he pushes his chair away from the table to "leave"*

Bibler: Quality of shows over quantity. We're trying to incorporate more of a thematic aspect into our stage show, so people aren't just listening to us, they're also visually getting the show along with it. That is entailed by having longer sets, and that's not always feasible with a bunch of the shows we have been playing all throughout the year so far. So having longer set times and bigger stages to perform our shows would be a goal, and getting outside of our local bubble, reaching out to bands in other cities.

Toskin: And continually songwriting, because I think that all of us are really good songwriters, and that's how we've gotten this far so far.

Above: Matt Bibler

Do you have any hobbies outside of music?

Toskin: Like I said, we all play Magic: The Gathering, so we're all pretty big nerds. I've recently been doing a lot of music things in my free time, but when I'm not doing that I'm usually reading comic books or playing Magic or that's probably it. That's my whole life right there.

Vito: Re-watching The Office again.

Ryan: I have a table top gaming site. I record a podcast every other week called Two Dudes in the Dark, it's a paranormal podcast. I'm in two paranormal investigating groups. I'm in the band, and then I work 50 hours a week.

Vito: I just do a lot of nerdy things, too. I play a lot of video games, I drink a lot of coffee...I just kind of exist until we do band stuff, or if I'm at my job, obviously.

That's all I have question wise for you. Do you have anything else you want to add?

Ryan: Listen to our album on Spotify, CD Baby, Apple Music, and people keep saying it's on Google Play, but I have not been able to find it.

Toskin: If it's on Google Play, please confirm or disconfirm! And just get ready for the next album, because it's gonna be a doozy.

Above: Will John