Written by Sandeep Sehbi

Wes Meadows. He’s a recent capital university grad with a music focus. He currently resides in northeast Ohio. He’s in a band called All Over the Place. He runs / is the founder of Flowerpot Records. That label runs a rad yearly fest. He’s recently released solo material and is soon to be embarking on a solo tour. And he’s a pretty rad dude.

TUNED UP: You recently graduated from Capital University, and you studied in their music program. Can you tell us a bit about their curriculum and your experience there?

Wes Meadows: The teachers at Capital are unrivaled in experience and character. I loved my teachers and their curriculum for the most part. However, the conservatory itself desperately needs a boost. More and more students are coming into the program, but we still only have a few studios for the students to work in. For example, Tri-C in Cleveland has a huge facility with dozens of practice consoles for students, and I only paid $300 for my class there. Capital has maybe 5 suitable consoles and I paid $20k per semester. I don’t need to tell you that the college system in the US is completely messed up, but the Recording Workshop will teach you everything that Capital will, with the room to experiment that you’d find at Tri-C. So if you’re getting into this field, the Recording Workshop is the best way to do in my opinion.

TUNED UP: You run (and have run for awhile) Flowerpot Records. How long has that run for?

Wes Meadows: I’ve run Flowerpot Records for a little over 5 years now. It started as a bunch of extremely limited releases of my friends’ homemade EPs while we were in high school, but it’s blossomed into a little community here in Ohio with dozens of musicians, artists, and performers. I am now able to make a bit of money back from my years of investments in local music, and our newest releases look professional, sound professional, and are promoted professionally as a result. In my last year of college, I really poured as much as I could into making FPR a viable way to support myself and others, so now I’m seeing our biggest year yet and I’m super excited.

TUNED UP: What are your latest releases (on Flowerpot Records)? Where can we find your artists roster?

Wes Meadows: My new solo album, Green And Growing, just came out last month. It was an experiment for me to record it all with one microphone, even the drums. It’s sad and lo-fi and twinkly and I’m pretty proud of it.

Wes Meadows: Old Souls just released a new EP called Eyes Wide Shut Up that has their best recording quality and songwriting to date, we’re really excited for that one. It’s sleek modern punk with a lot of creative guitar work and fantastic lyrics.

Wes Meadows: Suitcase Runaway, a new addition to the scene and brainchild of Nick Davenport, just released his first EP, Little Lives. His fingerpicking skill and ability to craft beautiful, well-orchestrated folk pop songs is gonna take him places, I’m so stoked on it.

Wes Meadows: You can find all of these releases and over 50 more at https://flowerpotrecords.bandcamp.com, and you can buy physical releases at https://flowerpotrecords.storenvy.com.

TUNED UP: Flowerpot Records runs an annual festival in North-Eastern Ohio. This years festival seemed to go off really well. What are your plans for next year?

Wes Meadows: FPRFV, as I’m calling it (gotta get on that hashtag game), is going to be a bit of an expansion from last year. I’m looking at bigger places that will let us play longer and charge entry so that I can afford to pay out all of the touring bands more fairly. A large farm in the suburbs and a big building in the county fairgrounds are our two big options right now, and each of them has pros and cons, so we’re working out the logistics currently. But next fest is going to be the biggest yet, I think!

TUNED UP: You’re in a band called All Over the Place. How long has that band been together?

Wes Meadows: All Over The Place is my second-longest running musical project, only succeeded by my solo acoustic stuff. We just celebrated our 5-year anniversary in April with a mini-tour with a few high-profile touring bands and a bunch of our best friends bands (Gelatinus Cube, A Little Out Of It, Dog Breeds, Meteor Moves).

Wes Meadows: The lineup is a revolving-door style setup. It is pretty rare that any two linear AOTP shows are the same lineup, even on tour. We have 7 core members of the band, and over 20 other people that come and go as they please. The most we’ve had onstage at one time was 25, at our 1-year anniversary show I got a huge chunk of the marching band to play with us and it was super fun.

Wes Meadows: The latest release is our tour demo tape. My computer crashed while we were working on a new single, so we decided to re-record as much as we could in the time we had, and we ended up with 3 new songs, along with a re-recording of our oldest song that we did with Tyler Schulte, one of our 4 guitarists, at his new job at the Recording Workshop. The master tape ended up being a Radiohead mix that my friend made for me in high school so after our songs fade out on the A-side, the best part of Paranoid Android comes in, and every tape is a bit different because I made them all out of thrift store 10 cent tapes, so some of them have a chunk of the original artist’s album on the b-side as well. It was fun, and there are only 10 copies left and we probably won’t make more because the album will be out in a month or two.

TUNED UP: You’re amidst plotting out a new solo tour, according to social media its going to be your most expansive yet. Can you give a sense as to where you’re going?

Wes Meadows: The solo tour I’m currently planning is the only time I’ve gone outside of OH or PA by myself. It’s daunting to me because I have a lot of anxiety and depression issues I’m working through and I won’t always have my friends with me, but I think it’s something that I need to do for myself, especially because of how much I believe in this new album. I’ll be heading down through Columbus, Cincinatti, Louisville, Nashville, and Decatur. My halfway point for this tour is Pensacola. I’ll be spending a few days there with friends, then heading back up via Birmingham, Atlanta, Knoxville, and Athens. In big boy touring terms, this is a small thing, all of the rockstars go out for months at a time, but for me to do this alone is a big thing personally. I’m super excited to go back out and meet new people and connect with old friends.

TUNED UP: Can you give us 3 rad tour anecdotes from your backlog of prior travels?

Wes Meadows: On our first tour, we ended up without a show on New Year’s Eve in New Orleans. We ended up busking for an hour, making $75 along with 2 tall boys and a bottle of champagne and then hung out with The Squirt Gun Warriors. When the ball dropped on TV, they paused it and played Cotton Eyed Joe really loud and sang along to the whole thing, and then unpaused the TV and drank to the new year.

Wes Meadows: On that tour, we were driving a gigantic RV that we could all comfortably sleep in. The problem was that the heat didn’t work and it was the dead of winter. And then it turned out that the windshield wipers didn’t work so we had to tie them up with strings and pull them back and forth from the passenger seat. Then the alternator broke 300 miles into tour and we had to spend a night in a backwards racist podunk town in southern OH. We had to listen to the dude make uncomfortable jokes the whole time he fixed our van, but their fried chicken was delicious.

Wes Meadows: On our most recent tour, we spent a night at a commune in Kalamazoo MI. They had something like 180 acres of land, split up into sections of forest, lakefront, farmland, and fields. We kept hearing weird high-pitched whooping noises from the woods and kept wondering what it was. In the morning, we went on a tour of the grounds and saw that not only did they have cows, chickens, turkeys, and pigs, but they also had peacocks. If you ever get the chance to hear a peacock make any noise at all, do it, every sound they make is comical. We asked the guy in charge why they had so many peacocks and he said “I have no clue, I think they’re ridiculous” so I’m not really sure where they came from.

TUNED UP: Whats your take on Ohio music?

Wes Meadows: It’s probably because I’m biased, but Ohio has so many amazing scenes. Everybody talks about Columbus these days, and while Dayton and Cinci were big with that metalcore pop punk boom in the mid 2000s, their punk scene is really picking back up. Athens, Kent, Berea, Oberlin, and Bowling Green are great college towns for music right now, I aways have a great time. There isn’t really a weak scene anywhere in Ohio, even out in the deep suburbs there are still a lot of cool musicians. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Columbus be the next Seattle or LA or NYC for music. It’s so central, within 500 miles of 70% of the US population or something like that. It just keeps getting better.

TUNED UP: What’s next for Wes Meadows?

Wes Meadows: Well, I just released a new EP, Nylon Voice, before I did this interview. It was really experimental and avant-garde, with lots of voice memos and field recordings. It’s definitely the weirdest thing that I’ve done and actually released. The next thing for me, I think, is a cover album of a bunch of my friends’ songs. It’ll be called Covers! Covers! vol. 1, a joke on a Bomb The Music Industry album title, and will have songs from Insignificant Other, 10nine8, Marriah Rodgers, and many many more. After that, it’ll be a series of splits and EPs. I won’t be doing another full album for a long time, I think.

Wes Meadows: But Green And Growing has been received very well and I’ll be touring and promoting that for the next 6 months at least. Maybe Nylon Voice will have a cassette release soon, maybe I’ll be doing a little EP recorded to tape that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. It should be a good end of 2015, and then the All Over The Place album promo will take priority when it comes out.

Relevant Links

Wes Meadows facebook – https://www.facebook.com/wesmeadowsmusic
Wes Meadows bandcamp – https://wesmeadows.bandcamp.com/
Flowerpot Records – https://www.facebook.com/flowerpotrecords
All Over the Place – https://www.facebook.com/allovertheplaceband