Photo courtesy of Project Daybreak
A few years ago, Conor Kelly, guitarist for Koa, was presented with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: a concert promoter offered him the chance to open for the All-Man Brothers at their show in Lincoln, Nebraska—that is, if he could pull together a band with a marketable name and image, in practically no time. Challenge: accepted.
He called up longtime friend Chase Bader, now Koa’s lead singer, and the two scrambled to piece together a band with a few musicians in Colorado, where Kelly was living at the time.
“In the meantime,” Kelly says, “they needed a name for the flyers. There was a koa wood acoustic guitar sitting in the room where we were rehearsing, so we just decided on ‘Koa’ on a whim.”
Although the group didn’t stick around for much time after the concert, the name did—and the experience opened up the door for a different collaboration between Kelly and Bader. After Kelly moved to Nashville, transferring to Belmont University, he and Bader started writing songs together. Through a random encounter on campus, the two met Ryan Ladd, who would become the group’s bassist. Ladd had been playing in another band at the time along with drummer Will Youngclaus, who he then encouraged to play with Koa, as well.
The band’s funky indie rock style gets its soulful vibe from the addition of a saxophone player, Alex Mathews, a native of St. Louis.
Mathews says, “I met Conor in the Belmont cafeteria one day, and on a whim, he saw that I was carrying an instrument and asked me what it was. I’d been a classical sax player, but Conor twisted my arm into coming and checking out this band. It wasn’t really a premeditated thing for the band to have a sax player, I don’t think, but I came along and we all became fast friends. It was more of that chemistry of us all together than a decision to add sax from the beginning.”
Koa often gets compared to Dave Matthews Band, O.A.R., Jack Johnson and even Chicago. Bader explains, “It’s stuff that’s based in songwriting, but has the inclination to just jam out and improv when we perform it.”
It’s hard to pinpoint the band’s sound simply because of the diverse musical backgrounds of all the members, but it’s generally a mix of rock, soul and jam music. Bader and Kelly live together, and often co-write lyrics and chords, creating what Bader calls “the bones of the song.” Kelly works on melodic composition, and the two will bring in what they have to a practice, so that everyone can work on the song together.
“Because we are all so different,” Bader says, “we all bring different strengths. One guy will work on melodies, another will do transitions and another will focus on lyrics, so every process is new. Most recently, we were working on a song called ‘What Now,’ which has become one of our favorites. Alex developed a sax melody in between parts, and he and Ryan composed a beats section, but really everyone leaves a stamp on the final product.”
Even the name of the band—however random it was at first—has come to represent what each member brings to the table: ‘koa’ means ‘strength’ in the Hawaiian language, the term used for warriors. Kelly says, “It’s a pretty good way to represent our camaraderie as a group.”
Koa has been recording in and out over the past few months and plans to release a full-length album by spring/summer of 2016.
Bader says, “A lot of the songs that we’re going to record have become what they are because we’ve played them so much, and we’ve been able to experiment and solidify the sound we’re going for. We plan on putting out a single or two to get our name out there because we’ve really been doing all of these shows off just the four songs on our EP.”
The band is coming into it’s own, one festival at a time. Bader says, “We’re excited to take what we’ve been experimenting with on stage and bring it to the studio—this next run of music will truly capture what we’re doing and what we’re trying to say.”
Koa performs Saturday, September 12 at 1 p.m. For more info, go to loufest.com.
