Phil : I hear that Shawn Beauville is from Tampa, Florida.
Shawn : More or less, on and off. I wandered off to a couple different places. . . I've never made anywhere else a home for more than a couple months at a time. I was born and raised in Florida. Florida is kind of weird with alot of transplants, alot of different people different cultures. Cuban, Italian, German and the southern crackers - - american families that have been rooted there for like 200 years. Kind of a weird cross section with alot of people moving in for the nice weather. It's not a bad place to live.

Phil : How long has your band The Beauvilles been together?
Shawn : Originally I was a folk artist. In the 90's nobody really wanted to hear that. Everyone was sort of getting into rave, techno, heavy metal, rap rock and that kind of stuff. I was kinda out of place. I did some college circuit and eventually became a side man in a couple bands playing old style rock and roll guitar. The 60's 70's kind of rock - - original bands and even kinda punk like. I kept writing songs for everybody and realised that I should be singing and writing my own songs. So I got together a pretty descent trio. The band that is together now has been around for about four years. So now I write, arrange, produce and record. I use to book all the tours, but I've gotten so busy that I have someone else doing most of it.

Phil : How did the trio come together?
Shawn : The people I'm playing with are a different kind of musicians. My bass player Lil' Randy was originally a touring bass player for some punk bands in Florida. Then he came down to Tampa and picked up the upright bass and moved up to Jacksonville and started playing with a symphony orchestra. I kept hassling him to come back to central Florida, I'm putting a group together, you're the right guy for the job and need to come and join the group. I found my drummer Craig Holmes on the internet actually, he was a Jazz drummer that loved rock and roll, like old 60's, the Stones, the Ramones, the Stooges and all that kind of stuff. . . It's a pretty interesting situation.

Phil : Do you ever have additional musicians play with the band?
Shawn : We did try to find some more musicians. Some of the music we write, especially the new music we're recording and I'm writing for the band, it's not necessarily challenging as much as it's a little bit different. So, alot of people don't necessarily get it. Especially as far as musicians, there is a small pool of musicians in Florida . . . it's not like Seattle where musicians are piled into clubs looking to do something or in other bigger cities like that. In central Florida it's kind of a close knit thing. Alot of us are kind of sick of the garage rock scene, we don't want to play in a hair metal band and we don't want to sacrifice goats on stage or anything wild like that. It's not really our scene. It's tough to find people that are on the same page. Maybe one day we'll add a couple other guys to the band. Right now we make quite alot of noise with just the three of us. When we are in a recording mode, alot of times we will pick up a house gig to keep ourselves sharp. So we will pick up a lounge gig and play whatever the hell we want. Like old 60's and 70's songs . . . jazz songs, we would play anything. Just for kicks to have fun with some friends. And, yeh we would have people sit in. But, in general as an act we don't really invite people on stage cause one of is likely to knock them out. By accident, running around.

Phil : Your band formed about 2002?
Shawn : The band as it is now formed about four years ago. It was kinda a different group when I first brought it together. It was actually more of an acoustic thing. I gradually started to feel that I was finally in the situation where I could do whatever I wanted. If I wanted to yell on stage, throw a guitar, pour wine on my head . . . whatever I thought would help bring across what I was trying to say to the audience. People are more receptive in different ways in different places. What I've seen, I had it tough where I grew up living in Florida. People can be a bit stiff and you have to do something drastic to get their attention. After a while thats what started to happen. When you grow as a musician in an area where good music often falls on death ears. So much to the point that bigger bands wouldn't even bother to tour down there. To get some kind of point across and some kind of relevance across, to get somebodies attention - - you start to get a little more meaner. Like there's a packed audience that are not really paying attention to you and just out getting hammered. But, you feel like you've got something to offer, something to say thats different and they need to hear. Or at least be crazy, or drunk or cocky or convicted enough to feel like they have to hear it. And then you become more accoutable for what you have to say. So you have to do whatever it takes to present the music or message and whatever. I figure if I'm going to drive a hundred miles and shack up in a bad hotel and have someone book me up with some place - - the least I can do is to try to get people to beleave in what I have to say. So far it seems to be working pretty well.

Phil : What albums do you have out?
Shawn : We're on a few compilations. We have a full length that we chopped down into a EP for radio, college radio. That's what got us into the Grammy showcase in Miami, by accident. . . They were accepting any recorded material that was recorded in Florida, produced in Florida over the past year. At that point I was concentrating on north, we do really well in the southern states, the college towns out to Nashville, Texas and up to New York and places like that. So the last thing I was really thinking about was doing anything in Florida. But, I sent it in ( the EP ), kinda forgot about it and then I got a phone call and the four song radio EP got us into the Florida Grammys showcase. Where, basically all the people there in Florida that vote for the Grammys were down there and we ended up being the runner up. That was 2004. After that, I got to meet with some major label folks that were interested in us and wanted to hear more material. I wasn't to interested necessary in signing with some big label that would forget about us. So I figured, at least until we have another record we can do it ourselves. Our full length album is actually out. Lets see how far we can get independently. We've always been independent, we've always done everything ourselves. We all came from a sort of punk folk background where you don't want to do what someone is F-ing telling you to do. So we gave it a shot and the next thing you know we got sponsored and we got put in South by Southwest in Austin, Texas and played the Northeast music conference in Boston. I got to watch Robert Plant of Led Zepplin buy a pair of cowboy boots in a store that I was at in Austin Texas. Things just kept happening, ya know, which is funny cause we were at this point not really trying to hard. It was that the music itself was doing it for us. Towards the end of this last year we were starting to get a little bit wore out. Tired of playing the same music, we liked the songs and people bought them which we are thankful for that. Yet, we have alot of new music which we haven't gotten to work out. When we got to the big music festival in Boston, everyone of us wanted to make another record, a real record where every song has to be great. Every single song can't sound the same and totally regardless of what ever else is going on. So we pretty much stop listening to what ever was coming out on the radio - - not like we did so in the first place. No one watches TV anyway and pretty much held up for the last six months and writing and recording the songs. A lot of the new material that is going to be on the next disk is so different. Now that I've pulled my head out of the sand and get out, we were still playing shows but mainly out of town, where now I got to see what else is  going on musically - - I feel very good about going through with it and finishing this full record and presenting it like we've did before. As independently as possible. I think it will be nice to have something different to say then the lot of other things people are use to listening to right now. Not necessarily set like a pop song . . . wanting to make a ten year old girl love you and want to buy your poster. If a ten year old girl wants to buy my record, that's awesome. But, I'm really making music for my peers. Someone interviewed us a while back and they asked us who were are favorite musicians. And we were all thinking that its not really musicians that we are influenced by - - - honestly we feel we're pretty much influenced as much by other musicians, typically dead musicians, as we are by writers and painters and things like that. I was originally a painter . . . I kinda dropped out of art school to be a rock and roll musician. A few times I've wondered if that was such a good idea. But, getting to travel the country, to be honest and not feel like the music you're playing is a lie or anything like that. Being able to be completely and totally honest and express exactly what you want to express and make art. Even if its not on a canvas, music can be art. There's alot of great bands that continue to do that.

Phil : What is the title of the EP?
Shawn : The EP is called the Singapore EP. It's a four song EP with singles that we noticed were being picked up by college radio. In the southern states, we hadn't really started playing up north until this last year. We noticed as we were playing these big music festivals, ahead of time our tour manager would really get in contact with these small college stations. And those are the people that really give a damn about music, not Clear Channel or someone like that. Clear Channel had us play a couple festivals . . .  I'm kinda happy we played in front of a thousand people at one point. I'm not sure if anybody was listening. What was happening, because we contacted all these small independent radio stations far left on the dial where ever we played . . . we started noticing that from the full length CD that we were giving them, these four songs kept showing up on their play list. We initially we burned like a thousand copies of the full length were running out of them. So, the Singapore EP has done pretty darn well actually and there was some pretty strange stuff in the recording process, at the time some people had different opinions about - - - the band, the engineers, the producers that were suggesting help here and there. I felt kinda strongly about having the CD so loud that it may blow up somebody's stereo. We went in and took it through some old analog gear to master the CD and make it  sound like it was really really about to blow your stereo up. And people seem to like it, I don't know if they have to keep buying new stereos or what. So far, it's done pretty well for us.

Phil : Will your new material appear as a full length?
Shawn : It will be kinda like we did before where we release a full length. There's so many songs, it's been two years since the first full length was recorded and the EP followed a year later. I think what will happen is that we will really push it as a full length. My bass player really wants to print vinyl. And, we might. People are still listening to vinyl, as far as practicality goes - - - I can't be a romantic about it otherwise I would really starve to death. I would like to think people will want to buy the whole album . . . what's going to happen, is everyone out to buy singles instead of buying the bands vision as a piece of work where you have to take all of it. You hope people will listen to the whole album, yet if it turns out that six of the songs people really like - - - well, we may not package them as an EP. It feels good as an artist to have a full piece of material, feeling you did everything you had to do, you did the best that you could, you were as honest as you could be, you made sounds that you hope people will like. You concentrated on making it sound different from other people - - - alive, loud, soft, gentle and trying to extract emotions out of people that way. And, if someone gets it - - - well, that's awesome. And if someone just wants one song, thinks its cute and their girlfriend likes to dance to it - - - well, thats sexy too. I guess, what I'm trying to say is that . . . as any songwriter probably does ( some may pretend to be shallow about it and say they are just out to have a good time ) maybe I take myself a little to serious. But, as a songwriter - - - you would like people to really get it. But at the same time you don't want to make it unacessable to anybody. Just because somebody doesn't listen to every single word that you say, doesn't mean they don't deserve to feel good by listening to the music. If that's what they get from it - - - hell yeh, please do.

Note : This interview took place at the 331 Club in NE Minneapolis on March 27, 2006  and afterwards we swung by Grumpy's NE.  Shawn Beauville came up from Florida as part of the Tim Schools experience where they played together at the Jungle Red Salon on March 25th.  Interview and photos by Phil Kramer

  www.thebeauvilles.net