by Jane McCarthy
LA-based songwriting duo Sasha Smith and Vivian Dominguez have been busy churning out songs for singers in faraway places. As of late, they’ve also turned their attentions to new project, Thank You, Goodbye. Thanks to Sasha Smith’s dapper keyboarding and a generous dose of melodic fancy, the band’s recordings are a whole lot of fun.
Last Sunday afternoon over tea and lemon bars (homemade by Vivian!), the pair got to chatting about quiet vs. loud houses, what’s happening with synth these days, and how to pen a hit for a Taiwanese pop star.
Jane McCarthy: First of all, you guys are husband and wife. You just started this band, but have you been collaborating for a while?
Vivian Dominguez: Our first collaboration was way back in 2010.
JM: What were you guys doing?
Sasha Smith: Well, the way we started was I was asked to write this song for this producer, and I was out on the road at the time. I was recording and writing in hotel bathrooms, airports, the back of the bus. I was in Chicago and sending Vivian the latest draft, and she was like, “Yeah, you know, it’s getting there, but the lyrics need to be re-written.” Not my strongest point. So I re-wrote them. Still not quite up to par.
JM: They didn’t meet Vivian’s standards.
SS: It was bad. Let’s not split hairs here. It was bad. Terrible. Anyway, eventually she was like, “Can I have a crack at this?” I was immensely relieved. And it became a number one hit in China, Singapore, and Taiwan.
JM: Okay, so that was the song for Yoga Lin.
SS: Yeah, it was Yoga Lin’s thing.
VD: And then we were like, “Huh. Maybe we should continue.”
JM: Yeah, maybe there’s something good going on here. So that was the start and since then, this producer has come back for more stuff, yeah?
SS: The last time we submitted a couple songs, we were like, “We’re going to make these really good. We have a little more time.” We put more into the production…
VD: We really worked pretty hard on them. And they didn’t choose either of them.
SS: Shows what we know.
VD: But they keep asking us so it’s fine.
JM: At what point did you guys decide you wanted to start a band?
VD: Sasha had been touring with a band for like a year and a half. He was just out of town all the time and you know, just wasn’t artistically fulfilled. And I was like, “You need to just quit. Just jump. Hope that something catches you. Start writing stuff for yourself.” And that’s kind of when it started.
SS: It’s scary quitting your day job and becoming like an independent artist or something.
JM: But you are doing some session work from time to time, yeah?
SS: Yeah, and it’s really picked up. After I committed to being in town more…I don’t know, I feel very fortunate to be able to jump into that.
JM: So you had been playing with a bunch of different bands. Was there ever an artist where it was just a really natural fit that felt spot on?
SS: Yeah, I feel like playing with Jesca Hoop was kind of like that. She’s a really interesting songwriter. The way she writes and thinks of parts- it was different than what I was used to playing, but it was sort of a soft landing because at that point, she was still figuring out her sound, and she was incorporating ragtime and that kind of stuff, which is sort of my specialty. So I was able to do that pretty effortlessly and then kind of get sucked into this other weird world of Jesca Hoop.
JM: So I read that you grew up on a commune. Is that true?
SS: Yes, kind of. My parents had moved out West to this Darshan yoga group. It was a small group of people- maybe 10 or so- they did yoga and listened to this guru who was sort of the leader of their group. He would just have these talks and people would listen. He was a protégé of Krishnamurti. That’s pretty much the gist of it.
JM: You must have had a lot of music around growing up then.
SS: Yeah. My Dad’s a bass player, and he was always playing his old hippie music- The Byrds. He loves The Byrds and The Rolling Stones and The Kinks, which I think has probably seeped into our music a little bit. But he started exposing me to Old Ragtime and Boogie Woogie and Blues records as well.
JM: Were you like a child prodigy doing shows early on?
SS: A little bit.
VD: You started playing violin at what, two?
SS: No. I was a terrible violinist at four.
VD: Oh, four. Sorry.
SS: I was terrible. I wasn’t particularly interested in it, and I kept bugging my violin teacher to show me stuff at the piano. Eventually he was like, “Alright. Get this kid a piano teacher.”
JM: So there was a natural gravitational pull toward the piano, and you haven’t really left it since.
SS: Not yet.
JM: The Thank You, Goodbye demos sound really great. You’ve got so many great riffs on the keyboard. There’s also a lot of synth. What’s going on with synth right now? It seems to be everywhere.
VD: It is everywhere.
SS: I think maybe it’s just become more accessible. You don’t have to pay like two grand for a synth anymore. You can find them for like a couple hundred bucks.
VD: I also think it allows a band to get away from guitar-drums-bass and lets them orchestrate larger sounds.
SS: There’s a lot you can do. There’s barely any guitar on our record. Just on AM. We weren’t even planning on putting it in there, but then we were playing a live show with our guitar player Grethel Bonilla, and she just came up with this amazing part. We were like, “Alright, we’re recording it. It has to go in there.”
VD: It just broke my heart when I heard that in the song.
JM: Do you guys go out to a lot of shows these days?
VD: We try to.
SS: You know it’s weird. It feels like work sometimes. That’s a horrible thing to say- takes all the romance out of it. But I don’t know, I’m always so thankful when we actually do get out to shows.
VD: But we don't listen to a lot of music. At home, it’s very quiet.
SS: I think it’s hard to be listening to music as you’re creating. You can wind up writing a song that has already been written.
VD: I grew up having music playing while you slept, just 24 hours a day. So when we first started dating, that was bizarre. I was like, “It’s so quiet.” He loves it so quiet, but he’ll wake up and have these ideas in his head. Just wake up and go to the piano.
JM: So what’s up next with Thank You, Goodbye?
VD: I think, writing more songs. We’ve just been kind of throwing them out into the world to see where things can go.
Ed. Note - Check out Thank You, Goodbye at King King on Tuesday, Feb. 7.
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