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Video Premiere: Deep West’s ‘Giving Up’ A Perfect Lesson In Community Building

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After talent, and sometimes as much as talent, the most important asset you have in music is your network. Look at Los Angeles brother duo the Deep West (Joey and Adam Chavez).

Coming out of a well-known local Los Angeles band, the New Limb, that disbanded in 2015 after a seven-year run, the Chavez brothers took some time to find their voices and figure out their next musical move.

Once they sorted that and recorded their six-song debut EP, out this coming February, the band went to work on the best steps to get back into the music game. This is where the network comes in. Tapping into friends they had made in the arts community in Los Angeles, the duo put together the "Giving Up" video, premiering here.

Featuring a robot head designed by Jason Moloney, who has worked with Daft Punk and Marshmello as well as on big-budget blockbusters like Black Panther, the joyful video presents a lighter spin on the song's serious subject matter.

Starring actor Mike Dye, a friend of theirs who introduced them to Moloney, the video is a perfect testament to the importance of developing a community of like-minded artists.

I spoke with the brothers about the video, finding their musical hope after the end of the New Limb, how their community brought their idea to life and more.

Steve Baltin: There is a long storied history of siblings fighting in bands. So how are you guys able to get along? And how many fist fights do you usually have?

Adam Chavez: That['s innumerous, there's not a number for that (laughs).

Joey Chavez: It's definitely tapered off as we've gotten older, but it gets heavy. It gets crazy because we were in a band before this and that was a band in the way bands used to be bands, where it's like, "You play guitar, you sing and you're writing, and you play the drums." But I just feel like things have changed so much now. Coming out of that, we had to learn how to do a lot of the things that were not our forte before. That was somebody else's job and so I think that's part of the reason why it took us so long. Not only were we tasked with doing jobs we had never done before, but in the previous band we didn't even write that much together. It was usually a different combination for whatever reason. And so we had to learn how to not only write together, but how not to just kill each other. We were depressed because of the failure we had just experienced; we were pissed off at that, we were pissed off at each other, we were taking it out on each other because this line isn't good enough. I feel like there's almost no way to express how hard it was. I felt like I was gonna explode for like a year straight.

Adam: I actually felt like this was kind of a therapy session for me and Joey to essentially get past all of our issues and previously unhealthy dynamics in order to grow in confidence and trust with each other and just to turn over a new leaf and have a healthier music relationship and professional relationship and personal relationship. We're able to work through our problems and prove to ourselves that we can work through that. Also we could've added other people in and formed a new union of people. I think in order to get past this whole thing it was good not to muddy the water again and again with other people's interests and perspectives. We could just come at it and write and play everything ourselves. All of it was done in my studio, so it was like, "Here we are, let's get it done."

Joey: Yeah, when it comes down to it I can truthfully say I am very proud of what we've done because there were a lot of times I did not think we would be where we are now with music and proud of the music and happy with where it is.

Baltin: So when did you realize you could write together?

Adam: I felt like I had to go out and work with other people and prove to myself I could do it cause when you have a brother and he has been writing longer than you, you need that proof of concept to back up why you think or feel that way. From my perspective, just collaborating with a lot of people on the side kind of helped me.

Joey: On the EP there's a song we finished first and there was a moment where I heard what we had done and I thought, "This is good." That was the moment. I was like, "We can do this."

Adam: The song we're releasing, "Giving Up," was one of the first songs we did that had legs on its own cause we were able to put ideas and productions ideas in there that we had just stirring around in our head. It was able to come out finally and be a little bit more magical.

Baltin: So what were the moments early on where you figured out what you wanted the Deep West sound to be?

Joey: It was really hard for me to put into words or song the depression and the pain that I was feeling at the moment, especially to specifically be talking about what was going on. I think "Giving Up" was one of the ones we finished early on. That song specifically is essentially us asking ourselves, "Is it worth going on?" Cause that is what the whole song is about. It's making the decision, "Are you a musician and is that what you are at the core of you?" And if so you can't help but just keep moving on. And I think that became the basis for the EP. And not only that, but the basis for putting into song how we were feeling throughout this whole process. And I think it spring boarded us into the songs we're now starting to do too.

Baltin: Take me through the video and how that ties in with that idea of not giving up.

Adam: The video is cool in the sense we self-produced and self-directed it because we worked on various things and have various experiences to get us to that point. But we knew creatively we needed to have a very specific execution of it and I think we got really close to what we were trying to do.

Joey: The song is very serious and the video is not very serious. The original idea was it'll be a funky dancing robot from the past and essentially the robot is the part of us that can't help but move on w e're not robots that are programmed to dance, we're humans that are programmed to create music. Like we were talking about the other day before we were in a band or writing any songs at all we were going to my dad's gigs when we were little. Four years old or whatever we were watching him play, backyard parties and stuff like that. So I think at this point the song and the video are about how we're not gonna try to pretend to be anything else other than musicians. So we're not gonna give up.

Adam: Yeah, so the expression of that is through this robot. In the music video it just loves to dance and it has a hard time. But I think it's a universal theme to have everybody get behind because everybody needs a little bit of a pump up or a boost in confidence.

Baltin: Talk about where the robot came from.

Joey: This guy Jason Moloney, he designed it. He worked on Marshmello's helmet, Daft Punk's helmet, he's done the costumes and helmets for DC and Marvel movies (Spider-Man: Far From Home, Aquaman, Thor: Ragnarok, Watchmen, Black Panther) and he happens to be a buddy of ours. When we were trying to figure out what video we were gonna do our whole strategy was because we have a serious lack of funds, "Who do we know? What is at our disposal? What can we pull from everywhere?" We came up with this idea for the dancing robot and then we were like, "Let's try it." It just so happened all these people lined up and we could do the video.

Adam: Yeah, Mike Dye helped us put it all together. Jason was the concept artist and he did a rendering of what Joey and I had done previously through our crappy drawings. The actual robot suit we rented, it was the helmet we built. Then we had to find a small dancer who could fit the suit.

Joey: It ended up being a woman, Catherine Viger, and she actually almost passed out a few times while she was wearing that thing.

Adam: She was a trooper for sure (laughs). We're like, "Do you want to stop?" And she goes, "No, I'm good."

Joey: We bought all these ice packs we would refreeze so we could put them down her back and stuff to keep her cool. She had to wear that thing for most of the day.

Adam: And the other fun part about that helmet is there's a glowing eye on it and that is in the way of one of her eyes the entire time. So she only had one eye the other time. She's classically trained and stuff like that and she does a lot of different projects and she's a really good dancer so she helped a lot. What we conceptualized too was we wanted the robot to be funky and not great at dancing. We wanted it to be goofy in some regards. And so her just being so talented and so diverse she was able to help us zero in what type of dance moves to do and what spots. So she was amazing.

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