Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Thaxter.
Ryan, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
We all met in school. I met our guitarist Cory in first grade for example. By high school we had played in various bands together, from hardcore punk to ska to grunge to reggae. By that time we had started to crystallize our vision of what we wanted to do, which was a heavy roots-reggae-dub project inspired by the old school legends like King Tubby, Augustus Pablo, etc. Fresh out of high school graduation in 2009, we officially formed Dubbest and started playing shows around the Boston area. From the start, the goal was to go big. We were touring by 2014. We moved to San Diego in 2016 to take advantage of the music scene and the weather and haven’t looked back.
We’re always bombarded by how great it is to pursue your passion, etc – but we’ve spoken with enough people to know that it’s not always easy. Overall, would you say things have been easy for you?
We’ve had our struggles of course but it’s been a lot of fun. It was always pretty obvious what we needed to do, which is to keep touring a few times a year and keep writing new music that legitimately gets us excited and makes us dance ourselves. So knowing what we want and what we wanted to sound like was never the hard part. There’s always room to grow and we look forward to reaching more ears.
So let’s switch gears a bit and go into the Dubbest story. Tell us more about your band.
I think Dubbest specializes in our attention to detail and original content in the melodies, lyrics and rhythms. We play the music that comes naturally to us but only as a result of years of hard listening and being critical of not only ourselves and each other, but also the music we hear everyday. We pick every note apart in our music and if something is not quite right on any level, we play around with it until we think it’s amazing. That goes for live shows too. We always discuss after shows how we all think the set went. We want to make sure we sound really clean and tight but also make each show a unique experience, and never be fake or robotic.
I’m still really stoked on our newest album, Gold Fever. We pushed ourselves out of our comfort zones musically, especially certain songs and allowed them to become something we hadn’t ever expected. Especially on songs like Guilty and Keep Waiting, which was pretty blank slates going into the studio.
Contact Info:
- Website: DubbestMusic.com
- Instagram: Instagram.com/DubbestMusic
- Facebook: Facebook.com/DubbestMusic
- Other: YouTube.com/user/DubbestReggae
Image Credit:
Group Photo: Marc Pedraza
Individual Photos: Gunnar Velten / Gunn Shots Media
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