Touch The Buffalo talks about creativity and “Bodhicitta”

Touch The Buffalo’s Jon Johnson talks the band’s influences on “Bodhicitta,” and more!

S) Hello!! How are you doing today?

T) I’m doing great today! It’s a warm, sunny spring day in Virginia.

S) What is motivating the band right now, outside of music – think specific people and places – and even movies, for example?

T) Hmm. Well, every once in a while I see an interview with 50 Cent, and he gives some advice to emerging artists, and that helps me a lot.

Right now, we are simply motivated by the desire to be heard. We believe in our music and its power to energize people. So we’re going to continue to do that. But here are some of our current media indulgences:

TV: Blood of Zeus, Conan O’Brien must Go Scissor 7, Demon Slayer, Evil (on Netflix, 20% chance of nightmare fuel), The Bear

Video games: Zelda Skyward Sword, Final Fantasy 7 – 10, Call of Duty

S) What do you think are the biggest challenges you face as a group?

T) Be discovered. People generally don’t go see bands they’ve never heard of before. But our experience is that people who see us play become fans. We won a battle of the groups. And we played a show where a girl with cerebral palsy in the crowd stood up in her wheelchair to dance to our set. My confidence in our sound is unwavering, but we’re not yet selling out shows.

S) What is your message for people who support the group and who will continue to do so?

T) Thank you for staying by our side. We are working to build a movement, we are grateful for all your support. We’re going to spend the rest of the year promoting this EP. The EP showed a softer, finer side to our sound, but our next album will return with heaviness. We hope you like it.

S) What are the main themes that run through “Bodhicitta”?

T) We went much further with Bodhicitta. First, stylistically, the songs change from song to song, with different emotions and energy. This echoes the EP’s title, Bodhicitta, which is actually a Buddhist term meaning “a mind aimed at awakening.” We wanted to capture a wide range of authentic emotions with introspective lyrics.

We started writing the EP at the start of the pandemic and wanted to capture the human feelings of that moment. “This City’s Burning” captures the chaos of anyone who has lived through a wildfire, war zone or riot. “In Six Heads About It” describes the madness of a powerful love slipping through your hands. “The Carpenter and the Nurse” is a song about surrendering to a powerful love. And Hope’s Song is about death, but also about keeping loved ones alive in our thoughts.

S) What do you think of the band’s success so far?

T) We’ve been a band for 7 years, I wish we were further along. We have 16 songs from an album and two EPs that we have released. We have 6 official music videos. We played at several festivals, some big, some small, we won a battle of the bands, we got played on the radio. Honestly, I don’t know what else to do.

S) I’m really interested in the band’s visuals – you approach them in a raw way in found footage and phone clips etc., is that intentional?

T) The found footage style for In Six Heads About It was inspired by the song “Blur” by MØ. I think there’s a lyric video for this song, with a home video feel, and I loved it. And I happened to take a lot of great images on my phone during the pandemic, and I selected images with great colors and lined them up in an energetically interesting way. So that’s the story behind this video. The other videos on the EP are animated, however.

S) Is there anything else you’d like to plug in before we finish?

T) For now, if anyone hasn’t heard our EP Bodhicitta yet, all the clips from the EP have been compiled into one long clip which you can check out here:

And if you want to discover our products, you can visit touchthebuffalo.threadless.com

S) Thanks for the time!

T) Thanks for the interview!