PEYOTE UGLY — JUNE 2018

PEYOTE UGLY — JUNE 2018 June 24, 20181 Comment

Dan Ray

Raised by a single mother in the suburbs of Detroit, Dan discovered an early passion for singing, songwriting, and the arts as a whole. She got her BA in English and music at the University of Michigan, where she reported for the school’s paper, The Michigan Daily. She worked as a Senior News Reporter on the government beat, transitioned to arts writing, and eventually became the managing editor of the social media department. She moved to Seattle in 2017. After losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic and discouraged about the lack of press surrounding Seattle’s music scene, Dan made the decision to turn Dan’s Tunes, a fully fledged music journalism website focused on showcasing the Seattle area’s musicians, into its own startup. There’s so much music happening in the city that spawned Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Jimi Hendrix — among others — and Dan’s Tunes is determined to find and expose those outstanding acts. The goal is to have satellites in every major US city, uplifting diverse and compelling voices and helping music communities thrive. In 2020, Dan was featured in the Seattle Times’s year-end music critic poll. Other than her musical endeavors (singing, playing ukulele, and auditioning for American Idol four times before the age of 24) Ray is passionate about food and education around the American food system, and she’s also a large proponent of eliminating the stigma around mental health. Ray loves cats, especially her own, who is named Macaulay Culkin (but she’s a lady).

Photo by Peter Cousins

It took awhile for things to come together for Brennan Moring and Noah Packard.

Moring, 28, and Packard, 27, have been playing together since their days at Sammamish High School where they won their freshman year Battle of the Bands, but it wasn’t until they found guitarist Elliot Preston in 2015 that the real music started to flow and the fringes of Peyote Ugly started to form.

Before meeting Preston, who is originally from Tallahassee, Packard had more or less given up on playing and hadn’t touched his drum set in three years.

“[Playing drums] is such an inconvenient hobby, and it’s an intrusive hobby,” said Packard. “It was really easy to get side-tracked and stop the music, so when we started the band it got me back on track. It went from a hobby that’s unproductive to something to take seriously.”

But even then, the three bandmates didn’t jive right away. Packard and Moring, who lived together, always wanted to jam with Preston, but the chemistry just wasn’t there yet.

“We sucked for awhile. We wrote some pretty bad songs,” said Preston. “I’m into jamming if it’s good, but it was always really bad, so I was like, ‘we should just write some songs.’ “

The band took Preston’s advice to heart, and in 2017, after a year of recording in Moring’s home studio, they released their first EP, a self-titled, six-track endeavor. The band said recording was what really helped them flush out their synthy psych-rock sound, and it shows. The shortest track on the record is four minutes and 24 seconds, and four of the six songs are over five minutes long.

Peyote’s studio sound varies from their live performances — which makes their shows all that much more exciting — in one key way: on their record, Moring played bass, which is his original instrument. Live, he plays two keyboards so the three-piece can fill out their sound on the high and low end.

_DSC8916 — Peyote Ugly drew a hyped crowd at their Central Saloon show on June 21. // Photo by: Peter Cozens

But, that doesn’t mean the band is looking for a bassist. They like being a trio, especially since they all get along so well.

“We were all best friends before we even started playing in this band,” said Packard.

And the best friends are on their way up. They’re currently in the process of recording their next, five-song EP, and, after that, they’re looking to dive into recording a full-length record that will hopefully have a title just as catchy as Peyote Ugly is in and of itself.

“That’s one of the best ways to get your name to stick in someone’s mind — just to have enough face value to where it sticks, and then it doesn’t mean anything after that,” said Moring. “What does Death Cab For Cutie mean?”

For a more in-depth look at the band’s process, check out their mockumentary, A Quest For Tone.