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With so much happening in Seattle’s bustling music scene these days, how do you even know where to start? Allow the highly trained culture curators of Seattlemag.com to help with Band of the Week. This week, we catch up with Josh Davis from Talktin and Easy, a spin off from the cast of Weezer-worshipping musicians orbiting the SEACATS universe. Today, we’re premiering the first track, “Milton’s Orchids” from the band’s upcoming debut, All In Our Family of Trees, an album they’re teasing with the release of one track every three weeks until the album drops in full this spring. 

In three sentences, tell us the story of your band: Talktin and Easy was born out of a (musical) love at first sight between a group of northwest musicians. When our bands [SEACATS, Special Explosion, The Violins] first played together, we hit it off as friends really quickly and an awkward musical courtship followed. Eventually one of us worked up the courage and asked the others out on a first date (“Hey, we should collaborate sometime and make a split 7-inch!”), and pretty soon after that we were going steady (“Hey, would you wanna join SEACATS and go on tour with us?”) until eventually we decided to pop the question and make it official (aka start a whole new band and make an album together). So now we’re in the honeymoon phase, I think.

Tell us about the new project (themes, inspiration, personnel, release details, etc.): We approached this project with a lot of patience. The Talktin and Easy record took us about three years to make. We decided that we were pretty content to exist in a vacuum while we focused on crafting an album we were really proud of. Everybody had made a few albums with other projects by the time we got to this one, and we decided pretty early on that this time we wouldn’t stop working until we were 100% satisfied with what we had made.

What does being an artist/musician/band in Seattle mean to you? When this project started in 2013, Seattle served as a midway point for the northern and southern sects of our band. Back then we were located in small towns on either end of Washington. Half of us lived in Anacortes (known mostly for its awesome DIY music exports) and the other half in Kelso (known mostly for its awesome lumber exports). We would meet and practice in Seattle at our friends’ practice space. Now we’ve all moved to Seattle and I feel very grateful to this place for connecting us all together.

What’s the BIG question we didn’t ask, and what’s the answer? What is SEACATS UNIVERSE? SEACATS Universe is a website/collective we recently started to serve as sort of a catch-all for our projects. There’s a wide variety of weird stuff made by the people in our little friend group and we always wanted to have a platform to put it all in one place. We launched the site a few weeks ago along with the new SEACATS EP, and Talktin and Easy’s album will be the first non-SEACATS-proper musical release.

What’s next? The Talktin debut album is entitled All In Our Family of Trees and it is all finished. We’re releasing the first track “Milton’s Orchids” with y’all today. After that, our plan is to release a new Talktin single every three weeks until March or April when we finally put out the whole thing! Oh, and a bunch of Seattle-area shows in 2017!