Interview: Big Fun 4Ever
The Milwaukee dance pop group celebrates its new 7-inch
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The power of dance music can get lost somewhere between the recording studio and the stage, yet Milwaukee’s Big Fun (now officially known as Big Fun 4Ever) has mastered this tricky transition by constructing its synth-laden pop songs organically, utilizing rock band instrumentation for its fun and funky grooves. Big Fun 4Ever’s Tony Dixon and Willy Dintenfass recently spoke with Decider about their brand new bubblegum pink 7-inch Teenage Sensation, released on Dixon's Vicious Pop Records, which also puts out records by locals Juiceboxxx and Terrior Bute. The band celebrates Teenage Sensation with a release party on Saturday at Cactus Club.
Decider: Where did you record the new 7-inch?
Tony Dixon: We recorded the 7-inch with Alex Hall in his basement studio. In some respects he’s almost like the Vicious Pop in-studio/in-house engineer. He does a lot of work with us and is helping us out a lot by lending his expertise to our records.
D: The song “Teenage Sensation” is a good mix of traditional rock band sounds, synths, and drum machines. How do you balance these different elements?
TD: On that song in particular, we all wanted to get the live band feel and were trying to balance a lot of different elements because it’s going to be one of our live staple songs. We’ve always been into punk and we’re into rock bands—we listen to rock music, too, but this is something we never really explored that much in previous bands. That one is definitely going to sound closest to what we sound like live, but even that is going to sound pretty ridiculous.
D: What’s the song influenced by?
Willy Dintenfass: The song is purposely backwards-looking. I think we wanted to write something really poppy, and for me, a lot of how you feel about music when you’re a teenager is maybe different than when you’re in your 20s and 30s. I used to listen to Hot 102 on the school bus a lot. I think that we found after a certain point, after we’d been playing in various bands, with this one we consciously wanted to do something more like the music that we liked as children. That’s kind of where that song comes from.
D: How do you create dance music that sounds true to your recordings in a live setting?
WD: It’s been a big thing with this band, negotiating the split between how we write the songs and how to actually make the songs when we perform them, because we just make them on the computer, for the most part, but we want to be able to play live.
TD: We’ll try to pull off some of the weirder stuff we do in recordings even though the dance music and pop music textures we use can get pretty hard to do. We don’t want it to just end up being rock music.
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