Tempe's Faded Lady Aren't Your Daddy's Jam Band

With all due respect, Faded Lady look like your average group of indie rockers.

The band, based out of Tempe, have released just two songs in a year or so. They've also only played a select batch of shows amid this COVID era. And their entire aesthetic is hip if also indicative of a lot of young, indie-leaning bands these days. (Their icon on Bandcamp is a public bathroom sign.)

But it's the actual music that's made them exciting prospects already, and they've earned some sturdy praise despite it being so early in their career.

"Their songs are fun and fast and unpredictable," said Kalen Lander of the band Snailmate when asked about promising local bands.

And that's sort of all you need to know to give Faded Lady a start. Their aforementioned two songs, "Art Box" and "Holy People," are as Lander described — robust, genre-hopping jams that feel hugely reminiscent of a more garage rock-esque AJJ or a more playful Meat Puppets.

If you dig deeper, though, there's still an interesting story that frames Faded Lady as delightfully odd up-and-comers making noise with little pomp and circumstance.

And, like any potentially great band, it all started in school.

"We started Good Ol' Joel in high school down here and all moved up [to Flagstaff] together," said frontman Brandon Holt, who is joined by drummer Max Mulmed, bassist Tyler Patnode, and a more recent recruit, guitarist Isaac Martin. "And while we were on a break with that, I put together a killer album."

Holt continues, "We all ended up moving back down here around 2020. I'd started recording with our buddy, and he and Max lived together at the time. We started jamming and they [Mulmed and Patnode] wrote some really cool parts. So we decided to stop the acoustic recordings and we did the whole album together with [producer] Jalipaz [Nelson] at audioconfusion in Mesa."
That resulting LP, also called Holy People, is set to be released January 1, 2023. It's the result not only of several years of work, but a kind of re-connection between seemingly life-long friends.

"The structures of the songs are pretty much the same, which was pretty useful for just getting everything together," Holt said. "These are pretty sappy songs; it's just me on acoustic guitar. But Max brought so much energy, and Tyler's bass lines are just so incredibly original even though he has muses. These songs have been worked on for three years, and they've changed shape so many times. But in such good ways, and ways that have reinvigorated the music."

Holt added that their collaborative process isn't entirely perfect, but they've found a way to work it out as a unit.

"I don't want to say that we have like this, like, stylistic harmony necessarily," he said. "And our intuitions are very different. But it's not hard making music together."

It's an entire process spurred on by a few different events and elements, the first of which was a typical enough experience for high school students.

"I was sad at the time; we were all just sad," Holt said. "I started playing guitar because I went to an art school, and the dean of the school was nice enough to lend me a guitar. You just buy stuff that makes you feel better."

Holt admits, however, that the move up north did help the band (and the members as individuals). It was a place to learn about community, especially one carved out by the arts.

"Personally, I love Flagstaff. My body just resonates with the environment up there," Holt said. "Flagstaff is really tight-knit. At the same time, there's a lot of touring bands that come through there, and so you still get to meet a good amount of people."

He added that they've found a similar kind of community down in the Valley, with Holt mentioning Trunk Space as another similar hub.
But their connection as both a band and a group of friends was also tested by something more traumatic than even high school itself.

"I assume it was as weird for everyone else," Holt said of the band's formation amid the early days of COVID. But, as he's quick to add, the process wasn't entirely bad.

"It was easy enough to do while COVID was happening, and also not really having to worry about playing shows too much," Holt said of band life. "In fact, it [playing shows] not even being an option might have been more encouraging to flesh out this [music] a little more."

It's not just global pandemics and public education that have shaped Faded Lady, either. The four members also share a distinctly unassuming approach to creativity in general.

"We don't really have a lot of vision around the growth of a band," Holt said. "We like to sit and jam and we like to sit and make music. We're emotional guys and we like making tunes."

(If you're anti-jam band, however, Holt noted that "the songs [aren't] a product of a jam band, although we do jam, if you know what I'm saying.")

It's a tendency and approach that even informs their live shows.

"We just try to hang out with the crowd," Holt said. "Like, our presence is weird because we're all really anxious guys. It's our time to have fun and be with the people that want to be a part of that. We're trying to get in front of that crowd that we've been standing behind the whole time."

It’s also not just about making music as a collective; they're just as active individually, which has the added bonus of giving them more space artistically.

"We all do our own solo stuff," Holt said. "We're always working on new music in different genres in the background. Max is an amazing artist; he's in a project called Doughboy and he's a genius."
It's a truly multi-layered approach and overarching story that's perhaps best exemplified by the album itself. After years of development by people also developing both as artists and people, Holt thinks the album' tackles some heady subject matter.

"The word that comes to mind is right, and good enough," Holt said of the completed record. "It's about, generally speaking, development. There's a lot of energy changes in development. Just in moving time in general, there's lots of energy changes. You get excited, you get tired, you get sad. And I think it sounds good enough for that, you know?"

As far as further "development" by the band, Holt said they want to release music videos for at least three album tracks, "Art Box," "Irish Car Bombs," and "How To Write A Song." He's also "working on a whole other thing, and it might turn into a Faded Lady thing."

While that's it for definitive plans, Holt did mention that they "like sharing everything we make, and we'll keep whoever's interested informed as best we can." (Even as he admitted that they're "sorry we're not active on social media more.")

All of this together may actually hint at what genuinely makes the band unique beyond their engaging take on indie and alt rock. It's the idea that they're sort of figuring it out as they go, and they have the heart, talent, and charisma necessary to make that journey truly entertaining to watch. If anything, not knowing is actually a thrill, and forging a career in real-time means the band can focus on the things that matter most.

"I don't know how to answer questions about the future too much," Holt said. "Whatever comes, will come. We like doing the whole musician thing."