Ryan Lewis is a busy man. He’s been that way since we met, and I think it’s always been like that. The dude’s been in a ton of bands, put out a ton of bands on Kindercore records, writes columns, blogs, and enjoys KFC more than most people should. He recently took some time out from his upstart scooter company to chat with me about his new band The Buddy System, a newly revived Kindercore and pink monsters. Dig.

Dry Ink: So what’s up?

Ryan Lewis: Well, you know, working on a million things at once. The band, although clearly not enough, a new brand of scooters to be coming out of Athens, the design and marketing on that. They’re going to be really affordable and unique. Should be cool.
The band is working on a DVD with animations and songs, and mp3’s. It’s kind of a process with the animation and all, but we’re working on having it out by the fall.

DI: I was wondering what your release would be like, with the animation and music being so integral. What’s your opinion on the music serving as a soundtrack to the animation versus the animation serving as a “video” for the songs? They could stand on their own, but they’re like 50 percent of one another.

RL: Let’s see… certain songs we’ve written, the idea for the animation came first and the music was written as a soundtrack to it. The song “Return To Horse Mountain” was started as an animation idea, and we started writing music from that idea and started doing both at the same time. So that one ended up being a soundtrack to a video, like with the sound effects and all. We originally intended most of them to be that way, but since the animation takes such a long time a couple of songs have developed where we had an idea for music and came up with visuals to go along with it. We all feel that the two shouldn’t necessarily be seperated. With an illustrator, an animator, and two musicians it was always set up like that so that everyone would always be bringing something to it.

DI: The experiment worked. It’s a little bit more than just a band and their record.

RL: Right! It’s fun to do something a little bit different without taking it too far and becoming like, you know, musical theater or something. As long as we’re not doing that then I’m ok…

DI: I think you’re safe. So y’all have a split 7″ with Ruby Isle (Kindercore co-founder Dan Geller’s band). That’s on Kindercore, right? How’s that going?

RL: Yep. It’s great; Kindercore’s been very much back to the days of seat-of-our-pants, whatever we can do in our spare time. Dan’s a biodiesel researcher and spends a lot of time flying around the country giving talks, I’ve got the scooter company and tons of work… It feels like when we first started, in a good way. I always preferred being at home photocopying record sleeves to having to deal with tour support and in-store listening stations, you know? We’re going to deal directly with stores as much as possible, and if I had my way everyone would just mailorder and we’d deal directly with the customers because it’s just so much more personal and cool.
The reason why got into doing this was so that we could share music that we thought was cool, and there’s no better way to do that than send a record to someone’s house with a note in it. I’ve been putting in CD mixes of old Kindercore stuff to introduce people to other stuff on the label, maybe a 7″ if people order vinyl. It’s so much more disorganized and fun instead of all the ridiculous trappings of trying to compete with major labels.
We’ve also been doing comic books and t-shirts. I’m really pumped about that because it’s been giving us a chance to work with artists we like and stuff we really couldn’t do before.

DI: Sounds like you have a lot of good stuff going on. Looking forward to playing Atlanta?

RL: I think it’s going to be awesome. We haven’t gotten out of town much since our van’s been broken, and we’re just pumped about getting out of town for this Southeastern jaunt we’re doing. I’m really looking forward to it!

The Buddy System plays Wonder Root in Atlanta Saturday, March 14.