Check Out Dan Irving & Em Edgerton’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Dan Irving & Em Edgerton of Pretty Crimes.

Hi Dan & Em, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
We (Em & Dan) met at UNC-Chapel Hill when we both DJ’d for the student radio station, WXYC. We started meeting up to play music together in 2017. We lost touch for a few months after Dan graduated, but then we reconnected at a concert and said “hey we should play music together again.” So we did.

We started meeting semi-regularly to play original songs that we had both written and also started co-writing songs together. After a couple of months of doing this, a friend asked us to play with their band at The Cave in Chapel Hill, and we put together a set and never looked back.

We originally called ourselves The Dreamhouses and went by that name for about a year, then changed it to our current name Pretty Crimes because we realized Dreamhouses was already taken.

Through our time as a band, we’ve rotated through several members, keeping the core of us two throughout. Currently, we have Mike Freeman as our drummer who has been playing with us since 2019, and Alan Marines as our guitarist since early 2020. We’ve put out one album so far, with another on the way. Our debut, called You Have Your Mind, came out in the Fall of 2020.

You Have Your Mind is a genre-fluid indie art-pop record about mythical creatures and the nature of belief. Currently, we are playing shows around The Triangle and, as mentioned, we are working on our follow-up record at Bedtown Studios, release date TBD.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It has not always been smooth, particularly with the pandemic and the way it shut down the world for so long.

We were wrapping up recording our debut record when it first hit, with promotional plans that hinged on playing shows. We had to retool our recording process to be safe with everyone involved and had to look to the internet to promote ourselves instead of in-person shows.

We also had to take some time to find band members that were the right fit for us, both musically and personally. We eventually landed on the line-up we have today, which feels like the right fit we were looking for.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
We specialize in playing around with different genre conventions.

We have songs that are squarely in the realm of indie rock, some that are country, some that are much more electronic, etc. We have a wide array of tastes that we like to channel into our songwriting. Our first record, You Have Your Mind, is full of different styles.

Even though our songs can sound quite different, some qualities that typically link them together are a strong sense of pop songwriting, melody, and propulsive rhythms.

Our next record improves on those strengths so that our genre-bending is a clear part of our identity. We look to artists like St. Vincent, David Bowie, and many others who change up their sound between records while still keeping true to themselves.

We aspire to also be constantly challenging ourselves to uncover new sonic territory while also genuinely expressing ourselves, making all of our music identifiably “us” without stagnating.

Where do you see things going in the next 5-10 years?
There will have to be a change in the pay structure of the industry, particularly in regard to streaming.

We also sense that there is a growing realization among the music-listening public about the importance of owning the music that you consume – this is happening due to the temporary nature of streaming, music can get taken off these services at any time.

And with the growing division of content in the world (See: So many different video streaming services when there used to be just Netflix), it will become increasingly difficult for one streaming service to have all the music that somebody would want to stream.

It is likely that exclusives will continue to happen for records (such as Beyonce, Kanye West, others have done), but these exclusives will be on different platforms. This will drive people away from conventional streaming platforms because it is unlikely they will use two different services for one type of content.

The solution we see is a move back towards ownership of music, so people do not have to deal with artificial barriers to what they want to hear.

Pricing:

• Name Your Price ($5 minimum) to buy You Have Your Mind on Bandcamp.
• T-shirts: $15

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: https://prettycrimes.bandcamp.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pretty.crimes/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/prettycrimesband/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqntLGhsrH93oIvq-7jFjxg
• Other: https://open.spotify.com/artist/00SYnMqSHm9wRbSgoVx7qQ

Image Credits
https://www.instagram.com/rebekahv_photography/, https://www.instagram.com/reel_local/, https://www.instagram.com/panosamic/, and https://www.instagram.com/em.edge.photography/