There’s something familiar yet new about the band Couch, which is readying to hit the road for an at-least-12-city tour next month that includes headlining a show on Sept. 10 at The Sinclair in Cambridge.
What may be familiar about the band to many in Wellesley are Couch bassist Will Griffin and trumpet player Jeffrey Pinsker-Smith, 2017 Wellesley High School graduates who made their musical marks locally via various bands and ensembles. What’s new about Couch is that the band’s style—self-described as infusing “pop songs with funk, R&B, jazz, and rock influences”—is always evolving.
Griffin and Pinsker-Smith describe their music as being satisfying to listen to for both musicians and non-musicians. They say if you’re someone who mostly listens to music in the background or while doing tasks, you’ll enjoy singing along to the easy-to-follow melodies and fun instrumentals. If you’re someone with a musical background, however, every track has interesting chord choices, rhythms, hits, and other details that will keep you finding new things on every listen.
Couch is a septet fronted by singer Tema Siegel, and has been playing gigs across the country since the spring of 2021. The band got its name when guitarist Zach Blankstein suffered a concussion during the summer that the band formed and the members wound up writing music on his basement couch.
Griffin and Pinsker-Smith joined/co-founded Couch in 2018-2019 after their freshman year of college. All of the band members went to different colleges, so Couch immediately became a long-distance band. That continued as the pandemic took hold, forcing the band to coordinate mainly in remote fashion.
The long distance writing and recording was tough at first, they say, mainly because band members were still students and had to deal with classes and assignments. Once COVID hit, they were able to take those long distance skills learned the year before, and apply them to the pandemic era “stay at home” rules. This allowed Couch to really keep the effort going throughout the pandemic and put out its first EP in February 2021.
Band members all live in the Boston area now, and while they see a possibility of Couch becoming a full-time gig, they’re sticking with their 9-to-5 jobs for now and squeezing everything in. They hope someday that might involve touring in a more “stylish vehicle” than the mini-van and car-towing-a-trailer set-up that they’re currently going with as they ready for a tour hitting cities such as Burlington, Vt., Philadelphia, New York City, Denver, and Washington, D.C. (A sneak preview will take place at Arsenal Yards in Watertown on Aug. 31).
Highlights of the band’s shows to date have included meeting fans, says Griffin, a recent Holy Cross graduate who juggled his interests in music and sports while at Wellesley High. “There is no better feeling than speaking with a fan after a show who can reflect on how the music makes them feel or certain memories that they have attached to that song. It’s interesting to take my feelings of the song (whether it be stress when recording, or the joy of playing it as a group for the first time), and comparing it to how it makes other individuals feel. Although we are experiencing different things, it still feels like some sort of connection.”
Pinsker-Smith, a recent University of Rochester grad, points to meeting artists that he’s listened to for years. “For example, earlier this summer we opened for Lake Street Dive , a band whose music Will and I covered in the WHS Jazz Combo back in 2017! If you had told high school-Jeff that I would be opening for them 5 years later, I would never have believed you.”
Being a band isn’t all performing and accolades, of course. Griffin and Pinsker-Smith, like their bandmates, take on many jobs to make the whole thing work. They picked up new skills while coordinating on the band remotely.
“Because we are essentially running a small business, it’s important that the 7 of us can tackle different tasks at once,” Griffin says. For example, his role within the band has expanded to include sound engineering, making sure Couch’s equipment is ready to go. Pinsker-Smith oversees the band’s finances. “I love making spreadsheets and handling data, so I’ve made a bunch of different spreadsheets that track everything from reimbursements for gas while on tour to streaming revenue to merch orders. Not all band operations are about music—in fact, most of our day-to-day work is not music related!”
Griffin’s long-term goal for Couch is “to try to ride the wave for as long as possible! I love working with everyone in the band and it is certainly a dream come true.”
Pinsker-Smith hopes “Couch can get to a place where we can all comfortably pursue music full-time without needing supplemental income. If we could be able to focus on music during the time we normally spend ‘working,’ I have no doubt in my mind we could accomplish really amazing things.”
“It might seem far-fetched for a band of our current stature to provide a healthy income —especially when split among 7+ members—but most bands never even get to the point where that could be a possibility,” he says. “We are all super grateful that we are in this position, which speaks to the generosity of our friends and family, the pure luck we’ve received in being found by streaming algorithms, but also the amount of focused work and rigorous attention to detail we’ve put in so far.”
Griffin, Pinsker-Smith, and the rest of Couch look forward to locals coming out to support them when they hit the stage at The Sinclair on Sept. 10.
(Fun fact: I had the pleasure of knowing Will and Jeffrey during their Wellesley Little League days.)
