The sounds of early 2000’s rock with a twist of a melodic queen. Chainflower hails from Los Angeles, California with a fresh, prodigious lineup that include luminary singer Syd Duran (Valora), Raanen Bozzio (son of legendary drummer, Terry Bozzio) and Kelly Wheeler (Jane’s Addiction). Releasing their recent single, “She Rides Fire” gives us a nostalgic feeling of strong female-leads like Evanescence, Flyleaf and Lacuna Coil. Read all about the trio in our Concert Crap exclusive interview. Buckle up and enjoy the ride.
Concert Crap: Tell us a little bit about your band?
Kelly Wheeler: Chainflower have been around for a few years, Raanen and Syd are new to the project for about a year so we released two singles last year on the recent tracks. It is new for us that way, like a new version of Chainflower.
Raanen Bozzio: New and improved!
CC: How did you guys meet?
KW: We rented out an ad for a vocalist. We were looking. I had gone through a few different vocalists and I was never happy after the original vocalist. It was a long process and about a year later, we were still looking and we ran an ad that Syd answered. So, we had auditioned a few singers we felt were great and wanted to jam with them. Syd came in and we were just blown away.
RB: Me and Kelly actually met through Dan Carey, the drummer for Tool. We met at a Tool concert and a mutual friend of ours, Ryan Brown (drummer of Dweezil Zappa) told me, “Hey, you should try jamming with Kelly sometime.” We got information exchanged, next thing you know, I ended up joining the band about October of last year.
Syd Duran: I think it was probably March of 2019 because 2020 was the year, like you know, that kind of doesn’t count.
KW: Yeah, we’ve played shows together. Right after she joined, we had shows lined up. It was great.
CC: So, you guys toured before the pandemic?
Chainflower: Yeah.
CC: Do you have a favorite city you like tour at?
SD: Well, we always appreciate that we live in Los Angeles and there’s most iconic venues or if they are still surviving. You got the Whiskey, the Viper Room, and even smaller ones. It is nice because we know these rock legends that played there before us, basically shared the same stage as The Doors and Guns n’ Roses. So, definitely cool, that’s our hometown.
KW: Definitely, LA is our hometown so we love LA and San Diego is good, too.
RB: I could never play in LA in my life again and be super happy. I have no issues with it, whatsoever. LA crowd suck, straight up! My favorite cities to play are Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Beautiful place, beautiful city, beautiful people and the fans really give a fuck. Tijuana, Mexico, great place to play. Orlando, Florida, weird places you wouldn’t expect. You know what, the weirdest place you would never expect is Butte, Montana. Yeah, everyone comes out to the shows, everybody is stoked, your bar tab ends up being very incredibly cheap. But honestly, I’m just happy to play anywhere even if it’s in LA where a bunch of people with their arms crossed. LA is a great crowd to play if you don’t like in LA.
CC: How did you come up with your name, Chainflower? What was the inspiration behind it?
KW: It was the name I had. It was bouncing around for a while and I had a band before. It had guy singers fronting but then, we auditioned for a couple of girls that really surprised us. The original singer had great presence and we started thinking, maybe, this is the direction we should take. It’s sort of how Chainflower came about. The name seems to fit.
SD: Yeah, the reason why I audition was for the name.
CC: I noticed that your music sort of sounds like Stone Temple Pilots, is there a band that helped influence the album?
KW: There’s not one we could name because there are several between the three of us but we happened to work with Stone Temple Pilot’s engineer on a couple of new release. Doug Grean, who is amazing and he engineered a few Stone Temple Pilots albums.
CC: You guys are definitely one of the bands to look out for this year. Is there anything in store for 2021?
Chainflower: Yeah!
RB: We’re just gonna keep releasing music, videos and try to play some shows, hopefully, as soon as things start to open up. Try to do what every band is doing right now, which is survive. As long as we have a day above ground, it is a good day. You know what I mean?
KW: We’re going to do some more live performances, some live streams, for sure. We actually have a new song in the works. We just released a song a few weeks ago. We have a new video coming up, so we have a lot of things coming up. You know before, things open up, we have venues that already want book us but we just have to wait. In the meantime, we are releasing and creating things we can do now which is music and videos.
CC: Is there a link we can find that at?
SD: Easy way to do it is Google, “Chainflower” and all of our things come up, all of our social media but on Instagram, it’s ‘Chainflowermusic.’ Twitter as well, you can find us on Facebook and Youtube by searching ‘Chainflower.’ And Spotify!
RB: It is available on every platform.
KW: It is easy to find. Our latest single is, “She Rides Fire.” That just came out a few weeks ago so if you go on YouTube or Amazon, you will find it.
RB: And check out my Twitch channel! It’s RaanPlays. You can ask me about Chainflower there!
Chainflower: We want to give a shoutout to our manager, Ditch from Hood Associates who is amazing so thank you.
GO DOWNLOAD: “SHE RIDES FIRE,” the song that makes you want to throw those rock horns back in the air.
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Post and interview by Christine Rios
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