Press Play - An Interview with Band 'Billy Billie'

Billy Billie is a group from the Flathead Valley bringing a mix of genres that they like to call "electrified folk". The duo, made up of Sarah Williams on electric guitar and vocals and Vinnie Rannazzisi on cajon, began playing locally in February 2023. They work to curate their set of originals, covers, and spoken word to compliment their stripped down sound.

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Chapters

• 0:00 Formation
• 2:30 Playing the Cajon
• 3:17 Other Projects
• 3:46 Sarah & Vinnie's beginnings
• 5:51 Name Origin
• 6:57 Takeaways

Transcript

Vinny and I knew each other already. We play in another group locally called Honeybee and it, which is more of a rock group.
And I personally was looking to expand what I do musically. Vinny already does a whole bunch

and we kind of decided to
move towards a more singer songwriter folk kind of vibe because there's so many places we can't go as a rock band, right? You can't play so many venues because really our band is very honey band. It's very loud and is really well suited to like heavy drinking and late nights.

Billy Billy is something that we can take into all sorts of different areas, and it's just a more stripped down, versatile configuration of our instruments.

had always seen people play at home and they reached out really low on the Cajon to get the get the low end sound.

So you can really do a lot with your arms. And then I saw drummer. Drummer engineers are always making up new stuff all the time. That's great. So I found a home with a kick drum pedal as a wire and it goes into the ground. It replaces your need to use your right hand as the bass instrument. And so I can go back to using what I what am I for way independents that I have on the drum kit.

And these are more dynamic stuff to accent her voice and guitar shakers. And then I can also play a high hat and then use my left hand as a snare drum the whole time and, and, and basically just kind of replicate the drum kit sound scaled down and it won't hurt my body. Moving it around.

We started playing Billy Billy probably like February of 2023.
So we had not been playing in this project for a very long time.

my wife Rebecca and my good friend Eric are in. I heard a jazz trio. It's been together about 20 years. The three of us are also in a big funk band called 20 Grand. It's like a piece funk band.

It's been around 14 years and three of us are also in another band called Hot. Dave is kind of like a world beat fuck people kind of thing. And then I played drums in particular project. I'm like the 12th drummer they've had. It's like these guys from Big Bigfork It's kind of like a rock and roll
I've probably been writing poetry since I was like in middle school. I started writing songs in high school. Once I learned how to play guitar.

And I just really enjoy once performing. And that's the main thing, how I kind of got into a performance team here in the Flathead as they did a spoken word poetry slam for a few years.

It's just super cathartic. It's really based more, I think, and people have different opinions. I think the spoken word is really based on more of telling of a feeling as opposed to something really analytical or cerebral that you might find in other poetry. It's like you don't really get to sit down and analyze it. You just get this short period of time to express a feeling and have the audience feel it back,

my biggest regret in life is not taking the piano lessons. My mom tried to make me do that as it is, and I'll miss that. But I was also really into sports and really dedicated myself to be to being a college athlete. But then that kind of flamed out and in the middle of that and then I so I started playing drums and

I'm really fortunate. I come from a musical family. Everybody in my family plays music, everybody's sayings. My parents had a band when I was growing up, like I can remember lying in my bed.

They always practice at our house and so I wanted to be tucked in and it was like 10 p.m. and just screaming like waiting for my parents to come and tuck me in and like going to their shows when I was growing up, getting kicked out of bars every once in a while when we were little

So and I learned how to play violin at a pretty young age. That's the main instrument I grew up playing, but stopped doing that and didn't really I played just a folk group in high school on acoustic guitar, but didn't really start hitting the music again hard until I moved to the Flathead, at least for playing with other people, getting more involved with an open mic.

We were just kicking around ideas for what we wanted to call this group.
It's nothing to like, I don't know, revealing or anything what our name comes from. But then it was kicking out ideas of doing to unisex names. Since we're a male female group. And I was kicking around doing like the same name twice. We used the same word twice and Billie Billie came about. You could also say it's for our main musical influences, Billy Idol and Billie Holiday.

It's not, but the other didn't know. I was like, You know, it doesn't sound like that. I mean, they're both they're both great musicians, but not maybe where we gather inspiration. So that's that's a good answer. Yeah.

And one thing that really sticks out to me as far as what you need to collaborate is recognizing that when you're figuring something out and you're putting something together, when you're learning a new song, even if it's a cover, you have to be somewhat comfortable with sucking at it and sucking at it in front of other people and other people

sucking at it in front of you. And it's really awkward. It can feel really awkward if if you don't have you're not it's not something you're doing consistently, especially, you know, if you sort of set in on your setlist and then all of a sudden you're going to try and bring in some new songs and it's like eight, gosh, you're like back in this really just uncomfortable space, vulnerable space.

And so I think having some grace for yourself, having some grace for others in collaboration, and also when you're collaborating and it's not all unless it's like I am bringing this song, this is a song I have written, this is the music I have written to it. You also have to give people license to play it how they are hearing it, and eventually it'll all come in to whatever that finished product may be.
Yeah.