Meet Me @ The Altar is an all women of colour pop-punk band consisting of guitarist/bassist
Téa Campbell, drummer Ada Juarez, and lead singer Edith Johnson, who live in different states in the US. With their youthful energy and encouraging lyrics, Meet Me @ The Altar are bringing something new to the re-emerging pop-punk genre.
Thank you for taking the time to do this interview with me.
Téa: Of course!
Edith: No problem!
So first off, how did Meet Me @ The Altar come to be?
Ada: Téa was 14 looking at YouTube covers, and I used to do drum covers very often. She came across my cover of ‘Holding On To You’ (by Twenty One Pilots) and she messaged me to say I was really good. Then I found out that she played guitar and that she was really good, like really good for her age, just to brag about her more. And after not even a week of talking we decided to start a band. We didn’t know what that meant, but we did it anyway because you know how kids are. And here we are, years later. Also, of course, when Edith joined the band. We first met her not even a couple months after Téa and I started the band because we started doing auditions for a singer, and that’s how we met her. She didn’t actually join the band until September 2017.
Edith: I was on YouTube, and I saw Ada’s video that said her band needed a singer, and I was like ‘that’s for me’. I clicked on it and tried out which was the first time I met them online, but I didn’t join until a couple years later.
You all live in different states, so how has that affected how you make and perform music, especially this year with COVID locking down a lot of states?
Téa: Luckily for us, it was a super easy transition because we’re used to this all the time anyway. Usually how it works for the songwriting process is a guitar idea will pop into my head and I’ll send it over to them and ask if they like it, and if they do, Edith will start writing a melody and then we’ll start writing lyrics for it. We write everything by ourselves in our own homes. We’ve tried writing songs together in person and it just does not work at all, I don’t know what it is. When it comes to live shows it does suck because we have to practice by ourselves and we get maybe one or two days to practice together for whatever show or tour we’re about to do, so we’re disadvantaged in that. But we do still make it work, and when we tell people that, they’re like ‘What? You only had this morning to practice for this?’. But it’s pretty cool, I don’t really have anything to complain about because we do make it work.
Punk is generally a very white male centric genre; how has it been finding your place in that world?
Edith: It’s hard. I feel like we’re so ambitious that, even though it is hard, we’re not going to never get to our goal. But yeah, it can get annoying sometimes, but we’re used to it now.
Téa: We have to work two times harder for everything that we have, but we do like to work, and it just makes our art so much better. It is unfair that at shows – shows that we put on – we get the side eye from other bands and stuff all the time. But we know who we are, and we know that as a group together we’re super strong so we don’t let it affect us that much.
With the protests currently taking place in the US, and a lot of other countries, in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s more important than ever to listen to black voices and to support people of colour. What is the message you’d like to get out into the world during this time?
Edith: I would say to just keep doing it, because I know that a lot of people are thinking that it’s over because the cops who murdered George Floyd are in custody, but this fight isn’t over yet. It’s going to last a long, long time.
Téa: George Floyd was the last straw, but it’s not just about George Floyd, it’s about every single black person that’s been murdered by a cop.
Edith: But it’s awesome that everyone is noticing, it’s not just the black community, it’s a lot of other communities as well.
Téa: And this is the first one that is so large scale, because there have been protests before like when Tayvon Martin was killed, and so many other people, but this one really stood out. And I’m glad that people are finally realising that this is enough.
Definitely. You had two new songs come out recently, ‘May the Odds Be in Your Favor’ and most recently ‘Garden’. What was the writing process like for those songs? Did it differ to previous music you’ve made?
Téa: Actually yeah, they both started out in my dorm room. Last year was my first year of college and I remember the ideas popping into my head, and my roommate would literally never leave the room, and I felt weird recording when she was in there, so I would keep it in my head and hope that it didn’t go away so I could record it when she left for the first time ever. But I knew as soon as I came up with it that we had to use it.
Edith: For me, I wrote the melody for ‘May the Odds’ so fast, and we agreed on it so fast. And then for ‘Garden’, I was driving and I wrote the melody in the car. I came up with it in the car, that’s really dangerous. Yeah, don’t do that.
Ada: You’ll just be driving and stuff just comes up in your head.
Edith: For real.
Téa: It does happen.
Edith: It happens all the time.
Téa: And as for the lyrics, these songs in particular, we really wanted the lyrics to kind of follow the feel of the music itself, because in the past we would just write whatever we feel like on top of it, but we really want it to match, and for ‘May the Odds’, it was back in like September or October, and I was just really feeling discouraged because like I said, even at our own shows people still don’t really take us seriously and it does weigh on you sometimes, so I wanted to write about that experience, and I know that we’re not the only people who feel like that, and I feel like other people needed to hear that. So, that’s why I wrote that. And for ‘Garden’, we really just wanted to write like a super positive song and let our friends know that we were there for them and our fans too. Because there’s not a lot of songs like that in pop-punk, it’s usually old white guys singing about their girlfriends.
Edith: Yeah, and a very negative energy with the lyrics.
Téa: We just wanted to be different.
Yeah, I love them both a lot because they still have that rebellious punk spirit to them, but in a very positive and hopeful way.
Téa: Yeah.
Do you have plans to release any more music soon?
Edith: Yes!
Téa: We have one more song coming out, I don’t know exactly when because we have some other stuff under wraps now, but a few weeks ago we got the first mix back for the song and we felt like it was missing something, so we decided to have our fans do gang chants for the song, and we put it in there and its sounding really cool so far. So we’re going to be putting out another song pretty soon, and we’re currently writing our debut album.
Awesome, I look forward to it! What are your hopes for the future? Do you have any dream gigs or people you’d like to work with?
Ada: So many.
Téa: The other day we literally wrote up a list of bands we want to tour with, there’s like 40 bands up there. We’re fortunate because we, right after this Corona stuff happened, we got booking agents from one of the biggest agencies in our genre, but we can’t tour right now. We don’t even know when people are going to start planning tours so it sucks but it’s good to know that we are going to tour when people start touring again. And hopefully we’ll get those opening slots for bands that we really want to tour with. I’m hoping, fingers crossed, for like The Wonder Years Tour because Soupy (The Wonder Years lead vocalist) shouted us out.
Ada: Yes, that would be amazing.
Well that’s about it, thank you so much for the interview.
Téa: No problem, thank you for interviewing us!
Meet Me @ The Altar’s newest singles ‘May the Odds Be in Your Favor’ and ‘Garden’ are available to stream now on Spotify.
