An Interview With Pizza Academy
November 14, 2023 • Written by Sophia Dedek
Are you a fan of live music and indie bands? Are you an emo kid that’s looking for representation in the Boston area? Well, I am excited to announce that I had the amazing opportunity to talk to the local student band, Pizza Academy about their recent performance here on MassArt campus! They are sure to satisfy that musical niche you’re looking for!
Riley Scease, is currently a sophomore at MassArt in the Film/Video program, and Shane Luczkow is an Electromechanical Engineering major at Wentworth. They make up the self-identified emo band Pizza Academy. For their first-ever concert, held here at MassArt on April 28th of last semester, Pizza Academy donned authentic pizza delivery uniforms and brought infectious energy and an engaging stage presence to our campus.
Their stage presence was positively unmatched. The coordinated costumes they brought showed that despite this being their first show, they came prepared and were ready to command the audience’s attention. They played each song with incredible precision and they had an amazing handle of the range of registers they played in. I found myself so completely lost in the moment during their set, swinging and floating my body around the dance floor, matching their swaying tunes. Their music is also completely infectious, and I found myself humming their songs to myself long after the concert had ended. I particularly enjoyed the song I Wish I Liked Slushies. Though it is only a demo, it is still very put-together and each layer of sound feels intentional. The song eases you into the thick of it with guitar that gradually becomes layered with percussion until the vocals come crashing in. Dual guitars create some amazing harmonies by layering different chords on top of each other. The band also plays with moments of sudden dissonance that surprise and engage listeners.
Going beyond just the concert’s setlist, their range of sound throughout all of their work is very mature and their command of the instruments they play is clear. Their vocals are visceral with the way the lyrics are sung to the point of being screamed out, adding to how deeply personal the music felt. Every song feels intensely emotional, and it is the perfect style of music to bang your head to in a crowded venue.
For fans of bands like American Football or Michael Cera Palin (of whom they did a cover!) I highly recommend checking out the work of Pizza Academy.
I feel so honored to have gotten the chance to speak with them about their first live event, their process, and the future of their musical career!
So you’re studying very different disciplines. Very, very different. What got you into starting a band?
Riley: Well, we’ve both known each other since, like, middle school because we live close to each other.
Shane: You started playing guitar in like, eighth grade.
Riley: Yeah, I started learning or whatever. I started writing music in freshman year. So it was mostly just a solo thing. It had a bunch of different names for a while. And then, eventually, I started writing things that could use drums and could use other instruments.
Your name, Pizza Academy, is very interesting. I like it a lot. Where does it come from?
Riley: It's a real place in the town that I live in. A pizzeria.
Is it good?
Riley: I think it's good, but it makes the fact that we work at Domino's even worse.
I was actually going to ask where you got those Domino's outfits from. So those are your uniforms?
Shane: Yeah. Riley’s a driver. I’m a manager.
Riley: I'm actually going back there.
This was your first show ever, how was that for you?
Riley: Yeah, we did the coffee house a couple of months back. And we just played one acoustic song but this was like the first full set or anything we've ever played.
It went really well, you guys killed it.
Riley: Yeah. I mean, God knows we probably won't play another place as good as that for a long time. With, like, the monitors and the big stage and everything?
Shane: The lights and actually having a sound guy?
….
Riley: We definitely didn't like, rush into it or anything. Band wise. We've been planning stuff for a while, we just– It's taken a while to get around to doing stuff.
What are your musical influences; how do you describe your sound and where does it come from?
Riley: Definitely a lot of, like, 2010s emo music because that's what I listened to a lot in high school. Obviously we played two covers last night for bands I really like. So it started out with mostly that sort of EMO, punk kind of influence. And then, more recently I discovered … more [bands]. … The Brave Little Abacus has been a huge inspiration recently for either, messing with the song or …adding synth to it as many instruments as I can find.
Shane: I give a slightly different answer every time someone asks me to describe what our music is. Usually I just, like, kind of cop out and say like, it’s emo punk. But my biggest influences I like– it's the same. I like all that stuff. Biggest band right now for me is Microwave. I think they're great. As far as actual bass playing, I'd say get a lot from Michael Cera Palin.
What goes into the process of writing and creating a song?
Riley: I'm usually working on multiple songs at once. There really isn't a process for starting, I just play a lot all the time. And eventually, I play something I like, record it on my phone, and then it sits in my song idea folder. So eventually, I'll have a mostly done instrumental. I'll string parts together. I never sit down and say, like, “this is the intro”, and “this is specifically this part of the song”. I'll take the different clips… and I'll smash them together if they're in the same tuning– which there's a lot of annoying different tunings– but once I have an instrumental I'll start. Sometimes I'll say something random that I think I can keep in there– just to get a feel for the vocal melody. And then usually, I'll send it Shane's way after that and he'll come up with a base for it.
Going back to the event itself, was there any song that you were particularly passionate about performing? Is there any song that is particularly important to you?
Riley: I think all of them are. I like performing all of them. since I'm so bad at procrastinating some of these songs are like some of these until like years old at this point. And like I just keep adding to them as time goes on. But I usually don't change the lyrics so these are like lyrics that I've written a long time ago that I no longer am fond of, I guess. I think my favorite one is MacGyver, which was the first one we played. “MacGyver, I Hardly Know Her” has stood up the best. Lyric content wise because it's more like not about random motions or something I kind of stuck with a mostly coherent subject for that one.” ‘Portals” is really fun to play, which was the second one. “Now You’re Thinking With Portals” was a pain for me to sing because I also tend to end up writing the vocal melodies in my lower register, because obviously I can't sing as loud. Sometimes it's night or I'm in my dorm. And then when I bring it up to a higher register, I'm like, “Oh, God, I can't hit these notes”. But that's also with practice. We practiced once before this show, because I can't really find a place to scream that much around campus. I'm most proud of the first time we played
Shane: I was really excited to play “Slushies.” That's not part of the EP we're working on right now. That was a demo that was put out a year and a half ago. Yeah. And it didn't even have bass. I only wrote the bass for that song like a week ago. And I was pretty happy with how that came out. So I was excited to play that. I thought it was a really good one for a stand on.
The titles of your songs are really clever and really fun, “MacGyver I Hardly Know Her” etc… How do you come up with them?
Riley: It's a lot of emo influence. There's a lot of dumb song titles, which I'm sad to admit I've kind of outgrown. This EP has good song titles, all five songs. They all have song titles like that that don't pertain to the content. They're mostly jokes. The EP is done, and I've started writing a full length album ever so slowly. And the song titles are not not as silly, not as fun–It's just a hard balance to find between something that's clever and doesn't try too hard. It's not clingy. I have a note Notes app on my phone alongside the lyrics, one for random song names that I come up with.
What are you hoping to achieve as you develop as a band? Do you have any future plans?
Riley: I want to have a real drummer. [Music] is something I want to do for as long as I still enjoy it and I can see myself being part of other bands as well. But this is my main creative outlet right now. So I would like to keep it going for as long as it lasts.
Shane: Anything we can get any show we can play, I want to do it. And yeah, like Riley said I want a live drummer. That would be great.
Riley: I debated taking music a little more seriously as a career. I mean, like, for starters, I don't know any music theory or any of that stuff, like Berklee College of Music-wise, but I thought it would be better for me as a passion to keep it as a side project. And also, music isn't the most secure job to have, career wise. I was more confident in the film industry, which is still not as big of a passion but I love doing it. So I thought I'd keep it on the side so I don't suck all the life out.
Shane: I’m going into engineering. I feel that there are still plenty of ways I can tie that in.I was a guitarist before I played bass, and I still play guitar regularly. I want to design all my own effects, amps and all that kind of stuff. I think that'd be super cool.
You're right, there are ways to tie music into basically anything.
Riley: I also usually write the soundtracks to my short-films. With mixing and mastering, it goes both ways for sound design and music.
Are there any future projects that you want to announce or promote that you're working on?
Riley: I'm gonna say two things we're working on. “Working on” in the sense of everything is recorded. A five song EP called “Sorry, We Don't Do Delivery”. I would like to do splits with other bands at some point, which are EPs where half of the songs are written by each band. If we make any more connections, that would be nice. We're working on a full length album. I think right now it's about 13 songs. It's called So This is How it Ends, which makes it sound like it's our last album, but I hope it isn't. But that'll be done. God knows what. Whatever. Yeah, that's what we're working on right now, I guess.
Where can we find your work?
Riley: We have pretty much any streaming service. The Tucson demo and the five song acoustic EP are on Spotify. We're also on Bandcamp. If you go on Bandcamp or you know me in real life, I have cassettes that I will give you for $5 Or maybe $3. If I feel like it on the day.
Lastly, if there's anything that you want to say about yourselves, go ahead. It doesn't even have to be about the music. It can just be anything.
Shane: Can we use this interview as also an ad for “we want a drummer”? Yeah.
Riley: If you're reading this and you like emo crazy drumming, Please. anything about myself? Oh sure. I have anything else to add really? If you are at MassArt feel free to say hi to me. I usually have earbuds in but I'm very open to meeting new people. This is a very small school. If you play music. Reach out. I like to jam. It's really fun. Music is fun. Music is great.
Shane: You might see me one day too
When [the concert] ended and we were all grabbing all of our stuff, there were massive smiles all around. So I think it went really great and like we could not have done this without you guys.
Riley: Thanks for letting us have our first show.
Find Pizza Academy on:
