I Said Stop!’s Debut Album Out Today!

I Said Stop! will release their debut album, Save the Dinosaurs, tonight at The Marquee in Tulsa.

You can purchase the album at the show, on Amazon.com or at your local independent record store.

SHOW INFO:
• Where: The Marquee, 222 N. Main St., in Tulsa
• Openers: P.D.A. and Callupsie

Tracklisting and an article from Urban Tulsa Weekly after the jump.

01. Born To Be Great
02. Jesus’ Beard
03. Summer Of The Dangle
04. Song About Stopping
05. Dr. Olandria
06. Talking Dirty
07. I Am Broccoli
08. Red Red Wine
09. You Said You
10. Save The Dinosaurs

Green Light Go
I Said Stop! celebrates its album release Saturday night at the Marquee
BY JOSH KLINE

After three years of success as one of Tulsa’s favorite under-the-radar local bands, I Said Stop! is finally releasing its first full-length album.

Save the Dinosaurs (which is being digitally distributed by local promoter Jeff Richardson’s Hard Work Records) will make its debut Saturday night, via a CD release party at the Marquee that will feature the band along with openers PDA and Callupsie.

For those unaware, I Said Stop! is a five piece that plays country-tinged indie rock reminiscent of bands like Modest Mouse and Bishop Allen. The lyrics and vocals carry a tongue-in-cheek playfulness that can at times be compared to They Might Be Giants or Ween, but there’s an underlying darkness, a melancholy that always keeps the goofiness rooted in an emotional reality.

The band is fronted by 21-year-old lead singer and songwriter Ian Gollahon, and is rounded out by 20-year-old guitarist, producer and engineer Brian Keller, 19-year-old drummer Philip Martin, 19-year-old multi-instrumentalist Sam Crow and 18-year-old bass player Sam Geiger.

Gollahon and Keller started playing together in the ninth grade, when they made the coffeehouse rounds as a band that Gollahon described as “acoustic, semi-christian emo.”

“It was awful,” he said. “The coffee shops would always pay us way too much… I wish we had that problem now.”

As the musicians grew through adolescence, their sound evolved and eventually inspired the band to change its name. In 2006, they became known as I Said Stop! and started seriously pursuing local gigs.

The band was well-received by the indie scene and pretty quickly landed a one-off gig as the opener for Shiny Toy Guns. That early exposure helped them to secure future gigs in rooms like the Venue (now Pink Bar), an impressive feat for a band of young high school students.

Gollahon views the initial success as a mixed blessing. “I actually wish we hadn’t played a few of those bigger shows, just because we weren’t that tight, we weren’t that good. We were just ambitious, trying to book any show we could get, but we weren’t really good enough to be playing with Shiny Toy Guns.”

He attributed this early luck to how tiny the local indie scene was just a few years ago.

“It used to be Elliot the Letter Ostrich, Stevedore and Callupsie,” he remembered. “There weren’t that many bands in our circle back then. But it’s grown. It’s not really a circle anymore, which is a good thing.”

The band eventually put out an EP of modest home recordings, and as its popularity grew, the band gained the attention of the local press, including Urban Tulsa.
Readers awarded I Said Stop! the Absolute Best of Tulsa award for Best Indie Band, and they subsequently landed a spot at last year’s NewVo Festival. They also played Hard Work Weekend at the Continental, and followed that up with a successful performance at last summer’s DFest.

Much of the success can be directly attributed to the live show; the sets are always rowdy and good-natured, and despite the humor and quirk, the band is always more focused on synthesizing the energy of the music and the crowd rather than subjecting everyone to the tired Flaming Lips theatrics that other local acts sometimes rely on.

Top 10

Last year, the band began work on what would become Save the Dinosaurs. They recorded the entire album in Keller’s bedroom.

“In March of 2008 we started, and we finished at the very end of the year, had it mastered,” Keller explained. “That’s a long time, but it was good because it wasn’t rushed at all, we could kinda write and re-write as we went along.”

“It’s three years worth of songs,” Gollahon continued. “For every 10 songs I write, I only keep one. And then we took the 10 best songs for the album, so it was really a reflection of a lot of time in the making. If we had one year to make another album I don’t know if we could make it with the same quality.”

“My favorite thing about it is that it was all us,” Keller said. “We recorded it all, we played everything, we had it mastered by our friend, an old teacher (Walt Bowers).”

For all the pride and accomplishment that Keller and Gollahon feel, their approach to the future is surprisingly practical and level-headed. The band plans to go on hiatus in the fall while Keller and Gollahon attend school. Keller has tentative plans for sound recording school at Indiana University, and Gollahon will be studying music business on scholarship at Chicago’s prestigious Columbia College. When asked about what that means for the future of the band, they both were unsure of the answer but relaxed in the confidence of their decisions.

“For both of us, it’s a better career plan to be like ‘okay, I’m a badass sound engineer and I’m in a band that I like to record,’” Gollahon said. “It’s much better to have that as a plan B, to have something that you do because you love it, but you don’t depend on for your income.”

Long-term future aside, I Said Stop! is currently focused on the imminent CD release party (where they say there will be numerous door prizes) and the post-release job of self-promotion. Gollahon, who also manages the band, put together 100 press packets and will send them to both local and national press.

For a band so relatively young, they’re extremely hardworking and unusually pragmatic.

Gollahon and Keller hope that Save the Dinosaurs will retroactively earn them the attention they were getting from the start.

“We were getting way too much attention, more attention than we deserved,” Gollahon said. “Now, we’re just starting to get good enough to actually deserve it… The album is definitely the thing I’m most proud of, of anything I’ve ever done.”

from oklahomarock.com