Talking Headways Podcast: Transit Themed Rock Music

This week we’re joined by Cameron Mays, lead singer of the public-transit-themed band, The Frans.  We chat about transit in Cleveland, the songwriting process, and the parking lot in Erie, Pennsylvania that inspired him.

This is a very special episode, so if you want to read the full transcript, click here. But below the player is an excerpt of our conversation. And don’t forget to check out the band on its Instagram page, or the Bandcamp link above.

Excerpt below:

Jeff Wood: So how did you all get started as a band? I mean, like, how did you gather all your bandmates and get together? And are they on board with this as well, or they just want to play music?

Cameron Mays: Oh, they’re super on board with it. Our first drummer was just somebody I knew from high school. Half the songs are written by me, the other half are written by my friend, Gabriel, our lead guitar player.

I told Gabe just about the concept of the band: wanting to do kind of a public transit rock thing. And Gabe, same boat as me, hates driving, doesn’t have a car, uses the bus exclusively. He was immediately on board. And so we kind of just got to work getting that.

Gabe’s a way better musician than I am, studied flamenco guitar and just has kind of a wealth of knowledge. And it worked out really well just because the things I was more interested in, which was a lot of the kind of political concepts of the 1970s punk. But the music I really like listening to was like ’60s pop music.

And Gabe also really loved like the early classic rock stuff, but had a much broader knowledge on ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, all sorts of music. And we just linked together really well. And the cool thing about the ’60s pop movement and the ’70s punk movement is they all kind of had like the roots all the same Bo Diddley records, Chuck Berry records and stuff like that.

So we, always had this common language and we went from that. Then, our bass player, Hope, saw us once and just bought a bass and started learning the explicit purpose of being in the band. Same reason, I mean, same feeling as Gabe and myself: they don’t drive.

Hope doesn’t have a car and takes the bus or the red line in Cleveland. And that was how it just worked out for us.