The Indie-Soul-Rock Sextet Six Foot Blonde are building a small but growing circle of fans. And they’re not even done with school yet!
These days, the concept of a band sticking to a single genre or label is gone. Six Foot Blonde are no exception. They draw influence from jazz, blues, soul, rock, alternative, and pop, mixing it all together in a sonic blend that is uniquely their own. You can hear touches of Veruca Salt and The Breeders, Lake Street Dive and Sharon Jones, Tedeschi Trucks, Joni Mitchell and Norah Jones, and any number of New Orleans second line bands, but each song is genuine and in no way contrived or pastiche.
Fronted by Julia Rusyniak, the eponymous six foot blonde brings powerful vocals and is supported by Zach Patrick and Elliott Obermaier on guitars, brother John Alex Rusyniak on keyboards, Dom Heyob on bass, and Brian Healey on drums. We had a chance to sit down with Julia, Zach, John, and Brian for an afternoon to talk about the origins of the band, the music scene in their native Bloomington Indiana, their songwriting journey, and their experience on their first ever tour across the East Coast and the Midwest.
I’d like to start by having you introduce yourself, how you got into music and who your biggest influences were growing up.
Julia: I was the toddler like running up and down the street singing to all my favorites… I did musical theatre for a long time. And then I realized maybe I didn’t love the style of singing of musical theatre. And I sort of just discovered some really unique voices like Janis Joplin and Franklin, like soul, some Blues and some rock. And I [thought], “I don’t have to sing like a, you know, a girl on a stage performing on Broadway”… I love Joni Mitchell, Stevie Nicks, all of the female powerhouses, really. I think from there, I think that hit me about the end of high school. I realized there’s more to music than just performing it, but also writing it and adding soul and passion to it.
Zach: I’ve been playing guitar since I was a kid. When I was a little kid, my dad had a guitar in the house. He wasn’t the most musical. He could play a couple things, but I wanted to be like him. So, when I was seven, I got a guitar for Christmas and I hadn’t put it down since. Playing everything from The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, all the old Blues records, that kind of thing. And that kind of evolved into indie rock. Played in bands in high school.
John: I grew up in the same house as Julia. I think for a long time, I kind of saw music as Julia’s thing. Funny enough, she had all of the attention as far as music goes. And then high school hit. I was an athlete. That was kind of my identity. And I got in a series of bad injuries and then I went from doing sports all day to having nothing to do. So I picked up piano and guitar, and some other instruments and pretty much spent six to eight hours a day, just absolute madness, just playing all day…. I joined choir and then ultimately this band. And here we are today.
Brian: I got my my start in music pretty young, around eight years old. My dad gave me the option of karate lessons or drum lessons and I picked drum lessons and it took off from there. I played in jazz band and regular band in middle school. Around high school, I did pretty much anything that they let me do, whether it was show, choir band or the marching band, jazz band. And then college came around. I was able to play with more people and write our own music and here we are. But during that growing up period it was it was my dad again, that was my inspiration. He writes his own music and always has. And so it’s always around the house. And it just kind of rubbed off on me.
How did you all come together as a band?
Zach: We met through a musician’s network club down at IU [Indiana University] and originally we were a nine-piece band. So we had Julia, another vocalist and two horn players. And then we had myself, another guitar player, drums, bass and keys. And it was a really fun experience. We played mainly covers at a local bar just trying to be the college party band. And then about two years ago, we decided to start writing original music, and a few of the other members left. And then it’s been the same core six people since about September 2022. This is where we’ve been writing our own original album and started touring the country. So it’s been a really cool experience.
John: During COVID, the only gigs that kind of existed were through IU, the actual school itself. And the club we were in was the only kind of musicians networking club around town that would actually book gigs… I think when COVID ended, it was like “yeah, of course we’re going to keep playing together.”
Julia: A lot of groups started as cover bands and then they end up branching out into their own styles. And a lot of bands come out through the Bluebird playing indie, funk, soul, a lot of the stuff that people can sing along to. But I do think, besides that, there are so many other really cool venues that support punk music, metal music, acoustic singer-songwriter music. And so there is a really awesome mix here… I feel like we’ve got good diversity in the music scene.
Six Foot Blonde just finished their first headlining tour around the country. What was that like compared to playing local shows? What was it like meeting fans outside of your hometown?
Julia: For me, I’ll answer the fan thing first. It was really cool because I feel like I’ve developed sort of a relationship with a lot of the fans here in Bloomington where I can recognize them and I see them at a show and I’m like, “that’s somebody that loves our music and that’s really cool.” But touring it became a whole new thing of I’ve never seen this person before and that’s really awesome. I had people make me bracelets and like do things that I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is the coolest thing ever. You care”…
It started with friends and family coming to our shows in Bloomington, then more people who are friends with the friends. Then all of a sudden we had music out, and people just in Bloomington wanted to come to our shows. But then they graduated and moved to other places and four or five years later, are saying that we’re playing in Dayton and, you know, they live in Dayton and they can come and they share our music to their friends at Dayton. And all of a sudden we have people there.
John: We played a show in Asbury Park [New Jersey] and it was right on the beach. You could see the beach from the stage, which is awesome. And I think it was one of those shows that when we started it, there were probably like fifteen people there, twenty people there. And I think we were like, “all right, whatever, you know, nice crowd, cool.” But I think by the end of the show, we had probably over a hundred, just because people would walk by on the boardwalk… So it’s cool to see that, like, happen in real time because you don’t often get to see a fan be converted… on the spot.
Zach: One thing that’s stuck out to me most from our tour was our experience playing Summerfest. We were able to play on our first major festival… I grew up in Chicago burbs. Going there [Milwaukee Summerfest], you know, as a kid and as a teenager getting to see all these great artists, and then I get to play there. That was a really cool moment for me. And like, “oh wow, we’re really doing something.”
Brian: For me, my favorite show was the St. Louis show, because I think it was one of the few shows that wasn’t populated by family and friends as much, which we love our family and friends. But there were two hundred people there that we didn’t know that came to listen to our music. And that felt really special to me.
How do you approach songwriting? Is there a principle songwriter for each track or do you jam it out as a group?
Julia: Each song is very different, but I would say a lot of our songs come from one person bringing an idea… And we then we come up with the structure… If I’m thinking that… it’s a heavy guitar song, then maybe I’ll approach Zach first. Or if it’s a song that think is going to be really synth heavy and rely on keys and I’ll maybe approach John first, and then we build it up a little bit and then we bring it to everybody and then it becomes a whole new song.
Congrats on the release of your first album. Was there a unifying concept with the record or is it comprised of individual songs?
Julia: We had basically a bunch of songs written and one day it just hit us. We were like, we need to have a project out and we approached it as an EP. We had six songs, I want to say six or seven songs we were really happy with and that was it. And so we scheduled some studio time to make an EP and then in the span of time before we had the studio time we’d written, we felt so inspired and had written so many more songs. All of a sudden we were like, wait, we have enough songs for an album….
And I had written a lot of the lyrics all around the same time in my life and going through the same transformative changes. And so, it created a story and it had significance and there was imagery that carries throughout the album.
John: Yeah, we came into the actual studio which we started with, I think it was was maybe nine or ten songs and we ended up adding one or two songs. In the studio we really felt, well now that we have the rest of them, we know exactly what else we need. Like we needed a softer acoustic song to be kind of in this position and like that’s like kind of how we end up writing “After Image”. So I think that was kind of cool too.
What’s next for Six Foot Blonde?
Julia: I keep saying we should open for Coldplay. Yeah, I was like, let’s make it a goal to open for the biggest band in the world. No, I I think for right now the next step is just writing more music and we really love having an album out, but we also now know that we can make an album and we can know we can make a better album… writing music is at least my number one priority… I have a lot to share.
Brian: Yeah, to keep writing. And I mean, the album’s only been out for about a month, so keep playing that and keep hoping to spread the word on all that. Play more shows and shows and shows and shows non-stop.
Do you all still have day jobs?
Juila: I’m still a student actually. So, I’m in my last semester of school. So that’s been a balance. And then everybody else has a day job. Zach’s also in school, he’s in grad school.
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