Interviews with Indies: After Winning the Name Game ViV Flies High

by Arien Rozelle
Feeling Anxious, January 28th, 2005

Finding a suitable band name can be a daunting task. Should you go short and sweet or bling to the max? For the four members of ViV, an alternative rock band from San Francisco, the task of picking a fitting name proved to be problematic.

After throwing around many ideas, Matt Ostrander (singer/songwriter), along with Erik Semo (bass), Andrew Griffin (drums), Justus Dobrin (keys) and Mike Fiorentino (violin, guitar) decided to enlist their friends for a little creative inspiration.

The task sounded simple: ask your friends to chuck a bunch of words into a hat, pull out two at a time, and combine them to form a killer name. But, it didn’t turn out so hot. “The names were so bad, they were so over the top pretentious,” said Ostrander. “And I think I’m the farthest thing from pretentious.”

After deciding that they didn’t want to go the ostentatious route, the group settled on a more concise moniker. “Somehow ‘ViV’ fell on us and we were like “let’s do that. It’s easy.” But, Ostrander says, “I don’t remember where the name came from. I think we were just kinda throwing things around.”
Formed in 2001, ViV released their debut, ViV White Album, that same year and has since sold 8,000 copies. Flawed, released in 2004 on their own 10 Toes Over label, has sold 3,000 copies thus far. The album includes tracks produced by David Cole (Melissa Etheridge, Cake), Adam Rossi (LUCE), Thom Canova, and by the band themselves. There are also guest appearances by friends Dave Immergluck (Counting Crows) and Bruce Kaphan (American Music Club).

Currently on tour in support of Flawed, the group has played over 300 live shows so far—and you may even be able to catch them up in the clouds. Their song “Green” is currently in the rotation for the Frontier Airlines in-flight television service. Ostrander said he hasn’t caught it yet, but recently one of his friends was on a flight and called him “and freaked out because he saw me on TV on the flight.”

And it’s not just in-flight TV that ViV is popping up on. In September 2004, they licensed two songs to Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and recently licensed their entire catalogue to MTV's Real World, Road Rules and Extreme Road Rules.

But with all this music licensing, does Ostrander feel like he’s selling out? “For a while there I think I looked down upon it. Being an indie musician for so long, I guess one day I woke up and was like, ‘why the hell am I looking down on this?’ I need money, I need to get my songs out there and it doesn’t devalue the product at all.” Ostrander added, “If you listen to a lot of TV shows, you’ll realize that some of the hippest music is on TV. I mean some really staunchly underground bands are on these shows.”

But, Ostrander says, don’t equate licensing music with raking in the cash. “We’re not rolling in money by any means,” he said, noting that it takes some time to get paid after getting your music on TV shows. “They give you money up front and then they give you money on the back end that gets collected by your royalty company, which is BMI for us. So we’re not going to see a lot of this money for, like, another year,” he said. “But the money up front definitely helps out a lot.”

Using some of that up front money, the band has begun recording their next album. But don’t expect to hear it anytime soon. “We have to do it piecemeal. We get a little money and then go in the studio. Get a little more money, we go back in,” said Ostrander. “It takes a while because we don’t have any backing, we’re doing it all on our own.”

With their own label and doing most of their business in-house, it seems that ViV prefers to do things on their own. Says Ostrander, “we’re just independent musicians who are staunchly and purely independent-- and really hardcore about art and music.”

ViV is currently on tour on the west coast and will be hitting the east coast this spring. And if you happen to be a band in search of a name (good or otherwise), keep your eyes peeled while they’re in your area. “There’s a hat sitting around somewhere with a lot of names in it and they’re all ridiculously bad,” Ostrander joked.

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