arts & entertainment

to High Holiday services. I think it's pretty
important.

Daniel Zott and JoSh Epstein

of Dale Earnhardt Jr..Jr.

T: What do your parents think of
your career as a musician? What do
they do?
JE: My dad has a manufacturing com-
pany, and my mother was an art teacher.
I think they are very excited about this;
they've always been supportive. They
never told me I should do anything else,
which is kind of amazing considering I
probably should have at certain points.
I worked for my dad a little bit here and
there when I needed to. Larry and Mary
Epstein — they're pretty much the great-
est people on the face of the earth.

Meet Josh Epstein of
Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.,
a local music group
attracting national
attention.

Natalie Sugarman

Special to the Jewish News

D

ale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. — a local
indie-pop-rock outfit compris-
ing lead singer and guitarist Josh
Epstein, 30, and Daniel Zott, 27, who plays
guitar and bass and sings backing vocals
— has raced onto the music scene over
the past year at an accelerated pace. Their
music — influences include Brian Wilson
and Simon and Garfunkel — is fun and
lighthearted, with an explosive indie-rock-
pop-synth sound.
Coming together in 2009, Epstein and
Zott have been receiving a great amount of
buzz, especially in the Metro Detroit area,
but also attracting attention from national
media outlets like NPR and the New York
Times.
In June, the duo released their first
full length album, Something Corporate,
on the Quite Scientific/Warner Bros. label,
celebrating its release in late June at St.
Andrews in Detroit.
At the release party, they came onstage
dressed in NASCAR jackets — but the
band's name, suggested by a friend, has
nothing to do with racing, the American
race car driver of almost the same name
or the sound of their music; rather, it con-
veys Epstein and Zott's philosophy of mix-
ing together different ideas.
At St. Andrews, they quickly discarded
the NASCAR gear to reveal regular suits
and proceeded to play to a packed house,
sharing the stage with local indie rockers
Prussia and rapper Danny Brown.
"I have caught them live twice," says
Kirk Rukenbrod, who runs the Motorcity
Blog and the Motorcity Special record
label. "Both sets were amazing. I remem-
ber thinking they should just keep playing.
"Recently my mother came by my
house to watch my two children, a Dale
Earnhardt Jr. Jr. CD in hand, and asked me

-

if I had ever heard of them. That's when
you know that a band is getting the buzz
around town."
Next up for Epstein and Zott?
Lollapalooza in Chicago this weekend and
Austin City Limits in Texas in September.
But first, frontman Josh Epstein took
time out of his busy schedule to talk to the
Jewish News about the band, how he met
Zott, growing up in Bloomfield Township,
his Judaism and more.

IN: Who or what influenced you to
become a musician?
JE: I was in college studying and didn't
quite know what I wanted to do. I ended
up getting meningitis at Michigan State
and couldn't go back to school for the rest
of the semester because I had missed a
month. It was then that I actually decided
I should go back [to an earlier interest]
and pursue music. I had all this time on
my hands and was writing a lot. I decided
to really just start playing, and that got me
back into it.

JN: How old were you when you first
started playing music?
JE: My parents told me I used to sing in
the crib, around 9 months old.

JN: Do you know what you were sing-
ing at 9 months old?
JE: I think I was humming "Mary Had a
Little Lamb" or something.

IN: How did you meet your band
mate Daniel Zott?
JE: Daniel had been in bands around
Detroit for a really long time, and we have
some mutual musician friends who were
working on some stuff for my [previous]
band Silent Giants and also some stuff for
his solo record. They gave me a copy of his
record, and I couldn't believe how great it
sounded, considering he had done it all

IN: Do you know any other local
Jewish musicians?
JE: My cousin, Rob Cantor, is in
the band Tally Hall. I also know Josh
Malerman of the High Strung.

himself.
I thought it would be an interesting
project to try and work with him. We
wrote "Simple Girl" the first night (it even-
tually landed on the duo's 2010 four-song
Horse Power EP, three of whose tunes were
incorporated into It's a Corporate World),
and then we just kind of kept on going.

IN: When you were at Michigan State,
what were you studying?
JE: I started off studying sociology, but
it got so redundant because it seems to
me that all the sociology classes were the
same. For example, the "Sociology of Race
and Ethnic Relations" covers a lot of the
same ground as "Sociology of Economics."
You end up studying the same thing over
and over again, and it was kind of boring
to me. Then I switched to business. I have
a business degree, although I wasn't really
cut out for it.

IN: Where in Michigan did you grow
up?
JE: I grew up in Bloomfield Township,
and my parents are still there. My sister,
Lainie Epstein, is finishing up her doc-
torate in psychology. I graduated from
Cranbrook. I went to Temple Beth El in
Bloomfield Township as a kid, where I had
my bar mitzvah.

IN: Have you ever performed at a bar
or bat mitzvah?
JE: Nope, can't say that I have.

IN: Have you had other jobs?

JE: I worked at a flower shop. I've done
cover gigs and written commercials.

IN: What kind of commercials?

JE: Car commercials for local dealer-
ships. I've also written for Target and
things like that recently.

JN: If you weren't a musician, what do
you think you would be doing career-
wise?
JE: I would be in politics; I would have
started another party already.

IN: How did you get picked up so
quickly by a record label?
JE: I think we work with really good
people at Big Hassle, our publicity compa-
ny in New York, and the guys at the Quite
Scientific record label [in Ann Arbor],
which helped us get signed for a distribu-
tion deal with Warner Bros. Records.
Justin Spindler from Quite Scientific
ended up managing us. I think we feel
like we know what we're doing in terms of
making music, but we really don't know
how to get it out to people in the best way.
I think a big part of working in a creative
endeavor is finding people whom you
trust and letting them do what they do.
I think our record people did a really
good job in the beginning of getting the
album out in a way that people paid atten-
tion to it and took notice of it, and I think
Warner Bros. took notice just like anyone
else. It kind of went from there.

IN: How important is Judaism to you?

JE: I think it's really important cultur-
ally. To some extent, I think Judaism is
more of a cultural than a religious thing to
a lot of people, and I think it's a beautiful
tradition. It's been very integral to many
points in my life. I haven't really spent
much time at the synagogue as of late, but
I attend Passover seders every year and go

Josh Epstein and Daniel Zott of Dale
Earnhardt Jr. Jr., with percussion-
ist David Vaughn, perform at the
Lollapalooza Festival in Chicago's
Grant Park 3:15 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 7.
For more on Lollapalooza, running
Aug. 5-7, go to lollapalooza.com .

August 4 • 2011

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