MidWest Friends Fest: The One With The 2-22s

Pick up some Skyline Chili, make a few friendship bracelets and grab your buds as Midwest Friends Fest is returning to the Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area for its sophomore year. Midwest Friends Fest is once again taking over the Southgate House Revival in Newport, KY. 

The 2-day festival with multiple stages and amazing national and local acts like Signals Midwest, Cinema Stare, The 1984 Draft and Tooth Lures A Fang will take place from 30 & 31 May with tickets available here. 

Adam Flaig of 2-22s has joined TGEFM to discuss this year’s festival for this installment of our MWFF interview series. Check it out below and we’ll see you at the bonfire in the woods!

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Thank you so much for agreeing to this interview! What should our readers know about 2-22s; your history, your mission, your sound?

Our story starts at Southgate House Revival; Each member is an employee there and that’s where our relationships coalesced.  Although we were already friends, our musical relationships came together gradually when I (Adam Flaig) started hosting a weekly Open Mic at the venue.  Slowly over time I would play my songs and the other members who are all multi-talented would join in until it got to the point where we were playing shows under my name.  Eventually it was clear that a real band was in the works so we made it official with a name change and Aaron Cordell (drums), Jimmy “JIMS” Snowden (Bass, harmony vox) and Adam Davis (Harmony vox and trumpet) and I (Adam Flaig, Vox and guitar) became 2-22s.  The name comes from my birthday, February 22nd. (Pronounced “Two Twenty Twos”).
Our mission is simple; Become the best band we can while working to support The Southgate House and travel to cities within a few hours of us to network and build a strong community that could lead back to our beloved local venue.  Our sound is ‘Rock, Reverie & Roll’.  We are just tall children trying to keep our rock n rolling dreams alive.

You are gearing up for Midwest Friends Fest in the coming months, what does the festival circuit mean to artists like yourselves? 

It can be a great way to meet new people and see new bands you may not have the chance to see.  For a relatively unknown band, all we want is to reach people and make a positive impact.  Festivals like MWFF help put people in the room that we can share our performance with and that can hopefully lead to making new connections.

What does 2-22s have planned for us beyond MWFF?

By the time we take the stage Saturday May 31 we should have our debut full length album recorded.  So we will be excited to share some of the tracks with everyone.  

What have been some of the most memorable moments or experiences with the band so far? What’s been the most unexpected? The weirdest?

We are a relatively new band although we’ve been playing music together for a while now.  A lot of the memorable experiences have taken place at Southgate House.  One of our favorite shows was last fall at the Mammoth Music Festival which took place inside and on the street outside the Southgate House Revival.  It was their first year hosting an all day music festival that closed off one block outside the venue with multiple stages, street vendors, artist tents, local business and restaurants as well as the three stages inside the venue.  It was so much fun and the turn out really blew us away.  We were overwhelmed by the local support of the neighborhood.

Regarding live sets, what are you most excited to bring to the Midwest Friends Fest audience? What do you want the attendees to say about your set when they tell their friends about you?

We are excited to share our songs in a way you can only experience from a live setting.  We believe in our songs and in each other and we have so much fun when performing together.  I hope people can see how much fun we are having and feel the level of reverence we have for performing live for an audience.  We hope people laugh, cry and sweat with us.

We’ve all got a few, what is your biggest regret? A gig you turned down, advice you didn’t take, what one thing do you wish you handled differently as a musician?

As a band, we don’t have too many regrets (yet).  I think personally the biggest regret comes from self-doubt or stopping because you arn’t seeing desired results.  Of course sometimes periods of rest/inactivity are important especially when dealing with burn-out.  One thing we have been lucky with is persistence.  We try not to overload ourselves so we can have a long journey and more opportunities to grow.  

The punk, ska and indie scenes have almost always been at the forefront of inclusion and diversity within the music scenes.   The flipside of course is that the gatekeeping in the scene is also very prevalent?  Why do you think the genre brings in such a welcoming community and is so happy to let everyone in and also seems to shut the doors so quickly behind themselves?

A main reason for inclusivity and diversity is those genres are based in some sort of revolt against the status quo.  So the people making the music are already outsiders and they are making music for other outsiders who can relate and by doing so it creates a community of people looking out for each other.  Especially now in a world that is taking humanity out of the arts, these subcultures realize the importance of human creativity and human interactions.  

This festival is all about friendships and music. What do you value most in friendships amongst yourself and your stagemates?

We are lucky that we are all truly best friends and really do love each other.  The friendship was there first and because we all love music and spend enough time together, forming a band was just a natural occurrence.  Although everyone in the band has overlapping skill sets, individually we all have our own skill sets and we know how to maximize our efforts.  We all value everyone’s creative input and dedication to making the best song, performance, band, etc. 

The 2-22s are from Cincinnati. I thought the city was only known for amazing chili, a dog-obsessed racist baseball owner and the greatest rollerblading movie of the 90s featuring Jack Black and Seth Green (Airborne), but MWFF is proving the city is home to some amazing artists. What’s going on in Cincinnati that led to so much of an overabundance of great music In the scene lately? How does the area feed into the music you are writing, if at all?

Cincinnati, OH and Newport KY are port cities on the great Ohio River.  That’s where a lot of civilizations start because of access to goods and services.  I thank the river for most of the progress because it’s an important part of our history.  Cincinnati has a lot of music history with King Records (James Brown) and Herzog Studios (Hank Williams Senior) just to name a few.  We are nestled in a musical melting pot of rock n roll, country, blue grass and Americana.  Cincinnati has the resources and funding to host major concert and festival events and that bleeds over into Northern Kentucky.  To me, this is the best place to be for independent artists since we have so many other main hubs within a 5 hour radius.  But don’t think about moving here, it rains too much and winters are brutal.

The world has been going through some shit over the last few days, weeks, hell, decade. What impact, if any, have the cultural and political landscapes of the last few years had on your music or the live scene in general?

It’s easy to think ourselves apathetic but the truth is everything we do is impacted by whatever the political landscape is.  Being an empathetic creative is a powerful tool to make small changes around you necessary for a peaceful and progressive coexistence.  Chaos is part of life but not letting it get to you is the key.  A band is a living, breathing organism and how we perform and carry ourselves is our power.  We hope to inspire people to follow their dreams, help their fellow humans and consider their actions in a sustainable and loving way.  It’s easy to denounce groups of people or people that think differently than us but the reality is we are all on the same team and we need to start treating each other as such.  
As the cost of living goes up and job/housing opportunities decrease, we will hopefully embrace the idea of community so that we can have the freedom to express ourselves through art and performance and people can have the freedom to enjoy it.

What album or band or significant singles made you go “Yeah, this is what I want to do”  Not just an influence but who or what was the catalyst?  On the flipside to that one… Who are some non-MWFF bands on your radar that TGEFM readers may not know about, but you think they should?

MTV made huge impressions for sure.  We all grew up in the late 80’s/early 90’s and were exposed to so much really cool art and music.  From a very young age we all made up our minds that when we grow up we want to play in a band and travel the world.

Electric Indigo is a local band in the psychedelic rock genre that just blow people away.  Each member is an aficionado and so much fun, super great people as well. 

I don’t know if you’ve heard about this newcomer by the name of Taylor Swift. Her growing fanbase trades friendship bracelets. If you made a bracelet for MWFF, what word or phrase word you put on it?

It would say: Be Kind Bud (with a little pot leaf at the beginning and end)

Post show jam session in a large, empty field. What song are you singing around the bonfire? (Pardon my playful biases, but everything I know about the Midwest comes from shitty movies and songs by the Kinsella Bros. so I assume everyone playing here has spent some time at bonfire parties in the fields off some lonely county road)?

Oh we would just make something up on the spot for sure, don’t bogart that J…

Midwest Friends Fest is a smorgasbord of fantastic acts. Which bands are you most excited to see?

LayLow always kills it, Signals Midwest, Bandages, Honeycrush, Mall Witch, just to name a few!

Was there anything I missed that you’d like to share or dive deeper into with our readers?

Thank You for reaching out!  Have a great day!