Las Vegas Weekly

January 16, 2009 · 1:15 PM

A sort of homecoming for Meg & Dia

By Sarah Feldberg

Meg & Dia

Sisters Meg and Dia Frampton are a modern day Brady Bunch. The musical girls started playing together as an acoustic duo while living in Vegas and have since moved to Utah and taken on three more band members for a fuller sound that earned them spots on the Warped Tour in 2006 and 2007.

We chatted with Dia as she drove the band’s van to Guitar Center and found out about Meg & Dia’s upcoming album, the first song Dia ever wrote and the ups and way, way downs of life on the road.

The band kicks off their tour tonight in Vegas at the House of Blues.

What do you have planned for this tour?

We’re getting a new record out; it’s coming out sometime in March, I believe. We haven’t ever really played a lot of the new songs. The next set that we’ve been practicing is 70 to 80 percent new songs. Some of the old songs I’ve been playing for over six years, so it’s just good to get some new material from our new record.

What music did you do while you were living in Vegas?

We were in a band called Coward’s Courage for a short while. Then Meg left to Utah and she joined another more hardcore band. I stayed with the band and then it slowly fell apart, because I feel like essentially Meg and I play really well together, and when we get our own separate bands the dynamic is really lost. So we just found our way back to each other, as funny as that sounds.

Does playing Vegas feel like a homecoming for you?

For some reason, I don’t really feel like I have that big home city. I know bands are like “We’re from this place,” but it’s hard to say where we’re from because we started acoustic in Vegas, and we essentially became a band in Utah.

You played Warped Tour in 2006 and 2007. How was that first tour in 2006 when you were just starting out?

It was a big shock. We played in a dirt tent for the whole 2006 tour. … We were on a bus, but we were paying for the bus with our merch money, so by the end of the tour we had like an $8,000 debt to our merch company. It was really stressful, because it felt like we had an apartment, which was our bus, that we couldn’t afford. Meg would be sitting in her bunk calculating money from T-shirts, and she’d be like, “We need to sell this many more CDs to be able to pay rent, for our bus spots.” It was the hardest time for our band. It’s just like being married. When you’re in debt, it’s awful.

A lot of your songs have been inspired by literature. Are any of your new songs specifically based on books?

Our new record is a lot more about our lives and our personal relationships with people and how we feel about everything that’s happened to us in the last couple of years. The only song that’s based specifically on a book is called “Hug me til You Drug Me,” which is based on a book called Brave New World If I didn’t tell you I wrote about that most people wouldn’t know, because it’s just my reflections on the author Aldous Huxley’s experiences and his ideas about how you can grow up a certain way because of the parents you have or the environment you’re in.

What’s the first song you remember writing?

I wrote a song when I was 14 about my best friend and her boyfriend. It was the funniest song. It was called “Lacey’s Song” cause that was my friend. … I knew three chords on the guitar and I just wrote her this song cause I was like,” That guy’s a douche, so I’m going to write you a song.” I mean, she thought it was good, but she was just being nice, ‘cause it was awful.

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