Local indie-pop duo is ‘Easy to Love’

Growing up in Snohomish County, Tim Wilson and Ryan Carbary began playing music with friends way back in elementary school.

Little did either one know that they would achieve national recognition — including Rolling Stone magazine and National Public Radio — as a professional indie-pop band.

After meeting up at a mutual friend’s party in 2007, the two formed Ivan &Alyosha, or I&A. While recounting how they started playing music together, they say they had very different ambitions going into the project.

“I was pretty hell-bent on making music for my career,” says Wilson, who provides lead vocals for the band. “I’ve always seen it as much as a business as something I was born to do.”

Carbary, who plays piano and guitar, states: “I knew I wanted to be doing music things, but I was more just interested in recording at the time. I wasn’t as into playing, but I think I was less confident that we could do this and make a living off of it.”

Regardless of aspirations, their 2009 release, “The Verse, the Chorus,” has earned them recognition from Rolling Stone and generated plenty of buzz within the music blogosphere. They made local headlines in December with their month-long residency at the High-Dive in Fremont. This past March, I&A, who adopt their moniker from brothers in a Dostoyevsky novel, were invited to play South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, one of the largest music festivals in the United States.

National Public Radio chose their single “Easy to Love” as one of the top 100 South by Southwest songs, and it was featured as NPR’s Song of the Day on April 20. That’s no small feat considering that nearly 2,000 bands performed in Austin.

Carbary and Wilson recorded their first album in 2008, the summer after they initially formed the band. They were signed to Cheap Lullaby Records that same year. Since then, they’ve taken on a few more members, including Tim Kim on guitar, Pete Wilson (Tim’s brother) on bass and James McAlister on drums.

The band contends that they were all really good friends first, then the business of music brought them together. The roots of their friendship run deep — three of the band members graduated from King’s High School in Shoreline. The band subsequently radiates a familiarity that’s as easygoing as their music.

“The best part of being in a band with your best friends,” Carbary says, “is that you’re in a band with your best friends. You get to do business and play music with people you really like.”

Playing music with friends is something Wilson has been doing since he was in grade school.

“I was in a band with my friends from church,” says Wilson, who still attends the church he grew up in, Alderwood Community Church near the Lynnwood Convention Center. “We were called ‘Solid Foundation.’ We played chords. No one sang.”

Recalling his own start in music, Carbary adds: “I remember being on the bus in fifth grade, saying, ‘Let’s start a band!’ And I was like, ‘I have snare drum,’ and my friend had a guitar. That was definitely my first experience in a band outside of school.”

The duo cite an eclectic group of musical influences from their early days, including Green Day, Metallica and Alanis Morisette. Wilson vividly recalls the time his dad played Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” on Christmas Eve, his first taste of pop music.

Much of their latest record, however, reflects a heavy British retro-pop influence, adopting hints of English rock legends T. Rex and guitar riffs reminiscent of The Beatles.

“The two have created a record that balances simple song structures and lyrics with complex layering and technical prowess,” wrote Clare Jensen in Tacoma Weekly’s arts &entertainment section in early April. “The end result is a record that instantly lures the listener in with the classic pop tendencies and American rock roots that most of Western civilization already knows and loves.”

But don’t classify them as strictly retro-pop. In a 2008 article, a Rolling Stone writer insisted on checking out I&A if “you’d be curious to hear what happened if the Shins slowed it down a bit.”

The band plans on recording a new record in May, a little over a month after the birth of Wilson’s first child, Henry, giving him a little more motivation for business to pick up. In the meantime, Wilson, whose wife is a school teacher, works part-time to augment his band income.

Carbary also teaches private music lessons, while his spouse works as a physical trainer.

The future of their musical endeavors looks promising for the boys from Snohomish County and, needless to say, the duo’s ambitions are harmonizing beautifully.

“I’ve always felt like (making music) is what I was supposed to do,” Wilson says. “Now, it’s just an everyday reality that things are going that way. Less things bother me now, like when people ask me, ‘When are you going to get a job?’

“I want to make money to support my family, but I know I’m not supposed to do anything else.”

Rene Ramos is a student in the University of Washington Department of Communication News Laboratory.