Evolution of New Orleans’ Stoop Kids: Part 2

The Album Release

Katie Sikora

Published in

houseshow magazine

6 min readDec 9, 2015

Words & Photography by Katie Sikora

(Part 1: In The Beginning)

Already Out Of Time

When I first began this project, the intention was to produce a photo story that conceptualized the idea of New Orleans music culture inherently challenging the stereotype of the “college band.” The photojournalist in me knew there was a story there and at the time, that’s what I thought it was. However, looking back on that thesis, it now seems cold, distant, and takes so much of the credit and hard work away from the artists in question and gives it to the rabbit hole that is New Orleans. Yes, this city is where Stoop Kids met, formed their band, and grew up in many ways, but that merely sets the stage existentially. The motivation, the exhaustion, the addiction, the responsibility, the end result lies with the musicians. As I spent more and more time with Griffin, Tom, Pat, Joe, and Dave, my viewpoint changed from the evolution of the college band as a concept to the evolution of one individual group past the college band image. But I’m getting way ahead of myself…

It took two months for Pete to call me following the first photo shoot, but the call was a good one — the band wanted me to shoot for them again, this time at the release show for their second album, entitled Already Out Of Time, an homage to the fact that they would be in their last semester of college when it went public. What I didn’t know then was that this record release was a distinct turning point for these boys and their band.

“Do not stand there,” the bassist, Patrick, turned around and said to me as they began to play the last song. This was a band that I was still trying desperately to impress, the venue was packed, and I had been posted up in the same spot at the back of the stage for over half the show. Pair that with the fact that this was the first time he had spoken directly to me, as Pat is not a man of many words, so in trying not to get flustered, I quickly shuffled off the stage, through the green room, and out onto the stage left stairs.

But as the song came to its end, I realized that his directions had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the chair, which for the entirety of the set had been placed inconspicuously next to Pat for no apparent reason, that was now flying through the air only to crash into the wall directly where I had been standing. Moments before, the stage had been shared peacefully between five clean-cut men, but now had instantaneously devolved into a mess of thrown instruments, knocked down mic stands, raw emotion, and chords and cables tangled everywhere. In a dramatic flash, the boys were off stage and the show was over. It was in the ending of this performance that I began to understand the new album and, more importantly, what it represented.

Already Out Of Time, as well as Stoop Kids’ first album, What A World, were both written by Griffin and composed in dorm rooms in his first years of college. Although Joe has expressed that he has “…never met anyone our age who can write songs like Griffin can,” any one of them, Griffin included, will be the first to tell you that the substance and direction were just not present on that initial record, and even less so on their debut EP, Asking, Why Me? When we enter college, our experiences are mostly made up of preconceptions of what we think our experiences should be. But sometime between then and graduation, real life manages to happen to us. We experience pain, joy, heartbreak, ecstasy, death, and failure in a much more absolute way. The fundamental difference between What A World and Already Out Of Time is the difference between writing about the things that he thought he should be experiencing versus writing about the things that he has experienced, which ultimately led the band to be different people entirely. Call it growing up.

What A World

It is important to keep in mind that while my time with these boys was just starting, the world of the band had already existed, albeit in vastly different forms and fashions, for close to two years. “Finding our place of creation was an issue,” Dave told me, “but we want to be able to look back and see how far we’ve come.” Griffin added, “in a way, I feel like the band is just starting right now. The past three, four years have been a learning experience to get to the point where we have a band that can travel and go do legitimate things.” Much how I believe that Griffin and the rest of the band needed to record What A World as a mile marker to consciously see the path needed to get to Already Out Of Time, I believe I needed to propose that vague and detached photo story to register how devoid of emotion it truly was and that in turn allowed me to pass it by and dig deeper. It is also extremely important to note that I am writing this article ten months after the release show, and the insights that I now have into what was happening to Stoop Kids in those moments have been gathered piece by piece until they made sense together.

But I do credit that moment, when the boys trashed the stage for the first time, as the moment that I felt just how visceral the music was despite its sleek packaging — and even then, I was able to see beautiful and raw moments amongst the band mates. One of those moments I didn’t even know I had captured until I looked down at my camera, but is still one of my favorite images I have ever taken of Stoop Kids. It depicts Patrick, seen by many as “the cynic,” mid-show leaning into Griffin and kissing him on the cheek. It was a moment so small and delicate that amidst the chaos of the show, neither boy remembered it happening. To me, however, it spoke volumes of an underlying side of Pat I had not met yet. All I could think was if, in only my second time shooting photos for them, I had been able to glimpse another side of the blunt bassist, what was waiting further beneath the surface of he and the other four Stoop Kids?