The Zooeys have gone through a rebirth in the past year that’s found front person Zooey Rudd with a new crew and a yet-unfinished new album on the horizon.
The group was influenced by bands like The Pixies, R.E.M. and The Replacements. The Lincoln-based group released the single “Cheer Me Up, Honey” in January, with a new single coming soon. The band will headline a show on Saturday at Slowdown with Uh Oh and John Voyage. Rudd gave the story of the current band, some short-term goals he has, and his take on the area music scene.
“This is sort of a reborn version of this,” Rudd said of the band’s origins. “I started this band seven years ago. It was a group of four of us that came together pretty quickly, and we played together for three or four years. Then in 2023, we just had sort of reached the end of the road for various reasons, and our drummer wanted to move, the stuff that always happens to bands. I was pretty burnt out at that time. We had done a lot of cool things in our four years together, and I was really happy about it, but I did have grander ambitions. I thought that we were destined for greater things that ended up happening for that group. I was honestly kind of bummed after it fell apart, and it took me a while to figure out exactly what it was that I wanted. Did I still have the juice? Did I still want to make music? Did I want to go solo? I just had to kind of start from square one and just see if I still had it. And I kind of realized at that time that I didn’t care what happened in terms of the result, but that I just had to make music. I felt like I would just cease to be.”
Rudd would play solo shows and put together a new band about two years ago, finalizing it within the past year. He explains, “I met Stephan (Mailand), my drummer, a year ago in March, and he’s just the best, and I love him. And Annie (Gaston), who is like sort of just a solid rock glue guy of our band. She’s been playing keys with me for almost two years now. The magic ingredient, honestly, was adding Hunter (Arias), who plays bass for us. He runs a recording studio called Compass Recordings. He does really good work, and he’s an incredible music producer, and when he hopped on and started playing bass for us, I feel like that’s when everything sort of coalesced. We’ve also got a saxophonist and a piano player named Kyle who started playing with us last summer. And he’s also brought a lot of complexity and added another layer to our band that makes us a lot more interesting and unique.”
Rudd has goals for The Zooeys, and said he wants fans to know their songs.
“Even as soon as by the end of 2027, I want to be able to play a room in Tampa, Florida, and have 50 people show up who know the words to our songs. I feel like that sort of feels like the signal to me. We open for these bands. Sometimes, they come through town. Sometimes it’s Slowdown where we’re playing this show next week, they’re coming through from California. They’re coming through from Nashville, usually one of the two. They just have this group of fans that have shown up for them in Omaha. That’s the next level that I want to be at. When we get there, then I’m not really somebody who likes to be satisfied with where he’s at. So, it’ll be about how we can keep building from there. That’s the thing that I find myself coveting is just the fan based that’s like truly nationwide.”
The Zooeys are currently working on a new album. Rudd said the album will feature tracks influenced by older bands.
“A lot of the influences that we’re pulling heavily from are like ’80s and ’90s, old rock. I like to think all rock now sort of has this different meaning that’s kind of taken on life of its own. I think of those old bands, like Pixies R.E.M., even like the grungier bands and Oasis and things like that, they all had distinct sounds, but they were all just guitar driven music that was very emotive and you listen to all of those records and you feel like you’re in the room with them,” he explained. “And so, I think that those references broadly are something that we think about and talk about a lot.”
Rudd is a transplant to Lincoln, and said he felt welcomed by the area music scene.
“I started this band when I moved here, when I finished school. I finished school in Chicago. The thing that was amazing to me is how open the Lincoln music scene was and how approachable it was to a new band,” he said. “I know the music industry is so messed up right now, all of the inputs are kind of broken compared to where they were. Earlier generations, it feels like if you had talent, you got recognized, then you started to have some investment behind you, and you could refine your craft. But honestly, I feel like this is the best place in the world.
“You could start a band because it’s not that expensive to live here, it’s way cheaper than most places. And so, it’s not that hard to find practice spaces here, it’s not hard to book shows here. Instead, you can just get all the reps in and learn to have an identity as a band. It’s like just a miniature version of a big city in some ways, where you have so many venues and there’s like a strong downtown. If you just kind of can get a crew together, and you start putting together some songs, it’s just not that hard to get a foot in the door. And then you can start building confidence and then go from there.”
Rudd also stressed that connecting with the band is one of the key things he wants audience members to walk away with.
“What I want from our live shows is for them to be powerful,” he explained. “I think that some of the character of our shows and the emotion of them kind of can change from show to show quite a bit. Some of them, we are just kind of letting them rip. And some of them, there’s a lot of like chatter and hanging out with the crowd. That depends probably more on the crowd than us, in the collegial, like hanging out, chatty, chatty shows I hope that we can connect with each other, but connect with each other and feel some community. But regardless, what I always want for whoever hears our shows, to feel that conviction.”