Ghost of a Chance

Brooklyn’s Haunted Hauses gets possessed by the spirit of the supergroup

Brooklyn-based Haunted Hauses is a “supergroup”—which is what music journalists call bands consisting of musicians who are in other bands. The band—made up of Autry Fulbright (Midnight Masses, …Trail of Dead, Dragons of Zynth), Leif Huckman (Boggs, Ex-Cops), Eric Rodger (VHS or Beta, Midnight Masses) and Peter Hale (Here We Go Magic, Boggs, Midnight Masses)—played its first show in July 2011 which I believe makes it a pimply teenager in band years. Considering how many balls these guys are juggling it’s just short of a miracle they just finished recording “five or six” songs which will become their first EP.

I did some rough calculations and it appears you all are in an average of 2.5 bands each. Go ahead and introduce yourselves.

Eric Rodger: My name is Eric and I’m in . . . several bands. I can’t even count.

Autry Fulbright: I can! He’s in three.

Leif Huckman: My name is Leif and I’m currently in Ex-Cops and Haunted Hauses.

Autry: I’m in …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead and Haunted Hauses and Midnight Masses with Eric [who is also in VHS or Beta].

Do you still get nervous before you go on stage?

Huckman: Yeah. Always.

Fulbright: I vomit. Every time. No joke.

I’ve DJ’d in front of some pretty big crowds before and I’ve gotten a little queasy if I think about it too much. But actually going on stage and introducing bands—something we radio guys used to do all the time—is the thing that gives me the worst dry mouth.

Fulbright: It’s better to just jump on stage before you get in too much in your head.

Huckman: If I don’t get nervous—that would make me more nervous.

So is Haunted Hauses the main band for any of you guys?

Rodger: No, it’s a side project . . .

Fulbright: . . . but it’s the most fun project we do.

Huckman: For all of us we have more ownership—more creative control—over this project than we do our other bands.

Fulbright: Our other projects are definitely further along. They’re a little more established. So you have to make a lot of creative compromises. We can kind of do whatever we want.

It’s hard to work with creative types. We have lots of opinions and large (yet also incredibly fragile) egos.

Fulbright: If you look at the paradigm of bands these days it’s much more commonplace to have really successful side projects and really successful main projects.

It may seem that way from where you’re sitting—because you guys are a talented and pretty successful bunch—but successful bands aren’t really all that commonplace. You’ve all done pretty well for yourselves so why take on another project?

Huckman: We’ve got all these musicians, we’re all in the same world together, we know each other, we play music together . . .

 . . . so why not make some tunes?

Huckman: Exactly. Why not make some songs? And if it turns into a project where you can actually tour—fantastic. If we’re just recording music and sharing it with our friends and the people who like it and want to listen to it—that’s also awesome.

Moon With a View

Since all bands will suffer from stage fright or anxiety every once in a while, so CULTURE asked Haunted Hauses’ members if they ever turned to cannabis before a show. “For some of us, yes,” says Leif Huckman. “For songwriting it helps me, but I couldn’t smoke before a show because I get too tweaked out.” But apparently it comes in handy for Huckman’s listening pleasure. “There’re a couple albums [Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and the Beatles’ Abbey Road, for example] that I have to listen to at least once a year—like from start to finish—and those are the times usually when I would want to partake.”

Haunted Hauses photos by Kaitlin Parry