UPDATE: David Olivas came out with a new music video for his song “Phone, Keys, Wallet, Weed.” Check it out:

Adam Sandler’s new Netflix comedy special is titled “100% Fresh.” But detractors are saying the special — or at least one particular part of it — is actually quite rotten.

David Olivas, 33, of Bremerton, has been rapping since he was 13. He’s not blowing up the music charts, but over the years he’s carved a place for himself in the local rap and hip-hop scene.

Olivas is finding himself in the national spotlight recently, however, thanks to Sandler’s new special, which included the performance of a comedic song called “Phone, Wallet, Keys.” The only problem? The song bore a striking similarity to Olivas’s song “Phone, Keys, Wallet, Weed,” originally released in 2015 — a full three years before Sandler’s special hit Netflix.

Here’s Sandler’s performance:

And here’s Olivas’s song:

This has led Olivas’s fans to ask: Did Adam Sandler rip off David Olivas? Some of Olivas’s most devoted fans have bombarded Netflix’s social media accounts to point out the uncanny similarity between the two songs. They’ve even contacted journalists across the country in an effort to ensure Olivas gets credit where they believe it’s due.

A couple days before the controversy broke, Olivas’s wife started watching the Netflix special, but turned it off before Sandler’s rendition of the song came on. A couple days later, Olivas was working his day job at Bremerton cannabis retailer The Reef when his wife texted him, telling him that Adam Sandler had, as she put it, “jacked his song.”

Olivas laughed it off at first, thinking she was joking. He kept getting tagged in Facebook posts, but couldn’t check them out while working. Finally, he took a break so he could see what all the fuss was about — by this point, he’d received 20-30 notifications from people tagging him in the comment thread of Sandler’s “Phone, Wallet, Keys” video.

More Than a Coincidence?

At first, Olivas thought it was a coincidence.

“My jaw dropped when I first saw it. I was a little speechless at first.”

“As people have been quick to point out, there’s half a dozen songs floating around that have titles like that,” he says. “But then when you click on the song, it’s more than just the title or sharing a couple words of a chorus. My jaw kind of dropped, honestly, when I first saw it. I was a little speechless at first.”

Although “Phone, Wallet, Keys” was performed by Sandler, frequent Sandler collaborator Dan Bulla was credited as the writer. He also performed the song with Sandler in the special. When the Kitsap Sun reached out to Sandler’s press office for comment, they directed the paper to Bulla; he has yet to respond to the Sun’s request for comment on Twitter.

Olivas doesn’t have a particular bone to pick with Sandler or his team and says most of the fuss was raised on his behalf by a dedicated group of fans who felt Olivas should get some kind of recognition for coming up with the song first.

“People that are fans of my music really ran with it. A couple of them, Netflix blocked their posts and banned them after a minute,” he says. “They started emailing journalists and stuff who are covering it.”

Robert Bacon was one of the first to report on the controversy on his podcast. Bacon mashed up segments of the two songs side by side so people could gauge the similarity of the two songs for themselves. Listen for yourself:

Listen to “Bonus – Did Adam Sandler Steal This Song?” on Spreaker.

In addition to Bacon’s podcast and the Kitsap Sun, the story has been picked up by XXL Magazine and HotNewHipHop, and Olivas has been contacted by a reporter from the Washington Post. The media attention has helped Olivas confirm that he’s not crazy: Other people recognize the similarity between the two songs.

Conception

“Phone, Keys, Wallet, Weed” appears on Olivas’s December 2015 album, “We Thrive.” It was recorded earlier that year, but Olivas had been using the phrase as a mnemonic device years before that, he says.

Olivas was traveling to a show in Port Townsend with his friend Denon Jones. When they stopped to get gas, Olivas began reflecting on his upcoming album.

“I was like, ‘Yeah, man, I have a lot of good songs on there, but I don’t know if there’s a real good, hyphy club song … I should just take that “phone, keys, wallet, weed” that I do to remember my stuff and just put it to a banger and make it kind of funny. But I think people would be into it.’”

Jones was onboard and encouraged Olivas to record the song, which was co-written with Chris Dean.

The song has always been popular, although Olivas says it’s not necessarily the best representation of his overall catalogue of music. Much of his music tackles more serious issues. “Reason to Live,” for example, is a song about suicide prevention awareness. “Blessed” is about appreciating what you have in life.

Origins

Olivas always had a knack for storytelling, even as far back as elementary school, where he gravitated toward creative writing assignments.

“My favorite stuff was when they would just give you a sentence … and be like, ‘Write a story with it.’ And I would just go off of that. So I always enjoyed writing and hip-hop just spoke to me.”

Olivas heard Tupac for the first time when he was 12 and a friend popped one of the rapper’s cassette tapes into the car stereo on the way back from a church camp. The music made an impression on him, due to “the way the beat hit with the bassline and the way it pumped you up and made you feel,” he recalled.

“Hip-hop sent shivers down your spine. It just got you through hard times and made you feel pumped up, like you could do anything.”

Hip-hop also appealed to him because it was a genre that encouraged storytelling. You could fit more lyrics into a rap song than you could in other genres. “It takes talent in most genres to get your point across in less words or whatever, but hip-hop, some of my favorite stuff was just the storytellers — Tupac and Biggie and Nas, who would just tell stories, take you somewhere. It was magical to me. It (sent) shivers down your spine and it just got you through hard times and made you feel pumped up, like you could do anything.”

Olivas was 13 when he constructed his first rhymes. But true art can’t survive in a bubble: He wanted to share his music with the world.

“When you talk about having a dream your whole life, I remember when I just wanted more than anything to have my own CD released and have the booklets and the credits and thank-yous on the inside,” he says. “I used to read those cover to cover.”

In high school, he attended Olympic College through the Running Start program. There, a man named Roger Nick helped Olivas operate the recording equipment in the college’s music studio. “(I) … made some pretty bad music that I thought was cool at the time and started passing out CDs,” he says.

He’d fulfilled his dream of making a CD, but ultimately, he was just a kid messing around. He’d eventually take his music making to the next level, but it may have never happened if not for an accident that changed his life.

The Accident

In December 2005, Olivas and his fiancé, Lacey Castro, were driving back to Washington from Los Angeles. As they drove, the conversation turned to Olivas’s music. He told Lacey he was thinking of putting music on the backburner to focus more on work and making money. But she wasn’t having any of that:

She turned to him and said, with a sense of urgency in her voice, “You have to promise me you’ll keep making music.”

“Ehh, I don’t know, Lace,” he responded. “It takes a lot of time and I don’t know if I have the time and money to put into that and still pay bills.”

“No,” she insisted. “You have to promise me you’re not going to stop making music. It means a lot to people and you’re good at it.” He finally relented and told her he wouldn’t quit making music.

Four hours later, the couple found themselves in a car crash that injured Olivas and took Lacey’s life. In the wake of the life-changing accident, Lacey’s insistence that he promise to keep making music took on new significance for Olivas.

“I remember thinking it was kind of weird, the sense of urgency,” he recalls. “I’m not going to speculate on anything beyond that, besides to say it’s not something a lot of people could say, when the love of your life at the time dies in a pretty rough way and then hours before that, told you to never quit making music.”

“It was on me to do something, like God wasn’t done with me. I still had some work to do.”

He didn’t get back into the studio for another year. When he did, he recorded a song for Lacey and gave it to her family on the one-year anniversary of the accident. He formed a band with his guitar-playing roommate, a rap-rock outfit called Redemption City. From there, he found himself fronting another rap-rock band called Crush Proof Juicebox, before returning to pure hip-hop, forming the duo Endgame with another local rapper, Nik Fury. As Endgame, Olivas had the chance to tour locally, opening shows for such acts as Kottonmouth Kings, Tech N9ne and Geto Boys.

Hip-hop became a way for Olivas to fulfil his promise to Lacey, but it also proved to be therapeutic, a way to heal from the psychic trauma the accident had inflicted on him.

“It made me like, OK, if I didn’t die from that or become an alcoholic and give up — which I tried to do for a while — then it was on me to do something, like God wasn’t done with me,” he says. “I still had some work to do.”

The accident shaped much of his early music and still does, to an extent. “Now it’s been 13 years,” he says. “It’s not something I think about every day or anything, but it’s always been there and it’s something I’ll always feel a responsibility for, but in a good way. It’s not as if I’m like, ‘Ugh, I’ve got to make music now because I promised this girl.’ It was something that, because she said that to me and I remembered it, it got me through some hard times and really saved my life in a lot of ways in terms of being a form of therapy.”

A Local Scene

As Olivas honed his skills, he found support and fellowship in the local rap and hip-hop scene.

Kitsap County’s burgeoning scene is overflowing with talent, Olivas says. Although the scene is diverse, it’s also tight-knit, he says. “Like any scene, some people have their groups and some people run in different circles and everything, but … people from different camps come together and have great shows and the fans have a good time.”

At 33, Olivas says he’s an “older guy” in terms of the hip-hop scene. But he sees many of the younger musicians doing cool things. As an example, he points out Young Lew and Jordy Sam, a duo putting out “KUBE 93-ready” songs.

“There’s kids that were little guys when I was starting out that are doing some really cool things,” he says. “It may not be known on the level that a bigger city scene is, but … there’s a lot of talent whose story needs to be told.”

And that’s not to leave out many of the forebears who came before, including both musicians, labels and promoters, such as I-Gang, a duo that was active in the early 2000s; Doc and Wesley Blackwell of Noroc Records; Lions Den 360, and Hustle Style Entertainment.

“There’s a lot of people doing a lot of things,” Olivas says. “I could go on, but if I start naming too many names it’ll seem like I’m leaving somebody out.”

In the wake of the Adam Sandler controversy, the artists in the local scene have been a major source of support. “They feel like one of their own got a raw deal and are just trying to spread the word,” he says. “The support from both the artists and the fans in the community has been really overwhelming and amazing.”

An Opportunity

As an artist, it’s never fun to feel like someone’s used your work without properly crediting you. But Olivas acknowledges there’s been an upside to the situation. It’s given him a national spotlight and pumped his music into more ears than ever before.

The day after the controversy began erupting online, “Phone, Keys, Wallet, Weed,” garnered a couple thousand listens overnight. Although Olivas’s music has generated thousands of listens over time between Spotify, iTunes and other platforms, getting that kind of traffic over the course of a single day was unusual. The traffic continued to increase, and by the next day, the YouTube video alone had racked up 5,000 views. At the time of this writing, the video has more than 28,000 views.

But the circumstances for the extra attention have seemed surreal.

“Do I think Adam Sandler is up late at night looking for obscure people to rip off? Probably not. But my song has been on the internet for a while and I don’t know what could have (happened) or how somebody could have come across it, but it’s just odd. At this point, thousands of people agree that it seems oddly similar.”

It’s possible, Olivas says, that it’s a case of unintentional plagiarism.

“Most songwriters have had that experience where you start to write something … and then you realize halfway through, ‘Aww man, I’m taking this from …’” he says. “I’m not an unreasonable person and I’m not going to say, ‘Yep, this is what happened. This guy heard it, and he ripped me off and rubbed his hands together and was like, ‘Ha ha, I’m going to screw this guy!’ I don’t know any of that … I don’t know for sure what happened and I don’t want to level any accusations of definite wrongdoing.”

“I’m not angry. I’m just kind of a guy that is dealing with it as it comes day by day.”

But that doesn’t mean Olivas isn’t considering all his options, including the possibility of legal action. In the meantime, though, he’s focusing on the positives.

“I’m not out here angrily shaking my fist or anything,” he says. “A lot of people have said, ‘You should be thankful if Sandler ripped your song off,’ … and I’m like, I get it; I am thankful for the attention and the opportunity and the platform, not just with this song, but to try to promote in general what I’m about, which is taking care of your fellow man and really trying to let and let live if you can. … I’m definitely not bitter. I’m not angry. I’m just kind of a guy that is dealing with it as it comes day by day.”

There is one way Olivas says Sandler could make it up to him, however.

“If we could just make Little Nicky 2, and then maybe I could be in it for like 30 seconds or something, I’d be good with that,” he says with a laugh. “You can’t have Rodney Dangerfield anymore, may he rest in peace. But I’d be down for Little Nicky 2. Let’s do it, Adam.”

More on David Olivas:

Website: www.PhoneKeysWalletWeed.com

Facebook: www.Facebook.com/DavidOlivasMusic

YouTube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCHrCrsKu8pHEoGMIukiNd2w

Spotify: http://open.spotify.com/artist/6ARMSIZgVFElETERjHrhQX?si=LEl8PsIySSSB8EVgeethzw

Instagram: www.instagram.com/real.olivas

Music comes naturally to brothers Casey and Jesse Cooper. It’s in their blood.

Their mother, while not a musician per se, is a musical person with a gifted singing voice. Their aunt used to sing on cruise ships. And their dad — unbeknownst to them until a couple years ago — played the drums.

“We definitely know where Jesse gets his sense of rhythm,” Casey said.

Jesse plays drums and sings for The Receiver, the band the brothers formed in 2005. Casey plays keyboard and bass, and sings.

The band was formed as the brothers expanded on ideas Casey had composed for his senior thesis at Ohio State University. The band began performing live, and needed a name, Casey said.

The name had to be three syllables and easy to remember, Casey said. They read signs, looked through books and even flipped through dictionaries for inspiration.

Out of the blue, Jesse called Casey from his car; he had just looked down and saw the words “stereo receiver” on his car stereo.

“What about the name ‘Receiver’?” he asked his brother.

They liked it, but after discovering another band already used the moniker, they added a “the,” and The Receiver was born.

“I like the simplicity of ‘The Receiver,’” Casey said. “Calling it ‘Stereo Receiver’ would have been way to obvious.”

The band can be described as “dream pop” with a progressive influence. The boys grew up listening to classic rock and love Pink Floyd and Radiohead.

When crafting their own music, they try not to alienate listeners, and work to craft a good chorus, Casey said.

“What really influenced our sound was trying to write songs with a listenable melody, but also the music kind of takes a few twists and turns the listener might not be expecting,” he said. “It’s not your simplistic dream pop. A lot of dream pop focuses on just a few chords and a melody and a real hazy feel. We kind of have a hazy feel, but it’s not limited to a few chords.”

Prog Magazine called their sound “dream prog,” a description Casey said he “kind of” agrees with.

“I don’t think we’re a proggy band, but some people interpret it that way to a degree,” he said.

“We try to draw from our influences, but also not sound derivative,” Casey continued. “It does become difficult to describe yourself.”

The band usually gives one of two answers when asked to describe its sound: They tell older people they’re like Pink Floyd meets Radiohead; they tell younger people they have a dreamy, electronic sound.

The Receiver is signed to KScope Records, but Casey said the band is on the lower end of the totem pole as far as the record label’s hierarchy goes. In fact, The Receiver is the only U.S. band on the label, making them something of a Guinea Pig, Casey said.

While beginning bands would see being signed to a label as a sign of success, Casey said success is a relative term.

“For bands starting out, we might seem successful, but it has been truly a labor of love and one that has never really been easy for us,” he said.

While the band is making a living through their music, they still hold down day jobs, he said. On their current tour, the band takes breaks to head home, back to their regular jobs.

“I would say we are successful to the degree we’re able to do this right now; we do have fans in different cities and people are listening to us on a small scale, but if you were sitting in the van with us, you probably would have quit already and wanted to go home,” Casey said. “A lot of shows are disappointing. A lot of shows are suprisingly good. It’s up and down. It’s a roller coaster. It’s not for the soft-hearted or easily discouraged. … Our mindset is to play through regardless of the circumstances, to try to earn fans one at a time.”

If it’s not easy, what keeps the brothers going?

“Just the fact that we don’t want to do anything else,” Casey said. “We’re not passionate about anything else. We threw all our eggs in this one basket years ago and when we started to get discouraged, to question our commitment to music, we’re always reminded at the right time there are people out there that enjoy what we do.”

Just a couple nights ago, the brothers met a couple who said they’d been fans of the band since 2008 and played one of their songs during their wedding.

“To us, that was crazy,” Casey said. “It’s exactly what we needed to hear at that moment.”

The band’s current tour is the longest The Receiver has done. Although there have been breaks here and there, the brothers have been on the road since mid-February.

“Right before we released our first album in 2006, we toured for like two-and-a-half months,” Casey said. “It felt like an eternity. It is fun looking back on that tour, because you compare the two tours, this one is much more successful. … There’s still days where it does not seem like it’s going well at all, but when we take a step back, it’s going much better than when we first started out. It’s a very positive sign for us.”

The band has played all sorts of venues on the road. In February, the band played a “teeny, tiny” diner in Charlottesville Virginia. The band was relegated to a corner just small enough for people to walk by.

“There was no room to move,” Casey said. “It was really interesting. The crowd was really small, but we gained a couple new fans.”

Casey was hesitant to name the other most interesting venue the band’s played: A bowling alley.

The band was set up in a bowling lane on the far end, facing all the bowlers.

“We played, like, a two hour show, with people bowling. It was ridiculous.”

The Receiver is playing two shows in the area:

7:30 p.m. June 25 at Laurel B. Johnson Community Center, 923 Hazel Point Road, Coyle, WA.

8 p.m. June 28 at The Charleston Theater, 333 N. Callow Ave., Bremerton, WA. Cost is $5

For more information on The Receiver, go to www.TheReceiverMusic.com

When Eve 6 exploded onto the scene in the late 1990s, the band’s three members became bona fide rock stars before they were able to drink legally.

The band — made up of Max Collins on vocals and bass; Jon Siebels on guitar; and Tony Fagenson on drums — is known for hit singles such as “Inside Out,” “Here’s to the Night,” and “Victoria.” The band’s self-titled debut went platinum, and its follow-up, 2000’s Horrorscope, went gold.

“We are the original three, basically,” said Fagenson, speaking to the Kitsap Scene ahead of the band’s performance next week at the Suquamish Clearwater Casino. “A lot of times bands that have been around as long as we have, you end up seeing them play and it’s really one original guy and the rest are new people. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but I think we’re fortunate enough to say it is the original three guys that are behind all the records, so we’re still going strong.”

Fagenson spoke with us about the start of the band’s summer tour (its first headlining tour since 2012), how online streaming has affected the music business, and the debt the band owes to the powerhouse scifi TV series The X-Files.

KS: You guys started out really young. Not when [the band’s debut album] came out, but when you first formed, you were in high school, correct?

TF: Yeah, that’s correct. And even when the record did come out, we weren’t long out of high school. Max and John actually went to the same school together and so they started the band probably sophomore, junior year of high school … And luckily for us, things just went pretty quickly. Got signed to RCA while still in high school. I joined right around that time and pretty soon after that we were writing songs and rehearsing and then recording the first album. I had just gotten out of high school and I was just starting my first year — which turned out to be my only year — at USC in Southern California. It definitely was a wild ride and a dream come true. We’re very fortunate.

The music business can be tough, and bands struggle for years and never really get anywhere. You guys seemed to have so much success right out of the gate, and you were so young. What was that like?

It was the shooting star kind of scenario where you just catch onto a wave and roll with it. I don’t think any of us really even expected it to happen or predicted it. When that wave comes along and all the different factors that play into are all firing at the same time, you just try to ride it.

It’s kind of hard to say what it’s like, just because we didn’t know any different at the time. It was of course wonderful. It’s everything you want. It’s the dream. Maybe that’s a cliche, but we really were living the dream, and at a great time for us to do it, because when you get to our age now, and people have families and people have a lot more home responsibilities, the idea of hitting the road in a van or bus for like 18 months almost straight isn’t as appealing when you’ve been around for this long and have more of a home life. So it was kind of perfect for a bunch of 19-year-olds to have that opportunity and we kind of did it on our terms, which was great.

We still had this sort of fight in us, because even though we were signed to a major label, RCA, we weren’t really a priority there at all. In fact, I think we’d heard rumors that even while we were making the first album, they were probably just going to cut us just like not even put it (the album) out, they’re going to drop us. Nobody really knew who we were at the label, so … we had kind of a small budget, left to our own devices with our producer Don [Gilmore] at the time, and we kind of fostered this kind of left-of-center underdog mentality there.

And also at the same time, on the radio around that time — this was like ‘96, ‘97 when we were putting the record together — believe it or not, everyone was preaching how “rock was dead.” It was just past the sort of alternative revolution of Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Chili Peppers and all these bands getting on mainstream radio. That had sort of matured, and now there was this kind of grab-bag and electronica was the big thing, with The Prodigy and all this kind of stuff, and so we were coming at it as sort of a simple three-piece rock band that was trying to keep it … I mean, obviously, we had our punk leanings and everything, but it was sort of more straight-ahead like that, and that was being preached as, well that doesn’t work anymore.

Streaming obviously is the future and is an amazing technology, but we’re still kind of figuring out how that trickles down to the artists the best way, because right now it doesn’t very much.

We were coming at it from all those perspectives, so then when it happened, it just felt all the better because we were able to do it on our own terms and really made our own decisions throughout our whole career. It was fantastic, what can I say? Incredible ride, we had a great time with RCA, and we’re really fortunate to have the support we had and just the opportunities that we had and frankly we’re still able to live from them today, to go on tour. All that was formed in those early days. It’s fantastic.

You guys are still going and touring. How do you come at it from somebody who has been doing this for many years now, and as a band that has a lot of experience under its belt?

Things definitely change both in how you, the artist, perceive things and do things and create, and also how the world around you changes and technology and fans and the audience, how they listen to and learn about music and everything. Just in general, I think you’ve gotta be fairly coherent with all that and on top of it. We’ve always been sort of pro-technology, I guess you could say, and interested in the new delivery systems and everything. I think you’ve just got to stay kind of flexible with it.

It’s definitely, I would say, sort of a tougher climate now, on one hand, for musicians, because there’s a lot less money changing hands. Not to put too crass of a point on it, but when people buy music, it helps everything: it helps support the recording process and touring and all of that. And there’s a lot less buying of music.

I mean, it’s in the form of streaming now, which obviously is the future and is an amazing technology, but we’re still kind of figuring out how that trickles down to the artists the best way, because right now it doesn’t very much. It’s hard to live off of that, and we were very fortunate to come up in kind of the last phase, the last round of bands that had the fortune to really have a great support system in kind of the heyday of the major label era. It’s because of that, the combination of what we did and who we are and that support system, that allowed us to get the audience that we’ve gotten and connect with the great fans that we’ve had over the years, which we still get to see every year when we go on tour. I think it’s really hard for newer bands to get to that point where you have a long-lasting relationship with your fans the way I think Eve 6 does.

This is to tell you how nerdy I was: I had my bag of VHS tapes of labeled X-Files episodes that I had taped off of TV

Honestly, we’re not releasing a ton of new music right now. The last record we did was back in 2012, Speak in Code. That was actually on Fearless Records. Before that it had kind of been a long gap where we actually basically broke up for a couple years, then got back together to do a lot of touring and writing and put that record out. So, the new record release is very sporadic right now. I think if we were to do a record, say, next year — which I’m not saying we are, I’m just saying if we were to — then it would probably be a very different process, even from the one we did a couple of years ago. So you’ve just got to stay on top of that. We’re definitely getting past the era of the full album. I think that audiences want to have a constant flow of new things coming in so you can do different release schedules like shorter EPs and all sorts of stuff you can do to keep things vibrant and alive. But right now, our main thing is really just the touring and that’s kind of where the focus is for this year.

According to Wikipedia, you came up with the name of the band based on an X-Files character. Is that correct?

That is correct. There’s actually sort of a weird falsity that’s come out.

I was the big X-Files fan, so I do take credit for bringing that into the fold. When we were recording the first album — especially when we went up to Seattle and did some recording up there, because our producer Don was from there, so we did some of it in LA, some of it up there — we were staying with a relative of John’s and every day we’d come home from the studio and — this is to tell you how nerdy I was — I had my bag of VHS tapes of labeled X-Files episodes that I had taped off of TV. DVDs were around, but I don’t think that show was on DVD yet. I think it was just a show on the network, obviously way before Netflix or any kind of on-demand video, so I would tape them. I was a big fan of the show and I wanted the good ones. I had a bunch of them and we’d watch them every night. That’s where that started. It was kind of a nice little post-studio ritual for us to go watch X-Files.

In the midst of that, we were trying to think of a new band name. We had a bunch of different ideas and none of them were great. We were currently “Eleventeen.” That was actually the name of the band when the band got signed to RCA and when we were making that album. Max and I were watching an old episode and it was the “Eve” episode, a very early one from the first season. It was actually Max that said “Eve 6,” which is the name of a character. He said, “Huh. ‘Eve 6.’ What about that?” So he actually said it first and I said, “Dude, I think that’s it.” And we both were like, “Yeah, I think that’s the band name. That feels great.” It just felt right to us. So for some reason I’ve gotten total credit for naming the band, but it was sort of a joint thing.

Did you watch the new X-Files episodes that recently came out?

I didn’t. Obviously, everything I heard was very mixed. A friend of mine watched them and then he kind of verified what I expected would probably happen. To be honest with you — if any makers of the X-Files are … (reading this interview), Chris Carter or anything, I apologize — but I really lost interest in the show after like the first four seasons or so. I feel like it took a different tone. To me, the quality of the writing wasn’t what I fell in love with about the show. It was still great production value and everything, but I just went off of it.

I feel like the best seasons are basically the first three, with some good stuff in four as well, and then I just wasn’t into it. I kind of wasn’t really paying attention when these new ones came out. I’ll probably get around to watching them, but everything I’ve heard kind of verifies what I expected them to be. I’m not sorry, X-Files, but hey, we’re still carrying on the name! Still carrying on a piece of the X-Files in our band name.

Do you ever get X-Files fans at your shows who are into the band because of the name?

I’m sure that’s happened. I can’t really think of specific things. We definitely see online, like someone will say, “Well look what I just found,” and they take a screenshot of them watching the “Eve” episode, where the character’s name is actually on a plaque above her cell that says, “Eve 6.” And so they’ll take a picture of that and it’s like, “I’m betting this is where they got the name from.” We get a lot of that. People connect the dots and everything.

It would be kind of cool if someone says, I was watching the X-Files, saw your band name, and then it got me into the band. I mean, it’s possible. I’m sure that’s happened, but I don’t know any specific instances of that.

The Pacific Northwest in general has always just been a great area for us. It’s actually a great way to kind of kick off this tour this summer.

Have you ever spent any time in the Kitsap County area where you’re going to be playing?

I don’t actually know if we’ve ever been across (Puget Sound). I know we took a boat ride with our producer and his wife back in the ‘90s when we were recording back there and I think it was all through that area. I know we boated past some of the Microsoft guys’ houses and stuff. Definitely we haven’t been to that casino. We’ve definitely played lots of casinos in our day and some are nice and some are not so much, so it’s good to know that this will be a good one. The Pacific Northwest in general has always just been a great area for us and the band and me personally. I love it up there. So it’s actually a great way to kind of kick off this tour this summer.

And this is technically the first show of this summer’s tour. We just did one little one-off last week in Indiana, but that was kind of separate from this. But yeah, it will be a great kickoff show.

I don’t know how the tours differ from each other, but if this one’s over the whole summer, it must be pretty extensive?

It is. This is actually our first headlining tour since 2012, since spring/summer of 2012 when we released that album, Speak in Code. The last two summers we were on these package tours. In 2014 it was the Summerland Tour with Everclear and Soul Asylum, and then last year it was the Under The Sun Tour with Sugar Ray and Uncle Kracker. So we’ve been doing these package tours which are great fun, great hangs with the other bands, but our set is a lot shorter. We get like a half hour set. We’re playing, we’re in the middle of the bands and stuff. Other than that, we’re doing kind of one-offs, or fly dates, or maybe a weekend here or there, but this is really our first true tour on our own as the headliners, since 2012.

That’s actually really exciting. I think the audience is going to be stoked. We’re playing longer sets. We’re digging into the catalog a little more for some fan favorites and some songs we don’t usually play, especially in the last few years. We’re kind of stretching that out a bit and it’s turned out to be a lot of dates. We start out with you guys in late May and that runs pretty much into August. There’s a little bit of time off here and there in July, and then in August it gets a little more sporadic, but we’re out there and covering all four corners on this one. We’re pumped. It should be a great show. If you haven’t seen us, then you must. And if you have seen us, come see us again, because it will be a different show and different songs and stuff we haven’t played in awhile.

It’s always kind of fun to hear what musicians are listening to. Are there any bands out there right now you’ve been really into lately?

I’ll take this opportunity to plug a band that I just produced called Dead Posey.

They’re brand, brand-new. They literally just came out with one song. But I think they’re awesome. We’re getting some really good response from it. A couple of the blogs are starting to pick it up and all that kind of stuff, so check them out. It’s sort of bluesy, gritty, dirty kind of rock with some other undertones in there.

Eve 6 performs May 26 at Suquamish Clearwater Casino‘s Beach Rock Music and Sports Lounge
Doors open at 6 p.m. Show starts at 8 p.m. Must be 21+
Cost is $25 for general admission, $50 reserved, $75 for VIP meet and greet.