Today we’d like to introduce you to Daphne Greene.
Hi Daphne, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I was a little music nerd from very early on. I always loved singing to the radio and dancing around the house, and picked up the trumpet in grade school which gave me opportunities to perform in band ensembles and eventually as a solo performer. Late in grade school, I also took to acting, having been peer pressured into joining the school play by my friend, and ended up getting the lead role as a satirical version of Regis Philbin in a play called ‘Who’s Dying to Be a Millionaire?’. That was really the moment I knew that I loved performing for an audience.
At the end of high school, I was playing trumpet so much I started developing some serious TMJ, a jaw disorder that became so painful I couldn’t eat without it hurting, and had just recently picked up the guitar which I enjoyed even more than the trumpet since I could sing and play at the same time. It was on my first day of college at ASU that I went with my friend Jordan to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, ended up getting selected to be part of a chili pepper eating contest hosted by a local radio station outside the event, and won front row tickets for me and my friend. I pretty much knew after going to my first rock concert and having Flea sweating on top of us for two hours that I had seen my future career path and decided to start writing songs and figure out how to start or join a rock band.
In college, while supporting a friend as an extra on his short film I was introduced to the actor playing the lead role, Dan Rojas, who had a local band called 42 Eternal, and also met some of the other bandmates who were on set as well. He gave me an EP called ‘The Circle’ to check out, and I popped it in my car stereo to listen to on the way home. It wasn’t exactly my kind of music, more pop-punk/emo than I was looking for, but I was hungry for a project and they seemed like good people who indicated they were looking for another guitar player to fill a slot in the band. I got my feet wet playing my first real shows around Phoenix with them for about a year and a half, took my first band photos, and got signed to a local record label called 80/20 Records. I was having a lot of fun with the project, but there came a point where I wanted to be doing more than the project was able to at the time, and ended up splitting with 42 to look for other opportunities.
It was in my fourth year of ASU, where I was actually studying film myself, and a few credits away from graduating that my friend Chris Price whose short film had introduced me to Dan and the 42 gang, and Mike Zimmerlich, the founder of the record label we had signed to asked me if I wanted to move to LA with them. It would mean dropping out of college before I was finished, but it sounded like the right choice to me after having just gone to hear a bigwig at Universal Studios tell everyone in the ASU film school that if they were serious about film, they should drop out of college immediately, move to LA or New York, and start doing film. That message seemed to resonate with me about how I felt with music, and not to mention gave me a convenient way to get out of Phoenix in order to work through some gender identity issues I had been feeling for a while in a new and unfamiliar place.
Los Angeles felt like home for so many reasons. The energy was different, there were more musicians and artists around, and lots more music-related jobs available. I had been working at GameStop when I moved, and was waiting on a transfer to the Burbank Mall store to go through when I decided to take matters into my own hands and started pounding the pavement looking for more music-related work. After having stopped at seven or eight different spots I got a phone call from the Carvin Guitar showroom that they needed a sales associate, and my Hollywood strip tenure began.
That job led me to meet a fellow pedal-nerd working across the street at the Hollywood Guitar Center who was a killer guitar player. After several months of talking about it, and having sold him an amp, we finally got together to hang out and jam. He happened to know a drummer who was equally a fan of the Chili Peppers, so he set up another jam session with him, and after that, it was clear that the three of us wanted to play together more, and that all we really needed was a bassist. It was around that time, nearing the end of my first year in LA that my former bandmate Dan was moving to LA. I set up a session for the four of us in our newly acquired rehearsal space in North Hollywood, and it was an absolutely magic moment that solidified the lineup.
Statues of Cats played in and around Los Angeles and the Southwest for four and a half years, being my first official band that I had spearheaded, wrote the music for, and recorded and released music with. We were doing very well for ourselves in the scene and making a splash anywhere we played, but near the end of the fourth year the members began drifting apart. After releasing our EP, ‘Memorabilia,’ and working on our next release, a compilation of four separate EPs each written by one of the four members, it became clear that the direction of the project was becoming different for each member, and the other three Cats left the project, leaving me the rights to the music and name.
After attempting to limp along as SoC for another year or so, using fill-in drummers and playing as a two piece, I began to feel like a new project was the better direction to start to move in. I had learned from the last project that not having a clear leadership structure can ultimately be the demise of a project, so I wanted something that was clearly ‘MY’ project, and a clear break away from my old identity before coming out as a trans-woman. I never really imagined myself as a solo artist, always really wanting to have a band to call my own, so I began trying to come up with ‘Daphne & the…’ band names until I finally landed on ‘Glitches.’
After one final farewell show in LA performing only as ‘Daphne Greene,’ I felt I needed a break from that city despite my love for it, and returned home to Phoenix in 2017 to help my Mom sell our family house and move into a condo. I reconnected with my future fiancé, got a job at Guitar Center, and started making connections with my coworkers to see if anyone was interested in playing together. I cobbled together a little four piece and rehearsed a combination of Statues of Cats songs and some new material I had been working on, and played my first two shows officially as ‘Daphne + The Glitches’.
At one of those gigs there was a killer bassist who I had seen but never officially met named Alex Saint who was featured singing and playing a mean version of Helter Skelter by the Beatles, and I knew that I needed to get her information. After a year of neither of us calling one another we finally connected and started playing together and I knew it was a great fit. Around the same time I was introduced to a guitarist named Cal who was new to town, and he also fit right into our glitchy little group. After playing a handful of gigs I had the great misfortune of getting into a car accident and breaking my femur, tibia, and fibula, and was bed-ridden for six months.
During that time our drummer left to pursue other things, but a good friend had a recommendation for someone who could fill the slot, and after one session with Neil Hathaway knew we had something really solid. I had also reconnected with my old bandmate Megan Ramos after playing a 42 Eternal Reunion show for 80/20 Records’ 10th Anniversary show, and she expressed interest in playing with The Glitches. My fiancé Hanna also had been in and around music because of her dad Jeff Jones who was a professional saxophonist and started playing percussion and singing backup vocals. Together the six of us began recording our first single, ‘Outgoing Male’, with our good friend Thomas McDonald, a killer producer/engineer who worked with me at Guitar Center for years. We released the song February 7th 2019 to a completely packed house at Chopper John’s right before Covid had really locked everything down, and were so excited for what was coming next, until the pandemic totally took the wind our of our sails and made getting together so much more difficult.
I continued to work on the rest of the EP songs we had with Thomas and the band as best we could during lockdown, and with band members all coping with the pandemic differently, took it as an opportunity to play with some other musicians who felt comfortable getting together. In a lot of ways I felt that I needed to play music to work through some of my own insecurities I was feeling during lockdown, like, ‘Is being a musician still going to be a viable career path?’ or ‘Are live shows as we knew them ever going to be a thing again?’.
I was also feeling insecure about my gender transition, and whether or not I was making “enough progress,” as well as struggling with finding motivation to keep working on the band while things were shut down. It was easy to look at all the bands who took to Twitch and live-streaming to keep themselves going the best they could during that time and feel like I wasn’t doing enough. It didn’t help that the theme of the EP that felt frozen in time in production was all about being stuck or held back, and that a couple of the songs had been in my repertoire for years, and I was ready to move on from them.
Ultimately, getting together with my old friend from grade-school William Unkefer, who was an accomplished bass player and musician around town helped a great deal, as well as jamming with my fiancé’s coworker Tristan Martinez, who was the front-man for local emo band ‘A Continent Named Coma’. These two became crucial components of getting the Glitches back up and running when things started moving toward opening back up, and are now staple members of the Glitch lineup. I never imagined myself in a project with more than four or five members tops, so having eight members right now is a little bit crazy, but ultimately great for making sure that no matter who can’t make it to a gig, someone is always available to cover.
Daphne + The Glitches plans on releasing the rest of our ‘Start All Over’ EP early 2022, and has regained the momentum we were feeling pre-pandemic, having recently played a live-stream show on the New Times cover featured ‘Way Back Sessions,’ with shows booked for the rest of the year including our good friend Katy Cage’s ‘Shiny New Vaginy’ benefit show on September 25th at Unity Through Community, Oct 7th at The Rebel Lounge, and a three hour dual set in Bisbee the weekend after Thanksgiving, Nov 27th. We are feeling charged up and better than ever, and ready to take Phoenix by storm!
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Honestly, the one, two and three punches of my LA band breaking up and feeling like I literally had to start all over by building the Glitches, followed by getting into a serious accident that left me bed-ridden for months, and then the pandemic shutting the music industry down and leaving everyone in a state of complete uncertainty for so long have been some of the most serious obstacles I’ve ever faced in my life. All of that compounded with navigating being in the music industry as a trans-woman and trying to feel at peace with myself has been a lot of stress over these past three years in particular.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m extremely proud of our very first ‘Daphne + The Glitches’ single that we have out currently, ‘Outgoing Male’. It was a song I wrote shortly after having come out publicly as a trans-woman, and had performed and intended to record with my old band Statues of Cats before we broke up. I think it not only specifically captures some of the struggles those battling with gender and identity issues face, but also can resonate with anyone going through a tough change, feeling like you’re not where you want to be quite yet, but know where you want to go and are going to push through any naysayers or negative personalities or situations in your life to get there.
I wrote it with an intentionally simple chord progression and melody, because I wanted it to appeal to a wide range of audiences, and wrote it with lyrics that could be interpreted a couple different ways. It is only a taste of the ‘glitchiness’ to come, starting out with a 56k dial-up modem sound and inserting some familiar sound bytes to anyone who lived through the old AOL internet days, but hopefully sets the stage for the evolution of a group that has had to collectively persevere some really tough growing pains as well. As a predominantly queer band, we hope to tap into the local AZ LGBTQ+ scene and carve out a glitchy little niche in that community.
What’s next?
Aside from waiting for our name on Spotify, iTunes, etc. to switch from ‘Daphne & the Glitches,’ to the newly rebranded ‘Daphne + The Glitches,’ (putting an emphasis on the importance of the members of The Glitches) to finish processing, you can be on the lookout for a re-release of our single ‘Outgoing Male’ with a brand new master that will knock your socks off, and the rest of the ‘Start All Over’ EP release announcements starting in the next few months, fingers crossed! You can expect a batch of merch to start popping up shortly, and a few other singles to be dropped along the way. Not to mention, we have been recruited by Hookworm Records to be a part of their upcoming Hookworm 2 vinyl release with some pretty incredible artists including Chrome Rhino, Sliced Limes, Sophie Dorsten and Birds + Arrows, and will be recording our single ‘Mrs. Mallard’ with Bob Hoag of Flying Blanket studios which we couldn’t be more excited to be a part of!
Contact Info:
- Email: daphneandtheglitches@gmail.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/daphneandtheglitches
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/daphneandtheglitches
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/DntGlitches
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLp53DH3S6nrfcTWm5Pk61w
- Other: https://discord.gg/bRKRf95zQM
Image Credits
Frank C Photography
Eric Daniels Photography
