'When you're so passionate about something, you should make it happen,'; Band Dogpark on Tik Tok success, live shows
Virginia-based group, Dogpark, is composed of college-age students, bonded by both their fascination and study of music. With a rapid increase of followers on Tik Tok, the group got their big break on the platform posting a cover of ‘The Backseat Lovers’ “Kilby Girl”, the video soon acquired over 700,000 views. With big plans for the year, the group was featured in Off the Record Press’ “17 Up & Coming Artists of 2023”.
OTR’s Reegan Johnson got the chance to speak to the group about their rapid success.
OTR: To start, I wanna know how you guys met. Were you guys friends before and then you were like, we can all play music, let's start a band!
Will Harford: So I've always dreamed of starting a band. It was the main reason that I came to college. I finally just realized that I had enough pieces around me to get it going. I knew Billy from my fraternity and Eamon from A Capella— we all met kind of fast because [University of Richmond] is a small school.
How long ago was that?
Chris Conte: It was a year and a half ago.
Eamon Moore: We had a different iteration of the group. We had two drummers and Chris was playing bass. Then they graduated, and we brought in Declan in, cause he shreds guitar. And then Chris moved to drums cause that's his first instrument. Now this iteration has been about seven months.
How do you guys manage to practice and do shows while you're in college?
Billy Apostolou: It's hard. It's a lot. We just kinda have to. Before the semester started we scheduled out three times during the week where we can meet and practice. We wanna play gigs cause it's what we love doing. When you're so passionate about something, you should make it happen.
Will: There are a couple gigs that we haven't been able to take because of school. We get out as much as we can.
Declan Harris: There was a learning curve with the practices too. I think originally we were doing practices at night, a few days a week, and now this semester.
What was your first gig like? Was that a venue or a house party?
Will: It was a house party, and it took a long time to convince all my friends that people even wanted to see live music at a party because Covid kind of killed house shows, I guess. And like no one really knew what a house show would be like, because there hasn't been a band [at University of Richmond] in like 10 years.
What kind of setlist do you perform? Does it change from show to show?
Billy: We've been trying to incorporate a lot of our originals now, so in our last show we played five of our originals.
Eamon: Our setlists are a lot of early 2000’s songs. Like ‘The Strokes’, ‘The Killers’... then we also have some Stevie Wonder stuff in there.
Declan: We've done some more jam-band type music, like Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers, stuff like that. We generally play like three hour sets at these things.
Billy: I would say we have probably five hours of like total content that we kinda pick and choose from, depending on the vibe. The other night it was a club and it was dark and there was a big crowd, so we were playing a lot of like heavy-hitting bangers.
Congrats on the 10k on Tik Tok by the way. That's impressive! What was that like when you first saw that people were gaining this attraction for DogPark?
Billy: It was pretty wild. We went from like, like 12 followers to 10,000 in like a week. We posted our first video on it, and got like a couple hundred views. And then we posted that cover of Kilby Girl on TikTok and it was the first one that really went viral. And for the first three days, it didn’t really hit the algorithm.
But then like three days later it kind of started blowing, and even now, 10 or 12 days after we posted it, it's still climbing. This is just like nuts. We were just kinda texting each like, holy shit, what's happening?
Eamon: It was pretty surprising. We weren't really sure if we were gonna post it, and we definitely weren't expecting anything of it. We just planned on getting content out there, and for whatever reason, I guess the vibes, people really flocked to it. Then the “This Love” cover is like an entirely different video.
Will: Which is good though, it's just a different range.
Billy: The videos are so different. It was kind of like a proof-of-concept where we did something, and then we did it again. So it's repeatable and it's not just like a one-off thing. It was so cool. I was refreshing my phone every 10 minutes for like two days.
Do you have any major plans for 2023? Anything in particular that you are really pushing for?
Chris: Yeah, so we're planning on recording one or two songs at a studio. We booked some time with an engineer, to kind of work on two songs that we're really happy with and we're trying to put out… Right now we are planning on releasing an EP with some of our original songs, so keep a lookout for that coming in the future.
End of Interview.
Be on the lookout for new releases coming from Dogpark in the following months. Check out the group on Tik Tok and Instagram at Dogpark.Band!
OTR would like to thank Dogpark for sitting down and taking the time to enlighten us on their journey. Well wishes.
Interview conducted by Reegan Johnson on January 21st 2023.
Cover photo via @Dogpark.band Instagram
