Dialogues

The Riverwest24 took place this weekend and brought all sorts of fun throughout the annual neighborhood bike race. The “Riverwest Arby’s” lot on Center and Pierce (between High Dive and Mad Planet) hosted an afternoon of live music Saturday featuring local bands Dialogues, Future Plans and HogHead in addition to Action Chief from Madison and Cel Ray from Chicago.

Dialogues consists of vocalist Emily Morrow, guitarist Joe Kirschling, bassist Mark Zbikowski and drummer Quinn Cory. The band’s sound is influenced by a wide range of 90’s indie rock that the members grew up with and enjoy to this day. Kirschling shares how Dialogues formed, “I wanted to play guitar in a band after I’d played drums in so many bands for so long so I invited Mark and Emily and Quinn to come play with me; some of them didn’t have a choice (laughs).”

Cory recalls, “I had tweeted about wanting to play in a new band because some of my bands are less active right now.”

“I had just ended some projects so it was perfect timing for us,” Morrow adds.

They had a hard time naming the band but “Dialogues” stuck once they were gearing up to play their debut show at Cactus Club in January. “We liked it better than all the ones we hated,” Morrow laughs. “We had been decided on a name and told the venue for the first show that name, but then we realized we hated that name so we told them “just kidding!” and changed it to Dialogues. When we first started jamming we were playing a bunch of covers like Aldous Harding and Big Thief, just riffing on things that we like.”

Kirschling is excited about how everyone brings their own edge as they workshop songs, saying, “I’ll have things that are all over the board in terms of guitar riffs and then we just turn it into magic.”

“I love that about this band too,” Zbikowski replies. “Joe and Emily do a lot of the heavy lifting but we arrange the songs altogether in practice and that’s really fun to watch something take shape, just like three times playing through.”

Morrow touches on her lyrics, “I find them hard to write since I’ve never really written lyrics of my own before, but I’m learning how to storytell. I don’t want to write about the stuff that’s at home but I have all these feelings from getting older and I want to talk about them. It seems to be working and people seem to like it – it’s a work in progress.”

Dialogues hope to record soon; their set on Saturday comprised much of the material that they want to track. Their next show is a Planned Parenthood benefit at Falcon Bowl on August 20th. - Breaking and Entering