LA Rock Band, Fencer released their first full-length self-titled album, Fencer, on February 3, 2023. I got to talk with lead singer, Field Cate, about the release and the future of the band. Field was a child actor, most notably playing Young Ned in Pushing Daisies. He started Fencer with brothers Scott and Cameron Sauve. This trio loves to play rock-n-roll inspired music.  

I hope you’re doing well! Could you give a little background on who you are and how Fencer came to be?

Field Cate: Yeah! So my name is Field Cate, I am the lead singer and guitarist of the LA rock band, Fencer. We’ve been doing this for a hot minute now. I think we started in early February 2017. We’re like pop-garage rock, we try to be as pop-y as we can, while still getting heavy. I was an actor for over a decade, that was like my whole childhood. I did that for a long time and then when I got to high school, I just kind of just started to grow, adapt, and change. I ultimately found that I was into other stuff, and so, I experimented with different things. Eventually, I decided I wanted to start doing music. I met Cameron, our drummer, on some band website. He and I started hanging out a bunch and we were in another band writing, and it kind of landed in the formation it is now. I’m also very passionate about mental health. I’m a life coach. I am a mess and that’s me!

What got you into mental health advocacy and life coaching?

FC: I’ve been incredibly passionate about mental health for around five years or so. You kind of have to be when life becomes very difficult. If you don’t kind of focus on that aggressively, then it’s difficult to manage. I spent a lot of years in therapy and dialectical behavioral therapy. I built up a nice little toolkit of techniques, mentalities, and approaches to dealing with mental health. My girlfriend is the marketing director and one of the main coaches of this company, Positive Presence. When we started dating, she kind of introduced me to this concept of life coaching and I really dig it.

I read that you have synesthesia and that Fencer decided to make everything sound blue. Tell me about what that’s like and what led you to make that decision.

FC: Synesthesia is this thing where people associate words and letters with colors. I’ve done that ever since I was in kindergarten. When we were starting off this project, we wanted to have some kind of aesthetic, some kind of color associated with our band. When we were trying to figure that out, the first batch of songs that Cameron and I had was all blue. I don’t know why, it just was. Like “Joseph Courtney,” one of the recent singles was one of the first songs Cameron and I ever wrote together. That song was just super blue. “Battery Pack” is this song off our first EP and  “June bug,” which I had even before I met Cameron. Those songs were always that specific royal blue color. We decided to go with that and since then, it’s just gotten so unbelievably over-the-top. We’ve just gotten completely ridiculous with it, but I think in a really positive way. If we are writing songs and it doesn’t seem blue, we’ll just shelf it. Our studio is saturated with blue lighting, our videos are all blue-- like all our social media posts trying to be blue. It’s like this weird rule we’ve created. I think it’s ended up really kind of seeping itself into our creativity and being a creative aspect of the band. It’s also a coincidence that Cameron, Scott, and I are each the three water signs. I am a Cancer, Scott’s a Pisces, and Cameron is a Scorpio, which is kind of interesting because we’re all so emotional.

This album is fully self-produced. What was that experience like and how did it feel to have creative freedom?

FC: It was just the three of us. I mean the entire production process was just Scott, Cameron, and I in our little studio, which we call Fencer HQ, for like hundreds of hours. I think that while we’re still independent, we wanted to put out our first album in our discography while we had control over that. We thought it was super cool to be able to just entirely have this unabashedly be the three of us. As far as the personnel on the record, I mean it’s the three of us, and then Henry Lunetta who’s great and who mixed it, and Zach Fisher who mastered it. Outside of that, I mean, we did everything else. I think it really kind of allowed us to have all the control we needed and wanted to introduce ourselves to the world. The way we wanted to introduce ourselves and our first actual full-length release.

This album shows a lot of different sides of Fencer. Tracks like “Come On, Keep Screaming”, “Couch”, and “Velvet Jetski” are all very rock-n-roll. Other songs go in a more alternative, indie, or slightly jazzy feel with the latest single “Joseph Courtney”. What led you to show the range of genres versus staying in one?

FC: Yeah, that’s kind of what we wanted to do. That’s all we’ve always been about; I mean, we make rock music. We like screaming and having a really loud, fuzzy guitar and Cameron loves crashing symbols. So we’re a rock band, right? I think the idea has always been that we listen to everything and so we try to write everything. We don’t have any rules for writing other than ‘does this song sound blue’ and ‘did one of us come up with it?’ That’s one of the things that I love about the record, the kind of spectrum it showcases. It shows what we’re about and that we do like to be heavy, but I like to also kind of just explore whatever we come up with. That’s what Fencer is, it’s just whatever the three of us made together. I like that people have confirmed this for me, that we’ve created a unique enough sound so that whatever we do still does sound like us. I think that is showcased pretty well on the album and that excites me. I love the jazz comparison because I always try to come up with the jazziest vocal melodies possible.

What does the future look like for Fencer?

FC: First thing is to get the album out, get it into the world. We have a couple of other videos coming out. At the release show, we’ll have a bunch of new merch. The goal after that is to, I mean I have nothing to announce, but obviously, the plan is to tour as much as we can. We’ve done some touring in the past, but we need to get back on that. Then, just to not slow down. We had a lot of space in-between releasing music for a while and a lot of that was because one, there was a pandemic that happened. We were also just figuring it all out. We’ve been together for a long time but we didn’t know what we were doing for a while. It’s a very new thing that maybe we’ve started to kind of figure out what we’re doing. So, now the goal is to just be super active and just keep releasing stuff. Ideally, continue whatever momentum we’re building off of this!

The debut album Fencer is available on all streaming platforms now.