Matt White and Marc Cashin have worked together for a while. even their band FIVES, that’s been around for a while. But the band the way it is now, with their current lineup and their current sound – that’s brand new. The band’s new EP, “Heart & Thunder” is a new sound and new direction for FIVES and Alternative Addiction recently talked with the White and Cashin about how the two started working together and how they created the title track for the EP. “We worked really hard on it,” said Cashin on the new EP. “Matt and I go way back. 2005 is when we met doing another project. We sort of got together and started playing more seriously in 2008. This project though, we’ve been working on it for over a year at Songbuilder Studios in Catonsville, Maryland. It took over a year writing these songs and coming up with the music, but Matt and I have been working together for over ten years.” “That’s the short version,” said White on how the band got together. “Marc was in another band and they had lost a keyboard player and they did a post on Craigslist. I responded to the post and I came out and auditioned for this other band. We played in that other group for a while but it kind of fizzled out, it wasn’t going anywhere. That’s when we started FIVES. The other members of our band have evolved over time. We’re finally at a place where we’re happy with where we’re at as a band with the guys we have.” They should be happy because their latest sound is something to be proud of. It’s both modern and original and it pays tribute to some of the solid alternative pop acts from the late 90s and early 2000S. In other words, it’s good. Talking with Cashin and White about the title track off the EP, they both had interesting perspectives on how the song was created. Said White: “The musical basis for it is really only four chords. They’re just played in different order. It was something that I was just messing around with on a keyboard one night. I had those opening chords and I just built the song around that. The title, Heart & Thunder, this girl I used to work with had two horses named Heart and Thunder and I thought that was a killer song title. That stuck with me for six or seven months. We didn’t know what the lyrics were going to be with those chords I had come up with earlier, but Mark did a great job of forming them around the song.” “Leaving the studio, driving home and listening to the mix before we had any of the vocals done, I knew I had to start writing lyrics,” said an amused Cashin “I was driving home and I kept saying to myself – heart and thunder, heart and thunder, how do I work this in? I was driving home and the chorus melody came in and I just kind of mumbled through it on my voice memos app. Eventually the rest of it came. That’s the first time that I’ve ever written a song around a title.” Creating the song was a big accomplishment. Not only because it’s well-crafted and well produced, but because it completed their EP and pulled everything together per White. “It was the last song that we recoded for the EP. We already had the other four songs ready to go. They were all about the intricate parts of relationships. It’s easy to fall in love, it’s hard to keep that going. This title track is the last song we did on the EP, we thought it represented the yin and the yang of relationships and it just felt right, like it pulled everything together.”