At 6-feet-plus, Shane De Leon looms over most people. It would not be a surprise to find out that this man was made up of several 5-year-old kids standing on each other’s shoulders. His wild, black wavy hair is peppered with about as many grays as instruments and genres he experiments with in his music project Miss Massive Snowflake.
From preschool hip-hop to Nick Cave-esque narratives, from sharp-tongued social critique to children’s recordings, from techno instrumentals to middle school band practice, De Leon is everywhere all at once. For him, music is all about being free.
Originally from Billings, Mont., De Leon played in a few different bands but didn’t hit his musical stride until he became the vocalist and trumpeter for local genre-bending indie band Rollerball.
“It was rock but with jazz,” De Leon says, “all genres at all times. It tended to be dark most times too.”
Very little in De Leon’s career has been easy to identify or to pin down. He played in Rollerball for 10 or 11 years before he took to the guitar (of which there were none in Rollerball), and thus Miss Massive Snowflake was born.
De Leon says in his tour diary: “Miss Massive Snowflake is my musical/familial art project. I write the songs and then recruit different family members for different recordings and tours.”
The project has featured De Leon, his mother-in-law, his nephews and even his own daughter. But when touring, the project was hard to digest.
“I had my mother-in-law doing concerts, kids singing backup. It was off-putting for the audience,” De Leon says. “Adults without children don’t understand children. We were throwing people’s expectations off.”
De Leon was trying to test boundaries without even realizing it.
“I realized I wanted to erase the idea of the audience,” reflects De Leon. “We would play video—try anything to be engaging. Talk to the audience. Make it about people coming together, wanting them to have a good time.”
De Leon soon realized what sort of a band MMS was, and what it wasn’t.
“I remember seeing Nick Cave a long time ago,” says De Leon. “It was in the middle of the day. And it was hot. Seeing him in the sunshine sucked. It’s hard to translate into daytime, but that’s what we were. We’d play street fairs and it was great. We are a daytime band. Now we are a morning band.”
There is no doubt that the band’s songs themselves are best experienced live, or at least with some visual component. It is often hard in the recordings to figure out where De Leon is coming from, how tongue-in-cheek he’s being or what exactly is going on in a song that starts off with preschoolers saying “Who wrecked the party?” then adds a beat and a rap talking about “eating the cupcakes that Jessica baked” and “politicians digging ditches to hide their dirty dishes.” The music video for this tune was filmed at the preschool De Leon used to work at and follows a bunch of children around as they dance their tails off.
The band has taken a bit of a turn away from the family structure in its recent 10-inch release and upcoming album (due out at the end of the year entitled Songs About Music). De Leon realized the need for a full band while on his last European tour supporting MMS’s last full-length album, The Queen’s Headache.
“The best thing about a tour is experiencing things with family and friends,” says De Leon. “I had my laptop for backing and I played guitar over it solo. I missed playing with friends—having people there to talk to.”
Enter David and Caroline Chaparro (lead guitar/trumpet and sax/keyboards, respectively) whom De Leon met while working at the preschool. He recruited long-time friend Jeanne Kennedy-Crosby (bass) and Zacery Stanley (of Dramady and Narwhal vs. Narwhal) to play drums.
De Leon still writes all the music and lyrics for Miss Massive Snowflake but understands his limitations.
“I’m not gonna tell Zach what drumline to play,” De Leon says, “because I don’t play drums. It’s about trusting the people you play with.”
A lyric from his first full-length MMS album, from the song “Swing of Hair,” seems a fitting display of De Leon’s philosophy and trust in music: “First we start by kissing the ones we love/ Then hold the hands of others less fortunate than us/ May your smiles become as numerous as the stars above/ If first we start by kissing the ones we love/ Then hold the hands of others less fortunate than us/ May this song embrace the people and fill them up with love.”
Miss Massive Snowflake knows they are an underground band, DIY in every sense of the phrase, but they have embraced this, showing that with good friends, family and music, you really don’t need much else. Except maybe an audience every once in a while.