Interview: Dog Food For Bananas, a Zelda-Themed Cover Band, Releases First Album “Fishing Hook”

The Legend of Zelda series offers many different musical styles, with soundtracks ripe with potential for covers, remixes, and re-imaginings. In the video game music (VGM) scene, one can find all styles of music represented, from soothing orchestral covers, to chill lo-fi, to heart-pumping metal. The VGM scene is filled with collaborations among musicians that result in some truly unique takes on everyone’s favorite tracks from across the gaming landscape.

In 2023, VGMCon, a video game music convention in Minneapolis, Minnesota, had an “Oops, All Zelda” theme, with musicians performing their takes on everything from “Song of Storms” to Breath of the Wild‘s Hyrule Castle theme. The newly-formed piano, violin, and guitar trio Dog Food For Bananas played an entire Zelda-themed set at the event. And in February of this year, they released their first album, Fishing Hook, which features music from Link’s Awakening, Majora’s Mask, A Link Between Worlds, The Wind Waker, and Spirit Tracks!

Zelda Dungeon was fortunate enough to, via Discord, interview Jay, the violinist for Dog Food For Bananas, about the band, the inspiration behind it, and their music. Please enjoy!

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Zelda Dungeon: How did your group come together?

Jay: All of us are friends in both the video game music (VGM) live performer scene, and Jake (the guitarist) wanted to play with me for fun, as we had a mutual appreciation for how we approach playing our instruments, in particular, guitar played in a rhythm-centric (but not exclusively!) manner, in combination with violin as a lead-centric instrument. We performed a secret, impromptu set at MAGWest 2022 under the staircase (if you’ve been to that hotel, you know the one), after the Kirby’s Dream Band set, for a bunch of our friends, which was a great time.

All of us are also in Dwelling of Duels, another VGM community that hosts monthly competitions, and for its Maxis month (e.g. any music from a Maxis developed/published game), I asked Chris to collaborate with us for our rendition of “Mall Rat” (The Sims shopping theme). Shortly after, we formed Dog Food For Bananas, as quite a few pieces fit together great, like the type and style of music we wanted to do, as well as our individual skills and experiences of being in different bands/projects.

How did you decide on the name for the band? (I think I listened to something like three of the songs in your set at VGMCon before I figured out it’s from the trading sequence in Link’s Awakening [I came in late])

Haha, that’s the perfect kind of realization that we want from that name. I’m a big fan of Link’s Awakening (I definitely recommend the Switch remake!), so, of course I pushed for it, and Chris and Jake are fans of it and its music. We had a couple Link’s Awakening inspired names on our short list, and I had a name similar to Dog Food For Bananas on there because I thought it’d be funny to have something that’s a reference to a random and small part of that game, in sort of an EarthBound-like comedic tone; the type of name that sort of reminds you of something familiar, but not quite all the way, but would give you a lightbulb moment later. Jake refined the name to its current form, and it hit right with all of us.

I’ve been in the VGM scene for quite a while at this point, so I’ve seen all kinds of great names to describe the essence of those projects. I can only thank the scene and other great musicians and friends for exposing the rest of us to so many great forms of music and their names, which lead to the spirit of a name like Dog Food For Bananas.

If I remember correctly, last year’s VGM Con was your first performance together. Have you done other live performances since then?

Yes, we played at MAGWest 2023! We’ve been taking a slight hiatus on performing live to take care of things in our own lives right now (early 2024), as well as to build up more of our digital catalog, and to think about how we want to approach things like performances in the longer term. The warm reception we had to both performances was a surprise, and we want to make sure we do right by our audiences.

We’re looking forward to performing more, soon!

How did you choose the tracks? I noticed you picked some tracks that are a little rarer to see — like “Milk Bar” and “Ravio’s Theme.”

I’m glad you noticed that, and I hope you enjoyed those rarer tracks getting played. We certainly want to play music that we love and appreciate, and some of those picks might go under-appreciated or under-played in the wider VGM sphere. I personally have always wanted to do the kind of deep delve into a game’s soundtrack like we did with our VGM CON 2023/MAGWest 2023 set list with Link’s Awakening, to go on a journey essentially from start to finish of a game, and it’s ALWAYS a treat to play a piece of music where I’m thinking, “Oh, yeah! This WAS awesome!”.

And, of course, the three of us have a lot of other offbeat tracks that we’d love to play (especially Chris!), and subsequently share our enjoyment with the audience. We’ve only had that one set list, so far, but I think we’ll continue with that concept of “delving deep”, and other tracks we’d love to play where we’re thinking, “Huh, we never really hear these played! Let’s play it!”.

It also has a coincidental bonus of shining light on composers who often go unnoticed; most of our set list WASN’T composed by Koji Kondo! Nintendo, in particular, has a LOT of great composers over the years across all of their games who’ve done incredible work.

What other VGM tracks would you like to perform and record?

Oh, we’ve got a giant (and always growing) list that includes music from Breath of the Wild, other Zeldas, Castlevanias, Chrono Trigger, Chrono Cross, the Final Fantasy series, and a bunch from different (and mostly earlier) Mario games, as well. There’s more that dips into various indie games, as well (like FEZ, Hollow Knight, and Hades), and bigger games, both old and new.

We also would also like to pick some of our favorites that would be unexpected with our instrumentation, like F-Zero’s “Mute City,” or music from the Mega Man series, that are usually done in rock styles.

What might be next for Dog Food For Bananas?

We’ve planned out and are working on our next albums and tracks to release digitally, over the course of 2024! And we’re looking to perform again starting from the latter half of 2024 and beyond.

We’re also discussing collaborating with other people/bands, too!

Thank you!

Thank you again!

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There you have it! I was surprised that my late realization of where the band name came from was intentional!

Dog Food For Bananas had great energy when I saw them live, and it was fun to gain more insight into how the band came together and their future goals. Their album, Fishing Hook, is available right now on Bandcamp. The tracks include “Seashell Mansion” (which includes a little secret), “Tal Tal Heights,” “Milk Bar,” “Ravio’s Theme,” “Dragon Roost Island,” and “Full Steam Ahead! (Overworld Adventure).”

You can find Dog Food for Bananas’ Linktree here and their YouTube channel here. On their YouTube channel are videos of both their VGMCon 2023 and MAGWest 2023 performances.

Jay, who also goes by Ronin Op F, has his own Link’s Awakening album, Link’s Restless Awakening, that you can find on your music service of choice here.

What do you think of Dog Food for Bananas and Fishing Hook? Are you excited to see more from this band? Let us know in the comments!

Source: Dog Food for Bananas