The Indigo Elephant Newsletter

#2: What the Hell is a Red White Elephant (History Pt. 1)

Author

Indigo Elephant
September 22, 2025

Hello from Indigo Elephant!

Welcome to the 2nd issue of The Indigo Elephant Newsletter! I’m Julius and I’m the drummer for the band. I also do most of the social media stuff! We decided to start a newsletter because we wanted a space to go more in-depth about the inner working of the band, and let y’all more into the behind the scenes for our growing project. Going anything more than surface level with a social media post can get lost in the data-space, so it’s nice to have a place where I can yap as much as I want, and connect with people willing to read it!

Writing about a band’s history can be tough when there are few people who care to remembers the facts, especially because we’ve been around for a while. There are few to fact-check what I recall, and the strongest source of truth I have is Apple iCloud timestamps from ages past. I’ve spent the last 2 weeks crawling through my photos archive, trying to get the facts straight and wrangle them into a semblance of a correct timeline. So before I even say anything about what became Indigo Elephant, thank you for wanting to take this journey with me!

All of the founding bandmates that would become Indigo Elephant crossed paths at UC Davis in Davis, California. Our three founding members were Julius (me), Brenden, and our now former band member Nick. Nick and I knew each other from both elementary and high school, while we became friends with Brenden within the first week of undergrad in 2012. All three of us had grown up with musical backgrounds - we all were in marching band throughout high school, and we were all multi-instrumentalists (even though I quit piano in the 5th grade). Throughout our undergrad, we joined musical extracurriculars to perform when we weren’t studying (I did taiko drumming, Nick was in jazz band, and Brenden played in the percussion ensemble + moonlighted as a KDVS student radio DJ). After becoming close friends, we would end up going to see bands such as Two Door Cinema Club and Vampire Weekend when they toured through Sacramento, and that inspired us to start jamming and write songs with each other. I would say that we all had our different circles in college, but we always made time to hang out with each other when it came to anything music!

Us with the band Pacific Air in 2012, they were opening for TDCC, I think they disbanded but became the band Mating Ritual

The first ever time we shared the stage was in 2014 for a event that is completely memory-holed from my brain. All I can recall is that it was in San Francisco, we decided to wear all blue button ups and khaki pants, our name was “The Soulution", and we got completely outshined by a group of high-schoolers covering Paramore. I have a video snippet of the performance as well, but compression was not kind to a video file created in 2014.

I think we were covering “Treasure” by Bruno Mars. It was a different time, but we still have much love for the friends who played with us here!

Nick and I finished our Bachelor’s in 2016, but we ended up staying in town working while Brenden was still finishing up his own degree. I’m not sure who approached me first, but in March 2017, either Nick or Brenden broached the topic of starting a band with all three of us, and had found a talent show to be our first gig. They showed me the original demos they were cooking, a mix of indie, folk, funk, and soul tracks. Within a week we learned the songs as a semi-acoustic trio, and walked over to the now defunct Aggie Re-Use building to play our first gig!

what the hell even is my technique here, also we look so baby

And thus was the beginning of… Red White Elephant?

Yeah we didn’t start out as Indigo Elephant. For the Aggie Re-Use talent show, we were tripping over ourselves deciding what our name was. Brenden had this elephant piggy bank on a shelf in his living room - he just named the two colors that the elephant had on it’s side. We were so done trying to come up with a name that we just gave in and said sure, that’s our name. No reason other than a brewing sense of frustration and apathy. After the show, we were too lazy to think harder on it, and the name would stick for a few months, for better or worse…

Next issue, we’ll talk about how Cliff joined the band, and some of our first shows as a full ensemble!

Our first photo together as a band, with the titular Red White Elephant itself

A gift from the band!

A preview of our 2025 promo band photos!

For the new album that we’re dropping (mid-October btw), we wanted to get bunch of new shots for promo. Not gonna lie I think we look tuff. We haven’t had new shots since 2022, so it felt really important to us to change our visual identity as we enter the next chapter of our band :)

that’s levi in the middle left btw say good job levi, he doesn’t join the story until 2025

Also, in posts where I talk about the history of the band, I want to include an album or two of the time period covered. Not trying to be elitist and name stuff that y’all haven’t heard of, but more stuff that I remember us being really into. Since I spedrun over 5 years, here’s Spotify links to 5 albums that we listened to, from 2012 to 2017:

2012: Beacon - Two Door Cinema Club - the first we went to together was a tdcc concert!

2013: Modern Vampires of the City - Vampire Weekend - i remember biking on campus before the show, and passing by ezra koenig smoking a cigarette

2014: Atlas - Real Estate - a song of the new record we’re dropping was really inspired by this band

2015: Currents - Tame Impala - god this record is a classic, i dunno if mr kevin parker will ever surpass this, but he doesn’t have to, he made his mark

2016: Blonde - Frank Ocean - idk how you could say you were in college in 2016 and not have spun blonde at least once

2017: Flower Boy - Tyler the Creator - really appreciated this vibe shift after cherry bomb, and it introduced us to rex orange county

Until next time,

This isn’t our logo, it’s just a great design, but it’s our logo for now until we make one for real haha