Held in Splendor came out two months ago, and, so far, the reception has been very positive. Has any of the post-release excitement worn off yet?
Well, no, it just changes. It goes from this state of keeping these songs with yourself for months and they’re kind of like your little kids, your little children, and then you send them off to kindergarten or something. But the whole point is that we’re making the songs for people to enjoy and feel moved by and experience in their own way. In the live setting, that’s what we’re focusing on now — seeing how they can come to life over time and what they become on stage in the moment. And the feedback has been really good.
People are really excited to hear these songs. People are really happy. There’s that initial thing when you put out a new record, and you’re excited that people are hearing the physical recording of the songs, and then you bring them to life on tour, and that’s exciting in a new way.
Saturday’s show is the last one in the States. Are you excited to head to Canada and Europe? Do you guys have a lot of fans outside the US?
We’ve never been to Europe. We have had people reach out to us from over there over the past couple years, but this albums is the first time there’s been more of a push. It’s gonna be awesome. I don’t have specific expectations about numbers of people showing up to the shows, but hopefully it’ll be substantial and people will be psyched. There’s definitely people in Europe that have been emailing us for a long time being like “when are you coming here?” So that’ll be good.
We’ve played in Canada a bunch of times over the years. We’ve played in Montreal, Toronto, Vancouver several times, so more and more people come out. I mean, Canadians are just like Americans only a little more laid back. It’s not terribly, terribly different. And they have funny accents sometimes. Canada is sweet.
We’ve had really weird experiences in Canada too.
Like, the first time we ever went, we didn’t know anything about paperwork or properly preparing for border control, and because we didn’t have official permission, we had no promoter’s signature, they ended up only stamping our passports for one day. We had to pretty much cancel everything. We just went, ate poutine, and went to a bar and drank cocktails with sexual names at this weird bar. Beforehand, we had gotten all paranoid about bringing vegetation into another country, so we threw all our kale into a bush, and we got into Canada, we sat at this bar, and, when we left, our car had been broken into. They took my backpack, and they took this shitty VHS camera that we bought, and we were pretty much like “well, that’s that,” and we turned back around and booked it back to America without even having played a show. That was our introduction to Canada. But the shows have been a lot better since then.
You’re also playing SXSW and Austin Psych Fest this year. Do you guys enjoy playing in the festival atmosphere? You seem like a perfect festival band.
Oh yeah, of course! Austin Psych Fest is like the only festival we’ve ever played in terms of that magnitude of artists you’re surrounded by and it being more than one day. I never really thought of SXSW as a festival. It’s a like a big trade show. It’s always fun to, like, eat tacos and see all these friends from all over the country. It’s almost like summer camp. You can go swimming in your favorite swimming hole, you just bring your shorts and your suitcase, and you go and play some cool shows. But Psych Fest is different. It’s more concentrated, it’s more contained in one space. The people on the bill are just mind-blowing. Definitely going to be a highlight of the year, I think.
Lots of folks (including us) associate your music with psychedelics and hallucinations. Is this accurate? How much of Quilt’s music is influenced by these — erm — altered states of mind?
I think those words that are said often carry the stigma of specific usages of specific drugs, which is not something we’re against, but not something we overly talk about. I wouldn’t say that we write songs as odes to LSD, or something, specifically. Any kind of music can have a hallucinatory effect, even if it’s like a Rachmaninoff composition.
I think that, through our specific use of vocal harmonies and instrumentation, it’s very easy to link our sound to a certain time period — like the ‘60s and ‘70s aesthetic — and that time period is very associated with young people experimenting with certain kinds of drugs for the first time on a large scale. Our generation inherited a lot from that, and we carry a lot of memories with us that we never even had because of our fascination with the past, so there’s always that fine line between paying homage or trying to recreate that aesthetic that you really appreciate and you really like while playing the music that you wanna play.
If you’re asking whether we or not whether we take drugs and write songs, that’s not something we’re pushing as an idea. We approach life in maybe a relatively abstract way in comparison to some people, we share our lives with each other in a very real way, and we all really connect philosophically. And we have had weird, really trippy experiences together for sure, so it all sort of runs into together. Whether it’s new or old sounding is kind of irrelevant to me.
QUILT + CREATUROS + DOUG TUTTLE + WEYES BLOOD :: Saturday, March 1 @ Great Scott, 1222 Commonwealth Ave., Allston :: 9 p.m., 21-plus, $9 :: facebook event page :: advance tickets