You may consider a recording a hermetically-sealed moment in time but you can’t do the same thing to the musicians who created it. Take Delta Spirit’s 2007 debut Ode to Sunshine. The band’s Americana mixed with indie and country rock attracted loads of praise and gained a devoted following. But the thought of remaining in that musical world is anathema to the quintet’s creative mindset.
On the follow up, History from Below, the members tweaked that sound. Then, on last March’s self-titled release they offered a nod to Sunshine but, overall, they moved further away from it. Delta Spirit has more in common with latter day My Morning Jacket and Wilco than the roots-soaked notes of Uncle Tupelo, Calexico, Jayhawks and Cracker.
I caught frontman Matt Vasquez prior to a show at Turner Hall in Milwaukee. A history buff, he described his locale. “It’s this old building from the 1880s. The stage leans forward at a really crazy angle, not a 45 degree angle but if you had an amp with wheels on it, it’s going to roll off the stage. And it’s also where a bunch of German Communists used to gather and had their rallies here. ”
A few days later Vasquez asks the crowd at Cleveland’s Beachland Ballroom about that venue. It was a Croatian social center and dance hall.
Presenting another example of how Delta Spirit is open to change things up, the members invited students from School of Rock Cleveland to join them onstage to perform “White Table” after seeing a YouTube video of the aspiring musicians perform the number.
JPG: I really got turned on to Delta Spirit when I saw the band play Bonnaroo back in 2009.
MV: I think to date that’s the most surprising and thrilling – we’ve had some pretty thrilling shows since then – but that one is certainly never going to leave my mind for how insane it got. When you’re playing and then your show gets cancelled and you have all these people working really hard to make it happen…our flight got cancelled on the way in. (All but one of the band members – bassist Jon Jameson – got the last seats on a later flight. Taking a different plane, his route landed far from Manchester, Tennessee.)
We had never played in front of that many people before, and our bass player drove 100 miles-per-hour in the rain just to make it. And he got there right when we were getting onstage.
It was like one of those things where destiny was kicking you in the balls for two days straight without sleep and then it turned around and became one of the best things ever. Life has a funny way of doing that to you sometimes.
*JPG: Yeah, turned out to be a great experience because I didn’t know too much about you at the time. It reminds me of what people say about SXSW. You accidentally show up some place and happily discover an artist that was completely unknown beforehand. *
MV: Yeah, we did so much work this year [at SXSW]. It was crazy. It was 16 shows that we did. We were so exhausted but it was really fun. Sunday, I really wanted to see my buddy, John McCauley’s new group, Diamond Rugs. I walked out of the hotel and I was completely exhausted. It was really weird. Never had that happen before.
JPG: Did you end up making it to the show or did you just turn around and head back to bed?
MV: Oh, I made it to the show. There was no stopping me from making it to the show but it was pretty rough. I was just all shaky and weird. It was really tough but it was good to see Steve [Berlin] and John and all those guys. They’re all such cool dudes.
Some of those SXSW shows were like that. The IFC one that we played was very much in the hell day where we did four shows, and then the fourth show was the IFC one. You know how when you’re at the end and it’s either going to go really good or really bad? It went really good. Nice to have one of those.
*JPG: Moving on to the new album, why does this feel to you more like what Delta Spirit is than previous releases? How do you feel about your previous two albums? *
MV: It’s more of what Delta Spirit is now than what it is in the past. Delta Spirit is every bit as much Delta Spirit was who made Ode to Sunshine or what that Delta Spirit was. It’s just like people grow up. People learn new things.
What made this record self-titled was the fact that we were finally a quintet again. There’s a musical voice that’s missing on that second record. And there was always a musical voice missing, somebody that was really able in terms of ability and eloquence to make what they are trying to see out of a song come across. And Will McLaren, our new guitar player is my favorite guitar player. It’s so great.
JPG: Did the band get tired of being viewed in a certain way based on Ode to Sunshine ?
MV: It’s not fun to feel pigeonholed ever. That’s like, ‘Hey! There goes Jimmy, the nice guy.’ And even Jimmy the Nice Guy wants to be the Bad Guy sometimes or has to be the Bad Guy sometimes. It sucks when people are like, ‘There goes Steve, the asshole’ and no one appreciates being pigeonholed. Same way with music.
We are always playing music that we are always heavily influenced by and inspired by. That’s more the word, ‘inspired’. We’ve always taken a bunch of different influences and thrown them in the songs. And that’s what the aesthetic of Delta Spirit has always been. If you listen to “History from Below,” there are Waits-esque songs and Dylan-esque songs but there’s also Peter Gabriel essence in that record and Nick Cave essences in that record and Replacements essences…And this is more Kanye and Nick Cave, Grinderman, a little more Paul Simon than last time, just more focused.
And it just came from clear streams of creativity where I was writing and recording songs like “Tear It Up” and “Tellin’ the Mind” were two songs that I didn’t have any direction or any purpose other than to write music that I could just write and then I could come back to writing in the direction of what I thought we wanted to go with Delta Spirit. When they heard “Tellin’ the Mind” and “Tear It Up” they were like, ‘No, we really like these.’ And that was one of the clues from a year ago that the record was gonna go in this direction.
Delta Spirit performing “White Table” with School of Rock Cleveland – photo by John Patrick Gatta
JPG: You talk about being inspired by musicians, what about location because you formed in San Diego, moved to Long Beach, now living in Brooklyn, and then recorded Delta Spirit in Woodstock?
MV: For music you learn a new trick, a new chord, a new phrasing or a new rhyme scheme or a new arrangement of the song and those things they inspired tenfold. Same with places. And being in Long Beach for the time we spent there was so great because we had this great community of friends and I think that our community in terms of our close-knit group of friends were either moving to New York or Los Angeles. So, it was kind of high time to go. Also, I got married in between the last record and this one. My wife is from Norway, so I just want to be a lot closer to her folks and I get to be in a city with a tremendous amount of energy. And we’ve always loved New York. It’s a different animal to be there. It’s so inspiring.
JPG: Singing lyrics written by Kelly Winrich (keyboards) does he sit down with you to explain them so you can get into his mindset or does he just hand them over and let you figure it out?
MV: It depends. There’s some things, like if there’s a vocal inflection that he likes out of a song. Like “Otherside,” I was singing it very staccato and he wanted it legato. So he was like, ‘Just lay it back, man.’ And a I was like, ‘Alright. All good.’ It’s very light like that.
In terms of topics it’s not hard to figure what he’s writing about because we’re really close.
JPG: I was going to say a song of his such as “California” is real heartbreaking each time I listen to it.
MV: I know what girl’s about what song. That definitely spurs me on to feel it when I sing it. I never have to sing a Kelly song from his perspective, which is nice. For me getting to play “California” is very much all of us. He didn’t even want that song on the record because it was so personal to him, and still is. But we really wanted to play and play it loud. It brings a different aesthetic and message because we want to pick our brother up.
JPG: Why did Colton Harris Moore deserve an anthem (“Tellin’ the Mind”)?
MV: Because…well, why did Jesse James deserve an anthem and all the songs that he got? He exhibits all the traits of a folk hero and he’s a folk hero in our day and time. He didn’t deserve a bluegrass song. It’s crazy. It’s a sad story. He’s so obviously gifted and intelligent and he had a real crap dad. He stole three planes. He never landed one. He just crash landed them. He stole cars. He stole money. Never was a violent guy. He donated money to the ASPCA. (slight laugh) He stole some money and left the money at an animal shelter and wrote a little letter, ‘Give this to the animals, Barefoot Bandit.’ Reading that I was just dying laughing. He’s got his Facebook while he’s doing all this crazy shit. And he also has an iPhone that he’s listening to police band on his iPhone. If that guy’s not worthy of a song then I don’t know who is worthy of a song.
JPG: When I was looking over Harris Moore’s bio and the things he did, it reminded me of the Leonardo DiCaprio character in Catch Me If You Can, which is based on a true story.
MV: Exactly. You think about that movie and you hear about this guy’s life. If they’d ever make a movie about him you certainly play a similar movie in your head. And I wanted to be a part of it. I wanted to write a song for at least the soundtrack in my head.
JPG: With all the textures on Delta Spirit, it’s very much a studio album. Is there a certain amount of adapting you did to bring a studio recording into a live situation?
MV: No because the variable is always the audience and the audience is what dictates us going deeper, and we’ll always try to encourage certain involvement. When you have an excited audience songs just naturally go there. We’ve been adapting since the second record. We’ve been using drones and synth loops since our second record. After working with Chris Coady he taught us how to use MPC Pads and all sorts of fun shit. So now, we’ve worked it out to a way where we never have to use a click. So, everything that is played it’s through triggers and Kelly’s hitting them with drumstricks while he’s playing the organ, which is really cool. Specific drums sounds are like sickening reverb-swelled ooze or just crazy drum samples. The piano sound on “California” is actually a piano note that we recorded, that we chopped down and put it into a MPC Pad, and Kelly literally plays the track. So there’s still performance space in the recording situation.
JPG: What about your fans’ reaction to “Delta Spirit” because your debut had a particular Americana sound while the new one moves away from that? Are you getting any grief from those who are like, ‘Aww, I liked your first record but then you changed’?
MV: It’s still happening at a concert, that’s for sure. What happened to us on our second record I feel like a lot of people said the same thing and we had the same amount of people, which is such a minority of people. A lot of folks when they hear something like that and they’re already listening for, ‘Oh, great. it’s gonna be like this.’ And then, in their imagination try to take away all the soulfulness in the existing record. It’s like placebo effect.
In between our first and third record it’s suddenly become really popular to be an Americana folk band, and we’re not necessarily interested in doing the popular thing. We write songs to write songs and make music to make music. And the response, especially to the new shit that we’ve been playing live, has been so so incredible. Just people coming up and being like, (mimics overly enthusiastic fan) ‘I had no idea! Ahhhh…!’ That is encouraging.
JPG: Is it a matter of just follow your muse and you hope enough people will follow?
MV: We’re not going to make a hundred of the same record or, hopefully, not gonna make even two of the same record. Geez, because why would you do that? If you’re not striving or reaching then what’s the point in doing it. That’s where we come from, man. We love it and believe in it and chase it.
