After completing a lengthy international tour, The Growlers recently stopped through the desert of Arizona to kick off another U.S. tour. The tour concludes with a five night run at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, and then it’s back overseas. The Growlers have been living on a pretty intense tour life for a while now. Despite the tiring road life these California natives still go beyond just spreading their groove, covering their crowds with golden shimmers of surfy guitar waves and refreshingly honest and soulful lyrics.
Sitting down with lead singer Brooks Nielsen in Phoenix he alludes to the demands of touring and some California emotions. His songwriting process of assembling poetry into music is somewhat reminiscent of Jim Morrison, another strong lone lyricist to “ride the highway west.” In the end seeing crowd members enjoy the grooves sure seemed to bring warm energy to Nielsen as he softly swayed on stage, microphone in hand, with a certain smile. A new day brings a new town, leaving behind a little golden Growlers dust. The quiet morning hides the howls of a once-growling night, and the ever-burning sun rises again…
To what extent were you at all influenced by sixties surf music?
I heard it growing up and I think that was a part of it, but Matt was really into The Ventures. We quickly kind of went through that and sixties psych stuff and moved on.
What music influenced you a lot growing up?
I really didn’t care about music when I was young. I wouldn’t buy a CD or pick a band, it was just kind of what my friends were listening to. They were into punk and The Misfits, and things like that. I guess the most music I heard was from my mom. She was really into R&B and hip-hop.
*If it wasn’t music, what do you think you would be doing? *
I think I was pretty content just working for my dad. So I’d be building water fountains.
Are you still not listening to a lot of music, and just focusing on making music?
Yeah, I still hear music from friends playing it. I don’t really tend to listen. I think early on I thought, “Oh, I don’t want to listen to music on purpose so I don’t have anything in my head when I make this stuff.” At this point we are just touring so much there’s so much constant playing music that I get a little burned out on it and when I get home I just want to be.
Your song lyrics seem to reflect reality. Do you write them mainly from your own experience of life?
Yeah, if not me than very close to my-my friends and small family. I’m just being honest about everything real close to me.
I’ve heard you play a little bit of guitar, do you still do that?
Not so much really. I probably should be. When I get home I’m just trying to put the pieces back together to build an actual home because we’re gone so much. It’s spending time and checking in with the family and trying to spend as much time as I can with my chick and then back on the road. I only had like two weeks off at a time for the last six tours.
When you write songs do you write them like poetry and go to the band to put it together?
In every way. We have a small amount of time to make a record and a small amount of money and we don’t want to waste it so it consumes everything. I shut everybody out and just focus. So it’s me writing poetry. It’s me finding melodies and humming them. It’s me trying to get the guys to put up everything that they can to me and me playing troubadour to it and humming to it and creating an idea and structuring it all.
Are you at all a fan of Jim Morrison? I think of him as a very strong lyricist and you’re a strong lyricist.
Yeah definitely. When I met Matt he was really into The Doors. I had never known anyone that was really into them. I heard a lot of that in the beginning. When we were younger we used to take a lot of psychedelics and stuff so it was pretty funny we were just trying to imitate these lifestyles. I think he’s really unique. He was a good shit talker and a very good poet.
Do you all still live together in LA?
We finally scattered. We always lived together. It was kind of a golden rule for The Growlers to get along and create as much as possible. In the beginning we had jobs so it made since to kind of make a spot where we could get away from everything and sit and all together all the time do it, but we kind of grew out of it and we were forced to split up. Some guys are in Orange County and some of us are spread out in LA.
You guys have been touring all over lately, what have been some of your favorite stops?
New Zealand was really special. We went and stayed at a house on the beach and surfed for four days. It felt like vacation.
I saw a fan got naked on stage in Australia..has that happened before?
I think so yeah, but these guys took the cake. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.
How did that happen?
One was dancing crazy, then the other one showed him up by getting naked and spreading his butt cheeks, and then the other guy couldn’t be outdone and came back naked and swung from the pipes on the ceiling upside-down, grabbing all the fans, and at the end came up on the stage and gave me a big fat kiss on the lips.
Did he kicked out afterwards?
No (laughs). Nobody cared. I think they were just afraid to touch them.
Do you resonate with being called Beach Goth? Has it grown on you or are you sick of it?
I think it made a little more sense in the beginning, especially for one record in particular, Hot Tropics. There were lots of songs about death and songs in minor chords, or kind of darker with more surf guitar and beats. I never really have cared, and I understand people that write need something to spread awareness of The Growlers and make it interesting. I think we’re beyond that, but it’s difficult to explain your sound and I usually get to lazy to get in depth so I just say rock n’ roll.
Maybe you won’t people to put it into words, but what is it about California that just does it for you? You have a song that says, ‘California is what we love’.
It’s Mediterranean climate. Climate is the first thing, it pushes everything and you notice it when you go to places. A lot of places aren’t really sunny and when they get sunny they come to life and people start hanging out in parks and taking their clothes off. We have that all the time. We grew up with some of the raddest surf pioneers in California and those are our dad’s and friend’s dads. We got kind of spoiled from that beach life, and a bit arrogant. Checking out the rest of the world was a trip because everywhere is special and especially when you meet someone there who can properly show it and you really get to know a city. There’s places all around the world I would definitely live in, but I can’t leave the beach because once we grew up that way we can’t turn it off.
Do you or the guys have any other major hobbies outside of music making?
Yeah, I think definitely surfing. We don’t get to do it as much as we’d like to. It’s little things like reading books because you have very little time to yourself. Other than that we are really consumed with the band because it’s all how much you put into it. Each show is another event to get all the production ready for. So, it’s us playing on the stage trying to make things fun for fans, and trying to handle the business of it because you might go into this business very naive, because you don’t think it’s a business. You’re just making music, but if you don’t tend to it properly you’re just wasting your time and building debt and that’s not fun.
Sometimes you have a friend dressing up as a drag queen, DMTina, how did that come about?
I wanted to try something new for the Chinese Fountain album tour so I thought I’d make a drag queen. I picked out the songs for her and the outfit and work with her and do some rehearsals. I hit up a friend of mine who was kind of a struggling actor, not really doing anything, and he said he was down. He’s also a bit of a heavy drinker and a rager so it ended up being completely crazy, but it was fun. We played a lot of places and to a lot of people that haven’t seen drag queens, and it’s pretty crazy to them. It’s good fun. It was her trick to find a different object- a cooler lid, a guitar case, or some big salad tray or bowl – and she’d go into the crowd and surf, and then proceed to take of her clothes and get naked.
You guys are known to come up with some fun things on stage like Chinese dragons once. Do you like to do that just for special shows?
We try to spread it out because it’s a lot of work and when we’re on the road we don’t know how to get a lot of these things. It started from us doing shows at home and then at the Beach Goth festival, and doing a Valentine’s themed show in Hollywood. It became fun. We did it in some of the big cities with the Chinese dragons. We did it in Vancouver, New York, and Austin. The more we can do the better because it cost money for us, but it make the whole occasion so much more fun.
Are you guys working on another album right now?
No, and I’m not sure when we can do the next one. We’re always ready for that. I’m not worried about it. We’re just gathering up experiences and soon as we get a chance to unload it all it comes out pretty easily.
Has the music taken off more than you really expected?
We never really have had expectations in any way. I was really content with nothing. I worked, had a pretty girlfriend, and would go surfing down the street. I never really cared to travel. Someone would be like, “Do you want to go to Europe?” and I would think, “For what?” The band took off and forced me into it and I am now very grateful and I love traveling and seeing the whole world. It worked out. I don’t know how big or small we thought things could get, but I definitely look back and see a lot of my decisions were made in ‘keep it small’ and record at home.
Have you chilled out relatively as a band?
It’s on or off. We used to be balls out every single night and now it depends, but shit happens when you’re on the road. You find funny stuff or one of the guys starts getting to drink during the daytime, or two naked guys jump on stage and spread their butt cheeks and everything changes.
What is your advice to the young musicians out there trying to make it work?
I think you just have to be prepared that it takes a long time, just like anything, to get good at what you do in order to get results. There are so many things tugging at you and nothing is really a game changer. You don’t get like one gig or one special interview or one thing on TV and all of a sudden you’ve made it—that one big festival—none of that really happens so there’s no reason to really jump the gun on anything. You just gotta get good at your craft and try to hold onto your integrity. You can lose your integrity if you try to take a short cut.
What does the music mean to you at this point? Because now you’re in it.
I feel like I’m sacrificing myself and some of my health and most of my life to make other people happy. There is wear and tear, but at this point there’s no other way for me to do it. It also helps me because it’s a way to relieve some stress and open up emotionally because I am a pretty closed person and this is my way of doing it, through writing songs, but mostly I would be completely content with not doing it. It’s mostly for everybody else.
One day you’re just gonna be sitting on the beach, building a fountain and think…
(Laughs) “Hey, I missed that.”
