We’re delighted to announce that for the third year running, TVD will be taking SXSW. In tandem with our partners Audible Treats and Flüd Watches, we’re presenting Speakers Push Air, an official SXSW artist showcase this Friday night (3/15) at Austin’s Parish Underground. We continue the introductions of the bands in our SXSW showcase’s lineup with Lightouts, the Brooklyn-based retro-ish indie/fuzz rock band co-headlining the TVD showcase and whose debut album, Want, was released on March 5th.
Band founders Gavin Rhodes and Greg Nelson—along with bass guitarist Dean Perry—chatted with us ahead of the Austin festival. Five different singles were released ahead of Want, an epic double album that is the product of two years of songwriting and a successful crowdfunding campaign. The songs on Want are catchy, thoughtful, arty and decadent—basically everything a good indie rock album should be. The guys talked with us about their feelings on crowdfunding their debut, the current state of vinyl and the album format, and how they’ve found small-town camaraderie in the middle of New York City.
You guys met through rather old-school means—a paper want-ad on a bulletin board. Why that route as opposed to Craigslist or something?
Greg: Well it was a good thing for me because I really wanted to be local and really create the scene around where I live and where we live, which is South Park Slope and the Gowanus area, so having something super local like that was cool, so that was where I was looking more. I really wanted to be associated with the neighborhood. That area of Brooklyn is so interesting right now; South Slope and Gowanus musically is a totally different scene than Williamsburg.
Can you describe the South Slope scene a little bit? What makes it so different?
Greg: The venues have been popping up. Early on, the only venue in the area was Southpaw. But then Littlefield, Bell House, Union Hall, and Rockshop have opened up in that area. It’s a little more spread out and… just the feel of Gowanus—especially with Littlefield and Bell House being out there in the middle of nowhere—it’s different. It’s not just sort of that, I don’t even want to use the term “hipsters” or anything like that. It’s just different.
Gavin: But I think that’s a big part of it, though, honestly. I think Williamsburg is… when you go out there on a typical weekend night, I think it skews a lot younger than the part of Brooklyn that we’re in. Five years ago, there wasn’t really a vibrant nightlife going on in our neighborhood. It was a nice neighborhood; lots of young parents and young professionals and stuff like that. It’s really only in the past few years that it’s become its own scene and it’s nice, too, because whereas people in Manhattan go out into Williamsburg and other parts of Brooklyn, I feel that the scene in South Slope is very locally based. The word hasn’t gotten out quite yet; when you go out, you see the same people. It’s more of a neighborhood-y, intimate feel to me.
Greg: I think of South Slope as a village, where every bar you go to you known the owners, they usually live in the neighborhood, too; same thing with the coffee shops and the grocery stores. It’s like small-town America.
Dean: I agree. Before you even said that, Greg, I was thinking the same thing. I was thinking that I kind of think of South Slope—and Gowanus in a certain respect—as being like all the other towns in the country and less like what people think of New York as this big city where you’re anonymous, so you don’t know anybody.
You all feel pretty much the same way about this. Is it something that inspires you all creatively as musicians—having that small-town support feel to the area?
Gavin: Yeah, I think that’s definitely a part of it. I also think that it lends an outsider feel for us—for me, personally, at least. There are so many bands from Brooklyn. It’s such a cliché to be an indie rock band from Brooklyn. But most of those people tend to be up in Williamsburg or Greenpoint. Down here, we’ve kind of made it our mission to put Gowanus on the map as a bubbling, creative center. It does feel different to us and it does drive us.
Dean: Also walking the streets of Gowanus feels different from walking the streets of almost any other part of Brooklyn.
You guys crowdfunded Want. Do you feel like that’s the way to approach making albums now—if I can paraphrase Amanda Palmer’s TED Talk—not to make people support you but to let your fans support you?
Gavin: We have different views about this, and it was actually a big and hard decision for us to decide to go the crowdfunding route. To date, we had totally done everything ourselves and supported it out of our own pockets. We were making a little money here and there from shows; we were able to license some songs early on. When it came to [crowdfunding], it seemed to be the most viable thing to do and yeah, I do think it’s… I don’t know if it’s the only way to do record releases these days for independent artists. Because I think it can become kind of lame, you know? We just have a conscience where we’re like, if we’re making music that is worthy, we should be able to put it out ourselves. I think that bands that do it at a really young age…
Dean: It’s an ideal, though, right? As Gavin mentioned, we kind of have different opinions on this. I think that the power of the internet is not something to take lightly. It’s important when bands don’t have a lot of means to make a bunch of money… we’ve got to get our music out. It’s important to us and if there’s an avenue for us to do that on the web, I think we’d be selling ourselves short if we were just passing the hat.
Greg: I was probably the one who was most hesitant to do any crowdsourcing type stuff. Having done it, I think the one thing that was most beneficial—to me—it was actually kind of a slow burn promotional campaign for our stuff. You put out a pre-release single, maybe a little video, where it’s building awareness even if people don’t give the money or do the pre-sale or anything like that. There is an awareness that’s being built over time when you do that type of crowdsourcing, which I think is just as beneficial as whatever money we might receive in a lot of ways. Overall, I’m happy with it.
That’s an interesting range of opinions, as promised. You guys released a bunch of singles ahead of this album, which might make some think you’re more of a singles band. I know Want is a double album, but do you still think of yourselves as more of a singles band?
Greg: I do think that the album, thematically and everything… every time we wrote a song, thematically I was thinking in terms of how it might fit into an album. It’s was just a strategic thing we were thinking about, releasing singles earlier. But the plan always was to put them into an album.
Gavin, Dean: [agreeing]
Gavin: It was most definitely a strategic thing because we had a really strong feeling if we came out of the gates with a debut album , and we hadn’t really done anything before then, the album could kind of burn out very quickly. Originally, it wasn’t going to take us two years and we weren’t going to put out five singles before our album; the plan was more like a year to a year-and-a-half. It took a bit longer than normal, but it was definitely a strategy.
Do you feel, then, that the album format is the goal for you as far as what you do musically?
Greg: We are kids of the ‘90s. I personally love that format. I don’t think it’s antiquated in any way or anything along those lines.
Dean: I agree completely.
Greg: I love the idea of putting together [an album]. I love singles, I love individual songs, but putting them together in more of a long-form format… it’s much more of a challenge and I think it’s a richer experience overall. I can’t imagine ever giving up the album format.
Gavin: I agree.
Greg: I don’t think it’s about technology—that’s not the reason why. It’s not just how things were packaged at the time and what you could fit on vinyl or on a CD… I think there’s something behind that. I don’t think that [the album] is necessarily going to go away. I think music will exist in all different forms, but I personally hope that the album format sticks around.
Gavin: I do, too, and I think one of the cool things about it is that there’s a definite art to ordering your tracks. It took us a while to figure out the best order for all these songs because we put a lot of them out on singles already, so we were very used to them in a certain order. I think it’s a dying art. And especially when you talk about vinyl… you’re doing a tracklisting for two sides that has to be cohesive as a unit, but also for each side when you have to turn it over. I think we’ll always be an album-oriented band.
Dean: The one thing I was thinking, Gavin, is that I’m all about the album. The one thing I miss, really, is having two sides because it allows you to kind of break it up a little bit. We don’t really get that anymore.
Well, you know we’re all about vinyl around here. I can gather how you all feel about it personally, but from a professional standpoint, do you think there’s a future for the format?
Greg: I kind of work in technology and studying the history of it… when they thought that film was going to destroy the play, and then television was going to destroy film, and then the internet was going to destroy television. We’re not seeing that to be the case, really. Everything finds its place, and vinyl provides and experience that we’ve absolutely proven can’t be duplicated. Also, the tactile experience… I think vinyl is more vibrant now than it was ten years ago.
Gavin: I think that it’s always going to be a niche. I think it’s really hitting its stride right now with people really using it as a premium product—with 180-gram vinyl, colored vinyl, picture discs, whatever. I think it’s always going to be very genre-specific, more towards indie music, like indie rock or hip-hop. There are certain genres where it makes sense. It does seem strong now, and there are plenty of USB turntables out there to where it’s incorporated into people’s technology already. It seems promising.
Dean: Can I also add that I probably have the least experience with vinyl of the band, although I do own a record player, thank you very much! [Laughs] If I want to dance at a dance party or a dance club, which I will do on occasion, I do not want to see a dude up there without turntables. I know that’s not all there is to it, but there’s a viability and a legitimacy to it, at least when it comes to the dance party, I can tell you that. [Laughs]
What about your own record—do you feel like it would be best represented on vinyl?
Gavin: That is one of the big questions. One of our original goals for crowdfunding was going to do vinyl. Unfortunately the cost was really prohibitive because if we were going to do it, we wanted to do it on white vinyl, 180 gram, with a really nice jacket and all this stuff inside. We budgeted for pressing the CDs and the PR campaign.
Greg: It still is a possibility, though. I would love to put it out on vinyl.
Gavin: I would, too. I think it would be awesome.
Dean: I would, too.
Let’s talk a bit more about Want. I can hear those musical influences you talk about in the press release—The Cure, the Stone Roses, among others—but I’d like to hear more from you guys about how it came together for you and what makes it stand on its own as a debut.
Greg: I think the songwriting process was actually really unique. How it all started out was Gavin had a bunch of instrumental demos that he gave me, and it was sort of like a puzzle to me to find ways to fit the lyrics within those demos at that time. Oftentimes, I would try to keep what Gavin’s title of the demo was and I’d try to work the theme of the song somehow into that title and into the demo. When Dean came on, we started working together musically a lot more and that was really interesting. The title track, “Want” and the opening track, “Not Today” were where he really added a big element to the musical sound to the band.
Gavin: For me, personally, where these original demos come from, it was a bit of a return to form to my early days of playing guitar. When I first started playing guitar, I was super into The Cure and stuff, but as a teenage boy, you want to play guitar loud and distorted. So, I was really into that style of playing. Then in the mid- to late-‘90s, I was doing some solo stuff and it was decidedly more… clean. A little bit more jangly; there wasn’t much distortion and it wasn’t super rockin’. And when I was done with it, I realized that I had been holding back on rocking out as much just because it wasn’t fashionable. I wasn’t listening to that same kind of music anymore and so when I started writing this new batch of songs, I thought I’m just going to do what feels really real and natural, and that’s what came out. It’s not super shredding, but it definitely rocks. And there’s hooks. [Laughs] It did bring me back to being sixteen or seventeen and playing guitar.
Gavin, I know that you have a promotional background through Audible Treats. Because you have both a PR and an artist standpoint, do you have a different perspective as far as your songwriting goes—maybe a mindfulness to marketing your music as you guys write it?
Gavin: Yeah! [Laughs] Dean and Greg can tell you that!
Dean: He does! He does! [Laughs]
Gavin: The interesting thing about it is that yeah, I think it’s helped us a lot, because there are a lot of pitfalls that I think we’ve avoided that young bands can make—easy mistakes. I think the flip side of that is that at times it almost makes me over-compensate and over-think things and doubt that things will work. It’s not that cynicism, but it’s being very, very critical of the process of marketing and doing the PR of it and making sure that we aren’t coming across like something that I think would not work for us.
Greg: But don’t you think that there’s an awareness that you have to be true to your own self because the really bad thing would be changing our sound in some way to meet some sort of marketing goal or fit in a particular genre that might be working right now. That might be the real learning experience, not to change your sound for those specific things.
Gavin: For me, personally, that’s never been a consideration that we should change our sound or we should cover a Justin Bieber song or something like that. It’s more about how we present ourselves. To be honest, when we came out, one of the early labels that we got was like “a golden return to ‘90s rock” or something like that. At the beginning, we really embraced that and thought that was really cool—like, right on, ‘90s alternative rock is coming back around!
But I think that as we got into that and started to go down that road, we realized that it was actually becoming a bit limiting and that people were just thinking that we were like Superdrag or some generic, ‘90s alternative band. I think that was one case where we had to re-define exactly what our message was for what our sound is actually like.
You go into things with your eyes more open now.
Gavin: Yeah, definitely.
Are you doing anything unique for our SXSW showcase on Friday night? Anything to stand out from the crowd in Austin?
Gavin: That’s a good question…
Dean: Are other bands going to be there? [Laughs]
Gavin: There’s a few, I think. [Laughs]
Dean: Gavin, I think we’ve got another show with our friends from Brooklyn here.
Gavin: We’re going to be playing another show with Ace Reporter, who are on The Vinyl District showcase as well. We’re going to be playing something with them on Saturday. I don’t know, though… that’s not something we’ve really talked about, doing something to stand out. We are definitely going to be super prepared.
The one thing that Greg and I learned from last year is to be ready to do anything at the drop of a hat. There are so many bands that are playing there, and there are so many things going on, that it’s actually common for bands to drop out of something at the last minute, so you can jump onto something. We were able to do that last year. We got onto this thing called “Jam in the Van” which is this big RV that drives around the country with a crew and they have a mobile recording studio in it and they make films. So, they had last-minute openings and Greg and I were able to jump right in. I’m hoping that some stuff like that will happen this year as well.
What’s coming up for you guys after SXSW? I know you’ve got a few other live dates scheduled.
Dean: We’ve got a couple of videos coming out over the next couple of months in support of the record. Some of our more hook-y tunes on that record are going to have some really cool videos directed by some cool directors at some really great locations around the New York area.
Greg: We’re working with a really great choreographer/director, Jordana Toback and she works with a lot of awesome dancers. We shot the video for “See Clear” out on Governor’s Island during the big jazz fest that takes place out there. We ran around the island with the dancers and Jordana directing and choreographing us. It’s just an amazing, magical space right off the tip of Manhattan.
Gavin: Jen, did you see “The Eloise Suite” video with the dancers?
Yes. It’s pretty damn awesome.
Gavin: The woman who did that is doing the next two videos for us—“See Clear” and “The Big Picture” have dancers in them. She’s been an amazing resource for us for sure.
Dean: I think these are going to be a big part of a success of the record because these videos are not your thrown-together-in-your-bedroom videos. We take them seriously and we’re all pretty excited about how they are going to come out.
Gavin: I’ve got a question for you, Jen. I’m always interested to hear what songs you’re feeling the most or what stands out to you.
Okay, you’re going to think I’m BSing you because this is the one that’s been written about the most, but I really like the title track, “Want.” It resonates a lot to me as a writer and I’ve hung around musicians forever, and I get wanting to see results for your hard creative work. Trying not to want anything is insanely difficult, because when you want things too badly, you tend not to get them. Or you get the wrong things. But you still want! It was really a cool song lyrically and musically it moved me as well.
Gavin: Well, awesome! It’s been great talking to you.
It was great talking to all of you as well. Best of luck on Friday night, and have a great SXSW.
