LouFest 2014: Delta Spirit

It's all about crafting a story in the song for Brooklyn-based indie rockers Delta Spirit. They're buskers turned friends turned singer-songwriters. Here, singer Matt Vasquez talks to SLM about their bright, soulful sound and how it's shaped. 

Tell me about how you got started.

I grew up a busker, I loved to busk. I went to the principal’s office for it in seventh grade. When I got a driver’s license, and I was living in California, I drove to San Diego and Los Angeles pretty often busking. And one night Brandon Young, our drummer, was out and about with his friend. It was his friend’s last day living downtown San Diego, and he walked up and said ‘Hello.’ He thought I was good and that kind of started a friendship. And we were all friends for probably four or five years before we started the band.

How would you describe your music?

How would I describe it? Umm, loud. The songs are kind of, it’s like songwriting for songwriting’s sake. There’s no real, at least in the form, there is no form. It’s just trying to do either modern story-songs, or more meta pop songs that aren’t just boy-girl, boy-girl. Or boy meets girl.

Where do you pull those ideas from?

The newspaper, life experience, books, everything. Also from each other’s experiences. I’ll sometimes write about something, or harp about something that someone else is going through in the band and they let me do that. Sometimes I just need to create a character. I have a metaphor I need to share, and I need to create the character to tell the story I want to tell.

Give me an example of that.

Let me think. “Before my Enemy” is one. You could take it two ways, because it’s pretty vague. It can either be Red Dawn, or it can be somebody that’s suffered from a drone strike and lost his whole family. And he reaches this last letter that his wife wrote to him that he hadn’t read yet. Before the moment of this great decision that he makes, he reads the letter and changes his mind.

You're not really pinned down to one style of music.

That’s the thing. I mean Bruce Lee has kung-fu but he’s got no style. I know it sounds crazy. That’s probably weird imagery. But that’s the only one I know. There’s bands with shtick. We grew up thinking that shtick was dumb and insincere and we try our best to avoid that and do the things that we just flat-out love, and focus on that, and try to kind of ignore the quote-unquote “title” people hook on you.

What are you really set on having?

Passion. Just a great song with great lyrics, great melody, more than one melody. An energy with five people playing something that they figure out on their own off of the root of the song. And then it goes into a different direction and then it becomes this band. Or any band like that. The Beatles do that, My Morning Jacket does that, Deer Tick does that. Every band band does that kind of thing. We wanna be that, instead of solo songwriter guy who calls the shots. That’s fun and cool, that’s not what this is. This is a family of musicians having a discussion.

How does that translate to playing live?

That’s the thing. When it translates live, you get five people playing like they really, truly mean it. It feels like a riot. You’re just trying to well up what the song means every time. Every song that comes up, you just try to pull it all together and just kind of throw it up at people. It’s really fun.

What’s playing a festival like?

The festival thing is super different than the club thing. It just depends on how many people you get to play in front of when it comes to the festival thing. If the weather’s right, it’s like playing in front of this many-celled amoeba jellyfish thing that you want to please. You just turn into a rubber band because the energy’s so crazy.

How are you feeling about playing LouFest?

It’s gonna be fun, we’re really excited about it. So Loufest is actually right before our record comes out. We have a new record coming out on September 9. We’re actually just getting ready. We’ll have done all of our preproduction for tour and are just super excited to play all these new songs. We wrote 45 for the record.

We worked out our record in New York and we went through two summers with it, and a really cold winter. It was crazy, we lost everything in Hurricane Sandy. Right where Newtown Creek in Brooklyn is. When the storm surge came, Newtown Creek is one of a few EPA zones in New York, so we just got this oil Exxon-Valdez wave in our studio. They had to gut it out. We were actually in New Orleans the day it happened, it was crazy. We rebuilt the studio and worked out the songs, but there’s just no windows in this place. There’s no vibe. Or it’s the wrong vibe for five people to communicate well in. But then we ended up getting with Ben Allen, who did Animal Collective and Deer Hunter, and he produced their records. So we all got into a car and went to Atlanta. Normally, we do that, like our first record was in a cabin, our second record was in like an old chicken coop that turned into a commercial studio, and our third record was at Dreamland which was an old church, and now we’re in an old grocery store, in Cabbage Town, in Atlanta. It’s so funny what natural light does to a person, like your whole demeanor changes. From being stuck in the Rat Cave, which was our studio nickname, to having this great, beautiful nice studio that used to be a grocery store. And it’s right butted up against a railroad yard, and the mix room, or the control room, was two of those cars cut up and they built like a box room, and that was the control room. It’s pretty cool.

You’re playing those songs at Loufest?

Loufest is definitely going to be one of those things, it’s one of the first run of shows that we get to do in front of people. So we’re going to be extra excited, and really bang hard on them. And oh, could I say one more thing? I’m really looking forward to hanging out with my friend Dave Stevens. He’s got a really great studio, and we might cut some fun jams at Native Sound in St. Louis.