LouFest 2014: Moon Taxi
Indie rockers Moon Taxi battled a constant problem in their early days playing as students at Belmont College–how to make songs stretch out as long as possible for dance parties.
The quintet has since ditched the college party scene for bigger and undeniably better things than frat basements, splitting its time between touring on the weekends and working in the studio during the week.
Moon Taxi got its start in Birmingham, Alabama, where bassist Tommy Putnam and lead vocalist and guitar player Trevor Terndrup went to high school together. The two met the guitarist and producer Spencer Thomson at school in Nashville on the very first day of college. Drummer Tyler Ritter and keyboard player Wes Bailey then came on board, with the band becoming 100 percent Moon Taxi in 2007.
Once they were out of school, they began to take their music more seriously, and ventured into pursuing music as a full-time career.
The band shifted their focus from tailoring to live shows to creating studio records, with their third album Mountains Beaches Cities hitting shelves in 2013. The band hops between experimental and radio-friendly sounds, with intricate harmonies refined by Thomson, who produced the record. Thomson says keeping the production in-house works well for the group, because it gives them more authority over the music.
“We’re real kinda hands-on, we like to control things, that kind of group,” he says. Producing their own music also allows them to keep working while they’re touring together, which the group has been doing all summer. This fall, they’ll be heading out on their cross-country Animal Style tour.
Thomson says with the routine of traveling for their tours, playing live becomes a release.
“To have just a short period each night, that’s almost like exercise, you sort of get a runner’s high from actually playing and doing something,” Thomson says. With crowd-pleasing songs like “Morocco,” it’s easy to see why the band stays true to its live show roots. And Thomson’s favorite part of playing live? Watching members in the audience try to sing along to the band’s songs.
“They’re just singing really loudly but incorrectly. They’re so confident, they’ll be like screaming the chorus,” Thomson says. “I can read their lips, and it’s just jibberish.”
The band is in the writing and demoing stage of a new album, and hopes to record by the end of the year, so we can look forward to more music for misguided but well-intentioned fans to mouth the wrong words to.
