Surfer Blood interview
HUCK caught up with Florida's finest surf pop revivalists to talk high school, karma and Tony Hawk's Pro Skater video game.
More like this...
Unless you've been living under a rock for the last year, you'll have noticed a beach-inspired twist to pop music's collective canon. The Drums went surfing, lo-fi punk dude Nathan Williams made Wavves, and we all sunbathed in the warm glow of Best Coast.
But Floridian five-piece, Surfer Blood, are one band who are standing the test of time. Their cosmic blend of buzzed-out bliss pop has not only been a staple of the summer soundtrack but it has continued to impress music aficionados from here to Coney Island.
Following an in-store performance from the Florida-based drop-outs at Pure Groove Records in London, HUCK sat in the shop's cold, dank basement to talk about their debut LP Astro Coast and their holistic approach to 'making it' in the music industry.
HUCK: How did you guys meet?
John Paul Pitts: Well Surfer Blood formed in April 2009 but we’ve all been playing music since we were young. Some younger than others: TJ was playing drums when he was seven. He always knew he wanted to be a drummer. He’s very special TJ... We met going to college in Orlando and started playing together and had this really natural style. I guess we both had similar tastes. So we wrote some songs, some of which became Surfer Blood songs.
Thomas Fekete: Brian and I met at an Ultra Music Festival afterparty. It’s a really ridiculous electronic music festival in Miami: a giant rave with loads of people on ecstasy. Which wasn’t our kind of thing at all. But we started talking about playing music together and touring and it all happened really quickly. Marcos [Marchesani] joined later after we played CMJ [Music Marathon and Film Festival].
What made you want to start a band?
Pitts: Just liking music; listening to it, playing it, everything about it.
Fekete: High school was really rough for some of us, we really didn’t enjoy it, so college was kind of refreshing. But at the same time it felt like it was just something we were doing because we should be. […] I studied everything under the moon. I flunked my major, like, four times. […] I think Brian went to school for a semester and called it quits. We always knew if we ever got the opportunity to play music, we’d drop it all, and luckily it happened kind of quickly for us. Pretty much as soon as we met we decided to take a semester off and try it out seriously. Our parents thought we were insane.
Pitts: We’ve always been in bands where we didn’t really do anything because we had our hands tied or were afraid to take that leap. But when we met each other we could see that we were all serious and so we decided it was time for us to really dive in and give it our all.
Did you have a clear goal?
Fekete: We were always half-assing everything in our lives except music, so it just made sense to do it as soon as we had the opportunity. And everyone has the opportunity, that’s the amazing thing. If you wanna tour, you can tour. We self-booked our first two tours and it was great. Although a lot of the shows were really bad. […] No one came and the promoters were huge dickheads.
Pitts: It’s not fair to say it’s easy, but it’s possible. I always thought, ‘if I keep writing and making songs, somewhere out there somebody great will notice me and appreciate me and love me for who I am!’ I always thought that was the case. But it wasn’t that simple. We had to pool together our limited resources. […] We lost so much money on our first few tours but, at the time, we were so excited because we weren’t sitting in classrooms wishing we were doing it, we were actually doing it. It was an incredible feeling. We got a lot of amazing breaks but there was a lot of hard work too.
Fekete: If you go and do it, it will probably happen. Some bands put out four or five records before anything really happens, but if you’re passionate about it, it will happen.
What’s the music scene like in Florida?
Pitts: There’s a million different music scenes in Florida. I’d say the south is really famous for heavy bands like Torche and Poison The Well. Orlando has produced the most commercial junk under the sun and in the north, Gainesville and Tallahasse are both college towns and have really cool music scenes.
Were people supportive when you first started?
Pitts: Not really where we live in Orlando. There were a couple of people who’d come to every show and be like, ‘you have to keep doing it'.
Fekete: Anyone who helped us, we have helped so much. It’s so important to be nice to other bands. Now we’re laughing at all these bands that were huge dickheads to us. There are some tiny little bands, whose music we might not necessarily like, that we’re going to help out however we can, no matter what.
Pitts: If you do someone a favour, it’s going to come back to you. It really is. And there’s no reason why you should be competitive and jealous of other people’s success and compare yourselves to other bands. In fact, you’re much stronger united with other bands, helping each other.
Fekete: One of the most exciting parts of being in a band is just pushing your friends’ music to other people.
What was the inspiration behind Astro Coast?
Pitts: It’s a lot of material from a lot of different times, so it’s hard to say. A lot of it is just about being at a point in your life where you don’t really know what you’re doing and you’re watching everyone else move ahead, but you feel stuck in one place because you’re doing something that might be unconventional and might be misunderstood. At the time I was writing, some relationships that I considered very important, that I took for granted, kind of fell from under me. And I was kind of in a dark place. So I think that’s where a lot of it came from.
It doesn’t sound like it came from a dark place…
Pitts: It’s more reflections on that period than it is me just writing, ‘oh everything’s terrible'. It’s not an outpouring of emotions, it’s more my thoughts on the fact that I am this age and having these emotions and stuff like that. Everyone’s going to take something different from it, that’s just where it came from, from my perspective.
Fekete: It’s very strange to be at home in your college years and see all your friends do these things that don’t necessarily appeal to you, but are impressive. Like we have friends getting internships in New York and what not, and it’s just like, ‘ah man, I’ve got no desire to do that so what am I gonna do?’ But now it's working out for us, it’s really crazy.
What do you do outside of music?
Pitts: Nothing! We play frisbee. I started playing FIFA at the house we’re staying at here. I haven’t played a video games console since Playstation One… I was really into Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. I was also fourteen. I used to do it when I was about to call girls on the phone so I wouldn’t get nervous. So instead of overthinking everything, I could just be myself. You kind of have to trick yourself sometimes. Like finding an excuse to get up in the morning. I tell myself, ‘if I go into the kitchen, there’s going to be something awesome there.’ And when there isn’t I’m like, ‘oh well at least I’m out of bed.’ That sounds dumb.
Astro Coast is out now on Kanine Records.
Subscribe to HUCK for six issues
Only £20 (UK) / £43 (EU) / £58 (Rest of the World).
Surfer Blood interview (text) by Shelley Jones is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Add Your Comment...
Please note: Your comment may be held in moderation for approval by an administrator to prevent spamming. This usually doesn't take long, please be patient.