Catching Up With... Apollo Sunshine

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Paste: How long were you there? 

Sam: We were there for six weeks. We went for three weeks, and then had some time off, and then went for three more weeks. And we spent even more time on the record, amongst ourselves at home. We spent two weeks mixing it, and did more recording then. It was a long process—we had a lot of time to get it how we wanted. 

Jesse: We built up and then deconstructed, and having the time to work on it like that was really cool. 

Paste: Hearing the scenario, it reminds me of The Band at Big Pink. 

Jesse: Yeah, I feel like it was probably similar to the way they were. 

Paste: A lot of bands seem really rushed to put out new material, but you seem to really take your time. 

Sam: That’s an understatement! [laughs] I mean, some people are even worse than us, but we definitely take our time. 

Paste: What do you think is the advantage to that? 

Jesse: It doesn’t seem so forced. 

Sam: Nothing against bands that do make their albums real quick. I respect and admire that, as well. I’m sure someday we’ll do something that way, too. But, I don’t know, we just do what seems to be happening. 

Paste: What else have you been up to in the last year, besides the new record? I know you live in different cities now—Jeremy in San Fransisco, Jesse in Boston and Sam in New York.  

Jeremy: We’d get together from time to time and do recordings. We did some recording in Boston—Jesse lives above this art gallery—and we did some recordings in Katonah, [N.Y.]. We’d work on music here and there. 

Sam: Even living in different cities, three weeks is about as long we’ll go without doing a show. 

Paste: You have a pretty full tour schedule coming up. Looks like you’re hitting it pretty hard behind this new record. 

Sam: Yeah, we’re getting ready to play a bunch of shows. 

Paste: I heard there was this really interesting multimedia show you just played in New York. What was that all about? 

Jesse: Yeah, Monkeytown is a spot with couches on all four sides. I don’t know, I picture some sheiky Indian people with hookahs laying on couches—that style. And the entertainment sets up in the middle. So it’s a really weird, intimate thing; it only holds like 50 people. But they have seven projectors and each of the four walls is a screen. Our friend Edan, who helped make some beats on the new record and is just a good friend of ours, has a really crazy movie collection, and he played snippets of a bunch of different movies. It wasn’t something we rehearsed, but he’s a very talented person and has good taste, and we just did our thing and fed off of each other. 

Sam: It was a treat for the senses. 

Paste: Is this multimedia approach something you might be interested in doing when you go on tour? 

Jesse: Well, Monkeytown has four giant projectors, so I don’t think we’ll be able to do that. Plus, Edan does his own thing, so probably not. It’d be cool in an ideal world, but we’re still at the stage where we’re touring to make money to pay rent. I don’t know if we can bring out a whole crew just yet. 

Sam: Once we can get our own lighting system, though, I know who I want to build it: the guy who makes all our pedals and stuff. We sometimes daydream about set design and lights that are triggered by instruments. Maybe someday. 

Jesse: If Apollo Sunshine were to make money, man, we would fucking blow minds for sure! Hopefully someday we’ll get that opportunity. 

Paste: Who’s the guy who makes the pedals? 

Sam: Well, there’s two guys. The guy that originally built them is this guy Patrick who has a company called Herscheltronics. And lately I’ve been working with a friend of his, Peter Edwards, who’s got this thing Casper Electronics, and he can build anything, he’s just genius.