Catching Up With... Apollo Sunshine

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Paste: You guys have all this crazy electronic equipment—stuff I’ve never seen before. Is that all custom? 

Jesse: My stuff is Herscheltronics, and Sam’s guitar is Casper Electronics. Those two dudes hooked us up. 

Paste: The new record is so dense, and there’s so much layering on it in places. Is it difficult to recreate in concert? Is the live show a lot different from the album? 

Sam: You’ve got to just strip it back down to the song, and just play it—make up a new part, sort of, and focus on the lyrics and the vibe. Just play it. It’s a different version. That’s the only way to do it. 

Jeremy: I feel like, with these songs, for the first time, I’m able to play very simply on tour. Before, I think we were always trying to do a lot, and this time, it’s just like, sing it really well and stay true to the form. It’s been easy just doing a more stripped-down adaptation of it. 

Paste: Since you worked this new material up in the studio, did you guys write together on the fly, or did you go back to your rooms at night and work on songs? 

Sam: A lot of the stuff we did together, and some of the stuff was songs that we’d written off to the side. But there was definitely a lot of collaboration going on, a lot of ideas coming out together as a group. The thing that kept being repeated over and over was, “Don’t worry about whether we can play it live, just make the crazy sounds and worry about it later.” [Laughter] 

Paste: Do you guys have anything else going on, any news to break? 

Jesse: Sam’s having a baby. 

Sam: Yeah, quadruplets. [laughter] 

Jeremy: Sam is working on a music video. 

Sam: Yeah, we’ll have a video soon for “Singing to the Earth,” from the new record. It’s a stop-motion-animation video using these paper cutouts from nature books. It’s pretty far along, actually. I was just working on it before this interview. It should be out next month. 

Paste: You do stop-motion? 

Sam: I do now. 

Paste: That’s pretty impressive. That’s kind of a complicated, time-consuming process, isn’t it? 

Sam: Yeah, well, luckily we had three weeks off, and... 

Paste: You just picked it up in those three weeks? 

Sam: Well, the demand came up for a video, I had time to do the project, and my girlfriend Sarah had the concept for the video. It seemed like a fun thing to do, so I’ve been spending all my time on that. It’s pretty involved. 

Paste: Can you explain the process a little for people who are unfamiliar? 

Sam: Take a shitload of pictures. What I’m working on now is like 3,000 frames. You loop a little bit of stuff—you know, if a bird’s gonna flap its wings, you take a snap of it up, and then down, and you can loop that maybe four times. I probably snapped about 2,000 pictures so far.