Getting to Know... Foreign Born

Photos by Emily Ulmer

Last summer, as the bottom fell out of the Dow and the world seemingly collapsed all around, the lads of folk-rock foursome Foreign Born were safely ensconced in the scenic hills of Los Angeles, recording music by day and taking dips in the hot tub by night. The product of that idyllic summer—their sophomore LP, Person to Person—was released in late June to rave reviews and was followed up with a cross-country tour in support of The Veils. Foreign Born frontman Matt Popieluch recently chatted with Paste about the band’s humble origins, their sonic influences and a tour so epic they're afraid to even revisit it.

Paste: How did Foreign Born get started?
Matt Popieluch: I was in a band in college called The Cave-In—we all just wanted to play in a country band. After college the band split up, and Foreign Born started that summer. We played around for the better part of a year, worked some odd jobs, and decided we were going nowhere. I had a friend in L.A. who had some recording equipment down there, we hooked up with him and all moved into a house together and went for the gold. We only got the bronze for a while [laughs], but it was cool.

Paste: You were featured in the pilot episode of Chuck. How did that come about?
Popieluch: It was a Hollywood turn of events I still don’t fully understand. They needed a local band with a fast tone, they needed someone to be playing while Chuck and some female assassin were dancing on the floor. I barely watch the show, I’m not a fan myself. So yeah, it was like a twelve-hour day, we had to come in early, and we hung around on-set long enough to get drunk twice.

Paste: There’s a real undercurrent of melancholy to your new album, Person to Person. Is that something you all are conscious of, or did it come about organically?
Popieluch: You can never escape all forms of darkness, you know. There’s two sides to every coin. I think that’s what makes upbeat music more interesting, when it’s got a dark edge to it.

Paste: It definitely had more of a loose and experimental feel.
Popieluch: We tried to make a record that was more about groove. I think the biggest fault of our last record was that it was too uptight. A little too rigid.

Paste: Who do you consider influences for your newer, less-rigid sound?
Popieluch: Older stuff, a lot of music from the 70s—Fleetwood Mac and John Lennon, Leonard Cohen, 70s Stones, pretty much anything funky.

Paste: How has it been making the transition to your new label [Secretly Canadian]?
Popieluch: Utterly fantastic, just night and day compared to our previous experience. They’ve really got their shit together. There’s actually press, and European distribution, it really feels like our first quote-unquote real record release.

Paste: Now that this album’s finished, what’s your plan for the immediate future?
Popieluch: We just finished a tour with The Veils two days ago, so now we’re gonna hang out on the East Coast for a second and drive back to LA, and go back to our real-world jobs, unfortunately.

Paste: What’s the real world for you?
Popieluch: I work for a non-profit called TreePeople. It’s an environmental NGO. I work at a park as a groundskeeper. I do a lot of borderline janitorial duties, pruning trees, watering, picking up trash, general upkeep.

Paste: Any highlights from your recent tour that immediately come to mind, as you return to the daily grind?
Popieluch: [Laughs] I don’t even know where to start. It’s probably been one of the most eventful, chaotic, drunken tours of my life, really crazy stuff. The tour was punctuated by robberies across America. We were robbed twice, in Seattle and in Chicago. Seattle wasn’t too bad, but they really got us good in Chicago. They stole a lot of clothes, the car stereo, our passports.

Paste: Yikes.
Popieluch: Yeah. I basically had one pair of pants and two T-shirts for the rest of the tour. They took five suitcases, really cleaned us out. We had to hit up the thrift stores to scrape together some semblance of order.

Paste: And that was the low point of the tour?
Popieluch: Well, not long after that we got detained by the west Texas border patrol because the dogs smelled weed in our car. We didn’t have any, but we had smoked a few days before, so the dogs smelled it on our percussionist’s clothes. So we got treated to about three or four hours of the good-cop/bad-cop routine.

Paste: Did you catch any breaks?
Popieluch: Not immediately. After that there were the zero-visibility sandstorms in Arizona. And then on top of all that was the general drunkenness. Some well-executed craziness, I guess.

Paste: Come on, you’ve gotta have at least one good memory.
Popieluch: We played a show in Oklahoma for a mostly empty house. But right next door was a hookah lounge, so we went in after our set while The Veils were playing, and the band got deep into a drum circle with the owner for about an hour and a half. We took some footage of it, so maybe that’ll end up on a tour DVD.

Paste: There you go.
Popieluch: [Laughs] As long as the video doesn’t give us PTSD, yeah.

Listen to "That Old Sun" from Foreign Born's Person to Person: