Catching Up With... Delta Spirit

Photos by Samantha West

Delta Spirit hails from San Diego, but as the band's name suggests, their sensibility is more Deep South than West Coast. With the 2007 release of their first LP, Ode to Sunshine, Delta Spirit made the jump from the San Diego scene to the national one, touring with Cold War Kids, Dr. Dog, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and The Shins. Still, in the years since, despite international tours and attention, the band has remained close and loyal to their friends and fellow musicmakers back in California. Earlier this year, the band took to Prarie Sun Studios in Northern California to record History From Below, following in the footsteps of another West Coast-rooted king of Americana, Tom Waits, who recorded extensively at the same studio. On the road promoting the new record, frontman Matthew Vasquez recently took some time off from soaking up Santa Fe sunshine to talk to Paste about the joys of touring, making a fan-approved album and the band's time in The Tom Waits Room.

Paste: How’s the tour going so far?
Matthew Vasquez: The tour has been a blast. More people showed up than ever before, we sold out the whole East coast, the West coast is sold out, and all the shows in between have just been bumping, and really really fun.

Paste: You guys aren’t sick of each other yet?
Vasquez: (Laughs) No, we do a lot together—they’re like my brothers. I live with Kelly [Winrich, multi-instrumentalist] and Brandon [Young, drummer] lives next door, and Jon [Jameson, bassist] just got married so he moved out.

Paste: I read in your bio that you didn’t mean to tour quite so much after your last album but you ended up enjoying it. Has that happened with this one as well?
Vasquez: Yeah, well we just started again. I’m excited to come home, but I love touring. Its really fun—you get to meet new people, you get to go on crazy adventures every day. This one was six weeks long, then we’ll be home for a little bit. ... Then we’re gonna do the UK, and then Europe and Australia. We’re gonna do Australia with Ben Kweller, I think—that’s in September. And then in November, we’re gonna come back out [to the states]. We’re either gonna open for a big group, or at some point we’re gonna do a West Coast/Long Beach band tour where we bring our friends’ bands that are just insane. There’s a bunch of bands that we’re talking about bringing out, we just have to figure out the right ones. I can’t name which ones will play, but I can say that where we live right now is an awesome place and there’s a lot of really great bands that live there, like Tijuana Panthers, Growlers, the Fling.

Paste: And you’ve played shows with them before?
Vasquez: Well, not the Growlers, but I went to high school with those guys in Orange County. I grew up in Texas and moved to California, and Matt Taylor from the Growlers was one of the first people I met.

Paste: Let’s talk a little bit about History from Below. How has the reception of the album been? It seems like its getting great press.
Vasquez: Yeah, it’s been really good. For us, we’ve always just try to put our foot down where we’re at and then move on from that. When we did Ode to Sunshine, we had been a band for only 11 months, not even a whole year, by the time we started recording. And the [I Think I've Found It] EP, not even that—we’d started recording the second we started playing together because we’d all been friends for a while. So it was like we had already been in a band. Three years of touring, writing all the songs on the road, living in the van and the apartment—you’re at home for two weeks and then you’re gone another three months, and that’s what it was like for three years in our band. The songs kind of found themselves in hotel rooms and sound checks and things like that. It was pretty easy to pick the songs, because people started singing along to them after YouTube videos. Whenever we did some blog video, people would learn the songs and start covering it on YouTube before the album came out. So it was really funny.

Paste: And you liked that? You don’t mind that?
Vasquez: No, it was so cool. It’s really easy because you know what songs people like and if you love playing those songs and people respond to them, it’s a no-brainer. ... We’ve been really fortunate too with our fans—they are superfans. Every single one of them likes the whole record, it’s not like, "Oh, I only like this song, I only like that song." So you get good shows with everybody singing along to every song. That definitely makes it a better night.

Paste: What were your biggest influences on History from Below, as a band?
Vasquez: There are a lot of records we’ve been listening to and a lot of them are friends bands. We’re big Tom Waits fans, obviously, considering the studio location. Los Lobos’ Colossal Head has a ton of bass in it, and it just sounds really earthy and loud. Richard Swift, The Walkmen, Elvis Perkins, A. A. Bondy, these are like little brother bands and we still love them, just all these—you know, just friends’ bands. When you do live together with a bunch of songwriters and you’re playing and you’re touring and you hang out with people ... they affect you. It just becomes a kind of language.

Paste: What was your favorite thing about making this past record?
Vasquez: The lack of stress going into it. All the songs were picked out already, and we already had it worked out for a long time so we just started building it and the whole idea was "if its not fun, don’t do it." We went a song at a time, it took six months, and had fun.

Paste: Do you think that’s a sign of how established you’ve become as a band, that making a record gets easier?
Vasquez: I think it has a lot to do with our friendships, and we were smart in that we didn’t pick a producer that was gonna … put his staple sound over us. We had seven friends going out to Northern California, driving up to where our girlfriends and our friends can’t get to us, hanging out, with these songs that are already worked out and we just went out there and nailed them. It was a blast.

Paste: Were there any anecdotes during these sessions that you can think of?
Vasquez: “St. Francis” is a good one—we were just talking about that. The song got written because Kelly had this chord idea that he wanted to make an interlude, but then when I took it that night I kind of got the chords wrong, and I wrote a song to that. We figured it out and played it live for over a year and it was really great, but we just couldn’t figure out the recording process. It ended up being recorded live, with Kelly playing guitar, John and Brandon playing percussion, and Bo in this other room called The Tom Waits Room, where they did every sound in Mule Variations. Bo [was] jumping up and down and stomping his feet in the room, and I’m singing the vocals and dancing, and Bo’s clapping his hands and hitting this water heater throughout the whole track. ... That song was one of the only roadblock songs, and it just took us getting kind of drunk and just an accident. Its tough to describe how fun that was.

Paste: So what’s next for you guys? After your tour, are you going to make another record?
Vasquez: Well, we did these videos up north—the record label paid us to go back up to the studio and shoot some video footage of us playing the songs, and it ended up on BrooklynVegan and all that. But we took that time that the label paid for and made a whole live EP [while we were there], and we did all these alternative versions of songs—“Bushwick Blues,” “Devil Knows You’re Dead,” and a few others that didn’t make the record that we felt were really strong. And also this Nick Cave punk version of “John Henry.” It’s an old 1800s song, a bluegrass standard—we took that and did a punk, Northern soul song and it’s mixed in there. So in November we’re probably going to put out that EP, and we’ve been writing, I think we’re about ten [songs] into a new record already and we have a ton of extra songs still besides those. But we’re just gonna keep touring and have fun, and when the songs come it will be time to make a new record. It’s been so fun.

Paste: What would you say your ultimate goal is for this band?
Vasquez: It’s really fun just being in this band. I think the goal with our music is kind of geared towards being a band like Wilco, maybe. The biggest hope we could have is that people will just like our music, and be like, "Oh, I’m gonna listen to Delta Spirit because I like everything that Delta Spirit writes," and its this or that, loud or quiet, whatever. ... And its tough to do that—because we get "indie" this, or "Northern soul" that, or "country Americana"—but I don’t feel like all those fit, necessarily. It’s me and my three or four best friends, getting to play music, and it’s a blast. And if people can believe in that then that would mean the world to me.