Catching Up With... Loch Lomond

The latest recipe for Indie Band seems to be a ton of members, boatloads of intstruments and an epic sound, but often missing is the ability to restrain the cacophony enough to create a dynamic that highlights the emotional pinnacles in the music as well the calm that precedes them. Hailing from Portland, Ore., Loch Lomond does all of the above and wonderfully so.

We spoke to frontman Ritchie Young shortly after the release of their second full-length record Little Me Will Start a Storm to discuss the new album, the Portland music scene and dreams.

Paste: There have been a lot of great bands to come out of Portland, Ore. What was it like trying playing music in that environment?
Ritchie Young: It’s funny because I feel like the Portland music scene is very supportive, and it’s competitive in a really friendly way. It’s more musically competitive but not like business-wise industry competitive. It’s really strange and good for all Portland bands, I believe, to step out and kind of step into the real world. I think it’s been good for us. I love playing outside of Portland, and I’m not a huge fan of playing in Portland because we’ve played there so much. I love playing new songs in Portland, but I love playing all the time every time outside of Portland.

Paste: Well, have you been touring very much lately?
Young: We did these four dates in the Northwest. We went to Scotland for a couple of dates. Then we’re going to Georgia, and we have a U.S. tour booked for May. We’re finalizing it now, which I’m excited about. May is a good time to head everywhere.

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Paste:: So, you’re second full-length LP came out in February. What was that experience like? Did you have any expectations with it?
Young: Yeah, personal expectations. If people enjoy it, that’s great. If it takes a while for us to convince people that it’s worth listening to, that’s part of what we like to do. But for us, it feels really good to have something to push that’s new, that we’re proud of. Tender Loving Empire did an amazing job. They’re a great label. We feel really supported. It’s always fun to push a new record and play new songs and see how it does – the weird cocktail and experiment that is being a touring band and trying to put music out.

Paste: Going into this album, did you try to anything different from the previous album?
Young: Yeah, we did. Well, we put out Night Bats, but that was just an EP. But the first full-length, Paper The Walls, we wrote most of it in a living room with no amps and no P.A. , and then when we went to the studio, we pretty much did it live. This record, we partially wrote beforehand and partially Dave Depper and I wrote rough recordings and we pretty much wrote half the record in the studio, which was a new experience for us completely because we only wrote music in someone’s hardwood-floor living room. So, it was fun to kind of step it up a little bit. I think Paper The Walls is a little bit more delicate and kind of folky, and I think that this record is not really folk at all. I mean we’re definitely influenced by that, but I think Loch Lomond the band is kind of growing up a little bit. It feels good to kind of move forward instead of getting stuck into a pattern and a routine of writing and recording music.

Paste: Speaking of your influences, who are they?
Young: I’m the complete opposite of everyone else in Loch Lomond. I rarely listen to music. They listen to music non-stop all the time and play music all the time, but I have a really hard time trying to stave away from being burnt out on music. So, I’ve done the music thing in Portland, and I’m in a band, and Portland is full of music. But I rarely listen to recorded music. I haven’t listened to recorded music for years. I think it’s partially because there’s so much around me and partially because a songwriter fears that you’re going to listen to something and either have the fear of emulating it or actually emulating it. So, I try to stay away from recorded music. [ laughs ]

Paste: Do you have any influences outside of music?
Young: I like to run. I really like that. A lot of the songwriting comes from just kind of looking around, being a human being. I try not to write about love at all just because I feel like it’s been done really well and really poorly over the years. I feel like that’s been done. So, I don’t know. I kind of write about my own human experience, but the rest of the band – everyone in the band – they live and breathe music. Dave is probably one of the most knowledgeable people about music I’ve ever met. So, I think, in a weird way, I write really simple songs and then they [the band] come in on top of it and write most of their parts just from their soul but at the same time kind of coming from classical backgrounds and all the way up to . . . There’s a lot of us. So, we have a lot of different musical influences.

Paste: How many people are in the band now?
Young: There are six of us all together.

Paste: And it’s kind of changed over the years, right?
Young: Yeah, it’s kind of changed. The first part of the band’s history, it was just my solo project. So, I had like 32 people playing in and out, and then finally, a couple of years ago, right after Paper The Walls, we pretty much just like “Let’s just be a band. This is a democracy and not just Ritchie’s project. It’s all of our project.” So, since then, it’s stayed pretty solid. It’s been pretty much the same group.

Paste: Does everyone contribute as far as writing the actual music goes, or are there a couple of key songwriters? How does the writing process work?
Young: I usually write about 90 percent of the music, and I just kind of bring in a recording of the outline of the song or just bring my guitar or play the piano and show the band. It’s weird how quickly it works. We figure out what needs to stay and what needs to go and edit just little bit in the practice space and just write it there. So maybe I’ll hum a little melody, but for the most part it just comes together. The band works really well with harmonies, and Jade [Eckler] brings plenty and Dave and Scott [Magee] are really good with harmonies. I don’t know. We just start from the music up to the vocals. When we’ve written the music, we go straight back to the acoustic guitar. Then we write all the harmonies and put it all together. It’s like three stages.

Paste: Loch Lomond is often praised for keeping a restrained sound despite the number of musicians and instruments in the band. Is that difficult to do, or is even conscious?
Young: I think it was actually the way we started writing music as a group because originally there was like 10 people in the band, and we would play without P.A. or amps: One, because when someone’s volume gets up and everyone competes with it and two, because we were super poor and couldn’t afford a P.A. or amps. When you have 10 acoustic instruments in a room, you can’t really outplay someone or turn up the volume. So, I think everyone finally got to this place where they really liked just sitting there for a while and not playing. I see so many bands that have a lot of members over the last four or five years, and they’re rad. I mean they’re great, but it’s just like a wall of sound all the time. There’s no dynamic. So, I think that’s one thing we pride ourselves on. Even though we may have six to 10 people depending on if we bringing string players, it’s okay for us to sit back and just be a part of the machine instead of everyone trying to shine at the same time.

Paste: Well, it’s something that you do very well.
Young: Thank you so much. It was kind of by accident. [ laughs ]

Paste: We have a couple of questions about some of the songs on the new record. What is the little spoken work part at the beginning of “I Love Me?”
Young: Oh, it’s my mom. We were in the studio, and I was telling a story about my mom having out of body experiences. We were kind of joking around, and everyone was like, “No.” The band thinks I like to exaggerate on things. I was like, “I swear. I swear she’s done this.” And the band respects her as an honest person. So, we put her on the monitors. Dave Depper caller her on his iPhone, and I asked her “Tell me that story about this time that you had this out of body experience.” Then, like a minute into it, we started recording it, and we used that at the beginning of the song.

Paste: What about “Earth Has Moved Again?” What is that song about?
Young: I had this dream. A lot of the songs I have are just random dreams, but a couple of times a year I have these really intense vivid dreams. I wake up exhausted from these dreams. It was one of those dreams where I was in Portland, and at the mouth of the Columbia River on the Oregon coast there’s a fault line. The fault line moves every 300 years, and it’s like 50 or 60 years overdue. So, basically it’s gonna happen any moment, and it would cause a massive earthquake on the West coast and floods and tsunamis. So, I had this really vivid dream that the city was just sort of shaken apart, and I was trying to find my friend. There’s a tiny, old volcano in the middle of Portland called Mt. Tabor. It’s really, really old, and it’s on a place where you can see anything. So, I went up there in my dream and looked out. I was looking for my friends . . . I just looked at how much the city had changed and how beautiful it was in my dream. Whole buildings were gone, and water pipes were bursting and shooting into the air. It was really terrifying, but a beautiful dream.

Paste: What about “The Egg Song”?
Young: It’s actually supposed to be the other way around. The first half [of the song] is supposed to be [second], but it’s the way we started playing it, and when I tried to flip the lyrics, people in the band were like, “No, this is cool this way.” But I think I was like 30, and I was having a pre-mid-life crisis. I was really grumpy, and I just moved back to New York. I just had zero patience for my friends, and I felt like my friends didn’t have any patience for me. Basically, it’s about me thinking that I was better than my friends, and that they were annoying. And then suddenly I just got, like anyone who gets a little burst of ego, you get slapped down by life, and I definitely got slapped down by life. I lost some friends, and basically realized who my real friends were and to treat them very well. The last six years, I’ve tried to treat my friends very well and be respectful of them and keep my ego in check and just try to be a good person to the friends that I have and kind of lose the ones who weren’t really my friends. So, it’s just basically about how fragile friendship is and how fragile we all are.

Paste: Where did the band name Loch Lomond come from? It’s a body of water in Scotland, right?
Young: Yeah. I wanted to call the band The Mountains, but there was a lot of mountain bands at the time, and I definitely didn’t wanna go with that blue-grassy vibe. I wanted to stay away from that, but I still think The Mountains would make a great band name. We ordered some one-inch reel-to-reel tape off of eBay, and it came from England or Scotland, and it had a piece of tape on it that just said, “Loch Lomond.” So we just kind of put that in the hard drive when we were saving stuff, and it just kind of became the band name. But I didn’t really know it was a lake in Scotland. I knew it was a lake somewhere. I actually went for the first time. This last May we did a 10-day tour there, in the U.K., and we went to Loch Lomond and drank Loch Lomond whiskey. [ laughs ] So, it was kind of fun.

Paste: When does your next tour start?
Young: Mid-May.

Paste: What are your plans after that?
Young: We just got back from Scotland, and I think – I don’t wanna say probably yet – but I think we might sign with Chemikal Underground over there in Europe. So, I think we’re gonna go over there in August. Between May and August, we’re just gonna try to pick up as many tours as we can and tour as much as we can whenever we can. Dave’s got a record coming out that he needs to work on, but the entire band’s setting aside like two years to try to push this.

Catching Up With… Loch Lomond