Bowerbirds come home

Earlier this week, on their way home from their European tour, Bowerbirds [1]’ Phil Moore and Beth Tacular took some time to answer questions about their music, tour, environmentalism and more. Fresh off the phenomenal success of their second LP, Upper Air, Bowerbirds are headlining this year’s Troika Music Festival, performing tonight at DPAC.

I’ve followed the European tour on your blog [2]. It looks spectacular. How has it been and are there any particularly noteworthy incidents you would like to detail?

Beth: It has been a really amazing tour this time around. For the most part, our drives have been more manageable than our other two times in Europe, so there were only two 12 hour drive days this time, which meant we were less sleep deprived than usual.

We also have a new drummer, Dan “Yan” Westerlund, who has been really making our new songs especially, sound more like we intended them to sound, so that’s been really fun. He is a phenomenal drummer, trained as a jazz drummer, and he can maintain the idiosyncrasies of our rhythms, keeping them kind of minimal, while also adding complexity in a very thoughtful way.

We’ve gotten to play in a lot of countries this time, and got to play with some really good bands. We played with our friend Damien Jurado twice, including a show in Paris with another musician we love, Tom Brousseau.

Probably our favorite shows of tour, mostly in terms of audience response, were in Barcelona, Madrid, London, Paris, Utrecht, Copenhagen and Frankfurt.

We basically had one day off with time to explore anything in Europe, and on the advice of [Trekky Record [3]s [3]'] Will Hackney, we went to Interlaken, Switzerland, where we went hiking in the Alps and had Swiss hot chocolates afterwards. Up high on the trail, we found these cobbled together rickety wooden stairs that went straight up a sheer rock face, and we pretended we didn’t understand the sign that said it was closed. But halfway up to the little cabin at the top, we were reprimanded by a woman and her 12-year-old son, who were working on repairing the stairs, and they made us go back down the stairs, following right behind us. We were very defeated, and then an hour layer we saw a different person sneaking up the stairs, who made it to the top. We were already on a different peak, so it was too late for us.

But the hot chocolate soothed us and made us feel better about getting in trouble.

The band has up to this point been Beth and Phil with other people coming in to fill percussion, strings, upright bass, etc. I’m assuming Brad Cook isn’t quitting Megafaun anytime soon and I know Mark Paulson has played with you a fair amount. Is there any possibility of making that third spot permanent or are you happy working with a rotating cast of musicians?

Beth: Well, we always wanted Mark to be a permanent member, but he has always had other projects and commitments, and for years we didn’t make enough money so he couldn't afford to tour with us and also take any time off for those projects when he got home.

Right now, we are really enjoying playing with Yan, and we’d love him to stick around for a long time. We are also trying to figure out if we can afford to take anyone else on tour because we would love to have someone playing either a bowed stringed instrument or another guitar player, especially if that person could also sing.

We have always wanted to have permanent members, but everyone we have worked with, until Yan, has either had their own other band or music project or has a family and so they haven’t been able to commit to touring all the time.

In terms of Troika, the prevailing theme seems to be community. Obviously, you are one of the first names mentioned when it comes to the local music scene and there is that link to the Rosebuds, Megafaun and Wes Phillips. How has the local community (musical, artistic or otherwise) affected you and your growth musically?

Beth: Phil moved here from Iowa because of what he had heard about the local music scene, and he and Mark and Wes formed Ticonderoga. They were kind of blown away by how supportive and collaborative the scene is here, and I think it really fed their creativity. There are just so many great bands in the Triangle, and musicians come to each other’s shows and take each other out on tour.

We got a lot of help from a lot of people locally, and both the Rosebuds and the Mountain Goats took us out on tour really early and gave us exposure to a lot of new people. We also learned a lot about performance from both of them, and the Rosebuds were really inspiring even in a practical way in that they are another couple who started out in a similar way to us, and where Kelly learned as she went, sort of like I have. I remember being inspired by her, and it helped me overcome my initial doubts about really being someone who could play music. I mean, even watching her figure out how to really use her voice over the last couple years has been inspiring.

I grew up in Raleigh and was into local bands when I was in high school, like Superchunk, Polvo, Dillonfence, the Connells and then Archers of Loaf and a million others, really. Phil tells me also that when he first moved here, one of the first shows he saw of a local band was Des Ark, and he really loved the show and realized he had made the right decision in moving to Raleigh.

Phil and I considered leaving the Triangle in 2006, and we spent seven months driving around the country, playing shows here and there and selling our first EP, Danger at Sea. We went everywhere and spent a month in New York and three weeks in Portland, but by the end of that long summer, we decided the Triangle was our favorite place, in terms of music and in terms of the quality of the community and how fun, kind and creative people are in general here.

So we came home, and we love it here. We just wish we could tour a little less, so we’d have more time to contribute to and support the local scene. We really miss our friends, and we miss a lot of shows.

How do your respective roots and then your new shared home of North Carolina figure into your songwriting?

Beth: Phil started really writing music when he lived with his ex-girlfriend out in a farmhouse in the countryside of Iowa. When she went to work in the mornings, he would get up, make coffee, feed his chickens and then write songs all morning. He seems to really thrive creatively on being in a quiet, natural setting (as do I). So after we met, he took a job watching birds in South Carolina, and we lived an hour’s drive from human civilization for a summer.

That’s when he began the songs for Bowerbirds, and they were very influenced by our daily and nightly encounters with all these new (to us) plants and animals, like wild boars and turkeys, night hawks, passion fruit, pitcher plants and bears. This was such a beautiful and inspiring time for us that we decided we really wanted to live close to nature, so we eventually bought land in North Carolina, to be close to the Triangle music scene, but to have our quiet and peaceful place. Our whole second album, Upper Air, was written in between tours out on our land,while we were living in the AirStream or the cabin we are (very slowly) building.

So the Carolina woods, the passing of seasons, the coyotes and lizards and flocks of cardinals and blackbirds have all been important and inspiring to us. And a lot of the new songs deal with the difficulties we faced with traversing back and forth between our rural North Carolina home and our time touring on highways and in crowded cities. Coming home is like sinking into the world’s softest bed, in a cave underneath a waterfall, at the end of a long day.

What can you tell  me about your plans for the Troika show at DPAC given it’s a set-up in a space that’s never been done before?

Phil: We actually haven’t seen the space, so we have no idea what to expect. It will be cool to test it out for the first time.

Regarding your art, [4] Beth, what is your driving force behind creating it? What do you hope people take away from it. I know you’ve shown at Lump before. Do you have any future plans for exhibition?

Beth: I make art for the same reasons Phil writes songs. I’ve been making things since I was a child, like all children, I guess, but I just loved it more than most, I think. On tour, I get a terrible aching feeling in my belly that means I want so badly to be making art, writing music, anything creative, but there really is absolutely no time for anything like that on tour.

I have been channeling my creativity into the band and the cabin over the lady couple years, but ideally we would make enough money from the band that I would have time when we were home to make art again. I really, really miss it. I collect art books and magazines on tour, go to galleries when I can and just try to store up ideas like a squirrel with it’s acorns, for when I’ll have time to paint and build things again.

But to answer the first part of your question better, I make art because it connects me with a sense of wonder and feels very spiritual to me. It is intellectually and technically challenging, it allows me to use my hands for detailed work, it helps me to make sense of issues I am facing, or to try to communicate about problems humanity is facing and also inflicting on the rest of life on Earth.

Just choosing to make art feels like a political act. It is kind of scary at times, and it can make me feel really vulnerable, and sometimes a piece or a show will feel like a failure, but it’s really just a chance to learn something. I really like the anything-goes aspect to art. Art can be whatever you want it to be. It’s like the opposite of fascism or corporate homogenaeity. It’s so subjective.

I know you’ve mentioned before that Derrick Jensen [5] has influenced your songwriting. Can you explain how?

Phil: I had always enjoyed playing and writing music before Bowerbirds, but just before I started writing Bowerbirds songs, in particular lyrics, I kept feeling like I needed to speak to an audience more than I had been. My lyrics in “Ticonderoga” meant a great deal to me, but I really wanted to be able communicate those thoughts more directly. Derrick Jensen put words to thoughts I had been having but hadn’t been able to express for years about the earth and all the creatures within it. His storytelling is colorful, concise and truthful. I had been reluctant to write from a purely activist perspective, and I still am, but Derrick’s writing helped me believe that my perspective was important and worth making music from.

Can you tell me what you’ve taken from being on Dead Oceans-it being a bigger independent label but still very much independent in that meaningful sense?

Beth: Dead Oceans has always been very personalized and individualized in terms of talking us through things, and they are very involved in helping us succeed as a band. They also have good distribution, have been working in the music industry for a long time, so they know what they are doing.

Their roster is also really good, and they are part of the Secretly Canadian/Jagjaguwar group, so we get all those resources as well.  

They also really follow through with what they say they are going to do, and they believe in us. So we get to work with a label that is very capable, that is run by people who really love music and who care about us personally. It’s really nice.

We have had some pretty disappointing and frustrating experiences in the past in this arena, to the point of being devastating, so working with Dead Oceans is a lot better.

You’ve been touring almost nonstop since June. What now?

Beth: Actually, we have been touring since last February! We are touring the U.S. again in November and early December, and then January and February. Hopefully after that we can take a bit of a break, maybe play some festivals, if we are lucky, and mini tours, but mostly hang out at home with friends, finish building our cabin, and work on new songs and art.

We are all dying to get back into the creative process again.

How is your cabin coming along?

Since we have been touring or recording during all the warm months for the last two years, we really haven’t been able to get much finished on it lately.  Right now we are actually hiring Mark’s brother Sean to help us chink the cabin while we are touring, which is exciting, because we had up until now done almost everything ourselves, besides my brother, cousin Lee, justn Vernon, and Mark each helping us for a day or two.

We liked how much we learned by doing it all ourselves, but there came a point recently where we were like,  “For the love of god, this will never get done if we are always gone.” We can’t wait to work on it some more this spring. The structure is finished, windows and doors are in and roof is on, but we still need to do sealing, siding on the non-log part, interior finishing, plumbing, electricity—OK, it’s still a lot. But it will be our own little place. It’s made almost entirely with salvaged finds, off Craigslist and from Habitat reuse stores, so it isn’t costing us much to build.

Bowerbirds will play at the Durham Performing Arts Center tonight at 11 p.m.