Surfer Blood are a young outfit from West Palm Beach, Florida, whose exuberant music is a throwback to old-style indie-rock. Their quiet-to-loud guitar jams, piloted by 23-year-old Jean Paul Pitts, owe an obvious debt to acts like The Pixies and Spoon. The band released their debut LP, Astro Coast, in January of 2010, to much acclaim and plentiful hype.
Interview: 2 December 2009
Was your band-name supposed to be provocative?
“Well, surfing is obviously a big part of the culture down in South Florida; it's just so saturated there that it gets a little ridiculous, and you have to make fun of it. Especially if you’re as nerdy and weird as we are. Our drummer, though, came up with the name, and we thought it was the funniest thing we’d ever heard, so we decided to stick with it.”
Do you feel any affinity at all to surf-guitar music?
“I do. I like clean, twangy guitars. I don’t think I could attribute my own guitar work to having studied old surf-rock records, but, if there’s not a preoccupation, there’s definitely an affinity with surf-guitar.”
People have been quick to paint your music as summery just because of where you’re from. But aren't you more rebelling against where you grew up?
“I have mixed feelings about West Palm Beach. My best friends and my family are there, so I love it. But the place itself? It leaves a lot to be desired. There’s really not a lot of per capita young people, and it’s geographically isolated from the rest of the country, so there’s not a lot of music that comes through South Florida. So, anytime someone starts a band, they have to start their own scene. You find a bunch of high-school kids just trying to run shows wherever they can. We used to put on show’s in my parents’ dance studio.”
So Surfer Blood isn’t your first band, by any stretch?
“All of us have been playing in bands for years. I know I’ve been doing it since high-school: making four-track recordings, making recordings via cheap, digital, pirated shareware. I’ve been in three bands before this one; just small bands that never went anywhere. The most exciting thing for us, with this band, is being able to tour. This is the first time I’ve seen the West Coast!”
When you formed this band, what did you want Surfer Blood to be?
“I do the majority of the songwriting, and I actually had a lot of the album recorded before the three new guys hopped on. Me and the drummer [TJ Schwartz] had been playing together since 2006, in different incarnations of this band, playing songs that were strikingly similar. We always were talking ‘someday’, like, in this future-that-never-gets-there, that we’d tour and release records and the rest. When I met Thomas [Fekete] and Brian [Black] in Miami, I’d seen their old bands play, and I knew that, in South Florida, a lot of times people get stuck playing in metal bands, because that’s all their friends want to play, and I thought maybe they’d been in that situation. I told them if they ever wanted to play, just give me a call, not thinking they’d actually do it. But, sure enough, Tom called me the next day, we started jamming, and then a month later we’re trying to book a tour up to Atlanta and Athens.”
Why do you think people have reacted so favourably to this project?
“Not to sound arrogant, but I’m pretty sure we have a good record. It took me long enough to do: almost a year of writing it and recording it. Sure, we had our concerns: 'Is it too poppy? Is having recorded it ourselves detrimental?' But we knew it wasn’t bad, and that someone would like it.”
Were there records you used as reference for making Astro Coast?
“Your music is always going to be indebted to the stuff you grew up listening to, and we all grew up listening to ’90s college radio. Dinosaur Jr’s You’re Living All Over Me is one of my favorite records. Yo La Tengo is one of my favorite bands, and, well, obviously we all love The Pixies. You can probably tell the influence.”
Were you trying to get that same sort of heavily-saturated sound as You’re Living All Over Me on your own record?
“Oh, yeah! We totally spent a lot of time tweaking the guitar tones, trying all kinds different combinations of guitars and amps and pedals. Obviously I’m a big fan of Kevin Shields and My Bloody Valentine, too. I remember a lot of nights in my apartment with TJ, just doing guitar overdub after guitar overdub.”
What has being a hype band been like?
“I think the height of the scrutiny was around CMJ in New York. That’s when I’d say something on stage, look down and see ten people with their heads down, scribbling in a notebook. That was intense. But, um, it’s intriguing: we’ve gotten a lot of comparisons to Weezer, which I can only attribute to the fact that the first time we got reviewed it was on Pitchfork, and they called a part ‘Weezer-esque.’ Now, I’m constantly fielding questions about Weezer.”
How does it feel making music in the ‘overdocumented’ era, where every performance is blogged about, bootlegged, video-taped?
“It’s definitely nerve-wracking performing in that situation. Luckily, we’ve played shows for a bunch of kids just dancing around, going crazy, and that’s a completely different feeling to one where the audience politely claps and then writes something down, or doesn’t move at all because they’re trying to hold their cell-phones still to get some video. It’s kind of awkward. After a while, you just have to forget about that kind of stuff. You get your first review, and that hurts. It hurts you to the bone. But after a while, you have enough press going on, you’ve played enough shows, that you can sort of let stuff slide off of you.”
You played 12 shows at CMJ; how ridiculous an experience was that?
“We loved it! The only thing I was concerned about was my voice holding up. Because our set is very dynamic: there are parts where I’m singing in a falsetto voice, there are parts where I’m yelling; there’s a broad spectrum of volume levels. So, I had to drink a lot of tea with honey, and that saved me. This reviewer in the Village Voice made out like we were these naïve young fools being exploited by our record label, that they must have bullied us into playing that many shows, but we wanted to play that much, to get as much exposure as possible.”
