Exclusive Interview: Venice Is Sinking

Venice Is Sinking (Photo by Ian Darken)

If you talk to those around the music scene in Atlanta, most will agree on one thing: Athens, Ga.-based Venice Is Sinking is one of the best bands in the region.

Describing their sound isn’t difficult as much as it is reflective. They make southern dream-pop; or something of the like. Live, they are smooth and mature; a band that has seemed to have found a comfort with themselves and their sound.

With three albums behind them, sessions with Daytrotter and Black Cab, and regular touring; the bands’ fan base continues to expand. As 2010 comes to a close, they are edging closer to no longer being one of the best band’s of whom you haven’t heard.

The band, comprised of Daniel Lawson (guitar, lead vocals), Karolyn Troupe (viola, lead vocals), Jeremy Sellers (bass, vocals), Lucas Jensen (drums), James Sewell (keyboards, trumpet, vocals) and Aaron Esposito (trumpet), will be performing with Oryx and Crake and Redharp at 529 in Atlanta on December 10, 2010. And on December 11, they will play in Athens with The Caste and BangRadio at New Earth Music Hall.

For more information on the band, visit their Web site or follow them on Twitter @veniceissinking.

DeadJournalist.com proudly brings you this interview with Venice Is Sinking.

What did you do for Thanksgiving? What’s your favorite part of the holiday?

KT: Drove up to Greenville to hang out with my mother in law and her British friend. Andrew and his sister and I ran a race on Thanksgiving morning and then drank and ate the rest of the day. Really fun. My favorite part of the holiday is the selection of pies that we usually have. I have my meal and then wait for an hour and then eat a piece of each: pecan, pumpkin, pineapple, German apple strudel, baklava, etc. 

DL: I made Pierogies and mulled wine with my girlfriend. It was a pretty relaxing day. Oh, and we sauteed some greens as well. Delicious. I think my favorite thing about Thanksgiving is probably walking or driving around town in the middle of the afternoon when everyone is busy eating. Nothing is open and no one is on the streets at all. It’s really peaceful and creepy.

Last year I spent the holiday in Sweden with an old friend of mine. It was impossible to find a turkey and we had to substitute lingonberries for cranberries, but we were able to put together an excellent meal anyway. Plus, the Swedish Christmas soda, Julmust, is already on the shelves by November and that stuff is the jam.

JS: This is the first time my wife and I had Thanksgiving dinner at our house. Her sisters and their significant others came over, along with my mother. We had the usual foods and everything was great, if a little hectic. I was happy that our dogs didn’t cause too much trouble.

LJ: I went home to Auburn, my hometown, for family, food, and the like. I also got to roll Toomer’s Corner after the Greatest Iron Bowl Ever™, when the undefeated Auburn Tigers defeated the heinous Alabama Crimson Tide in the Greatest Comeback Ever™.  War Eagle! I am not ashamed to admit that I am in love with Cam Newton.

(Thanks to Little Advances for the video.)

What are the bands plans for 2011? Are you working on a new album? Will you continue touring?

DL: We’re in the middle of writing songs for the next record right now. So far it’s going well, although we seem to be proceeding a little slower than we used to. We don’t have a ton of shows planned next year just yet and I imagine it will stay that way at least for a short while. I think most of us are pretty excited about taking some time to write music and start to think about recording again. I know I am.

LJ: I’ve been writing some stuff with Daniel and have worked on a new song with Karolyn, too. I like that all of the ideas we have floating around for the new album sound pretty different from each other. The fourth record is supposed to be the “eclectic record,” right?  Maybe we’re about to make our Sandinista! Is that a good thing? Daniel and I keep trying to write a reggaeton song. That hasn’t been working out.

KT: I think we’ll just keep playing weekend shows like we do now. I would like to record a few songs with our trumpet player, Aaron before he leaves us to live in New York. Also, I’m recording a few songs that I have written with my husband, Andrew and we are planning to release that next year. Some of the members of Venice will be on the album as well. We don’t yet have a name for our project, but we are planning to play and record more in the following years.

As a self-evaluation, how do you feel about the progress the band has made in 2010? 

DL: I think it’s been a pretty good year for us. We’ve gotten to play at some interesting places and meet some cool people along the way. In the past two years we’ve released two records and an EP, which feels pretty satisfying to say. I’d like to be able to keep up that pace actually. We also had the opportunity to do a Black Cab Session, a Daytrotter Session and we got to open up for one of my heroes Dean Wareham. I never thought I would be in band that got to do that!

Venice Is Sinking - Sand & Lines

JS: I feel like we’ve gotten more confident and somewhat more energetic. I know that many people in Athens that hadn’t seen us in a few years told me after a recent show that we were much more engaging, nowadays. 

LJ: Well, we did release a record, Sand & Lines, recorded at the Georgia Theatre. It was a real labor of love for us, and we felt we’d made a fitting tribute to the Theatre. Another cool thing about S&L is that it’s the complete opposite of AZAR.

How has social media affected the way the band markets and promotes itself? 

LJ: Gosh, how hasn’t it affected us? I pretty much spend an hour a day pimping the band out via social networking and stuff. Sometimes it feels like a bit much, like I’m a digital hustler, as Chris Weingarten calls it. You’re always walking this fine line between communicative and desperate. However, we are able to stay connected with fans and sell merch and set up shows and communicate with other bands. For an indie band, these connections can be really helpful.

It can get confusing, though. Our Web site is a Tumblr that feeds into Twitter, but we have to cross post our Tumblr posts on Facebook and MySpace (remember them?) and last.fm and who knows where else?

Also, there is always some new fancy Web 2.0 bauble coming down the pipe to play with, and you have to decide whether you need another site or blog or web portal. We’ve chased a lot of these in the past (Virb, iLike) to no avail, so we’re a bit wary of hot new social media until we’ve seen it stick around for a while.

How have you seen audiences change since you first began your career? Is there a particular city (or cities) that you are most warmly received? 

JS: Savannah has been great to us over the last couple of years. Those SCAD kids know what’s up. 

LJ: Savannah is great to us, as is Columbia, SC., Athens and Atlanta are good, but we play there so much that it kind of ebbs and flows over time. As far as the tenor of audience … we see a lot more texting and tweeting and such. Honestly, I’d rather have that then people chatting the whole damn time.

At a recent house show, this one dude stood in front of Karolyn the whole show, just popping and locking it, 1984-style. That guy was rad.

How has the band’s live performances changed over the past few years?

KT: Because we’ve been playing a lot of the songs for many years now, I think we are all able to just enjoy playing and being on stage and focusing on bonding with the audience and the emotional connection to the songs. I can’t speak for the rest of the guys, but I hardly look at my instrument anymore when I’m playing so I can just hang out and dance and have a good time.   

JS: Obviously with the changes in personnel and what-not, it’s pretty different than a few years ago. I joined in 2008 a couple of weeks before we recorded the Georgia Theatre record. Since then we’ve added a full-time trumpet player and he has added a lot to the show. I feel like we “rock” a bit more than we used to …

LJ: I think we’ve gotten more automatic, but not in a robotic way. We’re not as worried about messing up. We’re more concentrated on energy and putting on a good show and stuff. It’s fun to be at this stage. The Georgia Theatre album really helped us discover who we were as a live band because we had to do so many rehearsals for it. It’s been onward and upward since then … I really do think we’re a lot better live.

How does the band work through the creative process of writing a formulating the layout of a song?

KT: Ooh, tricky. Lately, we have been getting together in smaller groups usually composed of a couple of us, usually Lucas, Daniel or me. We work on the chord structures and lyrics then bring the bones to the band and we all fill in from there. There is usually a lot of arguing, but we eventually settle on a structure and arrangement. 

LJ: Karolyn is right. Arguing is the impetus behind our success.

Do you still have those emotional “I love this!” moments when you are on stage? Or is it now more about executing the songs and performances?

KT: Always in love with being on stage. Even when no one is watching or listening.   

LJ: Someone once told me that rock and roll is 90% drudgery and 10% the good stuff. I think that’s pretty accurate. At least 50% of that 10% is playing onstage. So the good 5% is “I love this!” moments. This sounds way more depressing than I intended. Math is hard.

What are the greatest challenges the band faces on a regular basis?

KT: Covering costs. If we travel anywhere we have to make sure that we make enough to cover our gas at least.  It’s a bonus if we can pay for food or hotel. 

JS: Scheduling. We all have jobs or school, so it’s taxing at times to try to make shows and mini-tours work.

LJ: Sticking.

What’s the most bizarre thing that has occurred to you while on tour?

KT: I think we’ll all agree on this experience: Charlotte. Lucas, do you want to explain? 

LJ: So we meet this guy Ivan after a show in Charlotte via a friend, and he offers his house up as a place to stay after a show. This happens a lot. His house is amazing, immaculately restored, which is something he does, I guess. His countertop was based on the Fibonacci Sequence, for Pete’s sake!  

He thawed shrimp for us and bought us beers. At some point in the night, after a seemingly innocuous hour or good times (piano sing-a-longs, Bud Lights), he became distant and agitated for no discernible reason.  

The agitation grew more bellicose, and, during a conversation about the science of plumbing, he calmly said “I’m tired of this” and then accused us of trespassing and started to dial 911. He looked completely crazy, and we beat a hasty retreat out of there.

Venice Is Sinking

It came completely out of nowhere and was way weirder than I’m making it sound.  It seemed like he was going to pull a gun on us or something, so we didn’t want to wait around to find out.  

JS: I was half asleep on the couch and was told we needed to leave immediately. We drove for hours into S.C. because ALL of the hotels in Charlotte were booked up.

Who is an artist that you have been recommending to your friends?

KT: Wham! Seriously, I recently just met someone who didn’t know who they were.  They were our age too!

DL: There is a French-Caribbean disco group from the 80s called Ottawan that I have been subjecting the rest of the band to in the van for the past few months. It’s really pretty awful music, but I’ve been so into it this year for some reason. There is something about the repetitiveness of their music that I find fascinating, and when you get down to it, the songs are catchy. They sound kind of like a poor man’s ABBA, but way worse than that could ever be.

Oh, and one of their songs is about going to the zoo. That’s it. The zoo. The lyrics go something like, “Come to the zoo / if its the last thing you do / it will always be there for you / Come see the lion / he roars and roars and roars!”

It’s pretty much a children’s song with the most obvious rhymes possible and way too many steel drum solos.

LJ: I tell everyone I can about the amazing Texas band Captain Audio, who were around in the late 90s or early 2000s, I guess, before two members split to form the Secret Machines.  Their only full-length, Luxury or Whether It Is Better to be Loved Than Feared, is something near a masterpiece in the vein of Deserters Songs-era Mercury Rev. It’s certainly stuffed with more good ideas than most bands achieve in a lifetime, and its shorn of the stadium-seeking pretensions that ultimately sunk the Secret Machines.

To whom were you listening to in 2000? 

DL: Gosh, what a good question! I think that Sparklehorse came out with an album called, It’s a Wonderful Life around that time. I adore that record. I mean it – I think that album is incredible. 2000 may have also been the year a good friend of mine sat me down and made me listen to Leonard Cohen. I mean really listen to it. I had always been aware of his music and even owned some of it, but had never really given it the attention it deserved before. Other than that, I was probably listening to Kid A like everyone else and that Sigur Ros album that had the alien fetus thing on the cover.

JS: Mostly Alt-country stuff, like Son Volt, Blue Mountain, The V-Roys, Six-String Drag, etc. 

LJ: I already mentioned them, but definitely stuff like Mercury Rev, the Flaming Lips, and Super Furry Animals. The big 2000 albums for me were Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump and the Delgados’ The Great Eastern, probably.  Did Stankonia come out that year?  Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out was great, too.  I loved Kid A, too.  How could I forget Broadcast’s The Noise Made By People?  That might be my favorite of 2000, actually.  So many good jamz that year.

What Web sites do you read on a regular basis?

KT: Pitchfork, BBC news, Tumblr and most of what is linked from there, stupid Facebook, Under the Radar. 

JS: Chud.com, The Onion, CNN, Weather.com, Bungie.net

LJ: Facebook, Facebook, Twitter, Facebook.  I am an addict.

One Drink. One Album. One Movie. 

DL: Hot toddy. High Road by Okay. Paths of Glory.

JS: Bulleit Bourbon and Blenheim Ginger Ale, Rolling Stones – Sticky Fingers, Open Range and “Dr. Strangelove”. Sorry, I had to cheat. 

LJ: I’m with Jeremy on the drink: Bourbon and Blenheim’s.  Album: New Order—Power, Corruption, and Lies.  Movie: “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”.  Please note that all of these just popped into my head and could change in a second.  I might have also said: Bloody Mary, The Cure’s Disintegration, “The Godfather”.