Three Stars: Birdlips
Photo by Greg Nash
Birdlips's music has an otherworldly quality to it. The songs on their debut LP, Cardboard Wings, are simultaneously somber and psychedelic. The keyboard and vocal harmonies seem simultaneously down to Earth, yet apart from it. Birdlips songs could alter the landscape of a claustrophobic Metro car or brick-enclosed nightclub into something more eerie... but more beautiful. As such, they've been put on bills that run the gamut from folky to slightly experimental.
We talked to them over the week of Thanksgiving about the influence of psychogeography, the difficulties of self-promotion and why they're hoping for the growth of an underground artistic community.
See them next: December 10 at the Winter Wonder Faire at Sova, with Frau Eva.
Find them online: http://www.myspace.com/birdlipsmusic or http://www.birdlipsmusic.com
Buy their album: At one of their shows, on iTunes or CD Baby.
You’re doing a festival event at Sova and that you’ve previously performed at the H Street Festival. You seem to have found a niche doing these festivals with an artistic bent.
Cliff: Well, it’s definitely cool to get involved. We’re trying to get involved in the arts scene here in D.C. It’s one of the things where we grew up in Northern Virginia but even though Northern Virginia’s so close to D.C., it’s only a 30-minute drive into the city, where we are here, but it’s still so separated. We felt like we never really were part of what was going on in D.C., so we’re trying to be a part of it now. We’re trying to get to know the other bands and artists of the area.
So, yeah, the H Street Festival was a lot of fun. The people in Frau Eva, I guess we first met Pree and then Vanessa from Pree is in Frau Eva. There’s a bunch of cool people we’ve met in the D.C. area. Matt Hemerlein, we played with him about a year ago at Galaxy Hut. We’ve seen him a bunch of times recently. I think we’re going to do a thing with him at Asylum later in December.
When did you move back to D.C.?
Cliff: We’ve been living in Charlottesville for the past six years, mostly. But we got back from tour two months ago, almost three months ago. So we’ve been in the area for all of three months now. Not really playing that many shows. Kind of lying low, writing new material and stuff.
Lindsay: But we’re trying to get back in the swing of things now.
Cliff: Have you heard of a band called The Torches? They play in the D.C. area and the lead singer was in The Cassettes. We recently did some recording with Thomas who plays in that band, and hopefully we’re going to be putting out a little EP soon with new songs on it. We’re going to be trying out some of the new material at these shows. At the Sova show and at the Asylum show.
Lindsay: We’ve spent the past couple of months really revamping our live show and trying to work in some new ideas and stuff so it will be exciting to debut that at the next couple of shows.
Considering that you haven’t been living up here, you’ve certainly made your way through a lot of D.C. venues. Do you have a favorite?
Lindsay: Black Cat. They’re just a really professional venue. I like going.
Cliff: I think every show we play there has been fantastic. There’s definitely a number of great venues around here but I think that what makes the Black Cat stand out is the way they treat the artists. Even if you’re the opening act, they still come out and help you load in your gear and give you a free six pack of whatever you want. Just, stuff like that, little things make a big difference as opposed to some big venues where when you play there, especially if you’re the opening act, you’ll get completely ignored and have to maybe buy your own bottles of water. Yeah, it makes a big difference I think when a venue is nice to people.
Lindsay: I like seeing shows at Iota a lot, it sounds really good there. And we’ve had fun playing at Rock and Roll Hotel. That DC9 show was really cool. There’s definitely some good places in D.C. Definitely happy with the selection of venues here. I have to say that Black Cat is my favorite as well, though.
You guys released your album, Cardboard Wings, about a year ago and all the press you’ve garnered for it seems overwhelmingly positive. Is this where you wanted to and expected to be a year after your release?
Lindsay: The people that have reviewed it have given it a good response. It’s just a hassle getting people to even listen to it. It’s hard self-releasing because, if you email anything, even blogs, bloggers get a ton of emails.
Cliff: Yeah, we sent out the album to a ton of places and I don’t think any of them wrote about it.
Lindsay: Maybe a couple. When I did PR for our tours, I’d send out hundreds of emails and I think we’ve gotten a couple of writeups.
Cliff: All the writeups we’ve gotten have been positive, but it can be pretty frustrating when you’ve put so much time and energy and money into a project, an album and then release it and send it out there. I mean most of the blogs say on their website “We probably won’t respond or write about you if we get an unsolicited thing.” I think pretty much all the reviews we’ve gotten have been people coming to us, asking us to review the thing and then we send it. It’s tough. It’s tough not being on a label because I think you get thrown on the pile.
Lindsay: Of everything. Of hundreds and hundreds of great albums. A lot of them are really great and people will never care.
Cliff: A lot of them are really terrible, too.
Lindsay: See, that’s the problem.
Cliff: I guess that we definitely weren’t thinking about that kind of stuff while we were making it and maybe we should’ve been thinking about it a little bit more, about more of a strategy, a way to get it out there into people’s hands to review it and stuff but we didn’t really think about that. I think that would be something in the future that being on a label would be really helpful. We keep toying around with the idea of trying to get on a label or keep trying to do it ourselves, but I don’t know.
Lindsay: There’s pros and cons to both, I guess.
You’ve mentioned that the inspiration for a lot of the songs on Cardboard Wings came from a trip through Europe a couple of years ago. But it sounds like you guys are writing right now. What has inspired the new set of songs?
Lindsay: I was actually thinking about this today, what our songs are about now and I don’t know, but we’ve been watching a lot of documentaries and reading a lot of books about anti-corporatism and green activism and all that stuff. So maybe, indirectly that has found its way into our songs. Mostly they’re about experiences though, we’ve had either on tour or otherwise, recently.
Cliff: I think one thing that we always strive for in our music and we often talk about kind of abstractly is a feeling of...
Cliff and Lindsay: ...Existential longing.
Lindsay: Which is hard to really explain how that finds its way into music. I feel like it’s something you can’t really put your finger on or really define in specific terms.
Cliff: But it’s that power that music has to kind of to take you beyond where you are right now and almost make you feel like you’re in another place and time and make you feel like you’re reaching beyond the physical reality. That’s something that we kind of strive for. I think that’s something that get strived for in deeply emotional experiences. We always try to write from experience, definitely.
I think our last tour, the travels, we just spent six weeks traveling around the country in the summer and had a bunch of experiences on that, that I think we’re drawing from. But it’s kind of coming from all over the place right now. The working title that we’ve been playing around with for our next album is “Drift” which I came across reading about psychogeography on wikipedia. I don’t know if you’re familiar with psychogeography.
No.
Cliff: I don’t know that much about it. I haven’t read Guy Debord, who is the main dude who wrote books on it. It’s kind of this artistic movement, I guess. This idea of approaching public spaces in a city in a different way and wandering around. There was a specific term they had for it in French, “Derive,” which I guess means Drift. And it involved wandering around in a way to explore spaces in a city. Cities are designed to move people a certain way, but there’s all these spaces that get kind of ignored and I guess the idea is just letting yourself drift through the environment in ways that you weren’t necessarily expecting.
When I was reading about this, I guess this was over a year ago, it kind of struck a chord in me, because I feel like this is where we are in life right now, trying to figure out our path. We’ve made the decision not to follow the path that we’re “supposed to.” We went to college, we graduated. We’re supposed to go get jobs and instead we’re living out of a car, driving around places. So we’re trying to feel out our intuition and feel out where we’re going. But I guess the one thing we know is that we love music and we want to keep doing this. We love playing shows and we love writing songs and making records. So, I guess we’re just letting things follow their own course.
I see that you guys have had a few tour dates with Bowerbirds. How did you make that connection?
Cliff: That was kind of random. We got randomly asked by different people to play shows with them. We’d played with them before and had met them before in North Carolina.
Lindsay: But nothing really materialized out of that though. It was really random. I guess when we met them, we hadn’t actually heard about them. They were just starting to get buzzed about.
Cliff: I think they were already pretty well known. But we did a tour with this band La Strada from New York, from Brooklyn, and they were about to go on a tour with Bowerbirds so Bowerbirds was at our show when we played in North Carolina.
Lindsay: To come check out La Strada, meet them and everything.
Cliff: So we met them, they were really nice and some of the people we were with were like, ‘They’re in a really awesome band called Bowerbirds. You need to check them out.’ So when we got home we checked them out.
Lindsay: And we were like, “Whoa! This is really good.”
Cliff: So we got their album. And we got their new album when it came out. Both of their albums are fantastic. Really cool, dark, cabin-in-the-woods folky stuff. They have very unique songwriting and they’re awesome people, also. We just played with them this past weekend in Greensboro and it was a packed house. It was a pretty awesome show.
Lindsay: Cliff and I going into it were like, “Man, college shows are always so disorganized.” I mean all the college shows we’d been to had been really poorly promoted. Because college students are in college and trying to get their studies done, too. But this one, the girl Alicia who set it up and everything did a really great job of getting the word out and it just seemed that the student body at Guilford College was really receptive to the kind of music and everyone there was a great audience.
If I read your bio correctly, the musical instruments that you studied in college aren’t necessarily the ones you use onstage. Do you have plans to bring any new instrumentation into the fold?
Cliff: I guess I did study a little jazz guitar and vocals and took voice lessons in college, but I didn’t technically study. Lindsay did. She majored in music. But it wasn’t performance.
Lindsay: Yeah, the program was theory and history based, primarily. So it was cool because you learn a lot about music from other cultures and you read and talk a lot about music but it’s not a lot of intense practicing or something like that. Both of us studied instruments. Cliff did clarinet as a kid and I took piano as a kid, too.
Cliff: Lindsay studied drums, too.
Lindsay: Yeah, I played the drums. I do a little bit of percussion, I guess, with Birdlips.
Cliff: I’ve never been really into the technical side of musicianship, I think. We just like to pick up instruments and play them. Make them sound good. Whatever instruments they might be.