“We’re psychedelic pop? I thought we were super hip hop players, too”: An Interview with Sunny Day Sets Fires’ Matthew Parker
Sunny Day Sets Fire finally landed in America last week. They came stateside to play a few shows in California aligning with the LA premiere of Sundance firesetter American Teen, for which they doled out a few tracks. In only eight days, the band’s new album Summer Palace will also land in America.
The album may well be the summer’s best, thus far and this writer’s iPod stats can prove it. The sing song style of tracks like Stranger and Wilderness alongside tracks like Teenagers Talking and Smallest Hearts on Earth that will open doors to a slew of emotions are only a few of the highlights of this 14-piece tour de force (or tour de Earth considering this band’s multinational line-up).
Sunny Day Sets Fire’s drummer, Matthew Parker took sometime to answer a few questions for Above the Fold:
ABOVE THE FOLD: Your band is described as multinational…tell me how a group of people like yourselves came to be.
Sunny Day Sets Fire: We’re all from different nations, but that’s very normal for London. If you sit down at a random table in a pub, chances are you’ll find a similar cross-section of backgrounds. We originally came to London for things like art school, brothers, kids, loved-ones, and the fact that London is – for all its faults – an amazing, swirling place. Then we met one another one at a time over a few years and became a musical family.
AFT: There seems to be a rather positive tone to most of your music…does that come naturally for you?
SDSF: I think our music generally aligns with our personalities. We like fascinating, humourous things. We avoid boring things yet don’t have a lot of time for anything contrived. I’d say the songs match that fairly well. It’s as much fun for us to play big, dark, epic jams like “Lack of View” as it is to play super-pure pop like “Adrenaline”. I think we all have those pieces in us, but to focus on any one thing for too long gets a bit tiring.
ATF: Your music videos seem to be rather well thought out…what did you hope people got out of your video for “Smallest Heart on Earth?”
SDSF: The videos were an experiment we did with a group of directors whom we’d never met before, but liked their work. We had very brief conversations with some of them to give them a basic idea of how we interpreted the songs and just let them do whatever they wanted. The end result is as random and delightful for us as it is for everyone else.
ATF: Your Stranger Remix EP doned the likes of The Cool Kids, CSS, Diplo, and XXXCHange. How does a psychedelic pop group from London get connected with dance and hip hop players such as these?
SDSF: We’re psychedelic pop? I thought we were super hip hop players, too.
ATF: You were brought in for the American Teen soundtrack, which is a modern day Breakfast Club documentary that went through the roof at Sundance this year. How do you relate to the movie and what were you like at that age?
SDSF: I was amazed that this is what American kids have to go through in order to grow up. It’s like running a gauntlet. It was a bit like that where I grew up, but nothing so fierce. My good friends were punky art kids but we existed in a pretty symbiotic ecosystem of popular kids, super academics, etc. If anything, we were the jackasses. I certainly remember being a huge elitist about music and lifestyle judgments when I was a teenager and I definitely saw me and my friends as the academy tasked with protecting the standards of good taste.
ATF: While keeping things upbeat most of the time, the new album has a unique way of sliding through a line of emotions. Describe the album’s tone a bit.
SDSF: From my perspective, I think it’s a representation of what we love not just about music, but people and places and situations and characters and everything else that feelings are made up out of. A snap-whiz perfect pop song is an amazing thing, but five in a row starts to eclipse what’s good about it in the first place; there should be an otherness to it. The same goes for darker songs. Focus too much on the dreary stuff and you miss out on the fundamentals of what rock and roll is all about in the first place. The most interesting music from my point of view happens when these things are layered purposefully. I think that was a consideration with the record. Whether it was conscious or not is another question.
ATF: I am a huge fan of whistling in recordings…who in the group does the whistling and how does it come across live?
SDSF:Mauro did the whistling on Smallest Heart and Stranger. I think those are the only songs with whistling in them, unless you count our cover of “Patience”. Mauro’s in the Bird-league of whistlers, so it always comes across great live.
ATF: What’s one thing everyone should know about Sunny Day Sets Fire?
SDSF: Nobody in London thinks we’re cool.
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The band’s album can be purchased on iTunes HERE now or in stores on July 8
Check out a fresh remix of their track I Dream Along and the track from the album:
September 11th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
I love so much listen music and trance