At this year’s Firefly Music Festival, Melodic Mag got to sit down with some of our favorite artists to discuss their summer, future plans, and this year’s festival. Provo, UT’s The Backseat Lovers put on one of our favorite sets of the festival with their energetic take on indie-rock, and we talked briefly with them about their forthcoming sophomore album Waiting to Spill and what lies ahead for the quickly-rising rock band:
The biggest thing that I can hear from the singles from Waiting to Spill is that it’s far away from your DIY roots and upbringing. This sounds like a big studio-rock record, and the experimentation is really interesting to hear. What do you feel like is the biggest difference between Waiting to Spill and your debut?
Jonas Swanson (guitar): I think the biggest difference is how much time we spent with the songs, and our ability to play them for a while before we got into the studio. Arrangement-wise, we really branched out from playing the same instrument on every single song. I think at its core, it feels similar enough to the debut, but I think we, as people, were writing about new things and showing off our growth as people.
Joshua Harmon (vocals): I think in addition to that, we had way more time to be obsessive about it. We ended up focusing on a lot more extraneous details than we did on the debut, which got pretty crazy after a little while.
I always love asking artists where they feel like the finish line is — where is that line for you?
KJ Ward (bass): That’s something we definitely had to learn in the studio.
Juice Welch (drums): For this album, I feel like every song had a different finish line, which we’d end up crossing and then not actually being done with it (laughs). We’d cross a finish line, then there’d be another finish line later.
Joshua: We’re really bad at finishing songs (laughs).
KJ: I feel like you can tinker with a song forever, you know? It feels like a song is never fully done until you’re listening to it on Spotify — it’s on a journey with you forever, and you kind of just decide it’s done in that version. Finishing songs is more like taking a snapshot of its current state rather than putting it away forever.
In the press release for the record, Joshua, you’re quoted as saying “this record was one of the hardest things we’ve ever had to do” because of how vulnerable you all are in the lyrical content of this album. What prompted you to embrace that vulnerability and write about these heavier topics on the album?
Joshua: For me, music has always been the place where I can explore myself. When I sit down to write a song, the feeling of getting completely lost in the song for just a moment and not having anything in my mind other than the song is kind of the time in my life when I feel most like myself. In order to do that, you have to be vulnerable with yourself, and your voice, and the instrument you’re playing. I think we’ve learned over time how to be more comfortable being more vulnerable with ourselves and with each other, and I think vulnerability is one of those things that you can never really stop chasing after and striving for as a songwriter. Being fully in a moment with a song, with people you love around you — that’s how this album is different than anything we’ve made before, is because we’ve learned how to do that.
The live show that you bring to the table is pretty fiery — we’ve seen you at a handful of festivals this year. Do you have any live show memories from the summer that stick out in your head as you enter this new album cycle?
KJ: Newport Folk Festival was one of the most special experiences of my life. Just getting to be there among the history and the legends was completely life-changing for me.
Jonas: Last year, I think it was in Indianapolis, our show almost sold out and we ended up bringing a dunk tank to the show and let everyone know they could dunk us if it sold out — which, it promptly did, and we all got dunked. (laughs)
Joshua: In addition to Newport, Shaky Knees was one of my favorite sets we’ve ever played. That show was nuts; so much went wrong technically, but I’d never felt more energy and love from the crowd than on that day.
What are you most excited about with this album’s release? Your rise was immediate and stratospheric amidst COVID-19 — this feels like the first “real” album rollout you all have implemented.
Joshua: I’m really excited to play these songs live. There are a lot of pieces of the record that we always imagined getting to play live, but we haven’t been able to for so long, that literally the thrill of just playing, say, the opening track excites me.
Jonas: I’m stoked to be able to play — on our upcoming tour, we’re playing the album front-to-back and we’ve never really done that before! The album will be its own art piece, taken in its entirety. I think it’s one of the more ambitious things we’ve ever done, and I’m really excited for the audience to get to digest it in that way.
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Stay tuned for the rest of our Firefly content, and check out the festival recap and portrait gallery featuring these bands and many more.
