At the tail of their world tour, Sylvan Esso is traveling to the ‘ville to grace the hallowed halls of our very own High Dive this Saturday, March 28th. On the road since early spring in support of Tune-Yards and Wye Oak, this summer they’ve graduated to the top of the bill.
If you’ve fawned over Sylvan Esso’s meticulous debut album like I have, you’ve had the date circled for a while now. But for those ignorant of the electro-pop splendor that is the Nick Sanborn/Amelia Meath collaboration, here is a short list of questions (inspired by my chat with Nick) to help you ascertain whether this is the concert for you:
- Is your idea of a cocktail a Bloody Mary chased by a brew?
- Could your go to karaoke song be Al Green’s “Let’s Get it On?”
- Are you the friend with all the pop guilty pleasures?
- More so, are you the friend with an appetite for live music and livelier stage performance?
If you answered yes to any questions above, think about getting your hands on a ticket. Still unconvinced? Well here’s a slightly more conventional discussion of why your Saturday night should be spent consuming the sounds of Sylvan Esso, chasing Bloody Marys with PBRs:
Like most good things, Sylvan Esso did not happen intentionally. Their collaboration parallels their sound—organic, complex yet effortless. Amelia Meath—formerly of the indie folk trio Mountain Man—met Nick Sanborn in 2012 at the Milwaukee Cactus Club where he was opening for her group. Formerly part of the band Megafaun, Sanborn was in the middle of his second show as Made of Oak, a hip-hop inspired solo project. In admiration of Sanborn’s sound (and dance moves), Meath later asked Sanborn to remix a Mountain Man song for her. It now appears on their eponymously titled album as “Play It Right.”
Via: Partisan Records
While the pair may appear an odd couple—Meath, the folk songstress with a birdcall for a voice; Sanborn, the electronic producer with a flair for stitching together pulsing bass and sweet synthesized melodicisms—your expectations should not be bounded by their last projects.
“The fact that the last bands we were in were Mountain Man and Megafaun—it’s a longer arc than that to me. That’s oversimplifying it,” argues Sanborn.
Rather, the pair succeeds in offering a fresh style that encompasses the best parts of both artists. Sanborn’s production deftly incorporates synth stabs and computer blips with re-imaginations of Meath’s ethereal voice. Both are borderline virtuosic in manipulating the emotional ebb of their songs without a single extraneous beat or breath. The result? A sound that blurs the gray space between genres and lyrics that speak to the gray areas in human relationships—Sylvan Esso fills a void we didn’t realize existed by crafting folk-informed electro-pop that rewards attention to subtleties.
Following the release of their first record in May, Sylvan Esso has peaked at No. 39 on the Billboard 200 and has ended up in all of the major 2014 “Best of” Lists, including New York Times, NPR, Rolling Stone, Billboard, SPIN, KCRW, Paste, and more. And for good reason… Sanborn’s melodic wobbles and crisp electropop pulses offer the gravity that restrains Meath’s emotive hymn from fluttering away. This, my friends, is pop music redefined.
“We just wanted to make music that the more attention you paid to it, the more it rewarded you for paying attention to it,” offers Sanborn.
They will be making the summer festival rounds in 2015, with appearances booked for Coachella, Hangout Fest, Sasquatch, Bonnaroo, Eaux Claires, and more.
Via: Nick Karlin
All of this I was already well aware. So imagine my heart’s nerve-wracked/elated state as I sat perched with phone and notebook in hands, ready to pick the brain of Sylvan Esso’s own Nick Sanborn. Here are some selected excerpts gathered from our chat:
Can you tell me about your creative process alongside Amelia? Does it start with a lyric? A hook?
“If I create a tiny idea for Amelia, my wildest hope is that she’ll write more than I wrote for her. Then we keep bouncing it back and forth until we both don’t hate it. It is really a long-winded process of bouncing things back and forth. I mean every once in a while, something will just happen, but we’re really meticulous.”
Many have raved about the way that you and Amelia represent two seemingly opposite styles, but have managed to come together as one much greater whole. Do you agree with that response to your collaboration?
“I wouldn’t say we have exactly similar tastes, but if I’m excited about something and I play it for Amelia, she would get excited about it too. If I am really into a record, I think she would react to the same thing I’m reacting too about that record. The fact that the last bands we were in were Mountain Man and Megafaun— it’s a longer arc than that to me. That’s oversimplifying it. We’re actually very similar people… It is tough to say how we compliment each other in that context. The music we would make individually would probably have niche audiences, but I think I’m in her audience and she’s in my audience. This gives us this interesting opportunity to contextualize the other person. Every time she sends me something, I immediately try to start writing to it in such a way that I showcase to someone else – the listener – the things I love about it.”
Creating a pop album, you have said you wanted it to be nationally accessible. How did this come into play?
“If you listen to a certain record, how many moments are you forced to forgive the terrible lyrics on that record? And I am a douche in this way, but there’s so many times I’ll be listening to something and think ‘Dude, c’mon. You couldn’t have just spent five more minutes coming up with a lyric.’ We just wanted to make music that the more attention you paid to it, the more it rewarded you for paying attention to it – stuff we could listen to and not feel it oversimplified how complicated being a human is - that we represented being human while being something anyone could enjoy. There wasn’t some bar for entry.”
You utilize natural sounds throughout your music. At the end of “Coffee,” Amelia’s voice closes to the sound of a door closing.
“Yeah there’s a lot of that! We really like it when records sound like the place that they were made, but also feel like a really specific time and place in someone’s life. The more references to your own life or links you can make for yourself in a record -even if someone else doesn’t know the reference you’re making – I think they can hear the depth and the ‘personalness.’ Is that even word? [giggles] They can hear the personalness of what you made. Even that though, that door opening at the end of Coffee — I didn’t add that in. I just didn’t take it out.”
If you weren’t making music, what would you imagine yourself doing?
“I really love graphic design, especially typography. I am a huge fan of people who make fonts and do hand lettering. I’m totally obsessed with that. I probably would’ve gotten into that if some point—but, maybe not. Who knows? This has been such a weird sequence of events. Its really difficult to predict where I would be if I wasn’t doing this. Hopefully I would be something cool. It’s really easy to do stuff that isn’t cool. That seems like a much easier thing to have happen to you. But, I hope I would have been self-actualized enough to take charge of my life.”
Outside of the music world, I hear you wind down with gardening and bartending.
“Haha. This is our first tour on a bus and it’s like the least rock and roll thing ever. Nobody does drugs. We’re all in bed at a reasonable hour. I guess all of my other pursuits are pretty low-key— appropriate for a 32 year-old man I perceive.”
If Sylvan Esso was a drink, how would you classify your sound in terms of alcohol? I would ask about vegetables, but liquor is more fun.
“That’s tough because I think if I were to take the elements and put them in a cocktail, it’s the kind of cocktail that would annoy me if someone put it on a menu. Haha, this is tough. This is like picking your spirit animal. And everyone’s always like, ‘I’m a lion,’ and we all know this guy is not a lion. You always want to pick something that’s flattering for yourself and so I may not have the best perspective. I kind of want to say a Manhattan on the rocks, but fuck. We’re not that classy. But that’s me flattering myself. Actually. Why don’t we do a handmade Bloody Mary with a short beer chaser, like a Milwaukee style seven ounce High Life bottle.”
What’s your go-to karaoke song?
“We just did a karaoke night for charity in our hometown. I think I did “Burn Out in Your Soul” by They Might Be Giants. That’s kind of a weird hit, so it is not always available. I usually sing ‘Let’s Stay Together’ by Al Green.”
Everyone wants to know… Why the name Sylvan Esso?
“Well, we had a bunch of other names that were really terrible. And then Amelia came up with that after playing the video game we love called Swords and Sorcery. There is a character in it called a Sylvan Sprite that is a beautiful little princess tree sprite thing? She had come up with that kind of nonsensical name. We immediately thought it was really cool, but couldn’t name our band after that. It was too difficult to explain and say. Everything else we came up with kept getting compared to this weird name Amelia thought of. We were on the verge of being named something else and as we were making an email account for it, we thought, ‘This is not right. We’re Sylvan Esso. We’ve known this all along.’ We were trying to deny it, but it just stuck.”
Tickets for the show on Saturday, March 28th, are still available at ticketweb.com, High Dive and Hear Again downtown. Doors open at 8 p.m.
Featured photo courtesy of: Badger Herald
