Strange Birds

What are your musical influences?
B: Radiohead, Whitest Boy Alive…
A: Grizzly Bear, and Department of Eagles…
B: electronic music from the 90’s, Bonobo, and recently Atlas Sound’s new album

While growing up, what music did you listen to?
A: Reggae. It’s rhythmic and sensual. And blues. Blues has an importance to lyrics—lyrics don’t just fill a gap. Like B.B. King: he plays a lot of the same chords but his lyrics mean something. You don’t just sing whatever. You make something that means something.

How would you describe your music?
B: It's important that it feels right. That's the great thing about us; we work well together and look for the same thing in a song We communicate. A mixture of people's distinct personalities creates effect—in this case two.
A: Feeling goes hand in hand with musical influence—we look for that same feeling that inspired us-it's the idea of what our music should be—it's all about effect. And a natural sound. It has to flow. Our music is an honest telling of a certain moment and what made that moment. The least expected comes naturally and we work with that.
B: We don't really sit and construct, but we still want to improve on construction and notes.

What is your favorite sound?
B: Silence. Silence is refreshing. You really get to enjoy something—sound or music or anything—by not hearing it at some point and learn to appreciate it. Sound helps you appreciate silence and vise versa. I also like the sound of water.

What is your approach to sound and recording? What do you expect from it?
A: We don’t really know what it should sound like when first coming in to record. We experiment as much as possible. Our approach to recording is that when we finish an album, we instantly start working on the next. People think you need to crap out as much as possible. That’s not how it works. We need to take it slow and maybe even do it ourselves. We change our minds a lot. There are always new ideas. But they also need time to settle. Recording is really done when we say it’s done.

What is your preferred setting to play in?
A: “Reverb Room” (What they call the “reverb room” is an open, glass and stone walkway on the UCI campus.)

What artist or band would you want to see together?
B+A: Radiohead. Or Portishead.

How did you guys come up with the name Strange Birds?
B: It was a song name first, and also a part of a lyric that I wrote in the past. Our upcoming album has two versions of the song: “Summer Birds” and “Winter Birds”. The song was written in those seasons.

What is your upcoming album called?
A: We have a couple of ideas but it’s not what we’re focusing on. That’s secondary.
B: There’s this book by Jonathan Safran Foer called Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. You read the title and think, what is that? What does it mean? The title ends up explaining itself once you’ve read the book. The same goes for albums. A good title ends up explaining itself.

What do you want this album to convey, especially it being your first one?
A: We’ve been writing music together longer than the actual band has been together. This album was something we had to go through to see what we had to do and where we would come out at its completion. I think people will be as confused about the album as us when we first wrote it. We’re still confused on what it should convey, but a little less now.

What’s the status of your album at present?
B+A: We’re done recording. It’s finished. A release date is yet to be set. - Self-Promotion Magazine