Band Profile: The Bowerbirds
Photo by D.L. Anderson
Tell us more about your sound & influences:
We are an acoustic band, playing I guess what people call either Americana, indie folk, or nu folk. We don’t really like any of these terms. We are influenced by 70s music, other current indie musicians, jazz, african harp music, traditional western and eastern european music.
The songwriting is mostly influenced by poetry and nonfiction.
Who are your favorite local bands?
Des Ark, Bellafea, Bright Young Things, Megafaun, Rosebuds, Phon, Schooner – ok, actually we refuse to continue to list these, because we would leave out someone important and then regret it, so those are the ones that first came to us in 10 seconds.
What other music is in constant rotation?
We don’t really have a way to usually listen to music at the AirStream/ cabin. I had an ipod that Beth got for Christmas from my brother, but it was stolen on tour, along with both our laptops and all our mp3s. So, we don’t really have much music. We don’t have a stereo or a record player. It’s kind of sad, but we can’t really afford to buy a stereo right now.
Phil has a new iPhone though, which has some Andrew Bird, MGMT, Beyonce, and like three other albums on it. We usually are just getting by on the sounds of nature, or else watching movies, when we have laptops, on the laptops. Unfortunately, Beth just discovered the show, Lost, and we are trying to avoid spending all our time streaming it on our new replacement laptop.
Photos by D.L. Anderson
What is happening around North Carolina that excites you?
All the new restaurants in downtown Raleigh are a lot of fun. Finally, Raleigh is getting better downtown. We really like the food co-op in Pittsboro. We aren’t home for most of the year, because of touring, so we are sort of out of the loop. I work at Sitti, though, in downtown Raleigh, the new Lebanese restaurant. We have met a lot of new friends recently, and there seem to be more cookouts than there used to be, and more late night skinny dipping and daytime trips to the quarries and rivers for rafting.
What current projects are you working on?
We have an album coming out in the U.S. and Canada on July 7th, and we start our North American tour July 6th. We are currently working on getting the new songs ready for tour. It’s exciting to have a different lineup for each tour. This time we reunite with Mark Paulson, who skipped the last three tours, but we keep Brad Cook, on upright bass this time. Brad plays also in the excellent band Megafaun, who will be touring with us.
We are trying to set up a tour blog for this next tour. Hopefully we can get that ready in time for tour.
Then we tour Europe in the fall, which is always fun. We just got home from a European tour, where we ate a lot of delicious food. They have better food than we do. In general.
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