Interview with bass guitarist Kevin Williams:
Q: When you were approached about the festival, how did you guys decide you were going to play at Coastline?
A: We immediately said yes. It’s really exciting to see a cool music festival happening in South Florida. I haven’t really seen a whole lot in the way of a festival drawing a lot of really large out-of-town bands to South Florida in a while, at least for the style of music that we like. So it’s really cool, and it blew our minds to be able to play at Cruzan Amphitheatre in West Palm Beach. I still remember it as the Coral Sky Amphitheatre. It’s the first venue a lot of us saw our first concerts.
Q: Tell me a little bit about the cover art of “Pythons.”
A: The cover art kind of manifested itself over a period of time. This idea of a young scrawny kid flexing his arm is a juxtaposition of being that young, and it’s an age where you see the world kind of differently than the world sees you, where you feel invincible, but you’re still a young little, scrawny kid. This idea of being young and being pretty insignificant to the world just kind of started hitting a note with us. It’s just the sense, the idea, of self-perception versus outside youthfulness.
Q: How do you think people’s perception of Surfer Blood has changed from the time you guys debuted your first album in 2010 to now?
A: We’ve had a lot of people say that. Obviously, (“Pythons”) is more polished because this is our first time in a studio. Both “Tarot Classics” and “Astro Coast” were pretty much entirely home recorded in JP’s (frontman John Paul Pitts) apartment. It still essentially was recording, it just was in a tricked-out home studio, nothing like a proper studio like when we went to EastWest Studios for “Pythons,” and we had the producer Gil Norton.
Q: I read in an interview that Gil Norton really pushed you guys out of your comfort zone.
A: He definitely encouraged us to embellish parts of the songs a little bit more. He would speak almost in riddles sometimes. He’d say, “Make the guitar fly.” He’d say, “Play the part but make it fly,” and then Tom (guitarist Thomas Fekete) would play this riff, and he’d say no, no, fly, and we had no idea what he was talking about, but I guess that was part of the fun. That was pushing us out of our comfort zone.
Q: What can people expect for you guys to play at Coastline?
A: It’s always tricky. Ideally, we’d love to play our full-length set that we play at our headlining shows every night, but with a festival, it’s a little more of a stripped-down set, just by the nature of music festivals. We try to start out strong but still keep the emotional numbers in there and try to balance it out. We also try to keep the deeper tracks like “Catholic Pagans” and crowd favorites that are not necessarily the immediate pop songs but band favorites as well. We try to keep it well-balanced.
A version of this story ran on page 10 on 10/31/2013 under the headline "Hometown boys Surfer Blood return to roots with Coastline"
