Sometimes, the medium of interviewing allows one to see a different side of a subject, occasionally contradicting either a public persona or what the subject is best known for.
People who play bright, sunny music can sometimes be unfriendly or curt. People who play loud, aggressive music, conversely, can be some of the politest and most considerate folk you’re likely to encounter. What, then, of those who make simple, sweet and yearning music – for instance, Girlpool; the Los Angeles-based two-piece who became one of the indie world’s most talked-about acts of 2015? Truth be told, they’re an accurate reflection of their music – simple, sweet, yearning, but also a little shy and almost reluctant to let too much on.
Although Girlpool only formed in 2013, their two members – each of whom are scarcely out of their teens – expressed great interest in making music from a very early age. “I played guitar for the first time when I was seven,” says Cleo Tucker. “I knew from that point on that I had found something that was going to be a huge part of my life. I never wanted to do anything else. Playing music and writing words for it was all that interested me.”
“My dad was a bass player,” adds Harmony Tividad, the band’s bassist who shares vocal duties with Tucker. “When he realised I was interested in playing music, he showed me how to play and really encouraged me. I sang in choir all through school and I got my first guitar when I was 13. I had piano lessons, too, but they never really stuck when I was a kid.”
Girlpool’s debut album, Before The World Was Big, was released back in June. Coming in at only 24 minutes long, it’s an album that makes great use of its time, filling its running length with inventive lyricism and warm, layered vocals atop of lush, intertwining guitars. For a band still in relative infancy – and that’s ignoring Tucker and Tividad’s actual ages – there is a considerable degree of certainty regarding the Girlpool sound already. This, according to Tividad, was an equal and opposite reaction to their rushed – almost gratuitous – first release.
“The start of Girlpool is kind of interesting,” she says. “The first EP that we put out [2014’s Girlpool] was kind of rushed – it was strung together really quickly within two months. We just wanted something to sell at shows, because we’d just started touring. When it came to the first song we wrote for Before The World Was Big, which ended up being ‘Ideal World’ … we actually decided to sit down and properly explore what our sound could be. We had a lot of lengthy conversations about it, and then [aimed to] see how we could reflect our love of melody and countermelodies in both the music that we were playing and the harmonies that we were singing. There’s been a real change in the way that we make music together, and I think this album reflects that.”
Everything you hear on Before The World Was Bigwas performed by Girlpool themselves. They have no studio or session musicians, they have no backing band and they don’t even use a drummer. It’s this stripped-back and almost primitive approach to making music that has fascinated audiences across the world – including Australia, where the band will soon visit for the first time ever. Although some publications have made quite a point of their minimal set-up, Tucker and Tividad insist they were never interested in any outside interference.
“It was a really organic collaboration,” says Tucker. “I think we were drawn to one another purely because we could both see that we really felt passionate and serious about making things, even though we were young. We both believed in the fluidity of creativity, so I think we were attracted to that in one another. It’s blossomed into this partnership, which has become really revealing and eye-opening for us.”
Before The World Was Big received some of the most positive critical receptions of the year, with a lot of kudos being awarded for the rapid growth and development of Tucker and Tividad as songwriters and as vocalists. As far as that side of things is concerned, however, the duo have not read a great deal into it – both as a figure of speech and quite literally. Instead, Girlpool have focused on a bigger picture, which is everyday people directly expressing what their music means to them – something that neither member takes for granted.
“It’s funny – I don’t think that I could feel any less detached from the public perception of our music,” confesses Tividad. “It’s hard to fully understand from the outside. From where we stand, it’s so hard to tell. It feels really nice that people enjoy it and connect with it, but we only really find out about things like that when people come up to us at shows and tell us things like that. “We’ve had a lot of great stories and nice things said directly to us, and they’re always so thankful – I mean, so are we, of course. We had no expectations when we were writing these songs. We were writing with an end goal of catharsis. We just wanted something out there in the world that we were proud of and meant something to us.”
Girlpool play at The Famous Spiegeltent on Tuesday January 26. Read more at the Sydney Festival website, here.
