From the Mouths of Birds

Two-piece Charlottesville outfit Birdlips is starting to make quite a flutter. Their debut, Cardboard Wings was recently named favorite local album of the year by the C-Ville Weekly. They have been featured in the Washington Post, the Washington Time, and on NPR’s song of the day for their track, “Tire Chains.” Before rushing off to New York for a show, recent U.Va. alumni Lindsay Pitts and Cliff Usher took some time out of their blossoming musical careers to sit down and talk with the Dec.

Tell us about how Birdlips became Birdlips, I know you were in a band before this one.

Cliff Usher: I met Lindsay on the street at a bar one night, and we were talking at Mellow Mushroom one time and she was like “Oh I play keyboard and drums” and we found out we lived across the street from each other. One time I called her up and she just came over for band practice.

Lindsay Pitts: Then some of the guys in the last band got jobs in DC, and we sort of decided we still wanted to do music. At the time we started finding all those bands like Beach House, two pieces. We were like, “What the hell, we can do it too.”

How would you describe your last Band, The Business of Flies?

CU: We were kind of constantly evolving, but I think the last few that we were together we were definitely focusing in on this grunge influenced dance stuff, grunge music with a disco beat. I was really into Death From Above, 1979.

In the Washington Times article, you spoke about how studying abroad in Spain really influenced your music, why was this?

CU: I’d been playing music with most of the guys from “The Business of Flies” in rock bands for a bunch of years, some of them from the sophomore year of high school. We had always played rock music. I was going to Spain for a year—two semesters—and brought my acoustic guitar with me. I had never really played that much acoustic guitar in my lifetime. I had an acoustic guitar, but I was always primarily focused on electric. I had to teach myself how to think about the guitar in terms of that voice. I started writing songs, but I didn’t have any recording equipment, so I had to strip it down, simple stuff.

Were all the songs on Cardboard Wings written in Spain?

CU: No, not all. We still focused on the trip over there, but couple of them I wrote when I got back. We wrote Tire Chains together.

Was it the isolation more than anything specifically in Spain that really helped you write the music?

CU: Doing the year abroad thing for me was a very eye opening experience. Its kind of cliché to talk about how, “Oh the year abroad is so amazing,” but it is. It makes you see things in a different way. Someone told me before I went over there that the culture shock going over is not as bad as the culture shock coming back, and I definitely found that to bet true. Coming back was really when it hit me. Here I’m walking down 14th street and there’s people playing beer pong in their front lawn. You look around and say, “Its so strange, Americans are so weird”. I think the album was more a product of those kinds of realizations.

Do you think Charlottesville has influenced your music at all?

CU: I think a lot of local bands definitely have a Charlottesville sound, and maybe from moving around a lot I haven’t really felt a connection to one particular place, but at the same time Charlottesville definitely has a great culture of artists and musicians that we didn’t realize until we moved back.

There seems to be a lot of experimentation with different instruments, like banjo, flute, and percussion on the record. Did you plan on including all of those or just pick up playing them along the way?

CU: I’ve always really enjoyed playing different instruments, even though I’m not particularly great at anything. The banjo was really interesting, because it was a gift from my uncle that I threw into some random tuning and put on the record, just jamming along to a few of the songs. I’ve always enjoyed picking up different instruments, but I’ve never been one to get caught up or too focused on one.

You said in an article in the Washington Times that even though they described your music as folk-tinged, you didn’t want to be labeled as folk. Is there any reason?

CU: I don’t have anything against folk music, I just feel that to a certain extent they have their own world that we aren’t really a part of and haven’t delved into. I think that fans of real folk music wouldn’t consider us a folk band even if we were described that way.

LP: We don’t really know folk singers that well besides some major players, and I think it would be misleading for us to be labeled as folk. We’ve always considered ourselves more on the indie side. The main opposition is for playing shows, where we’d rather be playing with bands we were into than folk artists with a different fan base.

Are you guys involved with anything right now other than playing and touring? Is there a new record in the works?

LP: We have a lot of half finished songs and pieces of songs right now, but mostly we’re really focused on playing shows.

CU: We’re actually hoping to get started on writing and recording our next record in late summer or early fall, and we early have a studio picked out. We were happy with the last process, but until then we’d pretty much self recorded everything we’d put out, and on that record we used a lot of vintage gear run into a computer with, so we think it came out pretty great. For the new studio, they have a great setup and we really feel like they’re on the same page as us for what we want it to sound like.

You self-released this record. Did you like how that turned out or do you think you’d go with a label if given the opportunity?

LP: It was a learning process. Especially from talking to different bands who have been in this situation, we discovered in today’s environment you really don’t want to be going around looking for a label be cause you won’t get as good of a deal. Right now we’re looking at booking agents, which should be helpful because a lot of venues just won’t even consider your band unless you’re affiliated with a certain label or agent.

CU: One of the main things you should do when self-releasing in album is to send your record out to as many blogs, zines, newspapers, etc., and we really didn’t do that when the record came out. We’re just getting around to making contacts and sending the record out now, but hopefully in the future we can link up with somebody to get national distribution.

So how did you end up getting C-Ville, the Washington Times and the Washington Post to hear your record?

LP: We had a friend at C-Ville who took it upon himself. He would’ve reviewed it even if we had asked him, but it wasn’t as if he would’ve talked about our record and said we sucked, so he actually passed it along to someone else. I actually harassed people at the Washington Post until they decided to do an article on us.

CU: I actually think part of it was the fact that we had really good press pictures, which really helped. That was another piece of advice we received, to have an eye-catching image, and we had a friend who helped us out a lot and took some really great pictures.

What’re some albums or artists you guys are listening to currently?

LP: We’re listening to the new Animal Collective, Deerhunter, DBB Plays Cups.

CU: Yeah, DBB Plays Cups is kind of an around town band. He’s this guy who’s a kindergarten teacher who does sporadic shows in random places, and he has a different band every time. He sets it up so they only practice the day of the show, and everybody plays a different instrument every time so the songs sound completely different.

Birdlips is playing live at iS January 22nd, and at Gravity Lounge February 12th.