About a Band: Mothlight
Written by Patricia Manlucu for Urban Outfitters Space15Twenty (2016)
Mothlight is an upcoming band located in our very own Los Angeles! Though Mothlight first released an EP in 2009, Matt, Grant, and Andrew have big plans for the future of the band. Check out our interview with Matt – he tells us a little bit about the history of Mothlight and what’s next for them:
How would you guys describe your sound for people who have not listened to your music before?
We've embraced calling ourselves dream pop although we generally try different things on each song so I think we could be classified under a number of different labels. The nature of constantly shifting musical trends and micro-genres in the Internet age makes it difficult to classify any band working outside of major labels I think. In the most basic sense though, we are trying to write songs that have unique but catchy melodies in a way that elicits some sort of magical feeling which usually brings me to call us dream pop.
How did the band first come together?
Mothlight first began when I (Matt) was studying film in Santa Barbara. I had played with some people in New York for a summer and had built up confidence in my songwriting abilities so I wrote a couple of tracks and recorded them with my friend Andrew who was learning how to engineer and mix music at the time. I wrote a few EPs on my own and had friends help me out with live shows wherever I was living. In 2012 I started playing and writing with Grant who had recently moved to San Diego where we were both kind of regrouping after post college blues. Once we got our shit together, we moved to LA with our friend Odie and finished writing and recording our first full length, Calico. The current iteration of Mothlight (which feels like the final version of Mothlight) is with Grant, myself, and Andrew who we strangely enough met off of Craigslist. It was pretty clear from the first time jamming with him that he was going to be as fundamental to the writing of future material as we were. It's been a pretty weird and varied road to where we're at now, but everything is feeling super comfortable and relatively effortless at our current state.
Where did the name "Mothlight" come from?
Mothlight is taken from a Stan Brahkage short film that has the same title. The movie is a few minutes of film being run through a projector with moth wings taped to the actual physical film. I first saw it in high school and it totally shifted my perception of what art could be. The notion that you could create something so beautiful through such avant grade means radically changed my approach to creating music and has since inspired me to reach outside conventions of a medium to find what best captures whatever I'm going for.
What is the band's process when creating a song?
Generally each of us will write something on our own and then bring an idea to the other members whether it's a guitar part, keyboard part, or drum part, but we've also written a few songs by just picking up our instruments and feeling a chord progression out in the moment. We've all got our own ideas on where we want to take a song that fortunately usually mesh with the other members' notions pretty well so songwriting is usually pretty seamless. I remember reading an interview with Boards of Canada where they discussed how they didn't need to explain their musical ideas to each other because they were brothers. While Andrew, Grant, and I aren't actually related, I think we all think about music in a really similar sense so we can skip through a lot of the steps of having to explain why something needs to happen.
Where does most of the inspiration behind the music come from?
Lyrically I'm usually writing about whatever I'm dealing with or psyched about although I'm not much of a story teller. I'm also always really interested in the way movies utilize sound to tell a story so I try to incorporate some of that into our songwriting. Our sound is heavily influenced by whatever kind of art we are consuming at the moment. Lately that has been a lot of Broadcast and Stereolab.
What has been your guys' favorite part about being in a band?
In the past, writing and playing music was a necessity for getting out all of the weird stuff buried deep inside me and to a certain extent it still functions in that way. However, it's a lot more fun now, especially since I am playing with two super close friends. We are still at the beginning stages of Mothlight in it's present form, but I get the most enjoyment out of the feeling we get when a song is really starting to come together and everyone's parts are coalescing.
What are you guys looking forward to next?
We're currently focused on recording and producing an album on our own which is a first as a band. We're hoping to play more shows opening up for bands that we're psyched about and just overall getting our name out more in Los Angeles. The three of us are very optimistic about the future of the band as our abilities as songwriters and performers continue to develop.
