Introducing… Trails & Ways – Interview

“It’s scary to borrow things from a different culture and fear whether or not you’re coming from a genuine place in how you do it…” Emma Oppen, Trails & Ways.

For a band who call California’s Bay Area home, Trails and Ways’ influences are anything but typical.  While the four-piece band may have similar pop sensibilities to fellow West Coasters like Rogue Wave (whose record we recently reviewed) and the late, great Rilo Kiley, their sound is actually derivative of Brazilian bossa nova music.

Having spent six months in Brazil prior to starting the band, singer and chief songwriter Keith Bower Brown, along with drummer/producer Ian Quirk, bassist/songwriter Emma Oppen and guitarist Hannah van Loon have developed a sound that fuses the genre’s jazzy shuffle with their own indie, pop, and punk roots.

Produced by drummer Ian Quirk, their new EP, Trilingual (released on their own imprint, Non Market Records), finds the band shifting effortlessly between English, Spanish and Portuguese, over a blend of reverb-soaked guitars, slinky basslines and stacks (on stacks on stacks) of harmonized vocals.

We caught up with the band before their headlining gig at The Knitting Factory, Brooklyn, to discuss their diverse influences and future plans to issues of authenticity and cultural appropriation.  Ladies and gentlemen, introducing Trails and Ways.

“There are things you can say in languages that are hard to say in your own language in both the musical forms and words themselves…”

First off, introduce yourselves.

Emma Oppen: My Name is Emma. I play bass and sing
Keith Bower Brown: My name is Keith. I play rhythm guitar, some keyboards and I sing.
Hannah van Loon: I’m Hannah. I play lead guitar, keyboards and sing.
Ian Quirk: I’m Ian. I play drums and sing and I do the production of our music.

Let’s talk a bit about how the band came together. You all went to UC Berkeley together but you didn’t start the band while you were there. You traveled a bit afterward and got things started when you returned to Oakland…

EO: Keith went to Brazil for about six months and was doing research there and I went to Spain to teach English for 10 months. It was kind of staggered.  Keith went to Brazil before I went to Spain. He started playing a lot more guitar and learned a lot of bossa nova songs. I had a similar experience in Spain. I didn’t learn traditional Spanish songs but just being in a different country, I found that I had more time to play guitar and also was more driven to play music and write songs just to occupy the time and process my thoughts while being there.  Those influences have made their way into the music that we make now.

As per the title of your new EP, Trilingual, you sing in English, Spanish and Portugese.  Was that a conscious decision as a group of people who had just spent time abroad or was it something that just happened naturally?

KBB: I feel like there are things you can say in languages that are hard to say in your own language in both the musical forms and words themselves. Working with Spanish, working with Brazilian music, there was just a lot of creative space that that opened up for us. On this album there are a lot of songs about struggling to say things to people across language barriers and finding that there’s a way you can say things more directly. Even though you’re struggling to find the words, you can say things more directly and more potently than you could in your own language.  Songs like ‘Nunca’ and ‘Como te Vas’ are about the directness you can find when you’re struggling to cross the language border.

Your music has a really lush, spacious, groovy sound to it that you describe as “bossa nova dream pop”. Can you elaborate on that?

KBB: I felt very inspired by both of those forms of music. I think there were just some moments when we were starting to make music together as a four-piece band for the first time that I really felt like those brought together a lot of what we were bringing to the table…like this ability to create atmospheric space and texture, drawing on dream pop. And then bossa nova and more Latin American musical influences brought in less conventional rhythms and a kind of hypnotic dreaminess to them as well.  I felt like there was this very seamless space where those two things came into the conversation together that I wanted to try to make songs in.

“We’re not trying to make the music that a Brazilian artist would, or a Spanish artist would, or a Mexican artist would.  Our music is situated in ourselves as Americans who got to go to college and got to experience these places and live there and not just be tourists…”

As a group of Americans playing music that is so heavily influenced by Brazilian music, do you worry about your authenticity being questioned?

KBB: I definitely think it’s important to put a lot of thought into that question if you’re an American artist with an American artist’s privileges who’s making music that takes influence and inspiration from other places.  I think that we try to make it clear through our music, and I want to make it clear in everything else we do, that we’re not trying to be like a Brazilian band.  We’re not trying to make the music that a Brazilian artist would, or a Spanish artist would, or a Mexican artist would.  Our music is situated in ourselves as Americans who got to go to college and got to experience these places and live there and not just be tourists, but have something of a more engaged relationship with these spaces and learn from people there.  The music comes from those experiences. It’s something inspired by, and based out of those relationships with the places, but we’re not claiming that it’s that music.  If anybody ever said that they felt like we were colonizing their music, I would take that really seriously and really try to take that into account with what we do going forward.

EO: It’s scary to go into a different culture and it’s scary to borrow things from a different culture and fear whether or not you’re coming from a genuine place in how you do it…if it’s actually coming from a real place within you, or if you’re just mimicking what you’ve seen somebody else do.  But that’s the nature of how humans live together, and we already live in a multicultural context in the Bay Area.  Being back in the Bay Area after being in another country, I feel like I see how there are people from all over the world in that space. If anything, being in a place like where I studied abroad, in a fairly small city in a fairly isolated part of the country, it was pretty homogeneously people from that region of Spain, which is, in some ways more restricted in terms of the variety of cultural influences than what I experience in the Bay Area.  I just think that it’s really just a desire to understand and communicate and see the different types of people and ways of living that are out there.  You kind of just have to take the risk that at some point there may be a repercussion of trying to step across that boundary and see what is outside of what you’re familiar with.

Let’s talk a bit about the EP.  What was the writing process like? The recording process?

KBB: Emma wrote the first song, ‘Como Te Vas,’ and I wrote the other four.  We started writing them ourselves and then brought them to the band.  At least with my songs, I would have a pattern on rhythm guitar and lyrics in some stage of completion and bring it to everyone else and we’d start jamming out.  Generally it’d be me, Hannah and Emma sitting down and grooving together on guitars and bass, finding riffs that we liked, finding arrangements that we liked.  Then we’d bring it together with Ian and he would come up with cool beats and arrangement ideas and production ideas.  We, for this record, did a lot of writing in the studio because we record and produce it all ourselves so far.  We’ve had a lot of space to experiment as we go.

You’re on your first U.S. tour right now, taking the stage at Knitting Factory Brooklyn tonight.  How do you translate the music from that studio environment to a live setting?

HVL: We all have to do three things at once.  We do try to get it to sound like the recorded music.  There are a lot of harmonies and all of the instruments are going most of the time so it took awhile to try to pull it all together where we could play our parts and sing our lines together and do it solidly.

KBB: We’ve had a strong commitment to not using backing tracks or any kind of non-live elements and I’m quite proud of us for that. I think it’s rad.

Now that the EP is out and you’re touring the country, what’s next for Trails and Ways?

KBB: It’s secret

IQ: Only our crystals know.

HVL: We have a bunch of new songs that we haven’t recorded so we’re going to record those and work on new material and hopefully put out a full length at some point sooner than later.

KBB: We want to make it good. We’re not trying to rush anything. You can be under a lot of pressure to do shit fast but good music takes time and we want to take that time.

Trails & Ways’ debut EP, Trilingual, is out now.