Austin Sound

Photo: Jacob Cuthbertson

It’s taken Shawn Jones of The Lovely Sparrows nearly two years to craft an album worthy of following up the EP that completely redefined the band’s sound in 2006, Pulling Up Floors, Pouring On (New) Paint. The new album, titled Bury The Cynics, is more expansive, both musically and lyrically, than its predecessor, but its writing was marred by its own set of problems, including the theft of a laptop containing most of the demos. Now on the brink of the album’s release, we sat down with Shawn Jones to talk about the new album, the state of the band, his view on the local scene, hipsters, swing music and, most importantly, to reprimand him for his lengthy absence.

Austin Sound: The album seems to be getting a lot of press lately with the video premiering on SPIN and all. How has that been, was it expected?

Shawn Jones: Umm… it has been unexpected because we’re now I guess a few months into the press push - most people start three months before the record comes out - and it’s been kind of a slow build. And when we put the video out, which I guess was like last week, it seemed like there was an immediate wave. I think it helped people, I think it gave them something visual to kind of hold on to. I know this album was a little bit more than the EP was, as far as imagery and it’s not all relationship based and stuff like that. So it was a pleasant surprise.

AS: Over the past year the popularity of Sparrows has been gaining, if slowly.

SJ: It’s very slow, very slow build

AS: You did Daytrotter…

SJ: Yeah, the Daytrotter guys have been really nice to us. They’ve been on board since like day one.

AS: Have they been in contact still, since that was back in June or July of last year right?

SJ: They have, they have. I think we’ll probably do another Daytrotter session whenever we get around to Chicago. We always touch base around South By. They’re just all nice guys.

AS: What was your ear to the ground for how popularity was building, or if you were doing the right kind of stuff?

SJ: It’s hard to gauge. I feel like in Austin we’ve just now gotten a little bit more, I don’t want to say selective cause that sounds kind of shitty, but a little bit more selective… I guess about who we play with in town. And there’s all kinds of stuff that I like, tons and tons of bands that I don’t think would fit well. I think we’ve been thinking more about which band would have an audience that might actually be into us. I think that I have a better gauge of it outside of Austin. I feel like we get a lot of support, like a whole lot of support for press here and stuff, but it’s so hit-or-miss at shows, like how does that translate?

I know that if we play in New York where I feel like no one has heard of us that we can kind of make enough to barely cover the trip, and it’s a pretty engaged crowd, especially for as low key as we are compared to a lot of stuff that’s big right now. But then we played inside between Fleet Foxes, which was kind of weird and fun, and they’re super, super low key. A lot of people compare them to Grizzly Bear, but their live set, Grizzly Bear’s obviously a lot more energetic in the Pink Floyd rock out sections, you know? And it gave me a little bit of hope, kind of the same thing from a Smog show. I saw Smog at the Cactus a year or two ago, and it was a pin-drop audience. So I thought, “OK, how do we find those people? How do we get the record out to those people that are interested,” cause there’s obviously a lot of people that are interested, or at least enough to fill a room. I feel like we somehow have not found those people yet in Austin. We’ve got a lot of friends and a lot of really loyal people who’ve been really great to us and always say really nice things about us, but it’s like, where are just the people who were at that show? So it is a really slow build.

AS: Yeah, it seems like going out of Austin you’d be attracting only people who want to hear the stuff, whereas playing in Austin you’re really attracting all of Austin, who come out anyway.

SJ: Yeah yeah, I’ve kind of made peace with the fact. I think at least right now, Austin is more of like a party-vibe type band atmosphere (and that doesn’t necessarily translate to “fratty”, I don’t mean that). I saw a band at this craft festival at the Scoot… Canopy, do you know them?

AS: Yeah.

SJ: …and I instantly knew that they would do really well, and I like ‘em! I like ‘em! But they’d kind of be like the hyper side for us.

But I don’t see a lot of stuff like… did you ever know Karrie Hopper, did you ever see her? She was another girl who played all the time. It’s like, where’s the crowd for all of these people? I know it’s gotta be out there.

AS: What’s it like on the road then with the “Austin” tag? Is that something that’s helped you?

SJ: I think so. Yeah, I think so. It definitely doesn’t hurt. I was scared to death the first time we played in New York. We played at Union Hall which is probably my favorite place to play up there now, but it was definitely super-hip. Super-hip. And this is right around… August of last year. We had never played up there before, and I was like “Uh-oh, we’re gonna tank, and these people want to hear Euro-dance type stuff. These people want hipster black tie stuff.” And it went over really well. I think that it’s because there’s not a lot of that stuff up there. We had some people coming up afterward and they were calling us alt-country and other people we’re like “Aah, you’re doing that like ‘indie-folk’ thing.” It’s weird all the different takes on it, because I honestly don’t have a good hold on it myself. I look at each song individually or something – oh well that one’s my Bowie song, or that one’s my Copeland song, stuff like that.

AS: So it’s been two years since the EP came out.

SJ: [Laughs] That wasn’t necessarily intentional…

AS: Well did you feel like you were trying to meet expectations with the new album or…?

SJ: I felt that way because, yeah, the EP definitely had a lot of support and buzz, a lot more than this record has so far. And when I did that EP, that was pretty quick, and that EP was special because, if you’ve heard the seven inch that came before it [The Lovely Sparrows' 2005 debut Take Your Hats Off, You Godless Bastards], it’s like 100% different. Two different bands. So that was as close as I could get to my version of a traditional folk record, keeping the imagery pretty traditional, stuff like that. And it did get a fair amount of love. I think if we had better distributions for that one then… well, you know. So there was that, but then I had the laptop stolen, lost all the songs [demos for Bury The Cynics]…

AS: Yeah, that was up in New York?

SJ: [Laughs] Yeah, that was New York.

AS: And I think I was reading, the only one that survived was “Year of the Dog” right?

SJ: Only the very end section of it, that little Neutral Milk Hotel section.

AS: Did you feel like you got the chance to re-write the album again?

SJ: I did, but I was really depressed, like clinically depressed, for…I’d say that I was an extremely bad place for a month, and it probably took me like three months to completely shake it off. They weren’t the ProTools versions, so I hadn’t gotten the point to where I was tracking yet. But I do most of my demos off Garage Band, cause I have it right here, and they were all sections, all songs. I think I had like 11, or maybe more, maybe it was more like 14, I think I did cause I had extras. And I was working on a sax quartet too. That was the one that I was most bummed out about, cause I felt like that was a real piece of music that I was working on, and that was gone. But it ended up being better because I just stayed up late and a lot of these… I am really happy about most of these.

AS: Just going by the names alone, Pulling Up Floors seems like a reflection of the past – a contemplation about moving on – whereas Bury The Cynics seems like a poetic way of saying “Good Riddance.”

SJ: There might be a little bit of that in there. You know, Meg [Perry, who's former relationship with Jones inspired much of Pulling Up Floors] did sing on a lot of this record though. We’re okay friends now, not as bad as it was when it happened, or nearly after that record came out [laughs]. But that’s what you get! What do you expect? You date a songwriter and you break his heart and he’s not going to write a song about you? It goes with the territory [laughs]!

This one though, I would say it’s not so much… I think Pulling Up Floors dealt with the past, but I think it was like recent past, whereas this one is more distant past, and a lot more like growing up in the south, and weird abstract imagery of Southern Baptist as cult-like religion. I don’t know…

AS: All the landscape imagery, is that something that you use as a symbol, or is it something that just comes naturally to you as you write?

SJ: I think that’s something that comes naturally because it’s another one of my interests, just as simple as cooking. But it’s not very poetic to write about cooking [laughs]. But yes, I’m a gardener, none of that’s put on; if you came over to my house we have a garden, I think we have like sixty plants. So it’s kind of like interests, it’s kind of an easy thing to pull from.

AS: And then there’s the “black-tie-hipsters.”

SJ: Yeah, and you know my complaint is that people don’t really want to listen to music anymore. You know I went to school for jazz, and I when I was playing I kind of lost interest. I’ve been in Austin about 10 years now, and I kind of lost interest in playing jazz about my first year out of school. I realized people don’t want to listen to it anymore, they don’t want to listen. So I started working on songwriting and stuff, thinking people want to listen to rock bands – you have to because it’s louder. I always felt that stereotypical “born in the wrong age” kind of thing, but I had never thought of it as a pop song writer, I had always though of it from playing sax and basic combos, thinking, “Man, when Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were alive, people used to go watch Bee-Bop to watch it. They’d have drinks and they’d sit at the table and they’d watch the music, they’d listen.” So I got to thinking, and I was like, “Man, what ruined all of that?” I put my finger on it. It was Swing music [laughs, triumphantly]! It was dance music!

AS: Those kids and their dancing!

SJ: Those kids and their dancing! So I told the band, “Swing ruined my career!”

AS: So what are the plans for the future? You talked a little before, I don’t know if we were recording, about going on tour soon?

SJ: Yeah, I think we’re going to do some touring in October and November. I think we’re going to try to see if we can make it work as a three piece, just to be able to afford gas and stuff. Just take it out in the Toyota.