INTERVIEW: Vista Kicks

WTBU DJ Katherine Evans spoke with Derek Thomas, the lead singer of California rock band Vista Kicks, on what their debut LP, Booty Shakers Ball, is all about. Vista Kicks will be stopping in Cambridge at the Middle East Upstairs on Feb. 28.

Katherine Evans: You hit the West Coast for the Booty Shakers Ball in December. How did that go?

Derek Thomas: The last time we toured had been almost a year so most of our places that we visited doubled in attendance, which is really promising. A couple of them tripled, which is good. I mean, when you’re only working with 20 to 50 people, a double or a triple is really easy. We had people out everywhere and we had a lot of fun on tour. We got to see a couple of cities that we hadn’t seen before. It was a lot of fun.

KE: Where did your idea come from to have everyone dress up for the first Booty Shakers Ball? Are people still dressing up?

DT: We only did the dress up shows in L.A. and Sacramento. So the first show of that tour was the Sacramento show and everybody came dressed. It was really cool. The name of the album [Booty Shakers Ball] really lent itself to having some fun ideas. I remember we were brainstorming when we were making the record and we were putting all the artwork together, and there was a poster made–I think that was where everything came from. The poster was done by the same guy who did the Chasing Waves [their 2016 EP] cover, and I sent him a couple sketches and he made up this poster of all these crazy people dancing; it was so cool. He was like, “Well what do you want the people wearing?” And it was like, “Well I don’t know, put them in some floral [and] some patterns,” and then it just became this thing where we wanted the Booty Shakers Ball to look like the poster, so I wondered if we can get people to dress up. So the week of, [we] just made a ton of videos about people dressing up and [said], “Hey you gotta dress up,” so people did. It was pretty insane especially in L.A. L.A. was wild–we sold out The Echo so now we’re playing The Troubadour, and that’s going to be a lot of fun. On a side note we got Tom Kenny–the voice of Spongebob and also the voice of Ice King and a bunch of different cartoon characters–he’s got a band, so we have him opening up for us at The Troubadour. That’s so cool to us, because we grew up watching it.

KE: I’ve noticed the new album has a different sound than your EP. How would you describe your growth as a band?

DT: We’ve really grown in terms of our live show. I think touring helps; you get better at playing in front of people and keeping that live energy. I think one of the strongest parts of our band is our live show. We tried to put that on the record and get that sense of how a band really plays live. Our growth is really translating the rock and roll and the energy onto the record, so I feel like we’ve grown in that sense and in songwriting I suppose. I like the songs that we’re doing now so much and I wouldn’t say that they’re better or worse. I like them more right now because we’re working on them right now.

KE: What or who was the inspiration for some of the songs on the album?

DT: For Booty Shakers Ball most of them were written by me and Sam, and we had some help from the guys as well. The inspiration for the songs came from each song, so each song sort of writes itself and then we take a look at the songs and go, “What do we call this?” Since we’d already been calling our music “booty shakin’ rock n roll,” it was like “Oh, perfect,” because it’s like a jambalaya where we mixed together all these different songs. If you listen to the record there’s a lot of different genres in there that we’re messing with. We don’t even try to stick in one genre; we want to just write songs organically and have them be the best songs they can be so [it’s fine] if it ends up being a different kind of genre. We don’t want to label ourselves as just one thing. The Booty Shakers Ball sort of encompassed everything that would be there, and it’s all booty shaking in some way, and that’s not necessarily a genre.

KE: How was the writing process for your first album different compared to writing your EP?

DT: For the first EP, we all wrote from the ground up together; you take more portions of songs and everybody works on them.  Now we don’t really have the time to do that with every song, so a lot of times, the composition will happen before we go to the arrangement. So for the arrangement, everybody’s involved, everybody’s in the room, we’re all playing our instruments, and having a say in how you should start low here and do this part there. We work together on that, and it speeds up the time a lot. I think that just comes from the growth of songwriting; whereas it used to take us so long to write songs, now we’re writing songs quite frequently and easily. It’s just kinda coming out. That’s why we just released the Booty Shakers Ball in September and we’ve already almost finished another seventeen song album. We just have a couple more things to finish up then we’ll be releasing and promoting for the next one.

KE: If you get stuck with writer’s block, do you have any games you like to play to work it out?

DT: I don’t have any games necessarily. Writer’s block, for me, I just stop working on it. I move on to something else. I’m very ADD, in that I work on several things at once. I’ll be working on literally ten different songs along with different projects, so if one starts to stall I just sort of go to a different one until I get the inspiration to come back to it–unless there’s a deadline for that but there’s really no deadline for songs. It’s just if you can get it done before the record, it can go on the record and if not, then just keep working on the ones that are coming. We try to make it easy that way. We cater to what’s pulling us, so then it doesn’t feel contrived, doesn’t feel like “Oh, we had to finish this.” We have so much that’s finished, that we get to choose from what’s done and start making something.

KE: What do you like to do on the days you are not touring?

DT: Well when we’re not touring, we’re making records. We just got off of the West Coast and Southwest and then we went straight to making a record. We’ve only had a month since then, and we’re already pretty much done with the seventeen-track record. We record ourselves so it really makes it easy to put out music like that. But if we get an off day while on tour, that’s when we can take a break, and we’ll have a day off in a city. We’ll either go fishing, go out to the park, go out drinking and dancing or whatever. We like to have fun.

KE: What is the strangest or most memorable thing a fan has done?

DT: Sometimes we get fans coming out from all the way across the country to come see us in different places. Nolan wrote “Chasing Waves” on this girl and then she got a tattoo of it with the cat and the wave logo. It’s on our Instagram [@vistakicks]. It was pretty cool, I don’t even have any tattoos.