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WTBU DJ Katherine Evans spoke with Derek Thomas, the lead singer of California rock band Vista Kicks,<\/span> on what their debut LP, <\/span>Booty Shakers Ball<\/span><\/i>, is all about. Vista Kicks will be stopping in Cambridge at the Middle East Upstairs on Feb. 28.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Katherine Evans: You hit the West Coast for the Booty Shakers Ball in December. How did that go?<\/b><\/p>\n 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\u2019re 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\u2019t seen before. It was a lot of fun.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n KE: Where did your idea come from to have everyone dress up for the first Booty Shakers Ball? Are people still dressing up?<\/b><\/p>\n 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 [<\/span>Booty Shakers Ball<\/span><\/i>] 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\u2013I think that was where everything came from. The poster was done by the same guy who did the <\/span>Chasing Waves<\/span><\/i> [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, \u201cWell what do you want the people wearing?\u201d And it was like, \u201cWell I don\u2019t know, put them in some floral [and] some patterns,\u201d 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], \u201cHey you gotta dress up,\u201d so people did. It was pretty insane especially in L.A. L.A. was wild\u2013we sold out The Echo so now we\u2019re playing The Troubadour, and that\u2019s going to be a lot of fun. On a side note we got Tom Kenny\u2013the voice of Spongebob and also the voice of Ice King and a bunch of different cartoon characters\u2013he\u2019s got a band, so we have him opening up for us at The Troubadour. That\u2019s so cool to us, because we grew up watching it.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n KE: I\u2019ve noticed the new album has a different sound than your EP. How would you describe your growth as a band?<\/b><\/p>\n DT: We\u2019ve 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\u2019ve grown in that sense and in songwriting I suppose. I like the songs that we\u2019re doing now so much and I wouldn\u2019t say that they\u2019re better or worse. I like them more right now because we\u2019re working on them right now.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n KE: What or who was the inspiration for some of the songs on the album?<\/b><\/p>\n DT: For <\/span>Booty Shakers Ball<\/span><\/i> 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, \u201cWhat do we call this?\u201d Since we\u2019d already been calling our music \u201cbooty shakin\u2019 rock n roll,\u201d it was like \u201cOh, perfect,\u201d because it\u2019s like a jambalaya where we mixed together all these different songs. If you listen to the record there\u2019s a lot of different genres in there that we\u2019re messing with. We don\u2019t 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\u2019s fine] if it ends up being a different kind of genre. We don\u2019t want to label ourselves as just one thing. The<\/span> Booty Shakers Ball<\/span><\/i> sort of encompassed everything that would be there, and it\u2019s all booty shaking in some way, and that’s not necessarily a genre.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n KE: How was the writing process for your first album different compared to writing your EP?<\/b><\/p>\n DT: For the first EP, we all wrote from the ground up together; you take more portions of songs and everybody works on them. \u00a0Now we don\u2019t 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\u2019re 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\u2019re writing songs quite frequently and easily. It\u2019s just kinda coming out. That\u2019s why we just released the <\/span>Booty Shakers Ball<\/span><\/i> in September and we\u2019ve already almost finished another seventeen song album. We just have a couple more things to finish up then we\u2019ll be releasing and promoting for the next one.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n KE: If you get stuck with writer’s block, do you have any games you like to play to work it out?<\/b><\/p>\n DT: I don\u2019t have any games necessarily. Writer\u2019s block, for me, I just stop working on it. I move on to something else. I\u2019m very ADD, in that I work on several things at once. I\u2019ll 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\u2013unless there\u2019s a deadline for that but there\u2019s really no deadline for songs. It\u2019s 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\u2019s pulling us, so then it doesn’t feel contrived, doesn’t feel like \u201cOh, we had to finish this.\u201d We have so much that\u2019s finished, that we get to choose from what\u2019s done and start making something. <\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n KE: What do you like to do on the days you are not touring?<\/b><\/p>\n DT: Well when we\u2019re not touring, we\u2019re making records. We just got off of the West Coast and Southwest and then we went straight to making a record. We\u2019ve only had a month since then, and we\u2019re 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\u2019s when we can take a break, and we\u2019ll have a day off in a city. We\u2019ll either go fishing, go out to the park, go out drinking and dancing or whatever. We like to have fun.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n KE: What is the strangest or most memorable thing a fan has done?<\/b><\/p>\n DT: Sometimes we get fans coming out from all the way across the country to come see us in different places. Nolan wrote \u201cChasing Waves\u201d on this girl and then she got a tattoo of it with the cat and the wave logo. It\u2019s on our Instagram [@vistakicks]. It was pretty cool, I don\u2019t even have any tattoos.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. 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