Surfer Blood: Idiosyncratically Awesome

Listen to the HPR Podcast of this interview.

By Jeannette Madden
Staff Writer

John Paul (J.P.) Pitts, founder and lead singer of Surfer Blood, has a lot to be excited about. Not only is Surfer Blood known as the hottest indie band around; Pitchfork.com said “There’s plenty to like about ‘Astro Coast’, the debut LP from the youthful Floridians in Surfer Blood…first and foremost it’s a great guitar album.” 

High Plains Reader: Can you tell me about Surfer Blood?

J.P. Pitts: We are a band from West Palm Beach. We’ve been together about a year and a half. We play a unique style of rock music and…I don’t know.

HPR: How do you define your music?

JP: I’ve always called it idiosyncratic pop music.

HPR: Well then, how do you define idiosyncratic? What do you mean?

JP: I think when I say that I mean that in a lot of ways the music is really familiar and a lot of people pick up on that. But at the same time, it takes those elements and sort of bends them at the corners and rearranges them in ways that they haven’t been used before. I think that’s what we’re going for and there’s a lot of interesting texture on the record, a lot of melodies that may surprise you. It’s familiar yet I think it’s unique.

HPR: When I read the reviews there was so much about another young group of guys from West Palm Beach but on the other hand, your musicianship was being raved about.

JP: Honestly, when we were writing the record and recording it we really didn’t know what to expect so we did it ourselves with a really minimal setup. We did the best we could with the resources we had. And we knew that we all liked the music and we’ve all been playing in bands for years so we’re all pretty decent musicians. We kind of took a risk and said let’s see what happens if we really try and push this and try and get this put out and try and tour with it and stuff, and it just worked out really nicely. The amount of positive feedback we started getting…I mean, at first no one really heard of us and we were just trying to make some interest but we played a few shows for a few important people, and copies of our records started circulating because we had been giving them out for free all tour. Next thing you know, it’s all over the internet and people are starting to take notice. We weren’t expecting things to happen this fast but I was pretty convinced that people would like the music.

HPR: Your first tour, you self-booked it and you did get in front of the people that you needed to get in front of. How did you do that so quickly?

JP: We just took the shows we could get. I can honestly say that a lot of the success I attribute to some people up in New York, specifically, Brooklyn. We were going all up and down the east coast and we were playing to maybe eight or nine people a night and we were emailing everybody, bands in different cities and different promoters, seeing if anyone would let us play.

HPR: It sounds like you worked really hard.

JP: We did. And the thing is we didn’t know anything about any of these towns so we didn’t know
the cool places to play and sometimes a promoter would assume that we had been around for awhile and we had a following. We were always good about getting other, local bands to play these bills, but I remember one time we played this one thousand person capacity room in Atlanta to like twenty people and it was like oh man, we had no idea it was one of those kind of places. It was kind of mismatched. But when we got to New York we figured we wanted to play a lot of smaller, like DLR spaces, and started talking to friends that lived up there and they suggested a few cool places. The people running the spaces were really responsive and not only that, they were super supportive. We’re big fans of the band Vivian Girls and they were playing a show that night and we had already committed to play another show at another warehouse in Brooklyn so we turned down the Vivian Girls show just because we had already made a prior commitment. I think that some of the people in that whole scene were impressed that we were true to what we had already promised to do instead of jumping on another show because it was probably going to be bigger. I was really impressed about how it was much more about the songs and less about the people you could draw and people were like “Oh wow, you guys are really doing something cool. I want to help you out.” The last day there was like over a hundred people at our show, which for us was insane, playing an out-of-state show with that many people. The next day there were reviews of the show and stuff snowballed from there.”

HPR: I read the Village Voice review from last winter and it made it sound like you guys were going to break up. Why?

JP: I don’t know. That was just really stupid. It’s just like super patronizing. We had already created some buzz around the east coast and we were playing our first CMJ event and we booked twelve shows at CMJ, which some people said was ill-advised. But we just wanted every opportunity to be seen and that’s what those things are all about, like an endurance match. After our first show they came and wrote some really snarky review about my sweater and something about an off-the-cuff thing I said onstage and didn’t really talk about the music that much. We got mostly really positive reviews at CMJ but there were a few negative ones and I guess they just figured that we were so fresh and so new to all this hype stuff that we would just implode on ourselves. We didn’t, obviously. We kind of rocked at CMJ. And then they tore us apart again the first time we played Bowery Ballroom. At the time we were new to the whole getting ripped apart by the press thing and now we don’t care because we realize that’s what happens sometimes. And then they asked us to play the SXSW showcase so they must not hate us too much.

HPR: I read so many reviews about new bands and yours is different because they are appreciating the work, the layers, the different things that you did musically.

JP: I’m really grateful that people are looking that much into it. And when we recorded it, there’s a
lot of subtleties in the recording. I spent six months working on that and teaching myself how to record it. And lyrically, I spent a lot of time on subtleties and nuances and there’s a lot of underlying humor to that and self-reflection. I’m really glad that people get it, you know? I can understand, not it going over people’s heads so much like high art, but because it’s a twenty-two year old guy’s indie rock band.

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If You Go

What: Surfer Blood
Where: Aquarium
When: Tues, Oct 12
Info: 701.235.5913