On April 12, Darlingside, the four-man indie folk band from Boston, MA, returned to Ithaca’s Hangar Theater, having played The Haunt last February. The most recent show, which I attended, was as brilliant as the other three shows I’ve seen, with their unique sound and breathtaking harmonies translating in a seemingly effortless fashion from studio to stage. The band played songs from their new EP, as well as tunes from all three full-length albums, and even revisited old favorites like “The Catbird Seat” (per audience request). Their onstage presence was as witty and cohesive as always; mandolinist and violinist Auyon Mukharji introduced his bandmates, Don Mitchell (guitar and banjo), Harris Paseltiner (guitar and cello) and Dave Senft (bass and kick-drum), by detailing the roles each member had played in his dream the previous night.
Prior to the concert, I had the opportunity to sit down with Senft, and talked to him about the band’s songwriting process and the new direction their music took on the most recent full-length album, Extralife. The 12-song album features new instrumentation and moves into a slightly more digital soundscape, in keeping with some of the lyrical references to video games. However, the earthy motifs are not lost, and the lyrics continue to center, in many cases, around the natural world, although they now occasionally serve as a warning about the cost of human damage to the planet. More recently, the band released a 6-track EP titled Look Up and Fly Away.
Chloe Moore ‘20: With the new album there’s been a shift in your lyrics from reminiscing and nostalgia to this new exploration of what the future might hold, and it’s more dystopian, so what drove that? Was it outside influences or personal influences that affected that songwriting and lyrical shift?
Dave Senft: . . .We didn’t really talk about it, we don’t sit down and plan what an album is going to be about . . . We write democratically, we write and we edit each others stuff and we give each other ideas and then the songs just kind of take shape. With Birds Say [the second album] there was a lot of reminiscing, there was a lot of childhood stuff, and looking back it was more escapist, finding happy things to think about to kind of get away from thinking about some of the more depressing or scary things in the world and that was kind of what we needed at the time. With Extralife, without talking about it, the feelings that were coming out were much more confrontational, thinking about and addressing some of our anxieties more head-on and thinking about the world and the direction that things are going. A lot of the lyrics came together in late 2016, right during election time, so there was a lot of anxiety and . . . being kind of afraid of the direction of things and wanting to talk about it a little more headon. We still are fairly subtle in some of that stuff, but people pretty quickly picked up on the things we were feeling, and it feels good to be a little more confrontational as opposed to escapist. Again, it wasn’t really a thing we talked about, it just kind of happened.
CM: Some of the stuff you guys seem to be confronting is very nature-centered, and seems to be about how we’re treating the Earth. Is that meant to a commentary on climate stuff?
DS: Definitely, I mean, how can you not be thinking about that stuff right now? At least for us it just seems like . . . there are so many issues of our time, but the fact that scientists are saying we have maybe a decade left before everything that we’re doing to the planet is completely irreversible, and it’s just a really scary thing. Not that you need to have kids to appreciate that, but I have a son and I want him to have the ability to live on a great, healthy planet and it’s a really sad, scary thing that that might not happen, so it’s definitely on all of our minds. Some songs talked about that pretty directly, like “Futures,” with the [line about] “underwater forests.” I think there’s just a general existential dread that goes beyond climate stuff and more into the nature of world politics that’s just scary to think about. So it all kind of comes out.
CM: In keeping with the new tone of the lyrics, there’s a new instrument on the new album, a septavox. What made you guys decide to branch out? Extralife is different from both of your previous albums; what catalyzed that production shift?
DS: Pilot Machines [the debut album] was super different because we had a drummer at the time, so we were maybe a “prog rock” band at the time, and that shifted pretty dramatically when we moved to the four piece format around one microphone. We called that kind of folk or indie folk, but then that again changed when we added the septavox, which is a whole new digital thing . . . it’s a rudimentary synthesizer that makes Gameboy sounds. With the title “Extralife” and that song [of the same name] there were some video game references lyrically and thematically, so that was sort of a sonic tie-in to that stuff. Getting to combine the digital sounds with the traditional folky stuff just felt like a really cool new direction.
CM: In January, you guys played at The Egg (in Albany) and you guys had the Maine Youth Rock Orchestra with you. How different did that make it for performing with the songs fleshed out in that new, orchestral way?
DS: It’s a totally different thing, and people loved it, and that’s something I hope we get to do again. It’s not just musical; the feeling is very different when you have 20 additional people on stage with you and you know they’ve been rehearsing this music that you wrote for months. It’s a very humbling experience and you feel very privileged and flattered. To have that many people on stage playing your music is a really unique experience, so we felt super lucky to do that.
CM: You talked about writing songs that kind of deal with outside anxiety more directly. When you’re touring and you’re going to a lot of different parts of the country, do people respond differently to the kind of subtly political concerns that you may be voicing in some of the songs? How does the audience react to your commentary?
DS: I think there’s some of that. It’s surprising though how similar everywhere can feel. We’re often playing in cities, and cities tend to be more or less homogenous, just because that’s how culture works . . . sometimes I forget what city I’m even in. Especially since we show up in a town and we go into the venue and for me I may not even be outside or get a chance to walk around or get a chance to interact that much with people other than for a few minutes after the show… But that said, you can notice that from night to night, some of the things you might say will get a slightly different reaction, and that often can honestly more depend on the demographic . . . whether it’s a younger crowd or an older crowd, you can definitely feel, for example, “Oh, this might not be a room that resonates with that so much!” But it’s super dependent on [the city] and venue in terms of what the vibes are like.