If there were one word to use to describe The Paper Kites, it would be humble.
The five-piece band from Melbourne, Australia began as a collaboration between Sam Bentley and Christina Lacy. After being accepted to play a local music festival, Sam Rasmussen, David Powys, and Josh Bentley were added to fill the band’s roster. The chemistry of the band was evident from their first show, and the rest they say, is history.
The band has sold out most of their Canadian tour dates, and Vancouver was certainly on that list. The Paper Kites played a solid set to a packed crowd at The Biltmore Cabaret, which included a lovely cover of Fleetwood Mac’s ‘Dreams’. It’s easy to see why music fans have fallen in love with The Paper Kites, as their music is as modest as it is earnest.
I had the opportunity to chat with co-vocalist and guitarist Christina Lacy just before they played Lucky Bar in Victoria last Thursday night, and discussed their first headlining tour, opening for City & Colour, and the message behind their music.
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asapmusicblog.ca: The Paper Kites are now a few shows into the first headlining US & Canada tour for you guys. The response seems to be really positive so far, and a lot of the Canadian tour dates have sold out – how are you guys feeling about the tour so far?
Christina Lacy: We’re really stoked, to be honest! We’re feeling really stoked – we certainly didn’t expect any of these shows to sell out, let alone having a few of them sell out over here. We’re so excited! Our first couple of shows that we’ve just done in San Francisco, and Portland, and Seattle have been really good and they had a really great response and a really awesome crowd. We’re kind of on top of the world, really.
a: And prior to kicking off the headlining tour, you guys opened for City & Colour. What was one of the biggest highlights of that experience for you?
CL: That was such a great opportunity for us and those guys are really, really cool and really looked after us, I guess showed us the ropes of touring America because this is our first time playing over here. We played a few House of Blues venues, which are really, really cool. I think for me, probably one of the highlight shows was when we played a show at the House of Blues in New Orleans. It was just so cool to be able to walk around New Orleans and get to see a little bit of that town – very historic and really beautiful. But all the shows were really amazing, and an awesome opportunity playing with those guys.
a: I saw some of the pictures from the shows on your Facebook page, and some of those were crowds were quite big!
CL: Yeah, exactly! I think for us, we felt kind of spoiled because it was our first experience playing in America, and because we’re playing with a band as great as City & Colour – we’re getting to play in front of these huge numbers, which obviously we wouldn’t be pulling those kinds of crowds ourselves. I think we were very lucky to get on that tour, and it was really awesome.
a: There’s been a natural progression in your music between the two EP’s – Woodland and Young North and now with the full-length album, States, which was released in September. How has that progression evolved into your live performances?
CL: Part of the progression is probably that it’s been a really natural progression of the fact that we’ve played a lot of shows together now. In a sense, if we think of when we recorded Woodland, we were just starting out playing live together compared to now when we’ve been touring for a couple of years now. I think all of us have developed a lot musically, developed a lot just in our performance, which is a really nice feeling.
With State, we wanted to obviously keep what has developed into The Paper Kites’ sound – to keep that, but also be able to broaden our sound a little bit and not get stuck in a box of just playing nice little acoustic songs. I think the kinds of different sounds we’ve used on the album has translated pretty well live, just by using different instruments or just even sounds and stuff in the background, it fills up the sound a bit.
a: The way that the band approaches music videos is impressive, as you guys look at it as an extension of the song. In particular, I was really mesmerized by the music video for ‘Young’, which is made up of over 4000 photos. How did the concept for that video materialize?
CL: We wanted to release a video for ‘Young’ because that is our latest single, and we were sort of looking around for some different producers, directors to work with in Melbourne and Sydney. We had a few different people pitching ideas to us, and then Darcy [Prendergast] who is from Oh Yeah Wow, the guys that did the clip for us – they’re based in Melbourne. He kind of came to us with this idea, and at first we were like, ‘Wow, this sounds very intricate… and kind of tricky. Are you going to be able to pull this off?!’ – but we were really interested in that concept, and thought that it could be very interesting.
I think the finished product even turned out more amazing than we kind of had in our heads. It doesn’t necessarily have much to do with the lyrics of the song or anything, but it sounded like a really creative and clever idea. We actually went into the studio, and we’re all in the filmed group as well for the millisecond or whatever it is that each face is on. It was really cool to go into the studio and see how much detail and all the specifics of how they were getting everyone’s faces to line up in the exact spots. It was really interesting to see all of the details that were going into all of the photos taken.
a: If there was a single message that you could narrow it down to, what would you would want The Paper Kite’s music to convey?
CL: You’ve got me, that’s a good question. Let me have a think… I think probably what our aim when we’re playing music is that we want to make honest music. We write about the things that we’re experiencing in our lives, or that we see people around us experiencing. We try to do it in an honest way, and not necessarily doing what people expect us to do or what we expect from ourselves. Play honest music that we think is really beautiful, and keep doing that, and be ourselves in the process.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF8PSGl-aIY]
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For more information on The Paper Kites, their North American tour dates, and much more, head over to: http://thepaperkites.com.au
