April 2, 2008: 100% PodSafe Edition, iProng Magazine Artist Feature

For someone who isn’t familiar with Lovespirals, how would you describe it to them?

We write and record all of our music together in our own home studio. As such, our music has a very intimate feel. Our sound doesn’t follow any particular genre model, instead, we play what we feel at the moment. We tend towards very melodic, bittersweet, and dreamy music that focuses on beautiful vocal harmonies and soulful guitar work, with liberal sprinklings of electric piano.

There’s always been a sort of tug of war in Lovespirals between jazzy electronica and folky rock. Each of our releases have come upon a different solution to this tension between the modern and vintage sides of our musical personalities. One the one hand, we both love the old vinyl albums we grew up with as kids, but on the other, we’re drawn to contemporary music and production techniques. The interesting thing about this is that while the casual listener assumes a song like “Caught in the Groove” from Long Way From Home was recorded with a full band, in actuality Ryan programmed the drums using a keyboard controller and samples, the piano is recorded with midi, and the guitars and bass were performed one track at a time in ProTools. The thing is, just because we’re using computer based recording techniques doesn’t mean our music has to sound like it was made with a computer, you know?

How did you end up being both a podsafe musician and a podcaster?

I started the Chillin’ with Lovespirals podcast back in June of 2005 to share information and music from our then-upcoming 2nd album, Free & Easy. I’d been itching to start a podcast for several months and it just seemed like a band podcast was the perfect project to start out with. I used to be a college DJ, and then I was an Internet DJ, so it was pretty no-brainer to become a podcaster! And we already had our own recording studio, so it just made a whole lot of sense.

How has podsafe music affected your career as a musician?

The podsafe music movement was really just a natural evolution of all the Internet promotions I’d been doing for the band since our inception in ’99. I just try a little of everything online to see what works and where the best music scene is, and go there. Podcasting is one more of those things.

How else do you promote your music?

One of the more exciting ways our music is promoted is via licensing to TV and cable. The first placement the band ever got was for a song called “Psyche” with guest vocalist, Kristen Perry, on Dawson’s Creek. “Psyche” is listed on iTunes as their most popular track, and I suspect we can contribute that to Dawson’s Creek in no small part. The second most popular LSD song on iTunes is the 1998 remix of “Sunset Bell,” which I’ve seen listed online as having been included on the show La Femme Nikita – even on Wikipedia – though we were never contacted about that. Lovespirals’ music has been included on multiple shows for MTV and VH1 as well as E!, WE, A&E, HGTV, Travel Channel, and lots of others. I think Oprah was probably the most fun inclusion on TV. We’ve also been on some DVDs. No films or commercials yet, but hopefully soon.

Do Lovespirals have any tour plans?

The past year or two we haven’t gotten out to play many live shows. We’ve found that the amount of time and effort it takes to organize and prepare for shows and tours is too draining. Honestly, we would rather be writing and recording new music than revisiting our past works. I guess you could say we are more like recording artists than performing artists. But as someone who enjoys live music, I understand the fans interest in seeing us perform. So for this album we decided to try something new. The weekend of our album release, we performed in Second Life on PodShow Island. It turned out to be a really cool event that was simulcast via multiple audio streams to 760 listeners in the US, UK, and Europe in addition to the maxed out sim in Second Life. So that was really exciting. And then we took the recorded audio and released it as an episode of our podcast which has had about 12,000 requests. Would we get that many folks at a gig in LA? Probably not.

Read the full feature iProng Magazine 4/2008