Vista Kicks are a four piece band from Northern California. I hesitate to call them a rock band or a pop band.. or an alternative rock band for that matter. These guys are a group of seriously talented musicians that very much stretch the boundaries of classified music. I have have enjoyed getting familiar with their work and had the pleasure of sitting down with singer/guitarist Derek Thomas. We talked about their new album ‘Twenty Something Nightmare’ due out on July 13, 2018 via Little Hook Records, some behind the scenes magic and the public domain.
Click on the picture above to go listen to them on Spotify. My personal favorite song is the lead single, ‘Million Dollar Seller’. This song has a great feel to it. It has a lot of the elements we talked about during our interview. Great vocals, drum sound, overall instrumentation and mix. This is a fun song. Enjoy!
SoundVapors: Your new albums drop on July 13th. You feeling good, nervous, excited about it?
Derek Thomas: I feel great! We’ve showed it around to our friends and other artists and people have been responding really positively, so I feel really good about it.
SV: When I first got it, I opened it up and my first reaction was..”whoa 18 tracks”. So I start listening and these songs just sort of flow into one another and I found myself excited to hear what was coming next. I thought to myself “these guys really have something cool going on here.” So the first question I thought of to ask you was, did you intentionally record 18 tracks for the album or were there more that were left off?
DT: We actually recorded 17 tracks and then we broke up the first song (Million Dollar Seller) into two parts. Part two was never supposed to happen. It was a fade out but it wound up being really cool. We invited a bunch of really cool people to play on it and I was like – “this is funky, it’s like a cool dance Cold Sweat Part II kind of thing.” :laughs: So it ended up being 18. It’s all we had time for as we did all of it in a month and just at the end of the month we had to go on tour.
SV: Where did you record the album?
DT: We recorded it in our own studio. We have a studio up in Highland Park. We recorded ‘Booty Shakers Ball’ there too. This time the guy that mixed it also engineered it. Sam engineers most everything, normally, but this time we let Joe Napolitano do the bulk of the work because it was better for us as the producers and the artists to not get fatigued by doing the work of engineering.
SV: I was going to mention that. I read that Sam did a lot of the engineering and I wondered who mixed it because I really thought the mix was good.
DT: Yeah the mix is great. That was Joe. We went in a had mix notes and made certain things different. The only song I could say we had a big change on was Million Dollar Seller. We made the saxophones distorted. So one sax sounded like the bass and the other sounded like the guitar but it had this element to it. Kind of like a straight line and a curved line going through it. So it’s doing the same thing but since they’re different instruments they sound different. Somebody told us that a fuzz pedal comes from a guitar trying to sound like a saxophone. So we just did the opposite of that. But we didn’t know that until afterwards and we were like “oh my god that’s so cool!”.
SV: Wow I had not heard that before. That’s actually pretty cool!
SV: So when you guys decided to make another album what was that writing process like? Did you come up with guitar parts first?
DT: Every song is different. We did a lot of both at the same time. Rarely do I write the lyrics out and then put it to music because often that doesn’t work. What’ll have to happen is that I’ll take the best of the lyrics, the poem, and put it to music and then restructure it so it will make sense, melodically.
SV: Definitely. There’s syllable count and everything else that you want to fit.
DT: Right and sometimes it’s just the way the song comes out. Other times I’ll hear something in my head for a long time like the bridge in the song numbers. I had that for like two, three years! I’d just play and say “there’s something here, guys.” They’d all agree and then finally like two years later the verse came. But in a different way, it was almost like a different song. It almost felt weird to not put back in that original melody and that’s where that bridge takes you. Sort of the origin of it.
SV: What about a song like ‘Machula’? The verses and chorus have two distinct parts, but it’s one of those things where both parts are very good. And on a side note, the verses are really great. I just groove to those!
DT: “Machula”.. there’s a made up word. :laughs: That song has gone through so many different changes. But what let me ask you something. What does Machula sound like?
SV: If we are taking about an artist or sound I think it has a Brendan Benson (The Raconteurs) sort of vibe, which is totally a good thing for me, being a big fan of Brendan’s.
DT: Oh, well, thank you! But I mean, the word itself. Machula?
SV: I thought it was a Spanish girls name. I actually looked it up to see if I could find a name like that. I did not.
DT: :laughs: It’s actually a shortened version of the phrase “my true love’. The song was written about Orpheus and Eurydice. I was going to call it Eurydice. But then Machula came to me in a completely different way. I was like “Machula that sounds like my true love and it’s not a word that was made up before.” So nobody used the word for anything and it’s not even a Spanish word. I thought it was and I was like, this sounds like a Spanish girl.
SV: That’s very interesting and pretty creative. I like it.
SV: You have almost two voices on your vocal parts. One part you have a nice single track tone and then you have the voice with a little bit a gravel in it. Which I think it great. Where did all of that come from?
DT: I’ve been singing my whole life. We started out doing Sinatra tunes when I was crooning back in high school. Same band, same everybody. We grew up together since we were 5 years old. The raspy part of it comes from James Brown! I really got into him a few years ago. I’d walk around the house and try to figure out how to do that.
SV: That’s a damn good person to learn from.
DT: Oh man. I have to think about this. We just got back from Nashville and cut another record. So I’m hearing those songs.
DT: Oh.. ‘Cool It’! I love that song. That song’s hilarious. It’s so fun :laughs: and there’s a lot going on in there. There’s an accordion, a clarinet, a trumpet.. it’s pretty cool. So I’d say that one and ‘Water Under The Bridge’. I really love that song. That’s a Sam song but I love that song. It’s such a well written song. He started playing it around the studio and I was like “holy s**t, WTF is that??” It blew me away.
SV: Yes, Cool It, is a fun song. I enjoyed listening to it. Water Under The Bridge was one of the biggest highlights of the album for me. I listened to that one a lot. The way Sam comes out of the chorus on the word “Bridge” is a very nice touch.
SV: Another thing that stood out while listening to the album were the drums. I love the sound of Nolan’s snare and toms.
DT: They spent a lot of time on drums. And it’s worth it. Nolan is really thorough on how he tunes his drums and how the drum sounds. And a lot of the work is on that end. The other side of that is capturing that and then having sit right in the mix.
DT: Before this, Nolan would always say that he wasn’t satisfied with the drum sound but he just kept at it and asking for what he wanted and Joe, our mixer gave it to him. I always wondered what he was looking for but after I heard what he wanted and was happy, I understood what he meant. Nolan is so awesome, I f**kin love that guy! But we were at Joe’s place mixing and Nolan would ask for the drums to be turned down. Like on a couple of different songs.
SV: That’s rare :laughs:
DT: :laughing: Exactly! Joe would ask “on all of these songs??” And Nolan would respond, “I’m a team player.” So he totally gets it. He also sings ‘Kelly Come Back’. He wrote that one and also played guitar on it, played the drums and the organ. He’s our low key secret weapon.
SV: You can definitely hear the time and work that was put into the drum track. As well as the whole mix in general. And that’s pretty special having a guy like that on your team.
SV: The bass guitar sits nicely in the mix and you can hear the cool things that Trevor is doing. And then with the guitars there are some very cool things going on. Not only with the performance but again with the mix. There were a few guitar parts where I heard two or three different effects happen sort of in a row.
DT: Oh yeah, that’s Sam. He brings so much. Not only to the guitar playing, but to the mixing, songwriting and the singing. He used to just play guitar but now that he sings, he really sings through his guitar. It’s just cool the stuff that he does because he can f**kin’ rip! But he chooses to lay low and play to the song. That’s how everyone does it in the band. That’s one of the things I love about our band. Nobody is out there saying “LOOK AT ME, LOOK AT ME!” It’s all, “look at us!”
SV: You’ve got to love that! I also wanted to talk about Public Domain. I just read in Forbes where you guys released your first single, ‘Million Dollar Seller’ into the public domain. Can tell us what that is and why you chose to do that?
DT: Yes! Public Domain means we give it to the world of art and anyone can do whatever they want with it. Any movie can use it without paying us. We felt that was important. We wanted to do the whole record like that but we realized if we did that, that we might not be able to keep making records. There’s not really a business model set up for it. Idealistically, if an artist can make money and have their art reach more people, effect more people and help people, then why wouldn’t you do that? I believe that people aren’t releasing their music to the public domain and allow people to make the art a part of themselves, like the art that influenced the creators’ art in the first place, is because no one has found a way to make a living at it.
SV: So that’s what you have to do. You have to figure that out, right? Be it you make money on the road or in other ways to support the financial side of it all.
DT: Exactly! There’s just so much we lose with copyright and our hope is to get that music to a broader audience.
SV: We’ll get ya out of here with the last two questions. Give us three albums you would take with you to a desert island.
DT: I would have to bring a Beatles record. Either Rubber Soul, Abbey Road or The White Album. A compilation of Sam Cooke and a compilation Nina Simone record. Man.. this is hard! :laughs:
SV: Any touring plans for North America?
DT: Yeah probably at the end of the year we’re going to try and do a North American tour and possible a European tour depending on how thing work out. We shall see. I don’t want to speak too soon but we’re working on it!
SV: Awesome. We’ll I look forward to seeing you guys on the road. Best of luck with the upcoming release.
DT: Thanks, man!
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Here’s the brand new video for ‘Live, You’re Gonna Die’.