Pinegrove is an indie roots rock band from Montclaire, New Jersey and they are making it clear they are a band you want to watch out for. They are about to start their summer tour all across America and in the fall, they will be touring Europe as well. Lucky for us, Pinegrove decided to come back to New Orleans and will be playing at Siberia on July 7. Recently, I caught up with singer and songwriter Evan Stephens Hall to talk about New Orleans, the writing process, and how the band has developed over the years.

You guys have exploded recently. How does it feel to go from playing local shows to shows all around Europe and in America?

Oh well pretty cool. We haven’t gone to Europe yet, but I feel really excited to. I think it’s awesome that music is giving us an opportunity to go abroad; for a few years we’ve been able to travel the United States. It’s so cool to travel and meet new people. So it’s just really wild it’s bringing us even further out. But definitely I love playing house shows also. I want that to always be part of what we do, but it’s really cool playing bigger venues also with monitors and stages. Yeah I don’t know it’s all good.

That’s really cool. Have you guys been to New Orleans before?

Yeah we’ve played in New Orleans probably about five times.

That’s awesome. Well listening to your music, I don’t immediately think New Orleans, but does the music or city mean anything to you specifically?

Well I mean of course New Orleans has a really awesome tradition. My dad, who’s a piano player, I think one of his favorite pianist is Dr John who is a really well known practitioner in the New Orleans sound. I think his interest in that sort of stuff and roots rock definitely directed my attention towards that region of American music and that region of the country. So yeah we were very excited to visit the first time we did, and every time. It’s a great place. It’s unlike any other American city.

Is there anything in particular that you guys are going to do while here that you guys haven’t done your past trips?

Well maybe practice moderation.

That was a good answer.

Yeah, I remember the very first time we went, you know, it was like New Orleans of course so we were really excited to drink beer outside, and maybe over did it and the next day was like 105 degrees. We get in the car and we have cans of soup in there and we were just kind of joking how you could open the soup up and it would just be prepared for you already. Then we had po-boys, one of them was like fish and alligator and all these kind of adventurous sandwiches and it was a bad look.

So I read in an interview with Spin that you guys did, that you and drummer Zack Levine have always been friends since you guys were kids. As the main writer of the band, do you draw from a lot of your childhood and teenage memories that you two shared together?

I think that in general the answer is no. I’ve been writing songs since I was a little kid, and I think always my main inspiration is what’s going on for me right then. I’ve been writing for Pinegrove since college. So it’s really mostly been my concerns throughout college and after graduating college. I graduated five years ago, and so like living at home in Montclaire when all my friends are doing other things or traveling the country with my friends. Yeah I don’t know. I think that truly it’s more likely I have repressed the memories from middle school and high school then it is that I dig into them.

Gotcha. So all your songs are based off of personal experiences?

Well certainly inspired by them. I mean I’m making compressed versions of the things that I have learned. The things that have taken me a long time to learn. But, I think for most people art is satisfying when it doesn’t take 5 years to learn something but it takes 3 mins and 30 seconds. So, definitely I draw inspiration from experiences, but I wouldn’t say that it’s nonfictional. This is fiction. But, I intend to make it as human feeling as possible and as honest as possible.

I definitely get that. I can totally imagine the scenes that you’re talking about when you write. So that’s always really cool. Do you ever feel like you share too much?

Thanks. Yeah I do sometimes worry about that and I think that’s a pretty common fear of writers or artist of any sort. Because if you’re writing honestly, then probably you’re writing about the people that you love and sometimes there are observations you don’t want them to know or might make them feel uncomfortable or something. So then there is that tension, but it’s a commitment of mine to be tender towards the people that I love and I hope that’s reflected in my music, but it’s not always easy.

Cool. So I saw on Twitter and Facebook, you were taking fan suggestions about song ideas, and you ended up coming up with a song about toast. Have any of your other songs have been written out of this fun way? Or do you have fun rituals that you do?

That was really fun. That was the first time I’ve done something quite like that. In college, I wrote a musical about the logician Gottlob Frege and Erika Boeckeler. That was based on a prompt for one of my classes. The class was Language, Theory, and Literature taught by Erica Beckler, who was one of my favorite professors at college. I went to Kenyon College in Ohio. I don’t know I kinda have like two modes sorta. There is the slightly jokier mode which frequently Pinegrove fans don’t see. Those are songs I kind of just write for myself and for my friends. Well let me be clear, I’m writing it all for myself. But, like I might write without the expectation of sharing it with people widely. Then when I write for Pinegrove I think, I know there are going to be people who are going to really want to dig into the lyrics so I want to give them something substantial, honest, and meaningful. And that makes me feel better too about the product and it’s a cathartic experience for me. That is an unusual origin for a song and I really wanted to try it. I think it was kinda fun and silly so next time I have another free day I think I’ll go to Facebook for another prompt.

I know you started out as a solo artist, but now you have a full band. Do you write most of the instrumentals or does each person write there own part?

Yeah, so usually I’ll start by writing the song and I’ll bring it to the band, in a pretty finished form. And I might have some ideas for what their parts are going be, but they’ll go from there and really make the parts their own and introduce ideas I never would have considered. Everyone I play with is immensely talented and they bring a ton to what we do. So yeah we arrange together.

That’s really cool. I noticed that some of your songs off of Everything So Far made it on to Cardinal, is there any special reason for that?

Yeah well so, “Size of the Moon,” with that one I just kinda thought I had more to say with it. We learned how to play it as a band. The mixtape version, or the same from Everything So Far I just recorded that by myself, and when we learned to play it with the band it started to feel different and better. And by the way, I think that it really explored exactly the sort of thing I wanted to investigate with Cardinal. So yeah I think the answer is I just had more to say with it, and I wanted to give it another shot. And I’m glad we did because, I’m really proud of the way it came out on Cardinal and I think it makes the themes of the album really stand out a little more or clarifies them. It does important work on the album, I think. Then “New Friends”, is actually just exactly the same recording.

I love “Size of the Moon,” so I was glad to see it again.

Yeah. Well when we signed with Run for Cover, one of the things I wanted to do was a discography tape. It was their idea to get one of the songs from Cardinal out and just to start pushing that and that was cool and I’m glad we did it. I think it really worked. It was a good strategy.

Yeah. Also, how do you think you’ve grown as an artist and as a band from your earlier songs like “On Jet Lagged” and “Recycling” to songs like “Old Friends” and “Aphasia?”

Yeah I mean that’s a good question. One interesting thing is, the more I write the more I am deliberately trying not to repeat myself. So with those really early songs, it was just like I had no shame in using really obvious cord progressions. I kinda just wanted to do it as simply as possible, like Hemingway says, “Write the truest sentence you know.” So I think that’s what those were at the time. Also on stuff from like Meridian era, there actually is an effort towards more complex almost bombastic writing also lyrically obfuscated sometimes. I think I’m getting better as a lyricist because, I’m less afraid to say what exactly I mean. I think my standards, maybe for a good lyric are higher now because it used to be, that if I could make an image sound cool phonetically then that was enough. But now, I want it to be a vivid image that sounds cool and means something in the larger context of the song and of the album. Maybe I’m a little more comfortable or a little better at doing that now. But melodically, sometimes I do find or I feel concerns that I’m retracing the steps I already have. But that’s maybe signals that it’s time to listen to new music or read a new book. Just to expose myself to other things if I’m beginning to feel too much like myself.

Do you draw a lot from books in your song writing?

I do. Well especially I did. I honestly do not read that much any more. It’s really hard to read on the road. I mean that’s certainly an excuse, but it’s also an actuality I think. But, there was a while when I was really not that excited about new music and I was really excited about discovering literature. There were all sort of authors that were really extremely exciting to me that I learned a lot from I think structurally and also how to tell a story and the types of information that’s important for the reader or listener to be able to imagine the environment of the story. Like I think early on reading The Waves by Virginia Wolf was a huge breakthrough for me or Mrs. Dalloway by Virgina Wolf and then Infinite Jest and other David Foster Wallace stuff and then George Saunders were three writers that influenced me tremendously. I think Wallace and Saunders taught me that a casual approach is inviting and can be funny and can be observant and smart and that these things are not at odds. Virginia Wolf taught me the value to attention to detail and a thoughtfully selected word, especially a noun, can really change the course of a sentence, and also phrasally and melodically like Virginia Wolf is such a melodic writer and any good writing, I think, is really rhythmically conscious. I love the writer Ben Lerner and Lydia Davis is important to me too. Definitely yeah I do draw inspiration from fiction and prose writers.

Cool. You guys have a lot of friends in the New York/ New Jersey/ Philly scene. How does this friendly collaborative scene help you as an artist?

Well, it is important to me to feel support and be supportive of my friends making art. I think it’s really beautiful that a lot of people can put so much into what they are doing. It is awesome to see other bands out there. It makes me want to challenge myself to do better. In general I kind of write in isolation, but I think it’s impossible that I’m not taking cues from bands out there. Yeah seeing live bands like Zula, Palm, or Stephen Stienbrink, Porches, seeing theses bands it’s so revelatory and it’s like oh my god we have so much work to do.

Well that actually leads perfectly well into my next question. What is next for Pinegrove after this tour?

Well I’m writing new songs and we’re going to be playing a lot more shows.

Pinegrove will be playing at Siberia on Wednesday, July 7. Tickets are available here.