Music

Three questions with Sleepy Sun

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It seems like your band’s move from Santa Cruz to San Francisco coincided with its breakout. Coincidence or perfectly planned?

I think that was the leap of faith for us in a sense—that “all right, we’re gonna do this” moment. San Francisco has a wider audience; in Santa Cruz there’s three or four venues, so you’re always playing for the same people. And it’s a college town, so you lose some of your fanbase every summer. San Francisco seemed to offer more consistency. So we floated around the Bay Area until we found a house and moved in. And within a year of moving to San Francisco, we self-released our record and got a booking agent and a manager, and then a label picked it up, and then it just went through the roof, and we started going on extensive tours with amazing bands that we’ve been into for years.

Is it tricky being a newish psychedelic rock band in a place with such a rich history of those sorts of sounds?

Usually the people who try to call you out on that tend to be from an older generation, people who were there during the ’60s and saw The Doors play the Matrix or whatever. And I guess they have the right, but it doesn’t really bug us. We’re just playing the music that we like to play. And I like having an older crowd that’s into it. We’re tending to access a lot of that older generation, at least in San Francisco and in Europe.

The Details

Sleepy Sun with The Delta Mirror, Underwater Ally
August 28, 10 p.m., $8.
Bunkhouse, 384-4536.
Beyond the Weekly
Sleepy Sun

ATP is a relatively small label with a pretty interesting roster of acts—Deerhoof, Fuck Buttons, The Drones ... What attracted the band to it?

A lot of it had to do with their festivals. Those are pretty legendary; they get amazing bands for all sorts of musical tastes, and it all seems to flow very well. At the one we played with Sleep [in England this past May], we got to see Spiritualized and Devo and everything else under the sun. ATP actually asked us to play that festival before we were signed. They saw us at South by Southwest, and I guess that sort of sealed the deal.

We’ve actually recorded our next record. It’s going to be mastered this September, and we’re shooting for [release] early next year. We have some people interested in it. Embrace was a one-off with ATP, but they still want to work with us, and we’re happy to work with them again, so we’ll see what happens.

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