Vancouver quartet Peach Pit has spent the past year touring across North America, Europe and the UK. This past weekend, they played the High Water Music Festival in Charleston, SC, alongside acts like Alabama Shakes, Caamp and more. Described as having a “chewed bubblegum pop” sound, you may know them for viral hits such as “Alrighty Aphrodite” and “Shampoo Bottles,” both with over 100 million streams on Spotify.
Within the press tent on the festival grounds, Peach Pit sat down for an interview with Melodic Magazine to discuss festival performances, the early days of the band, and more.
Melodic Magazine: So your set is in just a couple hours. How are you feeling?
Chris: We’re feeling really good. Yeah, we have not been playing too many shows this year. We’ve been focusing on writing, but it’s really nice to be able to… we’re just coming out for the weekend playing this one show and flying home, but we get to see our crew who we’re really close with and it’s kind of a bit of a reunion for us. So, yeah, it’s fun.
That’s so exciting. You guys have been touring a lot in the past year though, so how does it feel to play a festival like High Water compared to some more intimate venues?
Chris: It can be good.
Neil: Yeah, it can be good or it can be bad. It all just depends on who’s at the festival and yeah, I don’t know, like the energy of the crowd. I guess the energy that we bring affects the crowd too, but I like to blame it on the crowd if they’re, if it’s not a good show. So I expect tonight will be good. The last time we played in the Carolinas was what? Isle Palms? You ever been out there?
I’ve not, no. You guys also played at my university – Appalachian State.
Neil: Oh, Appalachia! We still talk about that show. Mostly because of the way we learned how to pronounce Appalachia.
Yeah, that’ll get people riled up. How does, you kind of answered already, but how does the environment, both the vibe and the weather impact the way you guys play?
Neil: I don’t know if it really does impact the way we play, actually. I feel like we play the same in an indoor venue than we do in an outdoor venue. But you know, depending on how many people are in front of you sometimes at festival shows, you just have a massive crowd and that can definitely get you fired up a little bit more.
Peter: If it’s hot and the sun’s right in your face, it’s kind of tough, but it’s fun.
Chris: That’ll definitely affect us. And we played a festival in Mexico City called Corona Capital in November, and we were having a lot of issues with audio, so we had to wait for a little bit and the crowd just started chanting and kind of singing themselves during the difficulties and right then, like we were won over by the crowd and had a way better time right after that. It depends on the energy of the crowd. You get good ones and bad ones, and then if we get a lot of energy from them, we can kind of give it back.
Yeah, for sure. So what’s on your festival survival checklist? Like what items do you need to feel prepared? And then what pre-show rituals do you have?
Neil: What do we have in the survival kit?
Peter: Oh, it’s that, it’s in my lip right now.
Neil: Oh, a Zyn. Okay, so if we’re gonna play a festival? We just need to rehearse. So we do one rehearsal before we play. We do rehearse the day before the show. We run the set. We try to run the set as fast as possible because playing as our set in our, in our jam space alone is like torture, honestly. Like we played the set so many times that it really sucks. So we just have to rehearse. And then what else do we need? We don’t really need anything, honestly.
Mikey: We need our crew.
Neil: We need the crew. Yeah, the crew. Yeah, we’ve got Jayquan, he’s Mikey’s drum tech, Marco’s our guitar tech. Gne does our monitors. Jerry does lights. Shoutout everybody on our crew right now. Connor’s our tour manager. Yeah, they’re the ones who actually do the work. We don’t need much.
So looking back at your earlier days, how does playing a curated festival like High Water compare to the kind of shows you were playing when you first started out?
Peter: You have an answer?
Neil: No, you answer, you have to. How does it compare?
Peter: I mean, we never thought that we would get to this point. Like really? I guess like when we first started it was just us in a van driving around playing smaller venues. It’s fun to play these shows though because the favorite thing about festivals for me is we get to see other bands play and that’s kind of the bonus of festivals. So, yeah, I don’t know.
Mikey: Jesse Welles playing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He’s awesome.
Is there anyone you’re particularly excited to see today, or if you’ve already gotten to see them?
Neil: We got to see Jesse Welles do his sound check this morning. So we just chilled and listened to that. That was cool. But then, yeah, no, honestly, after we play, we are gonna leave immediately. We have to get up super early to fly back to Canada tomorrow, so we’ll try to catch a bit of Sheryl Crow before we play.
Any dream collaborations for you guys? If you could bring anyone from the lineup on stage with you guys tonight who would it be?
Peter: Bruce Hornsby. Yeah, on the keys.
Chris: Oh, that would be amazing. That’d be awesome. That’s the way, yeah.
Well, you guys have a lot of stuff coming up this summer, a lot of festivals, so what’s up next?
Chris: We’ve got a few shows in May. We’re going down the West Coast, down to California and yeah, just a couple of their festivals, but we’re just really, it’s writing right now. We’re doing a lot of writing.
Neil: I actually was gonna mention this to you guys. I spent a couple hours making a schedule for all of the songs we have to write before October 1st. So that’s what we’re doing. So we have to write, the schedule’s gonna go we have to demo one song a week. It alternates one a week, then two a week, then one a week, then two a week until October 1st.
Mikey: How many?
Neil: 40.
Peter: Whoa.
Neil: Okay. Yeah. That’s our plan. That’s my plan.
Chris: Honestly, we’ve been writing and then every time we get offered a gig like High Water, we just can’t say no because we get this feeling of like, “man, this is just crazy that they even want us to play.” But yeah, it definitely interrupts the writing schedule. So we have a good little chunk after our shows in a couple weekends and we can just really hunker down and do that for sure.
Is there any song you’re particularly excited to play tonight?
Chris: Yeah, we have a song called “Tell Me You Love Me”. And that was released on our most recent deluxe version of our last record. And, yeah, it’s the song we played the least. Our favorite song to play is the song we haven’t played the most because there’s an energy to it that could go wrong and that kind of keeps us sharp and like more engaged. So that’s always fun once we played. A lot can go very wrong too though.
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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
