You just put out an album in October, blame it all on love. how has this album felt compared to your previous albums and how does it fit into your discography?
It’s the fourth album, so the first one was sort of the blueprint of what Poolside was supposed to be. There was not really a lot of ambition originally in Poolside. It was just kind of a weekend project that just kept growing. So that was kind of chiefly the idea of what Poolside was or would be, and so then the second album was like, what do we do not to sound like regurgitating the first album but still stick with the kind of concept of Poolside. The first three records just felt like expanding upon the idea that we’re all presented on the first record, which isn’t a bad thing. And I was just like, well, how do we kind of expand what the sound is, but keep it in the same zone? With this most recent record, Blame It All On Love, I just ignored all of everything, I just started writing, kind of giving myself permission to write whatever I felt like. Knowing maybe none of it would make the album, but just write songs in the same way I did maybe before Poolside existed. Just kind of picking up a guitar or getting on a piano like less dance music, starting with the drum beat or bass, less staring at a computer screen and more just working with instruments to begin. So I think, strangely enough in the sound, and the record, just didn’t sound as far away from Poolside as I was expecting. Coming from a completely different mindset and different sort of style. There’s a bit more difference for sure. So it sounds a bit different from the first three records, but not so much that it was like, whoa, this would never work as a Poolside record. So that’s in a nutshell, the approach was just to like, have no approach and just go back to like, kind of how I felt when I was in high school, writing my first songs in my like parent’s house, just kind of trying to come up with cool riffs or whatever. Having fun with it in a different way and luckily enough, it didn’t deviate from the sound or style of Poolside radically, and I was able to use it all for this record.
I saw online that you also were a fellow trumpet player, and I was also a trumpet player. how did learning music in your childhood influence your love for music and wanting to be a musician in your adulthood?
I didn’t even know why, I just remember in junior high, or I mean, sorry, not even junior high, that was when I was in elementary school, they were just like, “who wants to play an instrument?” For no particular known reason, I’d never thought I was just like, “Oh, hell yeah.” I was really drawn to the idea, and I originally wanted to play drums, but my parents were like, “No way.” And then I think saxophone was my next choice, and then the band was like, we have way too many saxophonists. Then I was like, I wanted to play cornet, and then they were like, well here, take this trumpet it’s like close enough. But with that said, I just turned to playing music. I feel like it was just one of the early ways, I’m from the suburbs of San Diego and it was a pretty homogenized upbringing, for lack of a better way to explain. And so it’s just one of the few areas where it felt like you could express yourself, like somewhat personally, in a way that wasn’t just like being on a sports team or getting good grades or something that you got strokes in a positive way forward, but didn’t really feel unique to me. But just felt like something I could be me, which I was really craving at that time and in retrospect, and yeah. Funny enough now whenever I play synth leads and stuff, everyone always was like, “man, it sounds like a horn lead.” And I’m like, “yeah, I played trumpet.” You know one of the bummers with it, as you may relate, is it’s like a mono instrument, it’s not like you can play chords or anything. So it actually took me quite a while, I still like sometimes with chords get a little more stuck than my friends who play piano or guitar or took a ton of music theory. I’m like, we’re just gonna make these all these little lead lines and put them together. Ultimately, I think just playing music in a band, and collaborating with other musicians and being part of a team makes you know, you have this like composition you’re trying to perform well, and everyone’s part of it. And I think I really got that in me early, the sort of joy or beauty or satisfaction that can come from just playing music well.
In light of being February and Valentine’s Day, would you say you actually do blame it all on love, As your album is titled?
I think so. Yeah, it has multiple meanings that aren’t all, tied together, so to speak. It’s sort of a romantic concept, or a concept, based around romantic love. But also based on love and passion for your doing. You know, I think it’s quite literal with me, when you follow your passion for music, a lot of hardships come along from doing that, but similarly, in romantic love where you kind of do dumb things and freak out about things that you shouldn’t freak out about. And all these other parts of you come out, when you’re in love, both good and bad. Then just like life in general, when you’re trying to do something in life, usually whatever you’re doing is based around love. And even if it’s doing something you hate, the only reason you would do that is for something you love, like if you have to support your family, so to speak, you’d be working shoveling soil or something so that you can support your loved ones or if you’re working at a cafe that supports your music career. There’s just all of these things I kind of realized, or perhaps came to a conclusion that we’ll see if I retain this. Like almost everything seems to be inspired by love, even though we don’t really think of it that way. Or I don’t, and there’s plenty of darkness all around. But ultimately, everyone’s sort of driven by love. So that was that was essentially the concept of the album, which has a lot of different takes, but they all kind of relate back to that framework.
I have been an active fan of your playlist on Spotify called ‘daytime disco.’ What are some of the ways that you discover music for that?
I’ve been a huge music nerd for quite a long time. I worked in a record store in San Francisco for five or six years, and was a DJ. I was primarily a DJ for almost 10 years, and so I’ve just always had a broad taste of music and really liked kind of finding throughlines, and things aren’t so genre-specific anymore. I mean, to some extent they are but it’s not as narrow-minded, where you could only be like a metalhead or jazz guy or whatever. Now you can be everything. But nevertheless, I just liked finding connections between different genres of music. So yeah, essentially it all kind of came naturally to me and just how I really grabbed most of the music that’s on the playlist are things I discovered years ago. Most all of it is pretty old or retro music, not a lot of contemporary stuff is usually on them. So it’s in general, just from being a record store nerd and shopping at traditional record stores, and then getting to know the person who worked in every genre, being like “Yo, what’s up, what’s the good stuff”. Doing that for 15 years or something, you learn a lot. And then when streaming came out, I never got into MP3 or CDs. I just kind of went from vinyl to streaming. So streaming just made it really easier to discover more esoteric stuff because you could just dive down a rabbit hole like you would on maybe Wikipedia, but you could actually listen to the song without spending a lot of money before you had to take a lot of chances and be like, and this is jazz fusion record worth $10? Do I really want to discover if I like this or not? Like, there’s a lot harder to just make decisions on, should I try to see if I liked this new thing. So in general, though streaming has a lot of flaws. I really like it as a listener. Plus, making the playlists is quite simple. I just have several master lists, like giant lists of different types, and then I just go into that big master list and pull out 20 songs every week from them, just kind of based on how I’m feeling. That’s how it all goes down.
how do you think the age of Nu disco has shifted in recent years. Since the 60s/70s and then the most recent resurgence back in the 2010s. How do you feel like it’s kind of shifted in most recent years post COVID?
I don’t know. I mean, that’s the short answer. But I can say it’s shifted from having a resurgence to not really feeling relevant. I don’t think discos influences has dissipated at all. So and then there’s acts like Jungle I’d say, which are almost even more traditional disco than the nu-disco. Contemporary like Jungle or Neil Francis are some friends. They’re kind of more synthy than actual disco but yeah, I think disco was just the birth of dance music. Music that was created for dance floors, rather than created for live. You know, it’s the first music that was really created with a DJ in mind. So in a lot of respects, that’s just like never going away perhaps, you know, just always going to be present as long as people are dancing, discos influence will always be strong.
I know that you’re currently on tour, and have been able to translate your studio songs to live performances with instruments. Have you found that to be difficult taking that synth electronic sound from A soundboard and moving into instruments?
Yes and no, it’s hard to answer that with a binary response. In certain ways, very difficult – in other ways. I’d say the music from Poolside, it’s almost harder to translate the music that Poolside typically makes into a DJ environment because it’s so slow and a lot of it is very organic. That really it felt kind of strange for DJing to be the main way people would experience the songs. I mean, the DJing thing was great. And, you know, I made a lot of remixes myself for DJing and had people remix the songs and, you know, a variety of things that made the DJ sets really awesome. But just some of the original numbers, just didn’t really like…feel like it made sense as a DJ. So on some level, I think the opposite is true in that it’s harder to make. One of the things I really liked about the music is it’s not super fast, it wasn’t really made to dance floors. So it’s kind of weird. Even though like as a DJ, it was sort of, at first a bit of a rebellion against that sort of banger, or dance floor music. At any rate, doing it live, feels more, I don’t know the word – authentic, sort of comes to mind. That’s not the perfect word. But like, you know, it just feels more aligned with what the music is, you can get this like expression of the songs. Live is sort of the like, ultimate expression of the songs like what they should be. But with that said, Yeah, I mean, we have sometimes up to a seven-piece band between five and seven pieces. We have to rehearse for weeks and weeks to get things right. So like lots of vocal layers and songs that we have to practice, it’s just so much work, it’s so hard. With DJing, I got good at that quite a while many years ago. So I really just have to like add new songs to my USB stick, and I’m going to be fine to DJ. Where as with the live band, it’s it’s just way more work, way more pressure. Anyone who makes a small mistake, it’s noticeable. In all these things, which, in part makes it more rewarding. But yeah, it’s not so much hard to do. But it’s just a lot of effort to do it right and say we’re finally doing it, right in the way that I feel like honors the music. Whereas before, we were just trying our best, but it was so much work that didn’t really seem feasible to really get it perfect. So we did a good job. But now I feel like this is aligned with what I want it to be for the first time maybe ever. We’re delivering something that’s worthy of the songs. It’s really live and still sounds like the record both so yeah, I’m pretty proud of it.
What is one of your favorite songs to play live versus the studio version?
When I DJ, Around The Sun, I always do the Body Music remix, because it’s really good. They did a really great job of turning into a dance song. But before they did that, you know, it’s one of our biggest songs has just felt like completely stupid to DJ, it’s more of, I don’t know want to say rock, but it’s not a dance song. Like that’s an example of the type of song that I feel like, this wouldn’t really lend itself well to a DJ set, but works really good live, which, generally most songs I’d say, feel that way. But that’s something in particular feels really good live feels really like musical and appropriate.
How would you say that energy in the crowd differs on a festival set versus one of your headlining shows?
It sort of depends on where, in South America and Mexico, they’re very exuberant no matter what the situation is, but outside of Latin America, you have a little more subdued because we’ve been playing pretty big slots at festivals where there’s 10,000 to 50,000 people. So obviously, not all of them bought tickets to a festival strictly to see Poolside but there’s like a lot of people who are passive fans who are checking it out, probably for the first time. I will say the music actually fits very well at festival so I really liked playing festival. While some artists don’t because it’s not exclusively hardcore fans, but the music for Poolside especially the first few albums were really just intended to be like groovy music to hear outdoors at a park or kind of like exactly a festival setting. So yeah, I think the music translates really well in a festival, so I really enjoy them. But yeah, in a club setting where we’re the headliner, and everyone bought tickets to see us, you know, we’re doing like encores and crowds usually very hyped to see us. So on that level, it can be more fun to play a club show as a headliner. But on another level, it’s really nice to see so many people vibing, for lack of better word in the music. As a musician, we’ve been in this a long time, I try not to forget the whole reason you start off making music is just to affect one person. Just one person being like, “man I liked your song”, and so the fact that there’s like 50,000 people doing that is very special. So that’s sort of the differences and it’s hard to choose one versus the other.
Do you stay the weekend if you’re at a festival?
Usually, no, I don’t have time. But if I do, or it’s like a location I want to stay, these days, things have gotten the schedules have gotten really crazy. Usually I have someplace to be the day before and the day after. But yeah, we were able when we played Austin City Limits on the second weekend, second day, and that was pretty fun. Sometimes lately, I’ve been DJing a festival or one day and playing live the next day. So then that’s like two days of festivaling. So I got to see like Modest Mouse recently at a festival. They were really awesome. Just stuff that I’ve always been wanting to see and finally get to see it, so it’s cool.
Relating to M3F, is this your first time performing a festival in Arizona?
We’ve done two I know, one was kind of like a hippie festival called, maybe it’s not even in Phoenix, but Gem and Jam was a festival done in Arizona. I forget the other one. But this will be the first one in a long time. We took a hiatus on the live band for a while, so this is kind of the first time we’re really coming full force. We were supposed to in 2020, but then, as you probably recall, there was a pandemic. That putting the kibosh on that. But yeah, so this is really the first time since maybe 2015/2014, that we really fully embraced the live band and pushing it. So it’ll be the very first time with a live band, and it will be the first time in a long time doing anything in Arizona at all. So yeah, I’m excited to be there again.
I saw that you have the 6pm to 7pm time slot with no artists overlapping on the main stage. which, in my mind, is the perfect festival set time because it’s right as the daytime is transitioning into the nighttime. how how are you guys planning on bringing your daytime disco vibes into the nighttime disco?
I don’t think we’re planning, we’re just going to play play the songs, but I think that’s what they were made for. So I don’t think we need to do too much planning there. It’s just getting out there and doing the songs. But yeah, that’s one of the cool things about the band, like some bands think a date time slot isn’t ideal. And like so many acts, especially in electronic music rely on pyro and a ton of crazy stage production, it’s like half of the battle of being a modern electronic artists. So I think one of the cool things about poolside is we’re literally even though we have a lot of electronics are kind of just like people playing music in the traditional sense. So playing at sunset is is a very perfect spot for us rather than something where wishing was later. You were like this is ideal, so that’s why I’m excited about that.
I know you already talked about Neil Francis, but since they were at last years M3F And then this year DRAMA is performing who you’ve collaborated with. Has there been any specific favorite collaborations you’ve had to date?
I mean, there’s been so many and sort of to say one would be to diminish the other. So I will say 100% equally excited about every collaboration I’ve ever had.
Is there one artist you’re hoping to collaborate with in the future?
Yeah, a ton, but I feel like there’s a couple that are pending, but until it’s for sure that they’re happening I don’t think I can discuss it. There’s definitely some cool stuff coming soon that I’m that I’m very excited about. So you’ll just have to follow us everywhere we’re followable.
At M3F, 100% of the proceeds go to charity. was there any charitable causes that you wanted to shout out or let people know about so they can be aware of?
We’ve done a lot of stuff with contouring music programs in areas where finances are not abundant in various countries as well as within the United States. So I imagine that that is where we will be putting our resources from now. It feels personal to me in that, it just feels like such a positive way to spend your time that also can be inspiring and expressive. If there was more programs like that, I think it would do a lot of good for a lot of people. So yeah, that’s the general area we donate to when we have opportunities like this.
is there any other artists on the M3F lineup that you’re looking forward to?
DRAMA for sure. We’ve been we’ve been friends for a long time. We took them on the tour in maybe 2018 or so, they opened for us for a few shows when they were first starting their live things. I’ve known Na’el’s brother for a long time. I’ve been listening to Na’el’s music from his brother since he was probably in junior high or high school. I’m a big fan of both Via and Na’el, they’re super great people. They did a great job with the ‘I Feel High’ collab that we did. We’ll be playing the same day so maybe we’ll do something special. They’re definitely somebody I’m excited about, and our relationship makes it even more exciting.