Preview: Delta Spirit at Spanish Moon

Photo of Delta Spirit, courtesy Sacks and Co., taken by Matthew Pandolfe.

Matt Vasquez talks about the band’s latest album Into the Wide, moving across the country and “Bushwick Blues”

Delta Spirit, one of the more energetic modern rock bands, visits Spanish Moon Wednesday, April 8. Doors open at 7 p.m. Avid Dancer will open. Tickets are $15. For more information and to purchase tickets, click here.

A quintet full of Brooklyn transplants, Delta Spirit is headed by singer/guitarist Matt Vasquez. Needing a change of scenery, four of the band members decided to move from Long Beach, California, to Greenpoint, the northernmost neighborhood of the Brooklyn borough.

“I had just gotten married,” Vasquez says. “[Bassist] Jon [Jameson] had been married, and [drummer] Brandon [Young] was married. We were all ready for this. … We thought, ‘Why are we still here [in Long Beach]?’ Why don’t we travel together and do something insane and see what happens?'”

There, the band found a studio space—Vasquez calls it their dungeon—it was a walk down the street from his apartment. That’s where he began writing what would became Into the Wide.

“In New York, you are living above or below, underneath, beside people with paper-thin walls. You can’t just pick up an acoustic guitar and come up with something,” he says. “This place was holy to me. I could walk, have my alone space and solitude. That’s where I was able to come up with all the ideas for the songs. In a year and a half, I wrote 45 songs for the album. I was able to craft the stories I wanted to tell.”

Those 45 songs were whittled down to 12, resulting into the band’s most fully realized release to date. Thanks to steady critical acclaim and relentless touring, Into the Wide peaked at No. 70 on the Billboard charts last year.

Check out the band’s latest video for “Language of the Dead” below and more from Vasquez below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33igphJatzs

On getting the track list down to 12 tunes: “It was a guttural process. Everybody wants the best thing. You end up with a selection of songs that everyone’s super happy with, then a couple of ‘Hail Mary’ tunes that you throw out there. The best was having [producer] Ben [Arlen] telling us to stop thinking and just play the song. We have always been a kinetic band with our energy. When it comes to recording, all you have to do is go into the studio and mean it.”

Live or studio, which do you prefer? “I love performing. I’m too insecure to just be a studio guy. There isn’t quite anything like playing that song and seeing that intimacy, that relation that you have with someone else. It ceases to become your thing. That’s why music exists.”

His grandmother worked for guitar manufacturer Leo Fender: “She was one of the first six employees of Fender. She had a father/daughter relationship with him. She loved delivering guitars to all the people.”

On the song ‘Bushwick Blues,’ my personal favorite of the band’s: “That song’s about my friend Sharon Van Etten. This is a long time ago, when I wrote it. She was standing outside of one of our shows, and I met her and thought, ‘Oh wow, she was really cool.’ We had friendship for a minute. It was just like fantastic correspondence. I was living in Long Beach at the time. It was never going to work out, long time, obviously, but I really had a crush on this person. So it’s just about hanging out with this awesome person and clicking, knowing it’s just not going to work. We see each other from time to time, and that’s the nature of us both being touring musicians. We’re constantly well-wishing each other. I think Sharon’s an awesome person. You can’t find a nicer person.”