Formed in 2005, San Diego-based indie rockers Delta Sprit has amassed a large following due to its seemingly endless touring. After releasing a new album in March and touring extensively, the band is embarking on a month long nationwide tour. Before kicking off the tour Wednesday night in New Orleans, bassist Jon Jameson sat down with The Daily Reveille to talk about the band’s tour, where the group is headed in the future and what it’s like to spend Halloween in New Orleans.
The Daily Reveille: This is the first date on a nationwide tour. Did you guys intentionally want to start the tour on Halloween night in New Orleans?
Jon Jameson: This is the first official date, but we actually played a couple of pre-tour shows. One of them was in Honolulu, but it was when that tsunami false alarm happened. Right as we were getting out of our cab to go to the show, sirens were going off and we were being told to evacuate. Which sucked, but we did a really cool make-up show Monday night at a small local club. But we’re stoked to officially start it in New Orleans on Halloween. It was actually a complete accident that we’re here on this night, but so far, it’s unlike anything we’ve ever seen and it just looks wild.
TDR: You guys are known primarily as a live band, so what kind of pressure does that put on you both as a band and in your personal lives, since most of you are married?
Jameson: In the past, it presented some problems for writing. After we put out our first album, we toured pretty continuously for about two and a half years. So most of the songs for our second album were written by Matt [Vasquez, the band’s lead singer] just playing on an acoustic guitar. He eventually had about 40 songs that we took and tried to make into songs that would sound like Delta Spirit songs for our second album. We all still love that album, but we didn’t make it in the way that we like to make music. So we’ve learned to make space for creativity. For personal time, we make space for that as well, and it helps to have such understanding families.
TDR: Your newest album seemed like you guys were getting outside your comfort zone a little bit. Do you think that goes hand in hand with expanding your audience and becoming more successful?
Jameson: To us, making the new record was cool because we were in a great place as a band, especially since we added a new guitar player near the end of touring for our second record. We opened ourselves up to different things and let a bunch of out personal influences come together. We also had a new producer, Chris Coady, who brought in some of those electronic influences.
TDR: Where do you guys go from here? After this tour do you plan on taking some downtime?
Jameson: Since this tour is so short, it seems like downtime, or at least a less stressful environment where we can stay sharp as a band. After this ends, we’ll have about a month off, but in January we go to Australia for Big Day Out, which is this awesome touring festival they have there. After that, we’ll settle down, assess things and try to make some new music. But we don’t feel that we have to worry about straying outside what we normally do, because we have the best fans in the world that have stayed with us no matter how “out there” we’ve gotten. We feel a lot of comfort in that, that we have complete freedom.
