Interviews // Sapling

Most bands that fall into the noise punk category are either pure noise and aggression or electronic near dance music. Sapling exist in both worlds, being both punk and groovy dance music. Plus, their songs feel both silly and completely serious at the same time, which is never a bad thing.”

~If It’s Too Loud

iheartnoise: What do you want people to take away from your music?
Rainy: From our music in general? I would say that I want them to take away more questions than answers, always. And a sense of catharsis and also frustration and wanting more.
Jon: I just want people to dance and have a good time.
Amber: I want you to go home with something stuck to you. Yeah, I want you to go home sticky and confused.

Iheartnoise: How did you meet each other?
Rainy: I’ll give the slightly nicer version of the story. I met Amber because a guy I was dating was obsessed with her, and now we’re friends, and we don’t know what he’s up to, and we’ll leave it there. But we’ve been playing music together since, like, 2016, and then Jon became part of the band in 2018, and we’ve kind of really been Sapling since then, I think.
Jon: Yeah. And Rainy and I met from our previous band Service.
Rainy: Where I was playing drums and he was playing guitar.
Rainy: Those are our main instruments, him on guitar and me on drums.
Amber: This is a band where the bassist is a drummer, the drummer is a guitarist, and the guitarist is a clown.

iheartnoise: What’s your favorite memory as a band
Jon: We just have lots of fun in the studio recording. It’s usually just a whole big weekend, and I like being in the studio
Amber: Fart a lot and drink a lot of tequila.
Jon: Do too many takes.
Rainy: I’m trying to pick a favorite, but okay. The hardest I’ve laughed is when we did our photo shoot for our first full-length record, no Sequoia, and we had Jon naked in a trash can full of spaghetti, and I told our photographer, okay, it was Coleman Rogers photography. I said, if he falls, you have to get it on film. Don’t let him fall over. Please keep an eye on him. And Coleman turns around for 1 second, and I hear, whoop, bang. And Jon falls, like, smack down in the huge trash can full of spaghetti, and there’s spaghetti everywhere, and we’re trying to respect the fact that he’s butt naked. And so we’re crying, laughing, trying not to look at him, putting spaghetti back in the trash can with him in it. And Coleman goes, “I’m sorry. I turned around I didn’t get it.”
Jon: But he did get the reverse.
Rainy: He took a bunch of photos of us cleaning and made a GIF out of it. So there’s an animation now of us, like, picking him back up in the spaghetti trash can.

iheartnoise: So how would you describe your music for someone who’s listening for the first time.
Jon: Jeez, I don’t know. We’ve even tried to answer this earlier today. We just handed a business card, but we can’t hand a business card to a tape recorder.
Rainy: We named our genre. We always say we’re bitchpop and art rock. Bitchpop as one word and art rock as two is how I usually write it. And now we’ve added bad jazz. Also, we did add a genre for this record. But yeah, I guess we feel like those descriptions fit us the best because we tend to get described as angry but catchy. That seems to be a big thing where it’s like it’s really aggressive, but you can dance to it. And we don’t know what they’re going to do next. So we try to I guess lean into that. And I would say that expect the unexpected.
Amber: We definitely don’t have one particular sound or style. Really mix it up. The song on the album is not going to sound like the song you’ve just heard.

iheartnoise: Do you have any projects coming up that we should know about?
Rainy: We’re going to be part of a compilation that our friend Dave from the band Double Star is doing. It’s going to come out, I think, sometime next spring. And so we’re going to soon be recording an unreleased track for that. Unreleased because we haven’t recorded it yet, We’re taking a break from shows for fall and winter because we need to go back into writing mode and just stop. So maybe we’ll try to make a video at some point. Again, we haven’t done one in a couple of years. Yeah.
Amber: We’re going to hibernate.

Sapling’s next show is Sunday, September 17th at Electric Haze in Worcester with Tysk Tysk Task and Crow Follow. All others are listed at www.saplingband.com/shows