From the East Coast, where Foreign Born had just wrapped up a tour opening for Annie Clark and St. Vincent, Popieluch talked about SXSW, his band’s slowly growing audience in middle America, and that tricky beat in his band’s best-known song, “Union Hall.”
How’d the tour with St. Vincent go?
It was great. It was the best tour we’ve been on, for sure. You can’t really argue with those crowds, you know? I think it was mainly sold out—like 75 percent sold out. That’s a real turn of events for us—usually when we’re in the middle of the country, we’re just playing to crickets and bartenders.
Does it seem like you guys are starting to get better-known outside of L.A.? I know you have a really strong local following, but it’s not clear to me how many people in the rest of the country have heard of Foreign Born yet.
Yeah, it’s not clear to me, either. I’d say we’re at about seven or eight right now. [Laughs]
Seven or eight people?
Yeah, it seems like we meet one guy at every show who knows about us. It’ll be a sea of unmoving faces and then one guy, like, moshing. No, it’s slowly growing. It’s hard to really tell the numbers, because we’re on a pretty small label and we haven’t really toured as much as we should have.
Is this the first time you guys are going to SXSW?
No, this is the second time. We didn’t go last year; we went the year before that.
So you guys already know the drill—cram in as many shows as you can…
Yeah. And cram as many pieces of pizza into my mouth as possible. And then proceed to throw all the dirty paper plates into the street and never pick them up. Oh yeah, I know the drill.
Is that part of it, too?
Yeah, it’s a dirty biz. You know when you wake up in the morning all hungover and nothing’s clean? Like, your soul feels dirty—and then you walk into the street and it’s all beer cans and grease-stained paper plates from pizza places.
You make it sound so appealing.
And then there’s the music. [Laughs] Yeah, you know, two years ago we had significantly less good slots than we have this year. You know, playing the middle of the day in some half-empty bar and then playing at like 2 a.m. the last day of the whole festival. But this time, our booking agency is Billions Corporation. So we’re playing the Billions showcase, and that’ll be really good. That’s with Vampire Weekend.
Right—Vampire Weekend and DeVotchKa. That’ll be packed.
Yeah, it should be great.
I think it’s interesting that one of the most unique parts of your sound is Lewis’ guitar—and yet, the song you’re probably best known for, “Union Hall,” has almost no guitar in it.
Lewis came up with that one—he did the music, anyway. And originally, it was double-time to what it is now. And then he cut it to half-time, and made that crazy beat that’s on there.
Where the beat kind of goes to double-time and then back again?
Yeah. It was almost like a crunk thing—almost like a hip-hop beat. And we were thinking originally it would be like a special version of it—a remix or whatever. And then that just became the real version, because it was too cool. At first I was like, “Uh, I don’t know about this.” But it grew on everyone.
Do you ever try to get the audience to clap along to that weird beat?
Yeah, yeah, I ask them. But even the people we ask to come up onstage—our friends who’ve done it like a hundred times—still mess it up.
If you're heading to Austin for SXSW, you can catch Foreign Born on Friday, March 14, at 10 p.m. at Antone's. Metromix will check in with them again while we're there.
