Sylvan Esso chases honesty in music

On paper, Amelia Meath and Nick Sanborn are unlikely bandmates. She was one of the lead singers in the all-female folk trio Mountain Man. He produced electronic beats for Megafaun and worked on his own as Made of Oak. United as Sylvan Esso, though, Meath and Sanborn share a musical partnership that goes down as easy as champagne at a wedding.

That’s just the sort of sound that Sylvan Esso brings on its self-titled debut: celebratory, effervescent pop that rewards the discerning listener while delivering radio-ready hooks. Less than a year since that record’s arrival, the Durham, North Carolina, duo is still riding a strong wave of critical approval. Ahead of its show Friday at the Bottleneck, I got ahold of Sanborn on the road to ask him about honesty, pop and, obviously, Taylor Swift.

The Pitch: After a couple of years of getting a lot of blog traction, Sylvan Esso was one of the most hyped bands at 2014’s South by Southwest. Then, last May, when your album came out, things really started happening. How have things changed?

Sanborn: In a lot of ways, but mostly it’s just been amazing how quickly the shows have grown. They’re so much bigger than we thought they were going to be. In our most ideal dreams of where we are now, I don’t think either of us thought we were going to be playing to anywhere near as many people as we’re going to be playing tonight. We’re going to D.C. tonight, and we’re selling out the [1,200-capacity] 9:30 Club. It’s been sold-out for over a month, which is just totally overwhelming.

Our own projects just never did as well as this project is doing. We always knew people who were doing well and just never really thought that that was going to be us.

When you and Amelia first joined forces, what were those conversations like?

I guess the only thing we kept talking about was that we just wanted to make a pop record that didn’t assume the listener was an idiot. And not in an elitist way — not in the way that like, “Oh, we’re gonna intellectualize pop” or something snooty like that. But I think we just found ourselves both big fans of pop music and kind of constantly having to forgive our favorite artists in order to love their records. Like, anyone I can name right now, at some point on their latest record, there’s been a moment like, “Really? That’s the lyric you ended up with? That’s where you stopped writing?”

We just really thought that pop music could be more personal, I think, and maybe more honest and less black-and-white. That was the other thing we talked about a lot: how frustrated we both were with the trend in pop lyrics of oversimplifying a situation. I think something we both really love about being alive and reflecting that through our music is that being a human is a really complicated thing, and it’s almost never very cut-and-dry. The more people that tap into that, I think, the more people will respond to what they do.

We didn’t want to do something that was like, “You broke up with me! You’re the worst!” or “I’m gonna fix you!” Because nothing is ever that simple. I mean, I love Taylor Swift, but is there really a chance that all those breakups were really not her fault? Like, seriously. It must be so complicated. It must be so intense and hard to be Taylor Swift, but really, her boyfriends are just terrible? [Laughs.] On her newest record, though — have you listened to it?

Um, yes. Like, a million times.

Yeah, of course. But she finally kind of did what I was wanting her to do, and that’s on “Style,” where she kind of gets mad at this dude for being with other women, but she also admits that, like, “Oh, yeah, this is just complicated and kind of unhealthy, but we’re just going to keep doing it.” And I was like, “Awesome! She perceives that this isn’t this one-sided thing.” And that song’s a jam, and everyone can relate to it.

I think there’s this theory that you need to universalize what you’re saying in order to have people understand it, and I don’t think that’s true. I think the more honest you are about how complicated something is, the more people will actually be able to relate to it. Because if it’s true, there’s no way you’re the only person who’s had that experience. There’s probably a bazillion parallels for the listener.

Reading other interviews with you both, I get the impression that you and Amelia have a really strong musical connection. What attracted you to her music?

It wasn’t until she asked me to do a remix that I saw she was someone I could really work with. I had been trying to find someone to work with. I had been a sideman for so long, playing in all these other bands, and I just wanted my own thing. The idea of an electronic band had been slowly forming, and I was trying to figure it out. And I think, as a big fan of hers, I knew how to put her music in context, so that other people could hear it the way I heard it and, hopefully, love it as much as I loved it.

How has working with Amelia in Sylvan Esso influenced your own approach to music?

It’s tough to put my finger on specifics just because everything about my life is different now than it was three years ago. In general, I think she’s made me much more confident, musically. I feel much better about the work that I do even without her now. That’s been the biggest shift. She’s taught me to trust myself, and I do, a lot more than I did before. I don’t think either of us would be where we are without the other one.