Silversun Pickups’ Joe Lester discusses touring and Butch Vig ahead of Midland show

Silversun Pickups. // photo credit Claire Marie Vogel

Joe Lester—keyboardist and founding member of indie rock group Silversun Pickups—was asked to step away from LA band Pine Marten to be the “weird sounds” guy in 2002. He agreed, and the rest is history. We spoke with Lester, who has ties to KC, on Tuesday to discuss the current U.S. tour, the evolution of their sound, Wednesday’s show at The Midland, as well as David Lynch.

The band just recently released yet another music video for their newest record Physical Thrills— this one for “We Won’t Come Out”.

The Pitch: In a couple interviews I watched, you had a KC hat on. Do you have any affiliation with the city? I read you grew up in California.

Joe Lester: My wife is from Kansas City, I spend quite a bit of time there. We have actually been talking about getting a place there and going back-and-forth between LA and Kansas City because her mom lives in Overland Park, her brother lives near there, and her older sister lives at The Lake of the Ozarks. Between this leg of the tour and the last one, I was in Kansas City for about two weeks before we drove back to LA. So over the last 15 years or so, I’ve been in Kansas City quite a bit.

Is there a specific thing that you like in KC, whether it be a sports team, barbecue spot, or venue that you like going to?

Sports team wise, I’m still pretty LA-ish. I’ve been to Royals games and Kauffman Stadium reminds me a lot of Dodger Stadium, it’s got a similar vibe and setting that I really like. I know they’re probably moving somewhere at some point in the near future. But I’m still pretty taken with my LA teams.

Barbecue-wise, I don’t think it’s called Oklahoma Joe’s anymore, it’s called Kansas City Joe’s. I really like that spot a lot, I like their burnt ends. I’m pretty agnostic, I like Gates. Jack Stack is close by, so we get that a lot.

Being the keyboard/sound guy, I read that you played guitar on a tour one time and I know you were a bassist before joining the band in ’02. How many instruments do you play, and when did you learn that music was going to be something you pursued as a career?

I’m not a really good guitar player at all and I mostly played bass before Silversun. I’m a mediocre piano player, to be honest. I just like making weird noises with synthesizers and that’s kind of why I joined the band. They had a second guitar player for a while, and he left to do solo stuff. They just asked me if I wanted to join. I was in another band where all three of us all played keyboards. They just wanted somebody to do weird sounds so that’s kind of how I ended up in the band, and that’s sort of been my primary role since then.

I think I tried to learn how to play guitar when I was 14 or 15, and there were too many strings, so I kind of gave up and sort of fell back into bass after college or during college. The idea of doing it for a living didn’t cross any of our minds until it just sort of happened. We were just playing around in LA for a couple of years and then we decided to record some stuff. Then, by dumb luck, a radio station in LA and another one in Seattle started playing “Kissing Families”—a song on the Pikul EP—and we started touring more. Then it just sort of happened. I don’t think there was any real intentionality to it at first, it just sort of happened, and then we were like, “Oh shit, I guess this is what we do.” We’ve been super fortunate that we’ve been able to do it for 20 years now.

Walk me through “Alone on a Hill.” It’s a very catchy, dream pop track and your fingerprints seem to be all over it. Talk about what Nikki Monninger brought to the song.

I think Brian Aubert had the idea for that piano intro and then just sort of fleshed it out. We’re always trying to find songs to have Nikki prominently featured on and that one just drew her attention. She was like, “I think I have an idea for this.” It felt like a fun departure to have a piano-forward song that Nikki was singing and she really vibed with it in the studio. This whole record is sort of the post-COVID times. We didn’t really demo anything the way we usually do. We basically did everything at Butch Vig’s studio, sort of demoing as we were writing. It just sort of grew from that.

Every two albums, it seems you guys like to change producers and go after something different. What did Butch Vig bring to the table that interested the band?

Well, he’s fucking Butch Vig. He lives in our neighborhood that we all basically live in. We all live sort of separately, but kind of in the same place. We’ve sort of known him in passing because it’s a music community and we live in the same neighborhood. We’ve always been sort of collegial with him. Brian ran into him at the supermarket a while back now, and Butch asked him if he wanted to sing backups on a Garbage song. So Brian went into Billy Bush’s studio. He’s an engineer, but he’s also married to Shirley Manson from Garbage, and he’s their stage manager and tech guru, as well. So he went into the studio with all the Garbage kids and he did vocals for a song called “Medicine,” I think. Then he came back to us and was like, “We should do a record with Butch, that was really fun. They’re good people.”

Butch is from Viroqua, Wisconsin, and he’s just the most Midwestern guy. He’s super nice and down-to-earth. You could talk to him for hours. He’s made hundreds of records so his instincts are just so good. If you play him half a song he’s like, “Alright, I know where we’re going,” and you can just get started. There’s just a shorthand immediately where he could see what we wanted to do with the songs and his instincts of where they should go and what should happen were basically spot-on all the time. Now that we’ve done two records with him, plus a bunch of other silly stuff, he’s like family. I honestly don’t know that we would switch who we do records with again. If Butch is available and wants to, I don’t know why we would do it with anyone else. It’s so easy and streamlined, we have a process now. He has a studio at his house, and we’ll do demos and early stuff there. Billy’s got a studio that’s 10 blocks away from my house and we’ll do guitars and other stuff there. It just makes so much sense.

Talk about the additions to the setlist this year: “Growing Old Is Getting Old,” “Mean Spirits,” “Three Seed,” and The Singles Collection’s “Cannibal.” Why bring them in?

We have a lot of songs now and it’s hard to make a setlist. There are certain songs that we kind of have to play. We have to play “Lazy Eye,” we have to play “Panic Switch.” But you want to keep it interesting for yourself and for audiences, so let’s dig up some stuff we haven’t played in a while, refresh the set, and keep things interesting. Those are songs that, historically, we’ve played either a lot, or used to be mainstays and we haven’t played in a while. We try to keep things fresh. We like to have a flow for the concert to go in, but there are certain songs that you can kind of interchange, that will rotate in-and-out. Sometimes we’ll switch “Little Lover’s So Polite” with “The Royal We.” You know, stuff that has a similar vibe that we can change to keep things interesting. I’m actually stoked that “Three Seed” and “Mean Spirits” are back in because we haven’t played those in a while and those are really fun. Same with “Growing Old.” You have to try to keep it interesting for yourself and you don’t want to play the same thing every time you come to a city, people will get bored as hell.

Was “Growing Old Is Getting Old” always the idea to open the set?

When we wrote the song, it was just kind of a song on the record, but for some reason it just kind of makes sense as an opener. Our brains know that’s where it belongs, to start the show with that. It wasn’t intentionally meant as a great opening song, but it seems to have lodged in everybody’s conscience that that’s the place where that song goes. Or maybe at the beginning of an encore. But for whatever reason, it’s usually the first song.

You guys have played The Midland twice already, both within a short six-month period of each other in 2015/’16, but have played the KC area a number of times during your lengthy career. How do you think the shows have changed over time, for you specifically? I don’t think you’ve done a solo headline at a venue of this capacity, at least in KC.

Yeah, I think the last time we were there, we played The Truman. Have we played The Midland twice? We might have, honestly, it’s hard to remember. We’ve definitely played it once. I know we played the Power & Light District for a radio thing and we’ve played in Lawrence a few times. We played a festival in the West Bottoms, I think, somewhere down by the river. And I remember we all had to hide in the dressing rooms because there was a hail storm in the middle of it. I think it was with Brittany Howard and Garbage.

They’ve always been really fun. It’s fun because my wife’s family always comes to the shows. I like The Midland, it’s a great theater. I always look forward to those shows, also, to go get some barbeque or go to Town Topic. There’s always something to do.

I read that the band likes to define your role as “sounds.” Explain this. I know you and Brian both agreed that you enjoyed the idea of not knowing what was guitar and what was keys.

Especially early on, that was kind of how it started. The idea of making certain aspects of the music sort of smeary and not easily identifiable. Like you were saying with “Alone on a Hill,” it’s gotten a little more, “That’s easily a piano, that’s whatever,” but we still like the idea of having sort of swirly and unidentifiable aspects of certain songs, where there are swells and things. A lot of the stuff that I do, especially on the older songs, are chopped up sampled guitar bits that we process and reuse as sounds for the keyboard. That was definitely a thing that we were quite taken with when we first started. I think now as we make more and more albums and have gotten more confident with our instrument-playing abilities, that’s less important, and now it’s more of, “What’s the best thing” for whatever song we’re doing. Maybe it is just a regular piano sound, organ sound, or straightforward strings. That was definitely a key component of the early stuff, for sure.

Your first two records focus more on a heavier type of grunge and some shoegaze influence. What was the decision like to change that up over time, album-to-album?

I don’t think that we’ve done anything explicitly like, “We’re going to change the sound.” As you live life, you hear new music and something influences you. Your tastes sort of organically change, or are what you’re interested in at the moment, or some movie that you saw, film score that you heard, just life in general. I don’t think we’ve ever explicitly said that we are going to do this or that, it just sort of naturally happened. I think from the outside, people see it that we took a step in this other direction. I guess we did, but it wasn’t like, “We’re not going to do this anymore, we’re going to do that.” It just sort of happens. You’re in a new studio, with new people, and new equipment, with whatever life experience you’ve had, in however many years since the last record, and you’re just interested in something, some other sort of aspect of something. It just sort of happens. We’ve never done anything intentionally to be like, “We need to make something that doesn’t sound like that.” In our brain, it always ends up sounding like the four of us making something. It makes sense to us.

What would you say were some of the biggest influences for your change in sound over the years?

Nothing specific, just everything. Whether it’s new bands or old bands that you suddenly got into or hadn’t heard before, it’s just the whole world. Each of us probably has a million different influences, things that we’re thinking about when we’re all making a record. It might all be different, but it coalesces how it does. Brian has been super into Waxahatchee.

I just saw her last week! And she’s from here.

Oh, that’s right. She and her partner Kevin Morby live there. Unfortunately we seem to be on tour at kind of the same time, I’m hoping I’ll get to see her in LA when we have a break. My wife’s a huge fan, too. But I think we’re going to be home when she’s in LA, so I hope we’re going to see her. I really like her, too.

But it’s all different. I’ve been super into weird soundtrack music. Everybody has different stuff and it all sort of seeps in. I don’t think any of it is, “I think I’m going to copy that,” but just what you’ve been listening to. It’s in your brain, it just sort of seeps into what you’re doing.

You guys released a single called “David Lynch Has a Painting Made of Flies Eyes” after Physical Thrills under a different name. Is Lynch someone that you and the band admire? Talk about that music video.

Yeah, of course, he’s amazing. That literally came from while we were making Physical Thrills, just like shooting the shit with Butch. Butch has a million stories and that was literally him talking through all the chance encounters he’s had with David Lynch, literally just running into him on the street or wherever. They’re both Midwestern guys, they both have a sort of similar sensibility, and he’s a really big David Lynch guy, too.

He was in the Hollywood Hills for some reason and ran into David Lynch and Lynch was like, “Hey, do you want to come over to the house and look at the furniture I build?” And Butch was like, “Uh…yeah.” So he went over to his house. And David Lynch is constantly making stuff. He makes furniture, he makes art, he makes movies. So he was sitting there with a cup of coffee and looked at this painting, and as he leaned into it, he realized that a whole bunch of it was literally flies eyes on push pins. That was the genesis of the song, all of Butch’s funny experiences with David Lynch. We were joking with him saying, “Dude, you should literally write a song about that,” and then he did over the weekend. Brian sang the chorus and was like, “That should be a song.” We came in right after we finished Physical Thrills and he sent us a demo that he did and was like, “You guys should play on this.” He had written most of the song, so we just said, “Fuck it, let’s do it.” We put it out for Record Store Day. Originally, it was just going to be vinyl, like a 7 inch, and they said we should put it on Spotify. I think there are already plans to do another one. The whole idea is Butch’s stories, so the next one is about Prince borrowing his drum kit. But that’s down the road, we’ll do another one in a couple years

I watched your guys’ What’s In My Bag? episode and noticed that movies are a big influence on your sound. Why base your records off movie soundtracks? And what’s your favorite?

It changes all the time, but for me Wendy Carlos is a huge influence. Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury, they do a lot of stuff with Alex Garland. Geoff Barrow is from Portishead. They did Ex Machina and Annihilation.

Physical Thrills did not find its way onto the charts. Is that something that matters to you guys? I know Swoon and Neck of the Woods both entered the top 10.

The short answer is no. The way that music is absorbed or enters into people’s consciousness at this point is so different than it used to be. Honestly, that stuff has never really mattered that much to us. It’s a thing that we’ve made and put out in the world, and if it finds people, it finds people, and we’re happy about that. We’re very lucky to keep doing this, keep playing shows, and be able to make a living doing this. I think record labels care about that stuff more than anything. Charts and stuff have never really mattered to us. We’re just happy that people hear it, and when it eases into your consciousness whatever way it does, at this point. The whole music industry is sort of weird and fractured nowadays.

What’s next for the band? I know you usually wait three years between albums, but is there something all of us can expect soon?

Almost nothing we do is intentional. We don’t intentionally wait three years, it’s just kind of how it works out. There’s already stuff percolating. We don’t have any definitive plans as of yet, but there are already some song ideas that are forming. We’ll probably do some recording later this year. There’s talk of doing a sort of, not the official anniversary, but a Carnavas tour, where we do the whole record, because there are a bunch of songs on that record that we haven’t played live in ages. I think we’re talking about maybe doing that next year. There’s a bunch of stuff in the works. We’ll probably do some recording soon, and we’ll probably have something out in the next 12 months or so. But for right now, we’ve got this run, and we’ve got another run in June, and then we’ll see. There’s a bunch of ideas for things, but nothing is 100% coming yet. There will be more.

I end all my interviews by asking an artist what the best thing they’ve listened to lately is. It can be something that was just released or something that came out in the ‘60s.

Actually, I just went down a Paisley Underground rabbit hole. I was listening to some old The Dream Syndicate stuff recently, that’s been kind of fun. Hadn’t listened to that in a while. There’s a band from LA from the late ‘90s/early 2000s called Acetone, who were fucking amazing and didn’t get as much recognition as they deserved. They’ve gotten back together. The bass player passed away unfortunately, but they’re getting back together to play a show when we’re home that I’m going to see. So I’m definitely down the rabbit hole with them.

And honestly, the bands that we’ve been playing with lately. Our tour manager actually introduced us to this band Hello Mary, who we’ve been on tour with and who is coming back on tour with us. It’s just been really invigorating hearing young bands, they’re fucking amazing. They introduced us to Rocket, who’s playing with us right now, and they’re incredible, too, so I’ve been listening to them a lot recently.

Silversun Pickups plays The Midland on Wednesday, April 24, with special guest Rocket. Details on that show here.