Discover Vinyl: Congratulations on the release of your debut album Start a Fire That Sings You a Song, how are you feeling now that the record has been released?

Social Caterpillar: Thank you so much!! It feels really great to finally get this record out and we are incredibly excited to be able to share these songs with everyone. This record is really important and deeply personal to everyone in the band, and we are incredibly stoked with how everything turned out. As a whole the record took several years to take shape, and it reflects not only our growth as a band, but also several of the struggles the band members encountered leading to its release.

Prior to Start A Fire you had been releasing music in the form of cassettes (Motorcycle in 3 Movements, Welcome To The Petting Zoo, and more), what drew you to put this release out on vinyl?

We all listen to and collect vinyl, and as a band had a goal to start releasing our music on vinyl so we immediately jumped at the opportunity when it arose. Cassettes releases are great and are a wonderfully viable way for bands to release their material at a low cost. Nevertheless, we all think there is something particularly attractive and rad about releasing records on vinyl. It’s a bit cliché to say this by now, but like a lot of other artists we feel like physical releases, especially vinyl, help establish a more personal connection between the artist and listener. From being able to hold the artwork, to reading the lyrics and linear notes, and even to having flip the record from side to side, all help, we believe, in establishing a more fundamental relationship with our audience.

All this said, we also know that we live in a world where streaming and downloading are more steadily becoming the most prevalent medium through which people listen to music. Rather than lamenting a time long past, we think streaming and downloading music is absolutely great, and are happy to always offer our releases for free download. At the same time, however, we still feel that physical releases are important for those who want to have that connection, and we will continue to do so as long as we have the means. Huge shout out to Steve Roche from Confluence Records for helping us release this record.

Your debut EP Welcome To The Petting Zoo shared similar dark and melancholic undertones with your debut album Start a Fire both beautifully and emotively expressed. In your words is there a driving theme or higher meaning that contributed to the overall atmosphere of the record?

Conceptually and thematically Social Caterpillar has always existed as a medium for the members of the band to collectively work through and reflect upon the struggles each of us endure as we attempt to navigate the increasing emptiness of contemporary life. In general, we like to think of Social Caterpillar as a direct reflection on who we have been, who we are, and who we hope to become, and the melancholic atmospheres of our records showcase our attempt to work through these ideas. The philosopher Michel Foucault once wrote that the point in life is to “become someone else than you were in the beginning,” and the trajectory of this record follows this idea. The opening track deals with the theme of what we call “collective pain”—a sense of general hopelessness we feel is becoming more prevalent in all of our lives and the lives of those around us, and really sets the tone for the rest of the album. The track “Bad Electricity” was written after losing a friend to suicide and another to an overdose and is dedicating to everyone who has a difficult time navigating through the troubled storms of paralyzing depression. Whereas the album’s closing track sings of protest and of hope for different, better world—that is of what we might later become through resistance.

We were delightfully caught off guard by the ambient electronically driven interludes laced in between songs on the record, it really helped bridge the compositions together for us while also letting them stand alone strongly. What led to your counter approach where so many bands today would place “filler” songs?

We initially started experimenting with the ideas of using short interludes between our tracks when we collaborated with the Denver/St. Louis collective UTAJAHS for our EP Motorcycle: In Three Movements. On that record, we had three tracks that we really felt constituted a larger piece of music, and wanted to come up with a way to make the EP feel more like an entire composition than a collection of songs. With Start a Fire that Sings You a Song, we had a similar idea in mind and wanted our songs to feel like specific movements within a larger composition, and we think that the use of interludes helps us achieve this effect. While each of the movements can stand alone, we hope that in succession the album works toward creating unifying the record as a whole.

Your final track Where There Is Power There Is Resistance opens with a sample from the 1976 movie The Network, could you tell us a little about that?

We chose to sample The Network because of the direct parallels between the film and what is going on in our own contemporary world, not only in the sense of a movement of resistance that the sample inspires, but also how the film addresses the simultaneous issue of the ways in which media outlets often profit from sensationalizing movements of protests as a spectacle to be consumed. As the album’s closer, we wanted to end with a song of protest and hope for a less bleak world, and we felt that the “mad as hell” speech not only helped set the tone for the song, but also parallels certain sentiments of a contemporary world in protest and revolt.

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