Stuart interviews...Butterfly Explosion

How has your close relationship with God Is An Astronaut influenced your music?
Do you feel you've taken influence from them or has it been strictly professional?

I don't think it was a case of influencing our music, but in terms of developing our own sound and fullfilling that on record as well as live they've been a big influence and help. We've learned a lot from them. For the music itself, we discussed a lot about how we wanted the record to sound, what direction we were taking with it. For Torsten, having already produced God Is An Astroaut's albums, he himself saw it as a new challenge and different project to work with.

Songs like Closer and Sophia are full of character yet have quite a radio-friendly vibe
- was it a conscious decision to include a few more 'accessible' songs on the record?

Yeah it definitely was, moreso for tracks like Insulate Dreams and Tracing Stars which I thought might have been too far removed from the vibe of many of the other album tracks but we put a lot of thought into the production of them to make them fit on the album while still retaining their original pop appeal. I think it was important to have them on the album, not necessarily for a radio target, but to bring diversity to the album.

How did your relationship with GIAA come in to frutation? Who approached who?

We were asked to do a couple of support slots for them before in Dublin and later London. It was about two years ago that I phoned Torsten about producing our album and I sent him on demos of tracks. Once they finished their own album at the end of 2008 he got in touch with me again and we got started on it.

Younger bands often find relentless touring the best way to gain exposure
- how much will you be touring this new record, and when?

That's true but it also depends on what touring opportunities are on offer. If it's not planned right and not promoted it can be a waste of time and money.
I think it's important to put a structure and plan in place before rushing into an album release or even an album recording. We could have rushed an album out
2 years ago but we wouldn't have had any plan in place with regards touring and I think it would have been a mistake in terms of getting exposure outside Ireland.

Even now with the US and European touring we lined up surrounding this album release it's tough getting any big exposure but the album seems to be stirring interest far afield and that's what we hoped to achieve in the first month of the release. The week we played SXSW our album broke into the CMJ 200 college radio charts and it's charting high on about 30 stations now, none of whom probably heard of us two months ago.

Any plans to come to Newcastle?

Would love to, it would really depend on one of two things, either finding another UK tour support to do later this year or a local promoter getting tips from good music fans like you and getting us over sooner!

Your songs appear to be more instrumentally predominant than vocally
- how does this translate in live shows? Is it difficult to not drown out the vocals?

Yeah I think that's generally how it works live, when it does reach those explosive moments
we try not compensate levels for the sake of the vocals. The guitar and keyboard melodies
are just as important as the vocal melodies, that's what the music is made up of, layers of melodies, it's not your standard arrangement of vocals sitting out nice and clear on top of the music.

What generic labelling would you use to tag Lost Trails,
and what bands do you feel you have a close sound to?

It may not sound like these but I guess you could draw connections to some of the alternative
rock bands of the 90s like Gish-era Pumpkins and we also get compared to Ride quite a bit
who, to be honest, I'd only be familiar with a few of their singles. I guess the common connection
might be that it's a wide and layered sound we go for and it's music with emotion. We never wanted
to make an album that tried to return to that era and replicate those sounds though.
We actually listened to and referenced several albums we love from that time and recent years, not to see how we could do what they did, but to see what new things we could do differently to develop our own sound and one that is of its own time.

How long did the songwriting & recording process of this debut take?

The recording was spread out over, just on a weekend basis.
As for the songwriting well you could mark the beginnings of that back to six years
ago when I wrote the track Chemistry. For me it was an old track but one I always wanted to re-record when I got the chance to do a full album. We knew most of the tracks we wanted to record two years ago, a couple more were written and added
along the way.

Would you agree that a debut release captures the sound of a band at their purest,
before the pressures of artistic evolution?

Possibly yeah, I think for our next record we have to approach it a bit different but I think it'll be a natural enough choice of direction rather than a forced one.
There's some strong tracks we left out of this album as they simply didn't fit the vibe the album was going in. One of them I even intended releasing as the first single but we decided it'd be best suited to leave it for the next record. It was more like synth pop 80s
than alt rock 90s.'Lost Trails' has plenty of ambient moments but I think it's the closest we will ever go
to making a "rock" album.

At this stage in your career, Butterfly Explosion is yet to be bound by stereotypes
- would you rather be a commercially successful act or a more cult band?

I wouldn't really care if this falls under cult status or not but if reaching more people means commercial success than I guess we'd more than welcome that. It's not something I'll be holding my breath for though.

We felt there was an audience out there for this album that it would connect with and that it might take some time to reach many. It was never intended and never realistic that we'd put out an album that would make an immediate or big impact. Really it just came down to making a record that was true to ourselves. The decision to include a couple of radio friendly pop tracks on the album was not a marketing strategy, that's just us showing our innate pop tendancies.

What inspired the vivid and raw album art?

My mate Dave Flynn in London had done some poster work for us before so I talked to him
about the style I had in mind. Without restricting him to specific details, none of which I had anyway,
I suggested the artwork of bands like Trail Of Dead as references, something with a lot of depth and mystery
with dark but warm colours. That's as good, or bad, as an artistic direction as I could give him
but he has brilliant visual ideas so didn't need much direction.