*Article by Adam Barnett — buzz Music Editor*
Photo by Cara Robbins
After a lengthy tour and a pretty successful first week of life for their debut self-titled, Gardens & Villa are going out again for another leg of touring coast-to-coast and possibly Europe. On the way, they stop by Pygmalion Music Festival for a set at Channing-Murray in Urbana on Sept. 22.
buzz: You guys didn’t really sound like you do now before you recorded your record. Where did that shift come from?
LH: That shift came from a lot of different directions. I mean, me, Adam and Chris had been playing together for about seven years, and we had just done a couple of different styles and played with other people, and we were kind of doing the noise, post-rock jam band for a while, and when we started Gardens & Villa proper, it was just more folk-y. We were writing songs with lyrics and stuff, and after doing that for about a year, we met Shane. And once we started playing with Shane, Shane just brought — not only his own style because we hadn’t really played with a whole lot of bass players before. So when you add a bass, that for me as a drummer definitely puts me into a certain sort of groove. And I think Shane had played more popular rock than any of us had played, so he kind of brought that to the way he would structure songs and so forth.
So we were going in that direction of writing some songs that I guess were a little more catchy but still kind of keeping it minimal, not putting in too many hooks. And right at the same time, Adam — who used to play on a keyboard, mainly played piano tones — he had gotten a synthesizer and was really starting to get into that and use the synthesizer more, and I don’t know if that was intentional when Shane came along, but that’s just kind of the way it happened, and before I knew it, he was just strictly playing synthesizer. And the final thing was when we went up to record with Richard Swift, we had these songs, but we felt like a lot of them were sort of missing one or two parts. And every once in a while on the songs, Richard Swift would add in one little synth line here or one electronic drum sound there, and I think that’s kind of what completed our sound was when we were up there recording with Richard.
buzz: I was reading that you guys slept in Richard’s backyard the whole recording process without a shower or a kitchen. How did that affect the record?
LH: I think it was really good for us. I mean, we were at the house with Richard. It wasn’t like we had to drive to the studio every single day. So we’d wake up — and Richard wakes up late — so we would just kind of wake up, and we’d have some time. We could go on a run, or we could just chill out. His daughters were around — he has three daughters that would come out and play — they have a garden of all things, which is something that’s always inspired us. They also had a chicken coop and a couple of cats that came around.
So it was just a real comfortable environment, similar to what we’ve kind of been used to in Santa Barbara, ‘cause in Santa Barbara, the four of us lived together, and we practiced and did recordings at our own house. So it was kind of similar that — we were all living in the same place where we were all playing music, and there was just a real home environment. So I think it was something that, regardless that we didn’t have showers and the amenities, we were used to; it felt like home, nonetheless. But I think after two weeks, we were ready to get back and shower up and have beds and so forth. But it was just an experience for two weeks where it was just camping out and living on the bare minimum.
buzz: You were talking about how gardens inspire the band. In what ways do gardens inspire you?
LH: Well, it’s kind of more like a literal thing. The band name “Gardens & Villa.” We lived on Villa Avenue right around the same time when the three of us started writing folk songs together. We had gotten into planting a garden, so that’s where we got the name from. I think it just comes from the way we live in Santa Barbara — farmers markets multiple times a week…
buzz: Did you guys originally intend for your record to be self-titled, or did you have any other album names?
LH: We kind of threw out some other ideas. I think one of the first ones we threw out was — we had taken this photo at our house of these beach chairs, and there were just these beach chairs against the house wall outside, and we looked at that and thought, “Gardens & Villa — we’ll call it ‘Coastal Village,’” referring to Santa Barbara. And I kind of thought that at first, but that was right around the time we recorded the album. And then as we got into really thinking about album artwork and what we wanted our aesthetic to be — I think we didn’t want it to be too literal, so we kind of dropped that name, and we didn’t want to be termed as a chillwave band, so we wanted to keep it a little more abstract and keep options open so far as what our style is and our aesthetic. And we thought that just keeping it self-titled for our first album kind of made sense. So it was something we all agreed upon.
Who: Gardens & Villa, The Leadership, Scattered Trees, Delicate Steve, NewVillager
Where: Channing-Murray
When: Thursday, Sept. 22 @ 8:30 p.m. (Gardens @ 10:30)
Cost: $10 at the door; free with festival wristband
Gardens & Villa – “Orange Blossom”
buzz Magazine: Music 
Posted on September 14, 2011
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