Chirpy Cajun-pop outfit Givers have a reason to smile: their irrepressible good-time vibe is catching on
The one question Louisiana band Givers keep being asked is this: how are you so damn happy? Their debut album, In Light is probably the most ebullient record you'll hear this year ? an unbound torrent of high-life guitars, Cajun rhythms and raucous boy-girl vocals.
"We are as happy as this music!" declares Taylor Guarisco, 24, their singer and guitarist. His conversation, rather like the quintet's music, rambles messily. Unlike his music, it sometimes disintegrates altogether because he's laughing so hard.
"We're immensely happy people. We're just regular people who were told growing up that we should get a degree and prepare for the worst." Instead, they "imagined the best".
"Everybody has their own coolest-scenario-possible in the back of their minds and the bottom of their hearts," he persists. "The only thing we did is we faced it ? we saw that making music was what we wanted to do and we focused on it as if it could be a reality."
It started to become real in 2009 when, in a ridiculous stroke of good fortune, the band Dirty Projectors happened to see one of their shows and promptly booked them on their tour.
"Dude," splutters Guarisco when I mention this, "I'm going to go off on another motivational speech, I swear to God! I mean they're like my favourite, favourite, favourite, favourite, favourite, favourite band. You notice how I said 'favourite' like six times? To tour with them was a testament to all that bullshit I was just talking about ? imagine the coolest scenario possible and just keep imagining it until it happens."
It's easy to see why Dirty Projectors were sold. Givers are irrepressible ? they pogo all over the stage while flashing each other ecstatic grins. They all play several instruments, which only adds to the impression of a children's wild party game. And if it were a game, Tiffany Lamson, 23, would win: she sings, she plays percussion, she plays ukulele, all while thrashing a huge mane of blonde hair.
"Yeah, it kind of goes where it wants to," she deadpans, "it's its own animal."
Are there any advantages to being the only girl in the band?
"Nope," she says with a rueful sigh. "Everybody's equal, so if we're in a hotel room and we only have a certain amount of space it's like, OK who's drawing the straw for the floor?"
The band know one another from high school in their southern hometown of Lafayette where, says Guarisco, "there's two or three clubs and everybody plays there and supports each other".
Louisiana and its musical heritage have been a huge part of their education, particularly zydeco, a Creole style of music which Guarisco calls, "the funkiest dance music ? you can't find any music like it in the world. You go to a zydeco club around where we're from and it's basically everybody looking so fresh and just dancin' with each other."
Lamson, however, whose parents are pastors, grew up with gospel music.
"We were taught just to feel music as opposed to think about it," she says, a counterbalance to Guarisco and the others, all of whom studied music.
"Tiff is like our authentic rebel!" Guarisco enthuses. "That's kind of the mentality of this band ? no rules, anybody can play what they want."
That sounds a little starry-eyed, but the band really did come together as a result of an unplanned jam, from which they took their single "Up Up Up". "I mean, we weren't a band, we were just making shit up," says Guarisco. "That was how songs were created, that total free-form state where we just played and recorded and then excerpted and rearranged."
They've all played in bands before but in Givers their main instruments are ones they're not used to. It's the first time Lamson and Guarisco have sung, the first time that jazz trumpeter Josh Leblanc has played bass and so on. "That," says Lamson, "was like a little rebellion: we wanted to do something that we hadn't done."
This week, they'll play their first UK dates and, as you might guess, their feelings about this are positive.
"Oh man," says Guarisco. "There are so many different levels of excitement." And then suddenly, a thought strikes him. In a rare moment of something approaching concern he asks: "Do people dance where you're from?"
He's got nothing to worry about
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/jul/03/givers-interview-in-light-hoby
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