I’m in the bowels of the Night & Day club in Manchester talking to Matt (lead vocal) of Californian band Delta Spirit.

Welcome to Manchester and congratulations on the new album ODE TO SUNSHINE

Thanks.

Tell me a bit about the band Matt. This is your debut album right?

Yes this is our debut record. We put out an EP before that which was mostly demos and our piano player in the band (he’s the one who plays the trashcan) recorded the tracks at his house for the EP I THINK I’VE FOUND IT . We then started to tour really hard around the States (our first tour was with the Cola Kids and Doctor Dog) and all those things have been so great (we got a really good booking agent in the States). So we basically got to the point that we had to tour because we were too poor to stay at home, and $15 a day was enough to survive and we even saved up enough to pay for the recording of ODE TO SUNSHINE which only cost $2500, and all the money we spent was for food…

That’s peanuts!

Yeah. We recorded in a cabin in the Santiago mountains which had such great memories for us because we had our friend out there who basically let us stay for free and take over his house like a bunch of hobos. We kinda just hung out and played with his black Labrador dog and played the horseshoes, drank a lot of whisky and recorded some of the finest stuff we’ve done to-date.

Tell me who’s in the band and what they do…

My name’s Matt Vasquez and I sing in the band, play guitar and piano. Sean Walker plays guitar and percussion. Brandon Young plays drums and percussion. Jonathan Jameson plays bass and percussion, and Kelly Winrich plays piano, electric guitars, percussion and sings.

And how did you guys get together?

We all kinda met in a weird way. In 2002 I lived in a two-bedroom apartment with my family. My parents slept in the kitchen and my brother and I shared a room and my sister had her own room. It was in a very nice place in California called Dana Point, north of Santiago. I got so frustrated ‘cos I used to play all the time, hanging out in this tunnel by the ocean and the beach. I just got my driver’s licence and on a whim I got in the car and drove to Santiago, which was about an hour and a half away. I was just sitting, busking, playing guitar - I wasn’t trying to make any money, it was just like a social experiment. Brandon walked by with his friend. I was sitting by the light rail station and he said ‘hey man you’re really good’ and was like ‘thanks man, thanks a lot.’ I was mutual friends with Jon and Jon and Brandon played together. So when I met them we bonded as friends but we had never got anything done and four years (around 20050) later everyone was jaded by a big music industry that’s crashing down. Sean had been playing drums in a band and they said ‘hey man wanna join a band? So we got the rhythm section I always wanted and then I met Sean who was like this alien guitar player who suddenly has blossomed into a great player. I don’t even know how to describe him, he’s magical… He’s so arse-backwards about everything. The first year in the band he didn’t even know that he could plug his guitar into a monitor - he didn’t even know what a monitor was for… Then Kelly recorded that demo and we took him on tour and he got really pissed of because he couldn’t get into a band so we just put him in. I’d known him since I was eighteen and we had been jamming together and just doing a bunch of stuff and learning how to record together. Then we recorded and it became this magic thing… we all pitched in, playing together, eating together, slept together, wrote songs…

And the song writing… you write the lyrics?

I don’t write all the lyrics, especially these days. You know it’s really great. Kelly and I have been pitching in a lot lately, Lennon McCartney kinda thing, Simon and Garfunkel is the only way I can describe it but they are icons of history. They’re not people like us you know, we’re pretty low by comparison, but it’s been really great being friends, the humility element. Kelly and I will start usually with the bare bones of a song with a 1-4-5 structure and a melody and I’ll go to Kelly and tell him I just don’t know what to say, and he’ll write the lyrics. Kelly and I bounce a lot of stuff off each other; keep it open and acoustic; feels like it starts like a song writer thing and then turns into a band thing with, for example, Sean putting elements in that we hadn’t thought of…