The Soft Pack

The Soft Pack are a fantastic band from LA by way of SD. If you like your garage rock with California cool then Soft Pack are the band for you.

What are your plans for the year? You all released your self titled debut, that must have been nice to get out. Any plans for further recording? Do you know what day you are playing Coachella? I am coming back to see Coachella and I am excited to see Soft Pack.

Brian: Once we finish up the current tour we're on in a week or so, we're going to be taking a bit of time off to get started on writing our next full length. We're really excited about doing some new stuff, and we already have a heap of new ideas to work with. Maybe even do an ep or something in the next few months? We'll be playing Coachella on Sunday, which we couldn't be more stoked about. Pavement is one of our favorites, and we are certainly looking forward to some other bands as well. I personally am extremely pale-skinned, and am not particularly looking forward to the sunburn situation. I am going to be as red as a lobster, I'm sure of it.

Who do you all look to for inspiration? The band has a classic garage band sound. Where the songs are urgent and fast, but they are also fun and have serious hooks. What goes into recording? Does the band like to play the songs live for a while then record?

Brian: We all have our personal favorites, but the band was formed out of huge inspiration from Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers. Matt Lamkin is a Fall fanatic, Matty is a Replacements maniac, Dave is a Sly Stone psycho, and I am kind of a Bowie freak. Whether or not that comes out in our sound is debatable. We also like a lot of garage stuff as well, but spend much more time listening to Grace Jones and Big Boys lately. Recording the record took a lot of love and attention to being faithful to our live sound. I guess we achieved something there. We definitely captured a nice little document of where we were at as a band last summer. If we can help it, we will have songs kicking around in the live set for a while before they're recorded. Sometimes, we have to finish them for the record in the studio though, which can be either a good or bad thing depending on the end result.

You all are apart of the San Diego scene, can you describe that? Seems like SD has a great scene with bands like Wavves, Crocodiles, etc. coming out with fantastic music. I heard you all are now living in LA is that true? How is LA different from SD?

Brian: San Diego has always had something going on, even if the rest of the world wasn't noticing. It's a great town. Three of us were born there and spent a long time living there before we moved to Los Angeles. L.A. has been really great though--great bands, great friends--I still miss S.D. though, and we all have some really great friends there as well. I used to play in bands with the Crocodiles boys for many years, actually. We have spent a lot of time in a van together, and know way too much dirt about one another.

The band has put out fantastic videos, how did these come about? Did you all come up with the concepts yourselves/direct the videos yourselves?

Brian: I believe Matt is mostly responsible for the "Extinction" video, but I wasn't in the band yet. The one for "Answer to Yourself" was shot at Matt and Matty's old work, a pizza place in Del Mar, CA. That was kind of more collaborative with us all, but with Matt and our good friend, Felipe Lima doing most of it. Felipe also shot us on the beach for "Down on Loving" and has done a lot of other incidental videos. The most recent one for "C'mon" was done with our buddy Michael Reich of Videothing.com fame. We have some very talented friends who have been cool enough to help us out with all of that stuff. I myself don't have the technical know-how to take care of it.