Last year at this time, OK Sweetheart was working in the recording studio and preparing for their first ever performance at SXSW. A lot has changed for the Billie Holiday-inspired band since then. OK Sweetheart is now preparing to return to the SXSW festival as seasoned veterans. They’ll be playing at Friends Bar on the 16th at 11 p.m., but you can also catch them at a few day parties.
OK Sweetheart’s frontwoman, Erin Austin recently spoke to PopWreckoning about the band’s new album, the festival and more. You can read the full interview below.
PopWreckoning: The last time I spoke to you, it seemed like everyone in OK Sweetheart was trying to move out to San Francisco, but it seems as though that changed…
Erin Austin, OK Sweetheart: Yeah, we weren’t moving out to San Francisco we were moving out of San Francisco. We had been there several years and we started splitting out time between that and recording in Denton, TX with Midlake. We were splitting our time for about a year and a half between San Francisco and Denton. When we finished our record, we kind of put everything in storage and we went on the road for the Fall. Then we decided that, really, we had started building a team: manager, business manager and publicist – stuff like that. We decided that really where needed to be was LA or New York. We decided to try to keep everything going based out of Oklahoma, but for basic music concentration, to be in LA or New York was a really good thing for a band like us. So we decided that New York was the best thing for us to go to for now. I’m from, originally, a really small town in upstate New York. I had been away from my family there for ten years. It is really nice to be on this coast and close to them. Rob and I are the collective core of the band. We’ve got a bunch of guys, some of the Midlake guys and guys from a few bands out here and bands out in San Francisco and band guys in Tulsa…Just random members of bands that we’re friends with and depending on where we’re touring, we’ll have a different configuration of players playing with us. The two of us are the core, but a bunch of us are the collective when we need it. It’s convenient to be in New York. Cities up here are really close together. It’s a nice configuration for regional touring, but it’s also good to have people all around the country that can play the songs and be a part of it. 
PW: Now did this moving back home, did that inspire the album title for your debut release?
EA: No. The album title – there’s a song on the record called “Home,” so it’s the title track. But what inspired us to pick that song as the title track is the fact that we really have been completely mobile for basically the last three years. We moved around a lot. Part of it is because we’re doing music and you have to be flexible with touring and stuff like that. The idea with the song “Home” is that it’s wherever the band goes-wherever we go together-that’s going to feel like home. Because we love each other so much and it feels like home being around the people, not necessarily the place. That’s what the title track is about. I’d love to say that it has to do with being closer to my family, but that’s not what the song is about.
PW: Talk to me about your debut album. When we spoke a year ago, you were in the studio and recording it. But now it’s done.
EA: All done.
PW: I’m a little confused by the release date. Did it come out in October or is it just now coming out? Your website said April.
EA: Yeah, we had…we started working with this manager last June. We finished the records-mixed and mastered it-in September. When I won that John Lennon thing: there was a separate thing I won called the Lennon Award. We basically got CD duplication, a certain amount of CDs, as part of the winnings for the award. So we decided that we would do a small release in Tulsa for our friends and family and people that had been listening to us a long time and had been really supportive. So we did a pre-release CD release in Oklahoma so those people could have it. We didn’t release it on iTunes or do any distribution because we were still building our team. There’s a good way to release a debut album and get people a little more aware of it, so we wanted to make sure we had plenty of preparation time to talk to people about it and get people to listen to it before we released it to everybody. We have been..our friends have a couple of retail CD stores in Tulsa, so we did place a couple of CDs there and we’ll tell people, “Ok, we put five CDs in this store.” Other times we were like, “It’s Christmastime. First 20 people to email us get a CD.” It won’t be until April 5 before we have it widely available. At that time we’ll have it on iTunes and stuff like that.
PW: Will you have it available at SXSW?
EA: Yeah, I have like 20 copies to bring to SXSW. So a few, but it’s hard because we had a certain amount printed, but once April rolls around, we’ll have more. We’ve also been talking about doing vinyl or vinyl with an mp3 code. We’ll have a few down there though, for sure.
PW: Now I had read that you had written about 60 songs before recording this album. How did you decide which 12 you wanted to go on the record from there?
EA: As a songwriter, I write everyday. Sometimes I write things that really work, but most of the time I write things that are just terrible. It’s one of those things that we had 60 synthesis songs or ideas or full songs that we could pick from. So you weed out and are like, 35 of these are full songs, but only 20 of them are good songs. So you pick from that 20. You weed out. From that 20, you say these are the ones we should demo out. Out of that we can figure out which 12 songs really work together. It’s interesting because I didn’t really study songwriting, so I had to sit down at a piano for a certain amount of time everyday and just start writing to make myself put something out there. The record that’s released in April, I wrote almost all those songs three years ago. So I have a whole bunch of songs since then and we’re almost ready to start working on songs for the next record. So it’s harder to pick the songs that you think will work together, but I think the next record will be even more cohesive. This one kind of jumps around a bit, but that’s the trade.
PW: It did look like there was quite a bit of connection on the record from what I was looking at because it seemed to progress from songs about betrayal and getting over love to finding some sort of peace and realizing that things aren’t that bad, especially with the single. Was that intentional or just sort of happen?
EA: I think that life in general for most everybody is that you have ups and downs and things you have to deal with. You have anger and aggression to deal with and in a relationship with someone you deal with whatever transpires from that like if you argue you have to deal with it. You also have feelings of love, deep commitment and feelings of loyalty. On the album you want it to start really upbeat and driven and it gets to the last song where’s it’s just a very heart-wrenching song. As people, you have a span of emotion and you have to recognize that it all exists and you have to deal with it and it has to be solved.
PW: Are your lyrics more from direct events in your life or are they more just inspired by?
EA: That’s a great question. I think a lot of people…when I started writing music…I’ve written songs since I was a little kid. I would walk around my house as a little kid and make stuff up and sing. I wrote my first song down on paper when I was nine. It was about a boy I had a crush on, so I wrote this song. As a kid, as a teenager, I wrote songs just purely based on my emotional experiences. If I was having a bad day, I’d write a song. If I was having a good day, I’d write a song about whatever good thing was happening. It was one of those things that one time I went off to college and when I finished school, I was like, ok, what do I want to do with my music? I had to marry classical training with this writing thing that I did and I had to actually make them connect somehow. There’s so much discipline in classical music and studying music in college. There was absolutely no discipline in my songwriting. It was just an emotional expression. So when I really sat down and started making myself write – I’d say, I’m going to sit down and write four hours a day. I did it for six months and I’d go to a little tiny studio everyday and I’d write. It started to become something where if someone said, “Write a song about this,” then I could write a song about that. It’s starting to become more of a skill than it was an emotional response. A lot of the songs that I write, aren’t necessarily about me. Some of them are, or they have a little of my life experience in it. Most of them start if I have an idea of if I experienced this of certain emotions. Like if I experienced loss, then what would that feel like and what would I think. There is this song on the record called “You Let Me Down.” “You Let Me Down” is a song I wrote when I was watching this random TV show. There was this husband and wife on this TV show that had been divorced for a number of years; they had a child together and the child was grown. He was kind of a philanderer, but he was in love with his wife, his ex-wife. He kept trying to win her back, but she knew that even if she did let him back in that he was probably going to go and be promiscuous with other women even though they had a relationship. But she’d let him back in, and of course, he’d do the inevitable. She’d then be like, “You let me down again. This is who you are.” So that song had nothing to do with my life. It was just a scenario I saw and I tried to write from that. There are other songs on the record like the song “Safe” that was based off of my life. My mom got sick and I went back to New York for about a month to take care of her and just be around. Do laundry. I wrote that driving home from the hospital. She had been in the hospital for about a week. So I was driving home and I thought to myself, “Oh my gosh. What would I feel if my mom died? What would that feeling be?” So I started singing that song. I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I was driving and trying to find something to write on to write these words that I’m singing while I’m driving. It was definitely inspired by emotion. It wasn’t one of the songs that I sat down and was disciplined about it. That was based off that. My mom did not die, thankfully, but it was one of those things were I wrote that thinking would I feel if my mom passed away. Does that help with the question.
PW: I’m glad you’re mom got better.
EA: I am, too.
PW: Well, let’s talk about SXSW some more. I know you have the rotating members and you and Rob are the staples. Who else will be joining you in Texas this year.
EA: We’ve got McKenzie Smith. He’ll be playing the 35 concert with us. It used to be called North by 35. It’s in Denton. I just found out we’ll be playing the main stage, which I’ve never played the main stage before. So that’s kind of exciting. McKenzie will be playing with us there. He’s in Midlake. He also played on Regina Spektor‘s record and some of the tracks on St. Vincent‘s record. He’s a very, very, talented drummer. He co-produced this record with Rob and was kind of the reason we moved to Denton: to work on stuff with him. Then Jeremy Buller, who plays for Sarah Jaffe sometimes and plays for Bosque Brown, another girl. He’ll be joining us. Then we’re still trying to figure out if we want to do a random string quartet or something.
PW: That’d be cool. I do love some of the string arrangements I’ve heard on your songs.
EA: Yeah, that was our dear friend John Arch. He is an incredible musician. W ekind of commissioned him and said, “OK. Let’s do some string stuff.” He’s in school. He actually goes to UT-Austin. He’s in the News program there. He concepted some of the string arrangements and brought them to Rob. Rob, part of his degree in college was composition, so he was used to writing string arrangements. John had the initial influence and then Rob went through and did his thing. He’s a huge part of the band and he’s the reason all the songs sound how they do. I may write the songs, but he’s the coolness behind it all. The string arrangements that John and Rob came up with are brilliant. But String quartets are so expensive, so there’s ome songs we don’t really get to play. “Weaving,” it’s all strings. It’s one song that we rarely play live. I think I did it once, we did it with a cellist, my friend, in Tulsa. Oh, we did it in Austin too, but we rarely play it because it’s just not the same when you play it with just a piano and guiatar.
PW: My last question for you is from your Facebook. For your genre, it says you are “dance metal.” I was just curious if you knew that was there, who put there and why? Haha.
EA: What? Haha. I have to ask Rob. If he did, it was a joke. He’s bit of a jokester. I had no idea. I’m kind of oblivious to a lot of that stuff that happens, so I’m never surprised when things like that come up.
PW: I thought it was fun, but you guys might get some interesting people showing up at your shows looking for dance metal.
EA: Exactly. People wanting to dance and bang their heads. It really doesn’t fit at all with what we do, so we’ll see. Haha.
PW: Well, that’s all I have unless you have anything else you’d like to add.
EA: We’re on tour for the next few months and we just put up a new website a few days ago at oksweetheart.com. We’re still booking and have about 15 shows up right now, but it will probably be 40 by the time we’re done, so if people want to just keep checking, we’ll probably be in your city soon. We’re going to be all over the country. If you’d want to catch us live, the next few months would be the time.
