Dag för dag - 23. Januar 2008, WUK

Zwei Geschwister reisen jahrelang getrennt durch die Welt. Eines Tages treffen sie sich in Barcelona wieder und merken, dass sie ziemlich akzeptable Musik machen können. Gemeinsam ziehen sie nach Stockholm, geben den Songs mit Hilfe ihrer berühmten Freunde den letzten Feinschliff, nennen sich Dag för dag und packen auch schon wieder ihre Koffer, um auf Tour zu gehen.
Bevor sie vor den Shout Out Louds in Wien auf der Bühne standen, setzten sich Sarah und Jacob Snavely mit uns auf eine Couch und plauderten über das Reisen, Bruder-Schwester-Angelegenheiten und natürlich Musik.

Who are you, how old are you and which instruments do you play?
Jacob: I’m Jacob Snavely. I am Sarah’s brother, and I am 30. I primarily play the bass in our band. And I also play these ancient chinese balls sometimes.
Sarah: I’m Sarah, and I’m somewhere around Jacob’s age. I play guitar, keyboard, violin, jingle bells and some drums and sing.

All at the same time?
Sarah: I have a magical loop pedal, which helps me.

Is this your first tour?
Sarah: Yes, this is our first. Tonight is our third show. Ever.

What do you sing about in your songs? Who is writing them?
Sarah: We write together, and the lyrics come up while the writing is happening. So I guess it’s a stream of consciousness. I don’t go back and edit my lyrics. Jacob edits his.
Jacob: Yeah. We are having a connection as brother and sister. As siblings, we can just go on and find melodies, Sarah finds melody lines the easiest, and then just stream of conscious, whatever is coming out lyrically. A lot of times then would I start saying what matches up and then we’d go back and look at it. I think a lot of our songs, or at least a few of them, draw our experiences and experiences coming into adulthood.

Has music always played a big role in your life?
Sarah: Huge. I started playing violin when i was five years old. My Dad was a huge influence on me, forcing me to stay with it (laughing). It’s sort of been therapy through the years and my connection point to the world. I don’t know what I could do without music.
Jacob: Sarah and I played violin together a little bit and then our parents got divorced and then I quit and I played soccer (laughing), or football, as you say over here, and she stayed with it. And then I tried playing drums a little bit and did various things... but music has always been the back bone, it’s got me through a lot of trials and tribulations and it’s just been another way of coping and dealing with things. So it’s been a huge part of my life.

What else are you interested in?
Jacob: Long walks at sunset. (Laughing) We sort of do this, because we love travelling. First we love music, but we like to travel. We travelled a lot as children. Being exposed to different cultures and different people and different situations – it’s so enriching to your life to be able to travel. So I love to travel. And I like to write and read and.... I have a strong connection with nature, I love being outdoors. We’ve been in Stockholm and it’s on the water, so just being in the archipelago on the boat, or hiking or sailing or fishing or stuff like that, just trying to stay outside keeps me calm and grounded.

What do you do, when you are not a musician?
Jacob: I tour manage Two Gallants in my spare time. I do other small jobs in Stockholm, like helping friends with film stuff...or carpentry...but music is the real passion. We are hoping to put a lot of time into it, to finish an album this year, put a big push on it this year. I hope this year it will be on just for Dag för Dag.
Sarah: I work as an editor and a translator and I do subtitles for films.

What languages do you speak?
Sarah: Spanish and Italian. And American English (laughing). I do a lot of British – American translations, which is funny work.

How do you know the Shout Out Louds?
Sarah: We actually met on a tour with Two Gallants. It was a festival a couple of years ago and they were there and we just became really good friends, which sort of influenced Jacob and I to move to Stockholm. And then we just became really close friends with them. I’ve played some violin for them and helped out and went on tour with them a couple of times to fill in for their keyboard player, when she couldn’t be there. They knew that we were working on a demo and asked us to come on this tour.
Jacob: They’ve been extremely kind, and have been helping us. I mean, they obviously liked our songs and our music, that’s why they brought us, but they’ve been encouring us in the process of writing our songs, too. And they’ve just been really really really good people. It’s so nice to have artists, or anybody in life that supports you, that wants to pass their knowledge on, that help you do whatever you do. It’s the ones that help you rather than be afraid of competition. So they were really helpful, wonderful people.

What music do you listen to?
Sarah: I listen to a lot of classical music, just like the local radio station. But... a huge range of music.
Jacob: I listen to a lot of old jazz. And I love instrumental stuff and...
Sarah: Old punk music I like a lot, like....well, the Pixies aren’t old but... when I was 14 they seemed really cool. I’m really into and always have respected PJ Harvey a lot and taken a lot of inspiration from her.
Jacob: For me it’s the Two Gallants, because they are close friends and I travelled with them and have seen 200-some of there shows, so they obviously influenced me.

When will you release a full length album?
Sarah: We were just talking about that last night. We are hoping to by the end of the year. It has all happened so quickly and we just recorded our demo in October and already we are on a tour. We have the material. If we had two weeks and a space for writing, we had a full album. We are just finding the means to record it right now. So hopefully by the end of the year it will be out.
Jacob: Yeah. We’re not signed yet, so we are sort of looking around. But that’s not going to stop us from putting out an album either way. We’ve got the songs we just need to start polishing them up, play more shows and put the album out hopefully this year, I’d say for sure this year.
Sarah: Well, it’s January, so...(laughing)
Jacob: (laughing) Yeah, maybe by August.

What are your other plans with the band?
Sarah: Touring! We might go to the Southwest in Austin, Texas in March. We’re doing one tour after this, for a week, we’ll stay in Germany and...
Jacob: Belgium...
Sarah: Yeah, it’s just touring touring touring touring, a lot.
Jacob: In Sweden, hopefully in Copenhagen, in Norway. Just playing a lot, that’s what we want to be doing. It’s pretty exciting to play live. This will be our third show today, I think the more we play it, the more we are going to want to be a live band and do different things live.

Do you share an apartment?
Jacob: No.
Sarah: We used to. Didn’t we?
Jacob: In Stockholm never really...
Sarah: Kind of.
Jacob: We lived together in London for eight months and then in Stockholm we lived together for a few days.
Sarah: We live really close, though, a two minute walk from one another. So it’s really convenient. And then we’ve been rehearsing about a twenty minute walk from there. Stockholm is really condensed and easy to get around. I have just been living in London previously, which is a nightmare to get around. So moving to Stockholm is like being in Disneyland.
Jacob: We see each other a lot.

So you’re never apart for long periods of time?
Jacob: No.
Sarah: Well, as children we were. He was raised more by our father and I was raised by our mother. So it’s just since we’ve become adults,ˆ we’ve become really good friends. Maybe we are trying to live our missed childhood together.
Jacob: Yeah, we probably spent 12 or 13 years apart. And when I was about 25 we started becoming friends and then we became really good friends and then we realized we were siblings and we were like ‚Oh, we are brother and sister’.
Sarah: There was one Christmas where he had to fly over to stay with my mom and he came down the stairs one morning and I was like, ‚Wow, you are my brother AND my friend.’

Who does the artwork on your homepage?
Sarah: Our youngest brother.

Do you have more siblings?
Sarah: Yeah, there is two more brothers. So, he does everything for us. He is a really amazing artist.
Jacob: He does our album art, our CDs, our T-shirts, and bags and such things. He does it all and he is a beautiful artist. On our website, if you refresh the browser, his different drawings come up. And a good friend of ours designed the webpage. So it’s like a family project, the whole family has been helping out. It’s really nice, it’s like a family band. We keep it tight.

Do you speak Swedish?
Jacob: En liten bit.
Sarah: I’ve been there more than Jacob because he’s been touring so much. I can understand most, close to everything. But it’s a hard language to learn, maybe because everyone speaks fluent English. They know when you are trying to speak Swedish, but you don’t really speak it, they speak English and you’re like ‚No! I’m training.’ (laughing) So neither of us can put much of a sentence together.
Jacob: She can understand a lot, being a linguist. And she’s really hard on herself about it.

Do you speak another language?
Jacob: I stumble through Spanish, and I can understand most Swedish.
Sarah: But when the Shout Out Louds are speaking Swedish we can understand.

Sarah, you are the older one of you two. Do you take the seniority over Jacob?
Sarah: He probably thinks so. Yeah, I feel a little bit older than you. Like a guiding force.
Jacob: Sometimes we have a relationship like that, when Sarah feels like ‚the responsible one’.
Sarah: Maybe when the whole family gets together, when all our brothers are there, I’m like ‚Uh, I’m the oldest.’
Jacob: I think subjectively, if people meet us, sometimes they think that I’m older and Sarah is younger. Especially in London, I think you were more ruckus and I was more tame. (laughing) ‚Sarah, you have to come in now.’

Where have you lived in your life?
Sarah: The US, England, Greece, Italy, Sweden..
Jacob: Spain, kind of..
Sarah: But I lived in London for seven years. And then I lived in Italy for a year after I studied. Greece for a few months, teaching English. The US. Spain on and off in the summer. Now Sweden. I think Sweden is the best, it feels like home. It’s so beautiful, everything just works right, I don’t know how they do, but they do it. Maybe it’s the weather.

Thank you. That’s pretty much it. Anything else you want to say?
Jacob: I like your boots.
Thanks.


Das Konzert:
Es sah nicht aus, wie das dritte Konzert, dass sie je gegeben haben. Sarah hat nicht übertrieben, sie spielt wirklich fünf Instrumente - quasi gleichzeitig. Jacob regiert den Bass und, sieh an, sieh an, unterstützt seine Schwester beim Gesang. Unerwartet hoch, aber gekonnt. Komplettiert wird das Bühnenbild von einem verruchten Drummer, der keine Miene verzieht, doch weiß was er tut.
Das Publikum zeigt zwar offensichtlich, dass es für eine andere Band gekommen ist, davon lassen sich die beiden aber nicht beirren. Ihren relaxt verträumten Sound packen sie mal in ruhige, mal in rockigere Stücke und geben zeitweise ziemlich Gas.
Wenn man dann zu fortgeschrittener Stunde einen Menschen aus der Menge fragt, welches sein Lieblingslied der Shout Out Louds war, und der antwortet: „Keines. Ich fand die Vorband am besten.“ – dann ist es vielleicht gar nicht so unwahrscheinlich, dass Dag för dag bald wieder touren. Als Hauptact.


Thanks to Connor and Isaac for knowing the English language so well.


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