Georgia's Venice Is Sinking recently completed their most experimental album to date: 'Sand & Lines', a collection of dreamy pop songs due June 15th, was recorded live at Georgia Theatre without an audience. At this year's SXSW, they'll be performing five shows in three days for crowds of festival attendees. Band members Lucas Jensen, Karolyn Troupe, and Daniel Lawson took a short break from the preparation to talk to Spinner.

How would you describe your sound?

Lucas Jensen: We usually go with what other people have said about us. I've heard that we play locore before, and I've heard that we play shoegaze a lot, but I don't think that those are very good descriptions.

Karolyn Troupe: We've also gotten Americana.

LJ: I'd like to think that we play orchestral pop.

How did your band form?

KT: Back in 2003, after I graduated from college, I wanted to play music, and I knew Daniel from a recording session. We decided to start having these jam-practice kind of things, and it was with another keyboardist. Then, all of a sudden, Lucas came in. It was all in this old house by the railroad tracks. I have a lot of good memories of that time when we would drink whiskey and shoot BB guns at trains and tag trains, and hit golf balls at trains. It was basically very train-oriented.

Daniel Lawson: It's not a very good story.

How did you come up with your band name?

DL: It was something I've been calling anything I made music-related since high school. A friend of mine came up to visit me in Philadelphia one summer and we recorded an album on a cassette 4-track, and we needed a name. There was a copy of National Geographic that was talking about Venice sinking, and we just settled on it and I've used it ever since.

What are your musical influences?

DL: We all love Brian Eno, Leonard Cohen. I really like Sparklehorse a lot, and we're all really big fans of this band Okay that's fronted by this guy named Marty (Anderson). He's been a pretty big influence on us. Our last EP ('Okay') was sort of a tribute to him, and we covered two of his songs. I'd written a song called "Okay" that was me trying to write a song like him.

KT: I think we're influenced by everything that we hear, which is quite a bit of things.

What's your musical guilty pleasure?

KT: I'm not sure if I even believe in musical guilty pleasures anymore. I think that we might all be in that same boat. Call me guilty, I like Lady Gaga. I don't feel guilty about that. I admit to everything.

DL: I felt a little bit guilty last year at South By Southwest. I was with Lucas walking by Stubb's BBQ and Third Eye Blind was playing. I never really listened to them, but Lucas and I walked right in, and that was a lot of fun.

LJ: I didn't know all of the songs, but they all kind of sounded like other Third Eye Blind songs that I knew, so I just imagined that they were those songs. I felt a little guilty about that, but I didn't feel that guilty.

What's your biggest vice?

LJ: I would say four out of five of us are really big scotch lovers. We really have a problem – if it's around, we're going to drink it.

KT: And food. We like any food, especially local fast food chains.

DL: In our normal lives, we really try to eat healthy. Then we go on tour and we succumb to the temptation of awful fast food.

LJ: It starts to turn into a one-up contest. We encourage each other. People will be like, "Do you want bacon with that?" and we'll be like, "Yeah, get bacon!" We tend to get the most amazing and fatty thing on the menu.

What's the craziest thing you've seen or experienced on tour?

LJ: Ivan the Terrible.

DL: We played a show, it was fun and people were friendly. Our keyboard player, a friend of his sister's lives in Charlotte, so we had some friends at the show. We needed a place to stay, so they suggested this guy named Ivan. So we went over there after the show, and everything was great. He had a piano, so we sat down and started singing.

LJ: Maybe we played the piano too long or something. Ivan gave me this look like, "What are you looking at?" I think he was really drunk. I was a little bit taken aback, but I thought he was joking so I let it slide. As we were in the kitchen, we were talking about the science of plumbing and complimenting him on his counter top, which he made based on the Fibonacci Sequence. It seemed like he got better for a second, and then suddenly he just said, "Get out of here. I'm going to call the cops on you, you're trespassing in my house." We didn't know what we did. It was really weird.

KT: He had initially been so gracious, and then all of a sudden flipped out like a complete psychopath. It didn't make any sense. This guy has apparently pulled a gun on his wife, and he's just basically psychotic. We didn't know any of this beforehand, obviously.

DL: We're a band that's never had this kind of problem on tour before. I guess we'll be a little more cautious.

What would you include in a festival survival kit?

KT: I would pack water and any sort of sun protection. Also dried fruit or nuts. I get hungry all the time, so some sort of snack would be essential for me.

LJ: Comfortable and durable walking shoes.

Is there anything you're looking forward to seeing or doing at SXSW this year?

KT: I'm looking forward to discovering my next Beach House.

LJ: I want see a concert like Devo. I also want to see another Third Eye Blind, like last year.

DL: You just want it to be like last year.

LJ: Yeah, I want it to be like last year when I saw Third Eye Blind.


Allison Davis is a contributor from Seed.com. Learn how you can contribute here.