An Interview with Billy McCarthy of Pela

In December, I went to see what was quickly becoming one of my favorite bands, Pela. I was quite literally on my hands and knees in front of the bar when I looked up and saw the lead singer standing over me. This is how I met Billy McCarthy. Over the past several months we have had many conversations. Recently, he agreed to sit down with me for an official interview.

I asked Billy how he became interested in music and what experiences he had as a child that made him follow this path. At around 9 years old, he was put in a class at school, learning instruments like saxophone and flute as well as singing in choir. That got the “melodic thing” going for him. At an earlier age, while going through a “difficult family time”, he would go to a place that had a piano and “would just put my ear on the piano and just hit a note and let it sort of resonate. I used to just follow the note until it died out and I remember feeling that it was in every sense of the word, striking a chord – like it was touching me. I remember feeling something that was larger than me. It was larger than my age. It was larger than the room. There was something I could feel about history, about adults. It was very powerful.” At around 12 years old, when the school band became a “chore” he asked for a guitar.

We spoke about how he started writing songs. He told me “it took me a really long time to be able to play and sing at the same time. That’s really hard because it really hurts your fingers when you’re a little kid.” Billy was always into writing, poems or just stories, also drawing and doodling. In his senior year of high school he started “pulling it all together.” Towards the end of high school, he discovered, “the best deal in America”, the Greyhound bus. He began to travel across the country and had many “adventures”. Much of this has been put into his songs.

We started to talk about songwriting by discussing process. He explained that it has changed a lot. “I think when you’re younger, you don’t have much mobility with your instrument so you’ll make something work with the three or four chords that you can play.” Now he feels “like it’s fishing.” “Everyday, I just put my line in the water with the instrument and then if something starts to heat up - I’m like – wow! I can tie this to this.” He describes it as “not unlike collage. You just start sticking stuff on a blank piece of paper and all of a sudden, it can say something at the end.” Generally, he writes at “home on an acoustic guitar”. He brings his songs as complete as possible to the band and they “just jump into it.” They also write together and the other members of Pela (Eric Sanderson, Nate Martinez and Tomislav Zovich) often record music at home that they bring with them. Billy describes his band mates as “tremendous musicians”. He feels that Pela is a band that can “deliver an impact”.

In previous conversations, I had described the songs as snapshots – which is how he describes them as well. He says, “I can definitely remember periods that would easily have been forgotten. Songs, the way I’ve come to start writing them, seem to encapsulate a period.” He explained that in some ways songwriting is like cinematography. “It just takes awhile to sketch out in your mind or maybe have the life experiences to be able to figure out how to get it in a frame because if you think about songs, they’re really verses and choruses and you have your variables but you have to figure out how to fit the subject matter and the music and marry them in generally three minutes.” We spoke about two songs in particular.

“The Trouble With River Cities” is a song about the state of things in “small towns or in medium size cities – not grandiose ones – not with people from all around the world – but in a small city where there’s people from all around the region.” Places where “people stay”. People of middle and lower middle class communities who he describes as “big dreamers, you know, the gay kid who wants to go to San Francisco to be a designer or the guy who wants to be an actor. It’s really common to go for a couple of years and have it not work out and no one knows you and you want to go back. Want to go back to people who know you.”

The town that he comes from in Northern California has a rumored curse. A General that settled there and had, “decimated many Indians” was cursed, “in a city where two rivers meet – you can never leave. And, that’s the trouble with river cities; you can never leave.” He describes leaving as being quite difficult, “I remember being on a Greyhound bus, riding out of there and refusing to turn around and look behind me. I refused. I’m not looking back. I will not even turn my head and look back.”

His lyrics illustrate these feelings of being stuck “Are we waiting on a hot air balloon”, which he explained as, “can we please get the fuck out of here”. “Do you need oxygen”, he sings. “Maybe you should think about this – maybe we should leave”. “There will be hells to pay”. “I had to leave and I didn’t say stuff and I have to live with stuff like that. But, I just had to go to break that curse or whatever. I’m not going to be trapped.”

Billy spoke to me about the type of songs that he would like to write but doesn’t feel that he’s quite there yet. Songs about much deeper subjects like the Middle East. A few years ago, he traveled there, to Jerusalem and Jordan. He expressed some thoughts about the media here in the U.S. “The media portrays this and that, but people don’t blow themselves up for no reason and people don’t storm towns for no reason. We can’t always trust our media.” I asked him if he felt that the role of the artist was to challenge how the media portrays things and he said, “absolutely and that’s our responsibility, to step up.” However, he feels that it takes time to address these subjects, “we better damn well be spot on and be able to stand behind it – because, I mean, who are we, why should we put our names out there to start saying shit about what we don’t know.” Out of this has come, “Cavalry”.

“Cavalry” is a song that Billy “rescued” from his best friend, Chris, whom he traveled with for ten years. They were a bit of a duo and one day, Chris stopped playing music, moved to another country and the two aren’t as close as they once were. Billy used Chris’ lyrics, added a chorus and adapted it into a “rock format”. It is a song about the Middle East. The inhabitants want “things to change and so they make this procession and they form this cavalry.“

"Probably the thing that touched me most was this line. It says, ‘Charge the great general screams. Everyone to his grave! Or so the legend goes, cause none were saved.’ It’s mythical. A story of this bravery. This guy sends his men to their graves for what they believe in. It’s pretty powerful.”

You can see Pela this Thursday, July 27th at their first headlining gig at the Mercury Lounge


To find out more visit:
http://www.pelamusic.com/
www.myspace.com/pela