The Solars are Harvard’s most talented up-and-coming band

Miles Hewitt, Quetzel Herzig, Cody Carson, Aaron Barber and Jacob Leightley are The Solars and they’re easily Harvard’s most talented band.

Ahead of their gig at The Queen’s Head this Thursday, we chatted to the group about their music, their plans and how they’d rather screw Stalin over FDR.

So, as a starting point, can I have your names and your ages?

Quetzel: I’m Quetzel, and I’m 20 years of age.

Miles: I’m Miles, I’m also 20.

Cody: Cody Carson, 24.

Aaron: Aaron Barber, 19.

Miles: Standing in for Jacob, Jacob’s like 23, I think?

Cody: Actually, he just turned 24, right?

Cool, OK, so, who are your idols?

Miles: That’s a good place to start.

And they don’t need to be musical necessarily, like if you’re really into Mussolini, you can say Mussolini, I mean, go for it.

Miles: Definitely not Mussolini. In terms of people who inform how we play, a lot of stuff from the 60s. Dylan, The Beach Boys, The Beatles, The Band, Joni Mitchell also, especially in the last year or so, we’ve got a bunch of Joni Mitchell LPs at Quetzel and Aaron’s house who we’ve been listening to a bunch.

Also, more contemporary stuff that maybe just sounds old, like Fleet Foxes, Grizzly Bear, Radiohead, Beck. I think Beck is a really phenomenal songwriter. Sufjan Stevens may be the top current songwriter in my mind. And then also, Kendrick Lamaar is amazing too. That’s probably not our field, but he’s a great poet. Anybody else have anything to add?

Cody: Yeah, we’ve all got really super similar musical taste, and I guess that just comes with being in a band, having that common ground.

How would you describe your sound using only adjectives? And, you know, they can be self-aggrandizing too, if you want to, you can say like “the greatest” or something.

Quetzel: What’s an adjective?

Miles: Yeah, probably the greatest, I’d say. People often say “dark,” I think. Someone told me we sounded like Fleet Foxes but with a “dark twist of lemon.”

I like that a lot.

Miles: It’s a weird way to describe music, I guess, but I’ll take it. I think we sound like a lot of the bands I just mentioned who I really dig, the ones with big vocal harmonies, and it’s really cool that that seems to be really in right now. But then of course, the bands from the past, in particular The Beach Boys, all the Brian Wilson stuff, where it’s just fucking ninety voices stacked on top of each other and it sounds really massive and cool.

Quetzel: Right, I think a good adjective, or one that we talk about, is “nuanced.” Working in detail, and paying attention to space and what we’re conveying.

Miles: That’s what we aspire to.

Cody: I’ve played in a lot of bands, and this is the first one where the band really hammers a little section of the song over and over until we feel like a part’s fitting, or until we kill each other.

Miles: I’ve always really felt that when you’re playing music in a band, it’s really easy to let your influences speak through you and just become the sum of all the different things that you listen to, anyone can play in a band and do that. But if you can be very strange and deliberate and nuanced about what you’re trying to make, you can walk away from something that’s really rather unique. I think that’s what we’re shooting for.

So, I was going to ask you who you would compare yourself to, and I realize that that’s totally antithetical to the point you were just making. So, I’m going to be a little bit circumspect and ask, you seem to be really deliberate in terms of your sound, who are the other artists that you can call to mind that are doing, or did similar things?

Miles: I mean, everybody I just mentioned are all my heroes for doing strange, seemingly counterintuitive things all the time. Who are really restless and trying to always cut out in some new direction.

Quetzel: At least, personally, I really admire Spoon.

Miles: Spoon!

Quetzel: I really admire their production, writing, collaborative processes. Both of them are very detailed and deliberate, and ever-changing. They’re just really cool every time they try to do something new.

Miles: The list-making part of me wants to say “Spoon? Yeah, easily best the best band of the last decade.” But, to actually say what that means, just the real amazing amount of thought and inspiration that’s going into every tambourine jangle, it’s incredible.

Where would you say you get your musical inspiration? Some people do a lot of acid. I mean, when Taylor Swift breaks up with someone, everyone’s really excited because they know a new album’s gonna come out.

Aaron: I guess Miles will present an idea, or his song that he’s fleshed out loosely, and then the band will jam, and figure out parts and arrangement.

Miles: There’s a big difference between songs I’ve written on the guitar or the piano. That’s really two-dimensional. When I bring it to the band, we realize, oh shit, there’s a ton of drums, or organ sounds that we can layer onto it.

I’m really interested in writing songs in the way the English language has a rhythm to it that you can use to write songs. And you come up with a really good phrase that will go a long way for you, and that phrase contains music within it to begin with.

I think that’s the best way to write songs. Our song Don’t Shoot the Messenger, you say those words, and you can hear the musicality in it.

Cody: Yeah, it has a swing to it, a syncopation.

Miles: That interplay between how you write the thing and how it manifests itself when you’re actually performing it is very mysterious.

Yeah, I mean, for me, you mentioned Beck, and for me, his album Guero was the first one of his albums I listened to, and in that album, I feel like he plays the drums with words.

Miles: Yeah, that’s a classic car album.

Aaron: Definitely. Favorite Beck album is Guero.

Who do you like in the Boston music scene?

Quetzel: We mostly play with the same circle of bands, I would say. It’s kind of a challenge trying to find another band with whom we really gel during a set. I mean, we can kind of mold the music to go harder to fit with rockier bands and softer to fit with something like an acoustic duo.

Miles: That’s the other advantage of playing nuanced music, is that you can do a real punk-rock, like, rock-gesture set, or a more pared-down acoustic set.

Quetzel: I don’t think we’ve found the perfect scene yet.

Miles: But it’s just a matter of time, there are so many awesome and interesting bands around this area. We played at the Harvard Advocate, we played with a friend’s band called Bear Salon, who are from Allston, and we played with a Harvard band called Lighthouse Keepers which was a cool kind of coming together.

To me, that sounds like if you’re not finding the perfect band that you match with, it sort of means that you’re filling a kind of niche. If anything, that speaks to your uniqueness, not to like, suck your dicks or anything. So, what are your three desert island albums, movies, and books?

Quetzel: Now I wish Jacob was here.

Miles: He definitely has the strongest opinions about pop culture. Probably double albums because that’s twice as much music, right?

Aaron: Movie-wise, Lord of the Rings Trilogy.

Quetzel: Did you just say Lord of the Rings Trilogy?

Aaron: They’re my favorite movies.

That’s a solid choice.

Quetzel: Yeah, with the extended edition.

You’ll get probably around eight hours, easy.

Aaron: There was one summer that me and my friend watched the LOTR extended trilogy probably once a day.

The rest was just sleeping? You can’t really do anything else in a day.

Miles: I’m trying to think of who my non-musical heroes are, because that was an earlier question. Probably Jesus. Or, it would be interesting to meet Emily Dickinson, which is just the poem nerd coming out.

She probably wouldn’t let you in her house.

Miles: Homer, I’d meet Homer, that’d be an interesting conversation.

Quetzel: Who would be your desert island historical figure?

I would do Bear Grylls. Desert island? Are you kidding me? We would thrive. Okay, so, you recorded an album, tell me about that. Recording seems like a clusterfuck, with so many personalities clashing.

Aaron: I’d say 75 percent of the recording was Miles and Quetzel just hanging out.

Miles: These two singles, they were started last January in Quetzel’s bedroom. We ended up going to the Oregon coast on a three-day beach retreat at Quetzel’s uncle’s beach house. And that was the most intense recording session I’ve ever done. It was really really fun. That’s when I realized it was something I really enjoyed. I mean, if I can stand spending three days of literally doing nothing else but recording for fourteen hours, I’m not gonna burn out.

Quetzel: We tracked the entire song there. And then, we took them back here once winter break was over, and slowly replaced everything we recorded in January.

Miles:It’s always dicey, I’m a real control freak about how stuff gets recorded. The more people you bring into the equation, the better it gets because you have all these ideas floating into it. But the real challenge is knowing when to stop so it doesn’t get too overgrown.

Cody: Oh my gosh, yeah. One thing I will say is Miles is pretty anti-studio tricks. There were times when I would sing the same six notes, probably fifty times.

You must have gone into a zen-like state, like a Gregorian chant. Or maybe you were just full of anger, I don’t know.

Aaron: Yeah, it was mostly the second one.

So, I’m gonna end on a weird note. So, marry fuck kill, FDR, Josef Stalin, Winston Churchill, go.

Cody: Probably kill Stalin, right?

Stalin’s a handsome guy, I don’t know.

Miles: Is this a sexless marriage, is that what we’re assuming? Or is it a mutually caring partnership?

Yeah, I’d say so, but you have sex once.

Cody: You have to kill Stalin, right?

Quetzel: I don’t know, I wouldn’t want to be married to Churchill.

Aaron: Probably marry FDR.

Quetzel: He seems like marriage material.

Cody: Yeah, so, kill Stalin, fuck Churchill, marry FDR.

Aaron: I’d fuck Stalin just for the story.

That’s a good answer. Okay, chill y’all. Thank you so much.

Miles: Definitely.

Photography by Alex Paul.

@TheTab