Soul-indie-pop group continuing touring streak with Vacationland appearance today
MisterWives are among of the latest entries in the growing trend of potpourri music, bands that synthesize too many sounds for an easy genre descriptor. Intricate and diverse, the band’s music moves from soul to dance to pop to folk, sometimes in the same song.
The band released its debut EP, “Reflections,” in January, which has led to a relative avalanche of attention and accolades. Now they’re on the road, currently on the Sperry Top-Siders Vacationland Tour, which is being brought to Greene Street today by Carolina Productions.
“It’s been incredible,” bassist William Hehir said of the band’s newfound success. “We actually just hit 10,000 followers on Facebook. … We’ve really been offered a number of opportunities and experiences that were kind of beyond our wildest dreams when we started together.”
The band came up through the New York music scene, pursuing music in its members’ own ways until the band came together and showed potential. Every member was born in New York except for guitar player Marc Campbell, who came to the city five years ago.
“New York’s kind of this region of culturalism, so all of the bands that we would ever want to go see always come through New York, and we [took] advantage of the fact that the bands we’re really into are always going to be in the neighborhood at one point or another,” he said.
Hehir has been interested in music since he was a child, but he first tried working in finance, to soul-crushing effect.
“I was sitting in a cubicle, and I’d had my dad look at me right before I went to work for the first day and go, ‘Y’know, the first 10 years are the worst,’ and I was like, ‘What?’ I sat there in my cubicle, and I looked at my screen while I was typing, and I was like, ‘I’m out,’” he said, laughing.
The professional music gig has worked out better, leading to a breakneck series of tours for the band. Despite their length, the tours were a good time for the group.
“In 2013, we spent the fourth quarter being constantly on tour. We started up in September, and we really — with the exception of a two-day break — didn’t finish up until like December 21st,” Hehir said. “We’re always in the van, telling jokes with one another, swapping stories, listening to music. … We all get along incredibly well, so we never get sick of the conversation. I think being on tour in and of itself is what the fun is.”
With such compatibility, the band works on songs collaboratively after singer and songwriter Mandy Lee works out a skeleton of melody and lyrics. They focus on the needs of the song, using their lack of genre restrictions to their advantage.
“The thing that we try to do is combine all sorts of influences that we’ve had, and so I don’t think there’s one predominate thing to say, like, ‘Oh, it’s more folky than it is dancy,’ because I think different songs lend themselves to different type(s) of genre(s).”
One question remains: Where did the name MisterWives come from?
“That’s actually a flip on the Mormon term ‘sisterwives,’” Hehir said. “Sisterwives … for Mormons, is when an individual marries a bunch of different women, and we just took it in reverse.”