Your New Favourite Band: Climbing Trees

You might remember Climbing Trees making our list of NEW MUSIC YOU NEED IN 2015, but it’s not just us CULTURED VUTURES that have got a keen eye on the Welsh four-piece, predicting big things for the band this year, as last year the group were picked out for the launchpad project ‘Horizons’. The project is the joint effort of BBC Wales and the Arts Council Wales to help give support and promote talented up and coming bands, to help give them the boost they need.

Prior to this the band had been touring relentlessly off the back of their debut album, 2013’s Hebron. I caught up with Matthew from the band to discuss the big plans for 2015, their next album, getting to record a session at the legendary Maida Vale Studios, and what make the band the band, right down to the writing. Enjoy.

Hello there, how the hell are you, and who am I talking to today?

Alright, duck.  I’m Matthew Frederick, of Climbing Trees non-fame, and I just want to make it clear from the off that we’ve all had the beards since before it was cool.

Don’t edit that bit out…

We recently talked about yourselves in our New Music You Need in 2015, but how would you describe the sights and sounds of Climbing Trees in your own words? Cymrucana?

“Cymrucana” was a tagline we came up with around the release of the first album, as we kept getting asked by people like yourself, understandably, how we’d describe our music, and never knew how to respond.  Hebron was a mixture of folk, country, pop, rock, prog, even a bit of classical, and yet neither of those genres adequately summed our sound up. Americana was pretty close, though, so we put our own little twist on it, and it seems to have caught on.  Although we’re still the only band on the Cymrucana scene, as far as we know…

Speaking of Cymrucana, specifically the Cymru, you’re a Welsh band based out of the valleys. How do you feel the Welsh music scene is doing at the moment? Any artists/bands you’d care to direct us to?

There are too many to mention, really, which is a good sign, and means that the Welsh music scene is in pretty nifty shape.  We’ve played with so many great acts over the last year or so that it’s hard to pick out one – but we’re big fans of Cate Le Bon, and her latest album Mug Museum was pretty much the sound of our summer, travelling around Wales in the van, chatting about nothing in particular.  So yeah, check her out.

You released your debut album, Hebron, back in 2013. How’s work on a follow up going? Can we expect a sophomore soon?

Since the release of Hebron we’ve been playing non-stop, right up until the end of last year.  Which is great, and we’ve loved every moment of it, but then you get to the point where you realise you haven’t written a new song in God knows how long.  So it’s been refreshing to get stuck into writing again over the last few months, and we’ll be heading into the studio in mid-February to start work on “the difficult second album” – or DSA, as we’re calling it – ready for an Autumn release, we hope.  Keep your eyes peeled.

When it comes to writing is it a case of jamming it out or everyone bringing things to the table and working it out?

The good thing about this band, which is then reflected in our sound, is that we’re all able to knock out a good song or two.  The way I like to describe it is that one of us brings the bones of a song to the group, and then we all work together and stick the meat on it.  Although for a band that’s 75% vegetarian, that’s probably not the greatest analogy.  But yeah, it’s very much a collective process, and I think it certainly helps to give each song its own angle, which perhaps would be a struggle if we just had the one focal point in terms of writing.

Towards the tail end of last year you performed at Maida Vale for the BBC. How’d that come about, and how good was it to be performing and recording at Maida Vale?

We were lucky enough to be chosen as one of twelve ‘Horizons’ bands by the BBC last Spring, which meant that we got to play lots of great little festivals throughout the summer – Laugharne Castle for the Dylan Thomas Centenary springs to mind – and rounded 2014 off with a Maida Vale session.

I remember walking down the long corridor through the centre of the building and looking at the pictures of people who’d recorded there over the years.  The studio we recorded in was the same room in which Bing Crosby made his final recordings.  We were interviewed in smaller studio where The Beatles recorded sessions just when they were starting out.  It was pretty surreal, and somewhere on that list of greats are Climbing Trees.  Probably closer to the bottom than the top, mind.

Prior to that performance at Maida Vale, you had quite a run of festival sets. Do you prefer the challenge of winning over a festival crowd or the intimacy you can get with a gig of your own?

There’s certainly a benefit to both.  At the moment, I think we’re eager to play in front of as many different people as possible, and obviously festivals are a great way of doing that and getting your music out there.  That said, there’s nothing like playing a gig to a room packed full of people that know every one of your songs back to front, love what you do, and have the t-shirt to prove it.  We really had the best of both worlds last year, and we’re looking forward to more of the same in 2015!

Carrying on the gig chatter, how’s your diary looking for the foreseeable? Where can our readers come see you climb trees live?

It’s filling up fast!  We’ve kept the first couple of months in 2015 free of gigs to concentrate on writing and getting everything tight ready for the studio, so we’re back on it from March onwards; firstly with the Horizons tour, which should be fun, followed by another summer of festivals to give some of the new songs a spin on the road, and then a Welsh tour in the    Autumn to promote the release of the second album, which should see us nicely up to Christmas, by which time we will have almost certainly cracked America.

Outside of Climbing Trees, do any of you have any other musical outlets?

Yeah, we all kind of have our solo things going on, as well as being involved in other bands and musical projects.  So it’s good to have these other outlets, as you say, to enable us to explore different avenues that perhaps we wouldn’t be able to with the Trees, for one reason or another.  I think we all find ourselves writing the occasional song that just isn’t Trees in any shape or form, and rather than waste them we end up sticking them on solo EPs or playing them with other bands and so on.  The more people you write and perform with, the more creative you end up as an artist, and the more content you’ll be, so there’s no point in limiting ourselves to one band of four people and getting sick to death of one another.

Lastly, and of course most importantly, we here at Cultured Vultures have our very own cultured vulture called Voltaire. If you had your own pet vulture that you found to be especially cultured, what would you name it?

As much as I’m a fan of alliteration and am tempted to go for Vernon, I’d have to lean towards Quentin the Vulture – and he would almost certainly smoke a pipe.