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Sun Blood Stories’ latest album, It Runs Around the Room with Us (2017), features a song written by Amber Pollard titled “Burn.” It was inspired by a time when the singer-guitarist and her son George saw a Confederate flag hanging from a parked truck.

AP: I was working at the time, and I was at the [Ada County] Courthouse. There was a burn ban in the city, and it was 110 degrees outside. We were standing at the courthouse, and we just lit it on fire in the parking lot.

The song served as the climax for the Boise-based rock group’s set at the 2016 Treefort Music Fest. As singer-guitarist Ben Kirby and drummer Jon Fust bashed away at their instruments, Pollard ran around the stage howling out the song’s single lyric: “BURN!”

It was the first time SBS had played the song live, and it hit the audience (including me) hard. My friend Jax Perez would tell me much later, “I cried. And I don’t publicly cry. I was raised to not publicly cry. But that show – especially when that song closed everything out – I was fucking bawling.”

Amber Pollard has that effect on people. On stage, she can hit an intensity level that few others in the Boise scene can match. In her everyday life, she’s thoughtful and outspoken on race, gender, sexuality, abuse, and many other issues. Her passion and forthrightness have earned her a number of fans, particularly among young women.

Amber and I met up recently to discuss her life and music.

Read Full Interview HERE

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Sun Blood Stories makes its latest appearance in Denver tonight, 9/15/17, at Lion’s Lair with Big Dopes and Serpentfoot. The former quintet now trio from Boise, Idaho, has been creating its experimental psychedelic music since 2011. Though the band emerged around the time when the most recent wave of psychedelic rock was headed toward its peak, Sun Blood Stories seemed to come from a different place. Its shows feel a bit like you’re seeing what a traveling, shamanistic musical ceremony might be like. Its songs, some rock, some weirdo folk but all informed by an attempt to create a mood and an experience as much as, or more so, than melody.

The 2017 album It Runs Around the Room With Us has a title that suggests the supernatural and the songs themselves are often melancholic compositions haunted by memories, dreams and experiments in crafting atmospheres that stir the imagination and don’t seen leave the mind. We recently caught up with the band via email to discuss some of its history, inspirations and perspectives in creating its riveting body of work. Where a specific band member responds the name will precede that response otherwise assume it’s a collective answer. But you can figure that out because you’re smart.

Read the Full Interview

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Having recently had Beatles on the brain, specifically the early years of their hysteria-inducing mop tops, I started to think about their early interviews. I started to look up some of those early pressers and was taken aback by just how many times the fab foursome was asked about money and marriage, but there were some gems amongst the clunkers. And so, inspired by the early press conferences of the Beatles, especially their US interviews, I decided to ask some of those very same questions to some of the best and brightest making music today.

I first came across Boise’s Sun Blood Stories while taking a look at this year’s Treefort lineup. It was pretty much love at first listen with these “High Desert experimental psych-fuzz”-makers. Their magnetic, colorful sonic machinations are both soothing and stirring, commanding attention whether they’re caressing or crashing into your eardrums (which they do with equal enthusiasm).

The triad of Amber Pollard, Ben Kirby, and Jon Fust gamely took on the Beatles questions, read on to get acquainted with these new friends and make sure you check their Bandcamp for all sorts of goodies. Oh, and someone please invite these three to play some shows in Europe, won’t you?

READ THE FUZZY LOGIC INTERVIEW HERE

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It’s quite a journey, one which those who haven’t heard SBS lately might not expect. In a departure from the group’s earlier blues-heavy sound, Twilight’s eerie tunes, sinuous grooves and waves of voices, riffs and hallucinatory noises call to mind early Funkadelic andBitches Brew-era Miles Davis. Metal-centric music blog The Obelisk called Twilight “a gorgeous wash that careens between minimalist openness, dual vocals that capture folkish intent with zero folkish pretense and psychedelic guitar howl, all the while swirling with experimental undercurrents and ambient heft.”

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It hasn’t been a long trip for Sun Blood Stories (yet), but it’s already been a strange one. In June, bassist-saxophonist Andy Rayborn got pretty wild when SBS opened for the Missoula, Mont. surf-garage group BOYS.

“He was standing on the drum set playing and he was crowd-surfing, playing into the ceiling,” Amber Pollard said. “And then all of a sudden… it was Andy everywhere.”

“I think someone licked my guitar during that show,” Ben Kirby added.

In August, Sun Blood Stories traveled out to Portland, Ore. After playing a couple of gigs, the band stayed with a circus troupe whose members had all dropped acid that night. “We weren’t on acid, but they were,” Kirby said. “They didn’t have any extra acid.”

“No, they did,” Pollard said. “We just had, like, three hours before we had to drive back to Boise, so we needed to take a nap.”

 

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