Sit Down with Vundabar
I was first acquainted with Vundabar when I was enduring my third coming-of-age saga, longing for sounds that resembled my own angst, listlessness and poetic desire for something more. I was sitting in the moody fog of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach when my prayers were answered. “Alien Blues” landed on my Spotify Discover Weekly and I fell in love with the melodic verses and the choruses that you’re meant to scream at the top of your lungs.
That sound continues through Vundabar’s latest single “Life is a Movie” — and while it’s somewhat more on the edge of electronic, the track still contains a certain sweetness combined with a nutty bassline that you can’t not dance to. The video for the song is cinematic and surreal [watch below]. We got to chat a bit with Vundabar’s very own Brandon Hagen, here’s that.—Karina Chahal
Inherent Bummer: How’s tour going so far?
Brandon Hagen:
Tour has been great — really nice to get back out to the fans, especially as a headliner. We haven't done a headline in the states in two years so it's been very refreshing to play to our people
Why don’t you play “Shuffle” live?
Maybe we will! We've been digging things out of the catalog — trying to be better at giving the whole catalog attention so… maybe.
What Inspired the new sound for your latest single, “life is a movie?”
I’d say the experimentation came from my recovery time after breaking an arm on tour. I couldn't really play guitar besides picking single notes so it really lended itself to focusing on production and cutting things up — deconstructing things and then putting them back together. I wanted to make an album that had a lot of the characteristics of electronic music but with a band making it.
what about the lyrics?
I think “Life Is A Movie” came out of this idea of how we all self mythologize our lives — use storytelling as a way to consolidate and partition things off, make [them] less abstract, but then that in itself is an abstraction
Tell us about the music video.
The Director Dylan Gephart presented the initial concept and then we'd have phone calls and riff on it for a few weeks and really honed it in. We had a couple different films as touchstones and made a point to really try to develop the character
How did singing in choir as a youngin’ impact your musical career?
It was huge! I miss choir so much — singing in unison with a group is such an uplifting feeling.I think if anything it just showed me how much music can move and the sense of wellbeing it can provide.
