In this interview spotlight, I chat with Down South Pepper about their music, technology, challenges and more.
Full Q&A along with links and music below.
Where are you from and what style of music do you create? (In your own words, not necessarily in marketing terms or by popular genre classifications.)
We are Down South Pepper band from the northernmost part of Norway. The place we are from is a little lappish village called Kvalsund that is just as far north as Wainwright, Alaska. We have sámi blood running in our veins, and grew up with the sound of the sámi music yoik under the midnight sun. But even up in Kvalsund there were people that had access to cassette tapes with Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson, we listened and we loved it. So now we are making our own kind of outlaw country music, with lyrics about any thing that comes to our attention that we would like to comment from our distant point of view. Most of our songs tells a humorous story with a depper underlying meaning.
What led you down this path of music and what motivates you to keep going?
We love that country music gives us an opportunity to write a small stories about phenomenas or things in life that we are concerned about, accompanied by catchy music. We are also very happy that our music is on rotation on country radio around the world and that so many people out there seems to enjoy the music we create. To play public and meet country music fans that tells us that our music makes them happy or glad is also a big motivation for us.
How is this new release different than previous ones? Were you trying to accomplish anything specific?
Our new release Not My Way has a folky style, with fiddle, banjo and tambourine – but still you can hear our characteristic rusty sami outlaw style. This time we would like to draw the attention to how some people seems to lured into trends that are not healthy – such as strange eating habbits and beauty trends. For us it is not easy to understand how people get caught into this and we have a look at it from our perspective.
Name one or two challenges you face as an indie musician in this oversaturated, digital music age? How has technology helped you (since we know it does help)?
As indie musician it is very hard to get the music played at comercial radio, because those spots are taken by top 40 artists with an active management and a large marketing budget. We guess that indie music don’t bring much advertisements and money to the radio station. We also see that it is a struggle to get songs placed on popular Spotify and iTunes playlists, and if you don’t get into such a playlist you never get your numbers running on Spotify.. On the other hand, in this digital music age it is easy to send our music to any radio station in the world, and every release is available worldwide from release day with minimum cost.
What was the last song you listened to?
The last song we heard was I love this bar, by Toby Keith. That’s a song we love.
Which do you prefer? Vinyl? CDs? MP3s?
We like the sound of vinyl best, and we actually miss the days when we went to the music store to listen to LP’s and look at the covers.
How about this one…. Do you prefer Spotify? Apple Music? Bandcamp? Or something else? Why?
As we are Scandinavians we like Spotify very much, that’s because almost everyone over here uses it. Spotify also gives us a nice artist dashboard where we among other things can find statistics about our music.
Where is the best place to connect with you online and discover more music?
We put out most information about us and our music on our facebook site https://www.facebook.com/dspband/ and if you like to watch our videos you will find them on youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCixW4If9PqJVaSW6QSuTxg
Anything else before we sign off?
To all the country music fans out there, traditional country music is still alive and kicking!
