Rubblebucket performed at The Jefferson Theater on the Downtown Mall two weeks ago. Arts & Entertainment sat down with lead singer and saxophonist Kalmia Travers to hear her thoughts on Charlottesville, the band’s recently released album “Survival Sounds” and Rubblebucket’s budding career.
Arts & Entertainment: You guys performed at Charlottesville’s hippest mid-range venue — The Jefferson Theater. What did you think of the experience? How do you like Charlottesville in general?
Kalmia Traver: We have played at The Southern in the past [and] I love the greenroom there because it is like a secret hobbit hole/stone cave. It's awesome. To say we like Charlottesville would be an understatement. I've never come through town without meeting more new amazing nice people, eating something delicious and thinking I am missing out on something huge by not living there.
AE: Survival Sounds seems a perfect synthesis of contemporary synth-pop and your own affinity for horns. How do you all think of the album in terms of your overall career? What does the title mean to you?
KT: Thanks! We are all prouder of this album than anything else we've made. We've worked together on playing and recording music for so many years and we've been ceaselessly refining our ability to work together and our approach to collaboration. Musically we wanted this album to be very Rubblebucket, horns and all, but we had some deeper darker rumblings in our soul that needed to get out too.
AE: “Carousel Ride” is full of great insights on life. The song’s devil-may-care message is pretty clear, but why was a candy factory chosen as the setting?
KT: The location was a child of serendipity, as some of the most mind blowing things in life seem to be. When we asked Alexis Boling, the director, if he wanted to do the video, all we had was an idea of the emotional core, and the flower suit. Then we left for Europe, and when we came back he had locked down this amazing chocolate factory (Madelaine Chocolate Company in Rockaway Beach) and written a wild action thriller-y treatment that seemed to resonate perfectly with the song. I got teary-eyed shooting it, and I tear up watching it.
AE: How do you characterize your music? The genre on Rubblebucket’s Facebook page is cited as “visual/visual/visual.” Can you explain that designation a little bit?
KT: This has always been the most challenging question for us. … I think we chose visual/visual/visual because our live show has a visual dimension to it, and also as a nod to the fact that we are genre-impaired. Also the senses of hearing and sight have always gone hand in hand for most of us, and I believe that performing music without paying attention to what the audience is simultaneously seeing is a lost opportunity.
AE: The term “Rubblebucket” is also highly interpretive and whimsical — is that why you all decided to use the term as your group name?
KT: We fell into the name or grew into it maybe. It dates back to the very seeds of our existence, a magical art opening during [a] jazz fest in Burlington, Vermont where the host hired a scraggly group of horn players and west African percussionists (i.e. us) to be the entertainment, and we improvised all night to cheers and wild dancing. It was billed as Rubblebucket and the name has stayed with us all these years. At the time I liked it because it was earthy and playful and reminded me of somebody in a colorful helmet shooting up into space like Neo at the end of the Matrix, except with a colorful helmet.
AE: Rubblebucket’s rise to fame came about with a group of like-minded people in pursuit of the quintessential American Dream. What can you tell me about this journey and how it’s affected your music and attitude up until this point?
KT: I don't feel like we're famous or even have our sights on fame persay. I want to be doing art and music for the rest of my life, and I'm just so thankful that people are interested in what we do and willing to be an audience. Fame is overrated in our society, I think it's going to be extinct pretty soon, because the age of reality TV has devalued it and taken away what mystique it had from the golden entertainment eras of old. We're all just alive dudes, that's all!
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