Few things are better than watching a group of talented, guitar and tambourine-wielding friends share their music and hometown pride on stages across the country, and for that reason few bands are more invigorating at the moment than Chapel Hill seven-man (and woman!) indie act The Love Language.  Back in April, The Love Language somehow fit a full drum kit, two keyboards, a bass, numerous guitars and seven people onto the tiny stage at TT the Bear’s for an epic set that had concert goers dancing along with “Nocturne” and fan favorite “Lalita”.  Though the stage Downstairs at the Middle East gives the group a little more room to stretch out, it was still a rowdy, crowdy party for all present on August 3rd as The Love Language opened for Cursive.  The energy encapsulated on The Love Language’s self-titled debut, which was written and recorded entirely by the band’s frontman, Stu McClamb, translates well to the band’s live show, and the album leaves us wanting more of this lo-fi, perfectly imperfect garage rock.

Jessie and I were lucky enough to catch The Love Language at their cheery TT’s gig this past spring, and we gladly spent August 3rd watching Stu, Jordan, Kate, Missy, Josh, Jeff and Tom dance, beat, wail, strum, shake and scream along with the jam-hungry crowd in the Middle East’s packed basement.  Pre-show, we caught up with four of the seven members of The Love Language and somehow wound up discovering a staircase that looks as though it walked out of a Lisa Frank coloring book after we ignored a “DO NOT ENTER” sign in order to find a quiet, tape recorder-friendly locale for the interview, and that’s where the photo above was snapped.  Our chat with [some of] The Love Language was an incredibly informative one, in which we discovered that North Carolina is definitely a place to visit if you’re in the mood for some fantastic local music and that Kate really, really likes crystals, especially in her cheese.  Read on to find out more about the band we can’t seem to get enough of, and keep an eye out for them here at TeaParty Boston because we’ll be jumping up and down in anticipation once we catch wind of their next gig in the area.

-Hilary Hughes

THE OPENING ACT: THE LOVE LANGUAGE AND THE TEAPARTY TEN

What’s your favorite breakfast cereal?

Kate:  Fruit loops!

Josh: Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Jordan:  Cracklin’ Oat Bran.  Not my favorite, but DAMN if I don’t want some right now!

Stu:  I haven’t eaten cereal in so long!  Honey Bunches of Oats.

Who would you rather punch in the face: Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles”, or Mouth from “The Goonies”?

Josh:  Mouth, definitely.

Kate:  Yeah!  Long Duk Dong is pretty cool.

Jordan:  I’ll punch Dong in the mouth (laughs).

Stu:  Dong.

If you were a kitchen appliance, what would you be?

Josh:  A toaster oven.

Kate:  A mixer with a bread hook!

Jordan:  I’d be a frying pan.  I don’t know what that says about myself.

Stu:  I think one of those orange juice squeezers.  Those are fucking awesome and I don’t have one.

You go to bed, wake up, walk into the bathroom to brush your teeth, and you look in the mirror and you realize that you’ve turned into one of Jim Henson’s Muppets overnight.  Which Muppet are you?

Josh: I’m gonna go with Kermit because he’s really the only Muppet I know.

Kate: One of the “Yip! Yip! Yip!” space dudes.

Stu:  I would be Gonzo!  That was one of the first songs I ever wrote, one called “Gonzo.”  I wrote that in like, sixth grade.  I just said his name and played two chords.

Say you have a crazy night, you black out, and you wake up feeling like crap the next morning and you realize… you got a tattoo.   What’d you get inked?

Josh:  The giant head of an Indian chief, complete with headdress, across my back.

Kate:  I think a tree, running up my ribcage.

Jordan:  My brother’s face all across my back.

Stu:  Hot sauce and ranch being injected into my veins through a syringe!

Would you rather be a rodeo clown or a sumo wrestler?

Josh:  Rodeo clown.

Kate:  Absolutely!

Jordan:  Rodeo clown.

Stu:  Yeah.

If you were a particular style of facial hair, what would you be?

Jordan:  I’d be a real gross thin mustache that rides above the top lip, because I’m kind of a tall and slender guy but also just because it’s a strong piece of facial hair.  Actually, maybe I’d change it to a pretty gangster chinstrap.

Kate:  I saw an incredible facial hair sculpting: He had a chinstrap that went all the way around his jaw, and then it followed his entire hairline all the way around his head!  And everywhere else on his head he was bald.  I would do that.

Josh:  Mine would just be sideburns.  It’s because I think it looks good.

Stu:  I’d be a traveling mustache, where you shave a little bit off one side and then you just let the other side go.

If you were a type of cheese, which cheese would you be?

Kate: An hard one with the crystals in it, you know, the way old cheese get?  Like, parrano: That’s a strong, hard cheese. It’s FANTASTIC.

Josh:  Bleu.  Bleu cheese.  Roquefort, whatever.

Stu:  Nacho.

Jordan:  Cottage cheese.  Actually, I’ll go with ricotta.

What’s your quintessential “I’M GONNA DANCE AROUND MY APARTMENT IN MY SKIVVIES AND LOVE LIFE!” song?

Stu:  “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.”

Josh:  “Flashing Lights”, Kanye West.

Kate:  “Dancing In The Dark”.  The Boss.

Jordan:  “Feeling Major” by Van Halen.

What’s your favorite word?

Stu:  Vulnerable.  I always fuck it up when I say it.

Josh:  I really like the word “pyramid”.

Jordan:  Boski.  It’s a word I made up.  Like, if someone tops you off, you say, “All right, Boski!”

Kate: It’s kind of lame, but serrated.  It sounds good.

THE MAIN EVENT: THE LOVE LANGUAGE TPB INTERVIEW

How does it feel knowing you’ll be playing a sold out show tonight?!

Kate:  We’re stoked!  It’s the first sold out show of the tour.  It’s gonna be awesome.

Josh:  We’re very, very excited.

So what’s happened since the last time we caught The Love Language in Boston back in April?  Have you been on the road?  Have you been recording new material?  What’s going on with the Love Language?

Js: Since we got back home we’ve been taking advantage of the downtime, just because it was our first tour and I think we all got home and were pretty road weary.  We took about a month where we just did nothin’.  We’ve been writing some stuff and recording a little bit at our studio back home, and then kind of getting ready for this tour once we found about it. Unless I missed anything else, we haven’t been up to anything too big, really.

You guys are based in Chapel Hill, correct?

Jordan:  Exactly.  That’s where we have a house and the studio.

What can we expect in terms of new material tonight?  Are we going to get a sneak preview of a forthcoming Love Language material?

Jr:  We’re going to be doing three new songs that haven’t been recorded yet.

What are your favorite songs to perform live from the catalog of The Love Language?

Js: I really love playing “Nocturne”, just because we kind of get to be loose and have fun with it and draw it out a little more than the recording on the album.  There’s a little more freedom on that song.  Everything else we play is, I think, by the book in terms of following what was recorded.

K:  One of my favorites is a new one called “Blood”-

Js: Well, it’s tentatively called blood.  That sounds kind of bleak!  It includes the lyric “Blood” and for some reason it’s being called that for its shortened title, but it’s fun.

What are you guys listening to right now?  If we were to steal the iPods of The Love Language and look up your “Recently Added” playlists, what would we find?

K:  For me, I’ve got Bats for Lashes, one of my favorite bands.  One of our friends is in a band called Max Indian and I cant stop listening to them, either.

Js:  For some reason, having to sleep in the van at night and generally having to wear headphones to keep it quiet and fall asleep, Pink Floyd has been big for me.  Jordan, what’s that rapper that we were listening to on the way in from New York?

Jr:  OJ and the Juice Man.

Js: Yeah!  I like OJ and the Juice Man.

Jr:  I’ve been listening to a lot of Keith Healey lately.  He’s like, a mid-eighties to late-eighties country singer, and he had a really amazing voice and some great songs.

What sets The Love Language apart from various projects or bands you’ve worked with before?  I know that you all come from extensive musical backgrounds and have played for years in various cities throughout North Carolina.

Js:  I would say the pure chance of the collection of personalities we’ve got sets The Love Language apart.  To have seven people together in one capacity and have them all click can be pretty difficult, but then when you put on them that they have to play music and be creative together, it’s a pretty difficult thing.  We didn’t plan or calculate the collection of people we have.  It just came together. As trite as it sounds, there’s a feeling, I think, about all our meetings.  It was so chance how we all came to be in this band together and I’d say just the pleasure of being with everybody and playing music with it and the energy we feed off each other, and I’d say that’s what the majority of positive feedback that we hear a lot of times from people is about.  They sense this energy and togetherness from us onstage, and that’s what we feed off of ultimately.

Do you think that place has any affect on your creative process?  You’re all from North Carolina, born and raised, and we talk about how where you come from can really affect your creative process with Boston bands a lot.  How has your sense of place impacted you, artistically?

Js:  It’s funny: We were in Brooklyn for two days, and it just kind of struck me about the variety and very expressive nature of those people there, and it just made me think, if we were a band up here, you really have to put yourself or really do something to stand out in this group of people.  Being back home from where we are, you’re not really faced with such a mass and variety of people.  I don’t really know the answer to this question, but I know that that’s somehow impacted our sound.  I wouldn’t call it “roots rock”, but I feel like we play what I call good American rock n’ roll how it used to be in the ’50s and ’60s.  We didn’t have that need back home to really stand out by doing something just outlandishly different that in other big cities you probably encounter, so in that sense, that’s probably shaped our sound in that it’s been steering us in terms of what genres or whatever we tend to favor in our songwriting and playing.  That’s a bad answer because it makes it sound like the scene back home is kind of dull and we’re a dull band, but North Carolina’s got a lot going on and I don’t think we’re doing anything groundbreaking or new but I think we’re covering some bases of the American rock catalog that we just happen to nail, and we’re a good band because of it.

K:  In Chapel Hill it’s definitely a community of musicians and we definitely all feed off of each other.  There’s something about people our age who are into music, in that we’re all drawn together.

Js:  I mean, the answer, ultimately, is that you’re influenced by the artists around you and that they push you in certain directions- “Well that band sounds like this, we don’t want to sound like them.”  Go and check out bands from North Carolina – Max Indian and Ryan Gustavson, Justin Williams and 12,000 Armies, get a sense of that and figure out for yourselves, but they’re all great bands and great friends of ours and they’ve impacted our musical decisions for the better because it’s a really strong scene there.  That’s one of our goals on tour, to put Chapel Hill on the map, because we feel like there’s a lot of good music coming from there.  We’re trying to start Drug Horse Collective, and it’s just a collection of great bands and great personalities that’s just waiting to explode.  Max Indian, Ryan Gustavson, 12,000 Armies, The Tomahawks, Jeff Crawford, James Wallace, the Light Pawns… so, yeah, we roll pretty deep and it’s just a matter of time before other people start realizing about us.

Jr:  There’s a great variety in that music, too: It doesn’t all sound like us and it doesn’t all sound like each other.  There’s some more eccentric stuff and there’s some roots rock and roll, but it’s all so good.  There’s a lot of inspired people in Chapel Hill.

The Avett Brothers are from North Carolina too, right?

Jo:  Absolutely.  They’re from Concord.  Once you see them live you’re hooked.

What about Boston?  You guys were here in April and now you’re back.  You’re pretty far from home, but do you feel any particular connection with the crowd and the community in Boston?  How has your experience here been for you?

Jr:  Josh wasn’t here the first time we played Boston, and we’ve only played two shows in Boston, one opening for the Rosebuds and the other opening for Headlights.  Both of the shows were awesome and really well received by the people of Cambridge, and tonight, being sold out, I think it’s a great setup for a third great show.  We’ve had an awesome response every time we’ve been in Boston.  I hope that we can come back as a headliner sometime and have a great show!

Well, we’d be happy to have you!  Have you been following any Boston bands, or do you like any Boston bands or artists in particular?

Js:  I don’t think so; I’m pretty bad about knowing where friends are from generally, so it’s very likely that there are bands I do like that are from here but I don’t think any come to mind that are just like, “Boston bands.”  I don’t hear a lot about Boston down in North Carolina, to be honest; nobody we know down in North Carolina is from Boston, and that’s generally how you hear about a band or something, through word of mouth. 

Jr:  I listened to that Passion Pit record on a road trip with a couple of buddies and I love their stuff.