During a bitterly cold winter in Northampton, Mass., in 2004, the group of friends who were to become Winterpills began playing music together. They drew from their personal struggles, as well as influences like Elliot Smith and Nick Drake. The band’s natural energy is stoked partially by the relationship between songwriter Philip Price and keyboardist Flora Reed. They often share harmonious vocals on Winterpills’ effortless grooves, which are born from chamber-pop and indie-rock sensibilities.
The band’s seventh album, “Love Songs,” sees the introspective group exploring new directions. They pulled in producer and engineer Justin Pizzoferrato, who’s worked with far more electric outfits like Speedy Ortiz, Pixies, Dinosaur Jr. and J. Mascis, Sonic Youth, and others.
Winterpills perform Saturday, April 30, at The Stone Church in Newmarket. The Sound talked with Price to find out more about the new album, the band’s first gig, and songwriting.
How did you get your start in music?
I started doing music when I was a kid, taking piano and guitar lessons, and I have to say, not doing very well. I remember my first guitar teacher quit on me, told me I wasn’t doing my homework. I think I started writing when I was about 14. I had a lot of other distractions. I wanted to study visual art in college. And I had aspirations to be a filmmaker too, but music kept inserting itself in my life.
Can you talk about how Winterpills got together? I read that there was a bad winter and…
That’s the myth, and it’s also the truth (laughs). It was just sort of one really rough winter, when a lot of people had broken up with significant others and my father had passed away, and we all began gathering at our guitar player Dennis (Crommett’s) house and drinking a lot of terrible wine and playing music. And I had a lot of songs in my pocket that I wasn’t sure where they were gonna go. We just began playing shows, and something really gelled for us. It was very organic and avant-garde.
I also had been playing in kind of a heavy band for a long time, and I was really tired of screaming and shouting over loud guitars, and found that playing really quietly was more powerful. It was like quiet was the new loud.
Where was the band’s first gig?
I believe it was at a club that doesn’t exist anymore. A place called The Eagles Nest, it was the upstairs of an Eagles clubhouse. We had to become members of the Eagles in order to rehearse in the space. … It wasn’t really a clubhouse. Actually, it’s funny, the other day I just came across my membership card, which expired many years ago. Forty bucks, and we could rehearse and then you were asked to go down and buy a drink – you had to buy a drink. But yeah, that shut down. People weren’t paying their dues, I guess.
Why did you go with Justin Pizzoferrato for the album?
We wanted to really try and do something bigger-sounding. So we had been wanting to work with Justin Pizzoferrato for some time, and it finally came together. We chipped away at it. You know when you write a batch of songs over a period of time, you don’t always know what the theme is. But I think sonically …. we weren’t trying to sound like any of those bands (Pixies, etc.), but we were able to stretch out a lot differently in the studio.
Why did you call the album “Love Songs?”
I really, really love the title. It kind of didn’t make sense at first, and then the more I thought about it the more I thought, “These are all love songs, they’re love songs without an object, they’re love songs about peace of mind or the mythology of relationships and obsessions and being in love with things that aren’t necessarily so healthy,” and that’s where that title came from. It has a touch of irony to it.
And the lyrics are all these little stories.
Songwriting is … it’s very hard to talk about. Some songs are really very clear and so many others … are so opaque to even me, and when I’m writing them I often let the melody carry me a lot of the time, and the lyrics come out of the melody. So if there is a narrative inside the songs, it comes to me from a strange place. I’m not always sure exactly what it is I’m talking about. There’s a couple of songs on the album, like “A New England Deluge,” which is how there’s a … certain very New England state of mind — a certain self-defeatism, a certain withdrawn nature.
What is it like to work with Flora, your wife?
It’s great, I have to say. I mean, we sing together. I’m the primary writer, but she’s always the first one to hear songs when I’m writing them. She definitely influences the music when it’s being born. We’re definitely the luckiest members of the band because we get to not leave each other at home when we go out on tour. So the other people in the band have to leave wives and partners behind, and we see that that’s hard. Sometimes when we would go out on tour, we would sort of temporarily break up while we were on tour. We didn’t really do that, but we would say that we did, just to make them feel better.
The picture of the fox on the “Love Songs” album cover is really striking. Is there a backstory to that?
It’s a photograph taken by this Spanish photographer and I came across it while looking through different art for the album. He … saw this fox by the side of the road and pulled over to try and get a shot, and the fox just stayed and … they had like a staring contest, and he got these remarkable images of the fox looking deep into his soul. What I first thought was, “Is there blood on the face of the fox?” He said, “I don’t think so. I think it’s just the fox’s coloring.” I found that compelling and slightly menacing, and we just kept going back to the fox. We decided to let the fox speak for itself.
Presented by Bright & Lyon, Winterpills will perform at The Stone Church in Newmarket on Saturday, April 30 at 6 p.m. with Arc Iris. Tickets are $12 in advance and $15 at the door. Visit brightandlyon.com/events.