Bledsoe: Silversun Pickups

Silversun Pickups

Silversun Pickups

Brian Aubert says Silversun Pickups' popularity has snuck up on the band members.

"It's a little like gaining weight," says Aubert. "You start getting chubby and you think, 'Maybe it's the pants.' Then a friend who hasn't seen you in two or three years says, 'What the hell happened to you?'"

Aubert is talking on his cell phone while, appropriately enough, sitting in his car in front of Silversun Liquor in Los Angeles, the spot that inspired the name of his group. With only two full-length albums under the band's belt, 2006's "Carnavas" and the recently released "Swoon," Silversun Pickups have caught fire. The band's songs have been picked up for editions of "Guitar Hero" and "Rock Band" (one of the most modern indicators of rock success), the band performed at Coachella in April, has a song ("Little Lover's So Polite") in the new film "Jennifer's Body," and the group's song "Lazy Eye" has sold nearly 400,000 downloads (a major accomplishment for a band on an independent record label). Add to that, the group's new album, "Swoon," has earned critical accolades and debuted at No. 7 on the Billboard 200 album chart.

Still, Aubert says it hasn't seemed so fast.

"Everything that happened for us has always been sort of a slow tumbleweed," he says. "That's almost the way we prefer it."

He says the group played live for a long time before ever deciding to record:

"We released an EP and that took a while to gain steam. We never really noticed what was going on because we had our heads so deep in the ground. I think the first time we noticed was when we were booked to be on 'David Letterman' and we thought, 'Do they know it's US<I>?"</I>

The group formed in 2000.

"We knew each other for a while and we were around people who were in bands that we adored," says Aubert. "That gave us the confidence to do it. Watching your friends making good music and relating to them it takes away a lot of the myths of being in a band. It makes it very tangible. So we just started monkeying around."

Silversun Pickups were asked to play shows shortly after the group formed.

"We probably shouldn't have, but I'm glad we did," says Aubert. "The songs were really slow and really long. We didn't really have lyrics and we were just sort of attacking our instruments. But we can rehearse until the cows come home, but it doesn't really shape up until we get out there and start playing live."

Aubert says the first time it really clicked that Silversun Pickups was a real band was when the late singer-songwriter Elliott Smith asked the group to open for him at a Los Angeles concert. It was the biggest crowd the band had played to (approximately 1,500), and the show went great.

"We walked off stage thinking, 'Wow!' It was a moment where our heads were out of the sand and we said, 'Things have changed!' I remember I couldn't sleep that night. I went to my friend's house and I was just so jazzed. He went to sleep and I watched 'Freaks and Geeks' all night. It was just so exciting that you wanted to get to work right away, but you couldn't because it was 5 in the morning."

Still, Aubert says the group doesn't make calculated moves. They don't have huge plans.

"We set goals so small that we pass them before we even think about them!"

© 2009, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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