Drinks With THE CURLS — Emulsion Lab

We met up with Mick and Jan, two (recently married) parts of THE CURLS to have a few drinks and wander about near Parson's Chicken & Fish.

Emulsion: You guys live around here right? What’s the spot you usually go to.

Jan: I mean the park. We love living half a block away from Humboldt Park. Just having that all summer long, to walk our dogs and go to the lagoon and do some swimming.

Mick: Yeah we’ve been going to this pool over at Sacramento and Divison and they have this water slide. And I’d never been there the whole time I lived in Chicago. I passed by it a few times -

Jan: Sacramento and Augusta.

Emulsion: A public pool?

Mick: Yeah. I think last year was the first time I’ve been to a public pool since I was probably thirteen, and I was like this is great. It’s free and refreshing and hilarious to watch people behave around pools.

Emulsion: It definitely is. Let’s talk a little about your music. Do you both write the music?

Jan: It originally started as Mick’s project and he did the majority of the songwriting but it's been evolving over the past couple years as members have changed. It’s more of a collaboration across all members of the band.

Mick: It was more boxed in, just like folk indie rock. I think now it’s more about coming up with weirder ideas and bringing them to practice. Jan will usually arrange things in more of a way that makes sense. There’s always a lot of freedom for everyone else to contribute too.

Emulsion: Do you have more music that you’re recording on now?

Mick: The new record is pretty much done and that’s basically with a whole new band on every tune. Anna Holmquist, our female vocalist has been writing lyrics more and doing lead.

Jan: As the music has gotten more complex I think Michael -

Mick: Well I’m still learning how to sing over playing over a lot of notes! But really it’s leaning more towards art rock & kind of synthy because I only listen to music from 1977 to 1983… so I think it’s starting to rub off a little bit.

Emulsion: When does the album release?

Mick: We’re going to do it at Emporium on November 30th. We’re going to put this out on a tape label initially called Dark Circles.

Jan: Chris Lee, who did Slice of Life with us too runs that. We just put out our first single Prickly Feelings a few weeks ago

Jan: And we have a video coming out for that.

Emulsion: Right I listened to it online.

Jan: What was your favorite part?

Emulsion: I did take a note… “mashup between the Talking Heads and Modest Mouse”

Mick: I feel like we’ve gotten both those before. We went with it for the single because Prickly Feelings is a pretty good representation of the sound for our new record.

Emulsion: And there’s a music video for that?

Jan: Right, there will be. An animated video that we're working on now.

Emulsion: Is there anywhere we can see you now?

Jan: Right in your own neighborhood! This will be out after it but… we’re putting together a little fest in our backyard next Sunday called Cheeto Fest. We got most of our favorite acts in Chicago to come over for a chill backyard show.

Jan: We will have buckets of Cheetos and...

Emulsion: Hahahaha!

Jan: I feel like any time we’ve hosted a house show we landed on this silly nonsensical name Cheeto Palace. The name just stuck.

Emulsion: So like a little DIY venue?

Mick: Hey, listen!

Jan: For any cops listening to this interview…

Mick: It’s not a DIY spot!