Eclectic doesn't begin to describe the music of DeVotchKa, but their gypsy indie sound is finally beginning to find an audience, frontman Nick Urata tells LAUREN MURPHY
‘CALIFORNIA’S a nice place,” says a contented-sounding Nick Urata down a muggy phone line from Berkeley. “Yeah, I can see why people want to live here.” Urata is on the west coast to play a series of festival gigs with his band DeVotchKa. The gypsy-indie group have just come off a brief tour with David Byrne, which included a date at the famous Red Rocks venue in their headquarters of Denver, Colorado. The magnitude of such an event is not lost on Urata, who grew up listening to bands such as Talking Heads and The Beatles.
“I had all those records when I was in school. I just never dreamed that I’d have the opportunity to hang out with him and open up his show,” he says with a soft chuckle.
Yet if you tried to pin DeVotchKa down to a certain genre, it certainly wouldn’t include 1960s pop or 1970s new wave. Throughout their 12-year history, the quartet have harvested a large (although initially underground) fan base through their unusual compound of Balkan gypsy music, roots-based influences and a good old- fashioned punk ethos. It was the music of Urata’s bloodline (a native New Yorker, he’s of Sicilian and gypsy ancestry) that initially inspired him to put a modern spin on the traditional family sound.
“When I was a kid, my grandmother used to tell us that she was half-gypsy, and they always had accordions around the house and stuff,” he explains. “But it sort of died off when I was still pretty young. As I got older, and when I heard an accordion as an adult, I just knew I wanted to work in that area.”
The band that Urata formed in 1997 were a different entity to the DeVotchKa of today. From early beginnings as a burlesque backing band for the likes of Dita Von Teese to one who were nominated for a Grammy award, DeVotchKa have become a group who are in demand. Yet Urata agrees that those early days had a lasting effect on the band’s identity.
“It definitely played a big part in our sound; we were in that early, malleable stage as a band,” he says. “We could have gone in many different directions. I was always very turned on by the romanticism of pretending we were this band from the past, backing up this burlesque show. I guess I just sort of continued the fantasy. Certainly musically, it taught us to think on our toes, and not be afraid to be a little flashy, and put on a show, and, uh, dress nice.”
“Putting on a show” is something of an understatement; in the past, the band have made their gigs as theatrical as possible, occasionally soliciting the talents of aerialists and other acrobats. It’s something that Urata feels gives his band an edge over their contemporaries – of which, at least over the past few years, there are many. Does he ever feel frustrated by young blow-ins such as Zach Condon of Beirut dominating the Balkan renaissance.
“Of course there are moments you might think that way, but I always looked at it as it comes with the territory. I mean, it’s not like we came up with the idea – people have been drawing from this well for hundreds of years, y’know?” he replies. “There’s always gonna be someone younger, cuter and better than you. You just have to embrace it.”
To a large extent, DeVotchKa succeed in their ambition to be individualists. Urata’s band remain on the periphery of most musical categories; indeed, their melting of genre barriers is their modus operandi. Their refusal to uproot from their southwestern base is a factor that has enhanced their music, too, he says, rather than hampered it. They use the same vintage Arizona studio (Wavelab) as Calexico, Neko Case and Giant Sand, and a tight-knit community of similar bands that shun the hub cities of New York and Los Angeles has sprung up around it.
The desert landscape certainly helped the band's creativity during the recording of their most successful project to date. In 2005, they were approached by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the makers of award-winning independent film Little Miss Sunshine. They had heard the DeVotchKa song You Love Me, and thought the band's music would provide the perfect accompaniment to their little road-trip movie. A phone call was made, a friendship struck up, and through a "stroke of blind luck", DeVotchKa were offered the job. Their work on the majority of the soundtrack won them a Grammy nomination for "Best Compilation Soundtrack" in 2006 (which eventually went to Joaquin Phoenix for Walk the Line). The whole thing was completely unexpected, claims Urata, although he had harboured ambitions to soundtrack a film for some time.
“It was definitely something I’d dreamed about, I sort of leaned that way when I was writing songs,” he says. “Sergio Leone and John Ford movies were always a big influence on me. But I think for the most part, we were just engrossed in the actual work of the film, getting it finished on time and everything. You don’t really think about that stuff. I just knew it was a good movie. I loved the performances, and the director, and I knew it was gonna resonate with people, but I never expected it to get out of the indie realm and go international like it has.”
For now, Urata's ambitions to be the next Morricone are being furthered by his work on forthcoming Jim Carrey-starrer I Love You Phillip Morris, which is due for release next year and will feature both DeVotchKa songs and incidental music written by their frontman. Before then, an extensive European summer tour looms large, after which the band will reconvene and begin work on the follow-up to their last album, 2007's A Mad and Faithful Telling. Considering all that's happened in the past few years, is there any idea what direction their new material might take?
“Well, I can only hope it goes up,” says Urata with a slow, earthy chuckle. “The only way is up, right?”
- DeVotchKa play Belfast's Spring Airbrake on August 9th, and Dublin's Crawdaddy on August 10th
