These LA locals are also Secretly Canadian's newest secret. They are currently on tour & made their most recent stop at UCLA's Hammer Museum last night during the second to last night of the awkwardly titled, "Also I like to Rock" FREE summer concert series. The Freeloader had a chance to speak with Matt Popielluch & Lewis Pesacov of Foreign Born.
Freeloader: Well let’s start small, what’s your favorite venue?
LP: The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.
MP: The Hideout in Chicago is pretty cool.
Freeloader: Would you mind self describing your sound for those who haven't heard?
MP: Sunkist melodies with dark as hell personalities.
LP: It’s kind of like a pineapple was shoved into a cornish hen & the cooked in an oven to the point where it was burnt black & just a little crispy on the outside
Freeloader: Hmm sounds tasty enough; tell us a little about your new album “Person to Person.”
MP: We found this really cool house in the hills, near Universal City called New King Sound.
LP: It’s basically a converted house into a barebones studio; it wasn’t really a “high tech” space.
Freeloader: In a day when anyone can record anywhere, why record there?
LP: We wanted a place that wasn’t a black hole studio, a place where we could see the light of day.
MP: A friend of mine gave me a card at a show. It had a picture of the tracking room with these big windows & a great view of the valley, it was beautiful.
Freeloader: What’s it been like since the new album came out?
MP: It’s been cool. Secretly Canadian is a very proactive label. They’ve done a lot for us. We’ve never done a tour with this much press or scheduled appearances.
LP: It’s like everyday we have an activity before the show, its kind of nuts, but its really good & you can’t say no because its great promotion for the album. We put a lot of effort into this last album, so we want people to spread the good word.
Freeloader: Well your tour is moving toward an end on the East coast; where are you most excited about stopping?
MP: New York will be really fun because we have all our friends out there. Chicago too, but sometimes the smaller towns are the better shows, I’m really looking forward to playing Minneapolis.
LP: We’ve done five dates so far; they’ve been surprisingly good. We’ve done tours before where we played in front of five people. Not that that’s a bad thing, but this is definitely not that.
Freeloader: You all are pretty new to the Secretly Canadian crew, so tell me a little about the transition.
MP: Dim Mak Records put out our first album, which was a strange friendship. They were nice & they liked out first record, but I think we had different artistic goals & we were headed down different paths. Our stuff kind of got out… Secretly Canadian heard our new demos & they were very interested in them. Everything happened pretty fast after that.
LP: It was an organic decision; Dim Mak didn’t seem really interested in the direction we were going, while on the other hand Secretly Canadian was excited by it, so it felt like an obvious choice.
Freeloader: So did S.C. find you here in L.A.?
MP: We were on tour actually.
LP: They came & saw us play a show in Chicago. I guess they had our first album, I think they must’ve had a copy on their desk, but probably never really listened to it until much later & then realized that maybe they actually had an interest in us.
Freeloader: Nice, well how did you all end up making music together?
MP: Lewis & I met in college at San Francisco State & we played around in college. After we graduated we played around San Francisco for the better part of a year & then Lewis had some friends down in LA, (Ariel & Garett) & they started jamming with us & eventually we just decided to make a change and move south to start living the dream.
Freeloader: So you both spent your college days here; are you California natives?
LP: I was born in Los Angeles, raised in Los Angeles… lived in San Francisco & then Germany for a spell.
MP: I was born in San Diego, but moved around a lot & lived in Hong Kong for a while before I moved to the Bay are for high school & college.
Freeloader: So what’s happened between then & now?
LP: We played a lot of music.
MP: Yes we did; we moved into a house together & did that thing for about three years. The clusterfuck; it was kind of rough. It was productive though & pretty cool to look back on.
LP: Yeah, it was really good considering that we never had any major fights between us; everything was surprisingly well paced.
MP: As time went on, more & more side projects started up. In the downtime between out last record, Lewis started Fool’s Gold. Pretty much we were always recording our friend’s bands & our own bands.
Freeloader: You both play in several different bands, how do you keep your different project’s sounds from bleeding into one another?
MP: That’s just my personality; I write a song for a certain thing, it’s very pronounced. I think it’s healthy to have a variety to help keep myself from letting things grow stale.
LP: I feel like I write all sorts of material & I deviate it out to whomever’s interested in doing it. Unfortunately this can lead to bleeding over into all my other songs pretty often.
Freeloader: Your sound has a little worldliness to it; how’s it feel to be released internationally?
MP: It’s great; it’s something we wanted from the beginning. It came out in Australia & New Zealand.
LP: That’s awesome; I just hope we can play all those places.
Freeloader: So after this are you finally professional musicians? …Or do you still have day jobs to cover the middle?
MP: We’re still not there quite yet; I’m a groundskeeper for “Tree People” which is a non-profit environmental group.
LP: I make music for Television Commercials, so my job is still kind of music oriented at least.
Freeloader: So finally, what is all this for? What are you hopes for this band in the future?
LP: That’s a good question, that’s something we never think about
MP: I think just like the hamster in the wheel, we only look at the wheel were spinning.
LP: I think of it like Sisyphus pushing his rock up the hill.
MP: Looking too far forward is never a great idea.
LP: It’s not about the destination. It’s about the Journey.
HAMMER MUSEUM
10899 Wilshire Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90024-4343
(310) 443-7000
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