For the new La Palma EP, "Red-tailed River," they looked toward the natural world for creative influence. The first track, “Hawks in the Sky,” sung by Chris Walker, takes inspiration from bird watching outside his home in San Francisco. “Rock Creek,” a track sung by Tim Gibbon, imagines absorbing patience and solace from the river behind his house in Washington DC. The tracks blend seamlessly from one to the next, and “Feather Sticks” wraps up the EP with a sun-soaked instrumental postlude. The songs flow, bubble, dip, and soar with La Palma’s dreamy psych pop & indie folk textures.
By Kamil Bobin
Discovered via Musosoup
Kamil) Hey La Palma, super nice to have the chance to chat with you. What first got you into music?
Tim: Thanks so much! We’ve both been making music in some form since we were kids. Music just seems to be something that wants to come out of us, and a channel through which we process the world. I learned to play the piano when I was young, and then picked up the electric guitar and started messing around with 4-track tape recording and playing with bands as a teenager. Chris and I met each other in the aughts, playing in bands in the Washington DC music scene. And then we reconnected in 2019. We were both craving music-making, while navigating life as new parents, and La Palma sprung from that. We’ve both moved - I live in Washington DC and Chris lives in San Francisco - but we keep finding momentum to keep creating together. We’ve put out two La Palma albums plus a couple of singles, and the “Red-tailed River” EP is our newest project.
How do you balance your time in the studio with other commitments such as a part-time job, family, admin?
Chris: It’s tough, striking that right balance. As a parent sometimes you find yourself cooking something like three different dinners at once, this kid wants mac n cheese, this one wants a quesadilla. I find that if I try to make them all at once, something always gets burned. I guess, the trick is to prioritize the things that matter and try to do them one at a time.
Tim: That’s so true. And for me there’s no real division between art-making and life, it all blends together. Recordings of our kids are embedded in our music, the students at the school I work at influence my lyrics… A La Palma song feels like a snapshot of a moment in life to me.
Your latest release is 'Red-tailed River'. Can you tell us more about the making of it and if there were any unusual things happening during the process?
Tim: We have a sort-of magpie approach to making music: like the way that magpie birds collect random shiny things, we might find inspiration in a random phrase that we hear, or a visual that catches our eye, or experience that we have. Chris kicked the process off with “Hawks in the Sky,” inspired by bird watching in San Francisco with his wife. Since we live on opposite sides of the country, he sent the files to me in DC and I added some layers of old drum machines, percussion, organ, piano, and slide guitar to build out the soundscape. That’s how we work- passing files back and forth long-distance to build up songs.
One day I was inspired by the calming experience of sitting next to the river behind my house, and that became “Rock Creek.” It felt almost like downloading a song from the river. Chris added an omnichord part, a bridge, and some other parts that elevated it to another level. And then Chris’ musical response to that song became “Feather Sticks,” the instrumental track that wraps up the EP. There’s a great mandolin-like sound on that song, which is actually an unplugged 12-string electric guitar.
Where did you get the inspiration for this EP?
Chris: Inspiration for our music tends to come from the same sources over and over again, like some bottomless well. Family, love, nature and dreams are little prisms we rely on to glimpse truths within our worlds.
How long did you work on the 'Red-tailed River'? Was it an easy process for you?
Chris: I sent Tim an early draft of the first song that would kickstart this EP back in July 2022 so I’d say a little under a year from inception to completion. That’s actually quite a lot in one year when you consider everything is done by us from recording, album art, mixing and mastering to a stop-motion music video creation.
How do you know when a work is finished?
Tim: For me, a La Palma song is finished when it feels like an immersive ecosystem, like something that you can put on headphones and step inside and walk around in, look at and touch the little details. Sort of like the ‘It’s a Small World’ ride at Disneyland, if that makes sense. It’s always a balance though of not over-working a track or adding too many elements, to maintain a sense of intimacy and immediacy. That tension of intimate and infinite, polished and rough, are elements that we like to oscillate between.
What can you tell me about the visuals that accompany the Red-tailed River EP?
Tim: When we were finishing up the recording, I found an old overhead projector- the kind that I remember my grade school teachers using long ago. I found that it looked really amazing to put colored acetate gels and paper cutouts on it, super vibrant and transportive. That developed into the stop-motion videos that go with each song. Frame-by-frame, I set up these little scenes on the projector, photographed and animated them together. It was a very slow, meditative, hands-on analog process, and a welcome departure from digital media & AI-generated artwork.
How do you find yourself in the music business? When you started out in music, did you know it would be like this?
Chris: I’m not really sure I’d consider ourselves in the music business honestly, we’re more like two dads that pour our energy into creating music to impress ourselves and each other. I hope someone out there enjoys what we create, but we’re not really trying to gain anything from it, certainly not financially. All I really want is for one of our songs to get stuck in your head for a day.
Not trying to sell t-shirts on tour or anything like that.
Who is your favourite musician?
Chris: Probably the first one that takes us on tour, buys a few t-shirts and gives us some money already.
Tim: Ha! There are so many. We have a 19-hour-and-growing playlist that we use to share favorite music with each other, and the range is super wide. From early-70s singer-songwriters like Karen Dalton, to música popular brasileira like Jorge Ben Jor, to contemporary indie artists like Panda Bear, and many places in between.
What are your plans for the future?
Tim: Well, we just recorded a music video together in San Francisco on super 8 film, and now we need to write a song to go with it! We have some new music in the works, and we’ll keep following the breadcrumb trail of inspiration wherever it takes us. We are grateful to everyone who listens and supports!