The Singing Lamb: How are you guys?

Lucas Jensen: Pretty good! We just picked up our tour van from our shop.

Was there something wrong with it?

Lucas: We thought there was, but it just turns out that we were out of gas. I wasn’t involved in that, I was not there for this incident!

Ha! Are you getting ready to head on tour?

Daniel Lawson: We’re a band who plays a lot of shows each year, but we don’t do a lot of touring, in a traditional sense. You know, because of the economy, and a lot of our band members have full time jobs.

What do you guys do?

Lucas: Karolyn is a biochemist for a French pharmaceutical company, Dan is a landscape architect, I’m a publicist, Jeremy owns his own landscaping business and James has been going to school for quite some time.

Yeah, I’ve noticed many of your shows are in and around Georgia.

Lucas: Well that’s not totally true but there are a lot of shows in Georgia. We try to branch out to the north east at least once a year; we’re going there briefly this summer as well as the mid-west a little. We do a lot of stuff on the weekend, so it’s like a ten hour drive.

Any plans to play Toronto?

Lucas: We’d love to! It’s actually not that far north…we’ve never played Canada, have we?

You haven’t?!

Lucas: No, we would like to!

You should!

Lucas: If we could get a booking agent, we would. Someone tried to help us out once but in this economy, taking off a week to front a rock band is not really good for retaining job security. So right now, taking time is kind of difficult.

That’s understandable. You guys recently played at SXSW though, correct?

Daniel: Yeah it was my first time playing there and my first time going to Austin ever. So it was pretty exciting to be there! I got to see a lot of bands that don’t really go through Athens. It’s really amazing to see that many shows in that short of a time period.

Oh definitely It can get a little hectic though, at festivals.

Daniel: Yeah, but you can kind of prioritize. You know most of the bands you want to see are playing more than one show so you just have to organize it because that band could be playing at a BBQ tomorrow, so you can see this other one tonight instead. It kind of works out, I think.

Lucas: It works out but occasionally, you can get off rhythm. It happened to me on Saturday night. I think the only band I saw, after 8 or 9 o’ clock, after I saw Kanye West for a bit through a fence because I couldn’t get into the show, the only band I saw was Third Eye Blind. That wasn’t what I expected but on our way back in the van, we just decided to stop by and watch Third Eye Blind for a little bit. They’ve still got it! Were they big in Canada?

They were pretty big!

Lucas: Yeah I hear that you have your own big bands like The Tragically Hip.

Oh definitely!

Lucas: Who else do you have, the Barenaked Ladies?

Oh yeah they’re still relatively big.

Lucas: Yeah! Anyway, so I kept missing everything and no matter what I couldn’t get into the shows. I missed PJ Harvey, I missed Echo and the Bunnymen; I missed everyone I wanted to see! Waiting in line was a nightmare! Going there and playing was unique though!

So I’ve noticed you guys are on Twitter nowadays.

Lucas: Yeah, I’m on it. I’m the more opinionated one so I probably shouldn’t be. I didn’t realize the value of it till SXSW actually. I guess I wasn’t the only one with an internet-capable phone so it was pretty interesting to be standing outside a club, checking Twitter and have the artist telling you why the show hasn’t started and why it’s not their fault. For example, you know Solange Knowles, Beyonce’s sister? Do you follow her on Twitter?

No.

Lucas: She Twitters everything in her life. What her kid is doing, what she’s eating, what she’s watching – and she’s funny! During her show, we were waiting to get into it and it was 30-45 min late. I checked my Twitter and she was like, “It’s not my fault! I don’t know why I can’t go on! Please forgive me!” I Twitter a lot about torture, the issues with the bush administration; I’ve kind of been up on that lately. Even if I only have 250 followers or something, it’s at least something. Although some people left because of that, so maybe I should stop.

Has Twitter helped with band in any kind of way like MySpace has helped bands?

Lucas: I don’t know if it has yet. I think we sold three copies because of Twitter! That was cool. A lot of what we sell is from us or digital or at shows though. Having a new avenue is good but the problem with Twitter is that I feel like I’m twittering all the time just to keep my name up on everybody’s list and that can be a little frustrating. I don’t think it’s the revolution everyone else says it is it’s just like having a bunch of little mini blogs, it’s not that different.

Let’s talk about your video for “Ryan’s Song.” How was it making that video?

Lucas: It was pretty painful for a lot of it! I think I had a better situation than anyone because I wasn’t in a lot of the early shots; they rolled me in later and I didn’t have to be tied to anything. Karolyn was in that box for the entire day and it turned that she didn’t even need to be in the box! She probably only needed to be in that box for ten minutes but she was in there for three hours! And she was tied up inside!

How long was the whole shoot?

Lucas: Eight hours or something, a lot of it was setting it up though; just getting established. There was a lot of moving around and underneath that blanket, my posture just got so terrible! And I felt like I couldn’t move because I wanted my head to be in the same spot and when they removed the blanket, my gut was just hanging out because I think I slouched over that much. Three hours under a blanket hurts!

Daniel: The slow motion was kind of weird too because they were playing the song really loud at half the speed or maybe slower and trying to sing along to that was weird. It sorted sounded better though; like a goth electronic song! Like Massive Attack or something, it was pretty cool.

And finally, if you were a singing animal what would you be?

Lucas: A red panda. Look that up on YouTube; you’ll end up watching that for hours!

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