MG&V Interview: SXSW 2010

The term supergroup seems to get overused these days. But when you gather the driving forces behind three rising-star bands on one stage, you make some exceptions for cliches. Such is the case with MG&V. The group gets its name from its three main songwriters: John McCauley, Taylor Goldsmith and Matt Vasquez, lead singers/guitarists for Deer Tick, Dawes, and Delta Spirit, respectively. Joining the trio of frontmen are drummer Griffin Goldsmith, brother of Taylor and drummer for Dawes, and Delta Spirit keyboardist, Kelly Winrich.

MG&V played its first official show as a band at SXSW 2010, and Spinner caught up with Matt Vasquez afterward to talk about the band's formation, their debut performance and the SXSW experience.

How did you guys form?

We're all friends and all in bands about the same size, and we have a lot of the same friends. John was recording and hanging out in Nashville, and he had Taylor come out. Taylor and Ian, John's manager, we were all good buddies. And I didn't really know John too much, but they were like, "Matt, you just have to come out." And I was, like, okay. The day I landed [in Nashville], I had an hour of sleep. We had mixes from the Delta Spirit record and I had to download some programs, so I only had an hour of sleep.

We stayed up until 4AM the night I landed. I cracked a beer on the way from the airport to the studio. We drank until 4AM. Next day, 5AM. The day after that, the sun was up and we had 13 songs in three days. Then we did a little more in the week, and we had 22 songs tracked. We all had so much extra material from records we had been writing and from the experience there. Taylor and John were able to write a lot in that circumstance. And how we set it up was just everybody had at least some part of it. One person's playing bass guitar, another one's playing electric, and switching off .

That seemed to translate well onstage. You all pulled off a few instrument rotations like you had practiced them.

Yeah, we all just had so much fun, you know. And all that stuff's, you know, like muscle memory and drunk recall. It was really fun tonight.

And tonight was the first show? It went really well, and you had a nice turnout.

Yeah, it went great considering. One of the guys that was working at the Ale House or was hired for the night was a real jerk and wanted to fight everybody. He tried to beat up our managers. And we were done before we were even supposed to be done. We actually caught up for them. But that's okay. There's plenty of great venues in Austin. We don't need to go back to the Ale House. Sorry, f--- you, Ale House. You were mean to us this week.

Well, you rewarded us with a great show.

Thanks so much. We had a blast, and the folks that we did get to play for were a total pleasure.

How many shows did you all play this week?

Delta Spirit played three shows, and both Delta Spirit and MG&V did an IFC thing. That was kind of our practice for this.

And now you're hacking up a lung from all of the singing and screaming.

Just no rest. It's cool though. It's been so much fun. We don't expect a lot out of this experience other than just hanging out with friends who've been on tour, so we've had such a blast. You know, everyone's trying to make it big and stuff, and we're kind of happy where we're at. We're not huge or anything, but when we get to play, we definitely see people appreciating it ... those are the people that we focus on entertaining, and it's great.


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