Q&A with Trampled by Turtles

Trampled by Turtles is a Minnesota-based folk bluegrass band playing at Memorial Hall tonight as a part of a collaboration between Carolina Union Activities Board and Cat’s Cradle.

Staff writer Katie Hjerpe spoke with mandolin player Erik Berry about the band’s decade together.

Daily Tar Heel: You just released your 10-year anniversary live album, Live at First Avenue. How does that feel?

Erik Berry: Outside of my parents and my sister, that’s the longest relationship I’ve had with anybody. I guess I’ve had some friends for longer than 10 years, but certainly prior to this, my own personal experience with bands was like, you’re here today and gone tomorrow. Suddenly here’s one that lasts for 10 years, and it’s an amazing thing.

Related to that, we’ve been trying to successfully record a live album for about four or five years, so I find the new record to be a double milestone. We actually got it right — it sounds good, and we’re happy with it.

DTH: Did you initially plan for Trampled by Turtles to last as long as it has?

EB: Absolutely not. If you think about it, most of our musical projects fell apart after a little bit because somebody’s always moving or something not musical and not dramatic is happening — because people are living lives.

In this band, actually, (one member) moved away very early off … but we decided to go for it even though we weren’t all in the same community anymore. That was a first for all of us, having a long-distance musical relationship. It works, and there’s another milestone, I suppose.

DTH: How did you discover a passion for the mandolin?

EB: In my musical life I’ve been a guitar player, and I’ve been a bass player. I focused on bass as what I would play in a band because circumstances are that there aren’t many bass players. But I always missed playing chords — after a little bit I wasn’t in any band, so I started focusing on my guitar playing again, but I missed coming up with bass parts.

What I found is that what I liked about writing bass lines I could do on the mandolin, and it was so high in pitch that it didn’t function like a bass part, and then I could play chords on it like I’d been missing. All the musical itches I’ve been wanting to scratch over the last 10 years I can scratch with this thing.

DTH: When and why did you decide to play bluegrass?

EB: When we started out we were just playing acoustic music and didn’t have a drummer — and we kind of didn’t want a drummer. And we were focusing on music from a variety of places that didn’t have drums.

I feel like the beat of bluegrass really worked for us, and it was fun to do. Right away we were playing gigs, and I think people were physically reacting to that. There’s some old Trampled by Turtles songs where we’re playing traditional Irish music and old traditional country-western music, but we don’t really do that approach anymore. We also don’t play bluegrass — we play our bluegrass.

I don’t like to use the word organic to describe it, but sometimes I fail to think of an alternate word. It’s a real graceful, magical process between all of us — it’s real consensual.

DTH: What should Chapel Hill anticipate from you guys?

EB: We are always trying to be very present — when we’re all together playing there is that sort of something special that happens. We’re never going to play a show on Nov. 14, 2013, again. It’s a special moment in time, no matter where it happens to be, and we always try to make the most of that.

DTH: Your last record came out a while ago, so are you guys thinking about a new release in the near future or are you going to lay low for a while?

EB: I think your definition of “low” might be a little different because we’re not going anywhere. Plans are afoot, but they’re flexible, long-term plans.

On some of the previous records there has been different things, and some of them were fairly spontaneous conversations — if a song calls for something a little different, we put it on there.

arts@dailytarheel.com