Photos by Scott Russell

By Mark Hagelberg

Hello Kavita is a folk-rock band that formed in Denver in 2007. I caught their show at the Hi-Dive this past weekend and I was able to get a little interview with Corey Teruya, the bands lead singer:

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MH: What bands (past or present) would you say have influenced your band’s sound?

CT: Definitely Neil Young would be number 1… The Beatles, Bread… And then like modern influences would be Grizzly Bear, Wilco, Beck, Bon Iver…

MH: What are a few bands that you are listening to right now?

CT: John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band, Three Dog Night, The Antlers, and St. Vincent.

MH: Since your band got started, how do you think Hello Kavita has changed, or evolved, or grown or whatever?

CT: I think the musicianship has improved a lot. We’ve finally found a bass player and drummer that are on the same page as us, and a lot of the ideas they have fit in perfectly with what Ian and Lucas and I were doing, so its been really easy to write songs and just play music without really thinking about it… which is kind of what you want.

MH: You and some of your bandmates have a recording background. Maybe you can talk about what you like to do in the studio, what your recording experiences have been like in the past, and how that has evolved?

CT: Well, we did the last record on 2-inch tape analog, which was a lot of fun. The process was a lot different because you can’t just go in and edit anywhere you want with Pro Tools or a digital format, you know? So we really had to be on our game and know what we were playing before we got into the studio because if we messed up a take we couldn’t just save it and be like, “well we’ll try another one, and if we like that one we’ll use it,” just because we didn’t have the luxury of a lot of tape.

MH: Yeah..

CT: So it was either we record over the entire take and lose some of those good moments, or we could just keep it, and live with some of the mistakes that we made on the take. And I think doing that kinda made the recording more real.. You know, like less plastic…

MH: Kind of like.. Maybe more…

CT: More organic. Some of those mistakes ended up making the song more interesting.

MH: Maybe it gave it a little bit more of that ‘70s sound that you have, perhaps?

CT: Yeah, absolutely. Because all of that stuff was recorded on analog. And we kinda wanted to make a record the way we perceive bands from that era would make records, in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

MH: Would you describe your band as more of a studio band or a live band?

CT: I think we all have more fun playing live, but recording is a lot of fun because we are recording to a medium that is going to be permanent. And creating something that we can remember is kinda cool- to document it.

MH: Yeah it’s a lot of fun to put a lot of work into something and have a finished product, I’m sure…

CT: Yeah, totally. And just being able to do the creative process, to stop, and just talk things over… You can’t really do that live… I guess they’re both fun, in very different ways.

MH: What are your plans for the band for the immediate future?

CT: We’re just doing a little mini-tour in Utah: Salt Lake and Provo. And then we’re doing a little Midwest tour in the beginning of April. And then in the meantime, we’re just writing new material and hopefully we can put out an EP or something in the summer.

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To hear Hello Kavita’s golden retro sound check out their website or their MySpace page. Their new album To A Loved One is available now on CD and digital download.