Interview: Catching Up With Silver Liz + Watch “Microwave S’mores”

Earlier this summer, Chicago-based duo Silver Liz graced us with their hazy new single “Microwave S’mores.” The gleaming guitars and the intertwining vocals of Matt & Carrie Wagner carry you away.

To get to the scoop on “Microwave S’mores” and the latest from Silver Liz we set up a (very socially distant) interview. Check it out all out in the space below and visit the band’s Bandcamp page for more.

Hi, Silver Liz! Congrats on your new single. Can you tell us a little more on who you are and how you first got into making music?

Carrie: Hi! Thank you so much! Matt and I met during our freshman year of college in a music practice room when I overheard him talking with a friend about The Strokes, so music has pretty much been a bonding point for us from the start. Silver Liz started in 2016 not long after we got married and moved to Chicago, but Matt has been writing and recording his own music since he was 16.

Matt: When I was in high school, I started making music because I was really inspired by the local bands and musicians where I grew up, in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. My favorite local band was called Siamese Dream, which was comprised of these two guys Dane Adelman and Brandon Locher who would write and record these amazing eclectic lofi pop albums in one weekend. I still think those albums contain some of the most interesting songwriting I’ve ever heard and I try to maintain that spirit of fun experimentation in my own creative process. Brandon also curates an archive of work from artists with ties to Johnstown called My Idea of Fun. A lot of records found in that archive from 2007 – 2012 are definitely what inspired me to create my own work.

What’s your songwriting process like? Who are some of your biggest influences?

Carrie: Our songwriting collaboration first started out as Matt asking me to sing and write lyrics overtop of some songs he wrote, and those songs eventually became Silver Liz’s first album. In 2018, I started teaching myself the guitar and writing songs. About half of the songs from the new album are written by me, with the other songs either written by Matt or a collaboration between us. So, genre-wise, our upcoming album is shaping up to be fairly eclectic.

Some of our biggest influences include Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine, Elliott Smith, Alvvays, (Sandy) Alex G, Sufjan Stevens, and Japanese Breakfast.

How did you arrive at the idea for the music video?

Matt: I really just like the idea of creating garish, surreal images that will get stuck in the viewer’s head. I wanted to make something like a weird dream—something absurd with no obvious meaning, allowing the viewer to come up with their own interpretation in order to resolve any weird feelings the video caused them to feel. I guess that is kind of a Lynchian thing to do. As far as the idea for the actual scenario in the video, I’m not sure how I landed on that idea in particular. For whatever dumb reason, I had the image of someone being wrapped up in foil on a beach in my head for a few years now. The first line of Microwave S’mores is “I’m not having fun”. So, it seemed like the perfect song to go along with an image of being wrapped up in foil on a hot beach, which is obviously not very fun.

Any new Chicago-based artists/venues/purveyors of the arts you could turn our readers onto?

Matt: The Chicago experimental music and sound art scene is always really inspiring. Artists here are always making forward-thinking ideas happen and are generally also super supportive and nice. In January, this DIY venue called Elastic Arts installed a 16-channel speaker setup, a huge 4X4 lattice of these speakers hanging from the ceiling. I went to the first show using the system and it was incredible. It was a very immersive audio experience and people could walk around and explore different pockets of sound while drinking a beer.

We’d also like to give a shoutout to Drew Flippin, who plays drums on the new single and also makes his own music. He released a mini-album last year, which Matt co-produced. The music video for his song “Nobody’s Fool” is hilarious and really well-done (unlike ours, his was actually made by a professional).

Where can we follow you and where can our readers catch you live next?

Carrie: Anywhere streaming is available! At this point we don’t have shows or tours coming up, but we plan to perform around Chicago as soon as things get back to normal, and eventually we’d love to tour.

Any parting thoughts? Open platform!

Thanks so much for the interview and for the kind words about our single! We’ll be releasing more music throughout 2020, and hope to release our second full-length album at the end of the year or early next year.

Also, we have been matching and donating all our Bandcamp proceeds to different organizations. When we released this single, which was before the murder of George Floyd, we were donating our Bandcamp proceeds to the MusiCares COVID-19 Relief Fund. Since June 5th, when Bandcamp announced they waived their fees that day, we began double matching and donating all proceeds to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Because we have full-time jobs and music isn’t the primary way we make our income, we wanted to use our platform (even though we have a small audience), to give back in any way we can.