Summer Salt on Wrapping up Their Year with a Mini Tour and a New Holiday Single “Christmas Cactus”
There is nothing not to love about Summer Salt, the indie pop band that is taking over the southwest (plus the world) one tour and dreamy 60’s 60-inspired album at a time
Matthew “Matt” Terry and Egune Chung decided to form Summer Salt senior year of high school. The pair began working on songs that would later be their hit debut EP Driving Through Hawaii. But a lot has changed since 2014, from welcoming new band members, Anthony Barnett and Winston Triolo, to international tours, the band has only continued to grow. Almost a decade later, Summer Salt's latest album, Campanita, a tribute to the passing of Terry’s sister and cousin, is filled with gorgeous harmonies but also a deep understanding of relationships and loss.
This spring, the band is going on a national tour with Mom Jeans and Hunny, but 2023 isn't over for them just yet. Catch Summer Salt on their mini west coast tour accompanied by Almost Monday, Small Crush, and Togashii to ring out the new year. Unpublished had the chance to sit down with Summer Salt to chat about everything, and there was a lot of it. From connecting to amazing fans, to the less-than-pleasant bumps, scraps and broken bones along the road while touring, it's been a long year. But despite it all, Summer Salt manages to stay blissful throughout chaos.
I opened my laptop and was greeted by 3 out of the 4 members of Summer Salt. “Unfortunately Eugene wasn’t able to make the interview,” Matt explains. Behind him sits Winston and to his right, Anthony. They are zooming in from Matt's house in Austin, TX where they have been since returning from Thailand in November.
Earlier in the year, to promote their newest album, Campanita the band toured through Asia, however it wasn’t as easy going as they had hoped. “We had a really hard tour. It was really tough, so many things happened,” Matt explains. They gave me the rundown on the situation: First Anthony’s guitar broke, then some gear got stolen. Flights were missed and fingers were broken. But they didn’t let those mishaps ruin the tour and with Matt down a working finger, he spent the rest of the tour on stage running around with a microphone.
“I think it was really fun for people that have seen our shows before. It's like, wow, this is cool. There's something new. So it was a good experience for us,” Matt adds.
While on the topic of fans, I posed the question, “What's your favorite thing that you have ever received from a fan?” After a slight pause their heads began to swirl around the room and within moments scrambled to find some notable gifts they have received on tour. As they were busy running around, I sat admiring the bright blue walls which hung an assortment of string instruments and trinkets on a square wooden shelf.
The band regrouped and in front of me laid an array of various items. I pressed my face against my computer screen as they described to me, in great detail, each item they have been gifted.
“I'll tell you my favorite is when we were in Thailand,” says Winston. “We got this [ Anthony holds a small yellow item against the screen] in Thailand, it's a big thing. They are these icy hot, vapor things.”
Later, after a quick internet search, I realized he was describing a Thai nasal inhaler. They are commonly used to help with nasal congestion and make the user feel more relaxed. The difference with these is a fan personalized the inhalers by adding a cut out of each band member's face onto them.
“Our fans overload us with the cuteness a lot, they blow our minds,” says Matt.
[UNPUBLISHED:] You recently released Christmas Cactus earlier this December. What inspired such a breezy Christmas song for people who live where it doesn't snow?
[MATT:] It does kind of snow here.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Does it? I wouldn't know. I've never been.
[WINSTON:] Yeah, like it snows more these days than it used to. You know, global warming.
[ANTHONY:] Texas is not prepared to deal with that kind of weather. It snows really bad once and then you're stuck inside for 4 days.
[UNPUBLISHED:] So not your traditional blizzards and “chestnut roasting by the open fire” kind of Christmas?
[MATT:] Whenever writing holiday songs, it's kind of fun to me to kind of think of things that are unconventional or aren't necessarily like, “Christmas.” So that can be a challenging thing. And it's art. So it can be really hard to write about holiday stuff without being too cheesy or too on the nose. But I mean, my mom always likes giving us Christmas cactus and it's got Christmas in it, so let's make a Christmas song about plants.
[UNPUBLISHED:] So your mom gave you inspiration?
[MATT:] Yeah, my mom, she's got a huge green thumb. All of us have, like, very hippie, hippie-ish moms. Like moms that like plants. [Winston’s] mom sings, write songs. She literally asked my mom to jam out with her one time.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Do you think that your moms inspired the genre of music that you create?
[WINSTON:] My mom definitely got me into music. She basically made me learn how to play guitar at a young age, but I’m really glad she did. So I would consider her, like my biggest inspiration musically from an early age.
[MATT:] Dang, that's so sweet Winston. But seriously, that's cool. That's really cool that she got you into guitar at an early age. I feel like most people, during their teens, pick that up when you're with your friends because you think it's cool or something.
[UNPUBLISHED:] I found y'all, like many, through your hit EP Driving to Hawaii in what ways do you feel as though you have grown and evolved throughout the years?
[MATT:] That was almost a decade ago. There's tons of life stuff and going through our twenties. We're adults now, you know? It feels like it was so long ago and to look back on everything that we've done. From learning so many different things musically: different techniques, different production styles, learning less is more. That's a huge thing. I feel like the more and more the years go on we are trying to not crowd up the music that we write as much. Whereas back in the day, we would add so many things to it just because we didn't, maybe we didn't know if we were doing it right or like we needed to make it sound big.
[WINSTON:] I think stylistically it's kind of evolved over the years. Like with each album, like Campanitia, it has just to me, a totally different feel than Driving to Hawaii. Like it has a Southwestern vibe, you know? Sequoia Moon kind of has its own vibe, like ethereal. Each album has its own style shift.
[MATT:] I think we're going to try to go from where we've been and make some fun pop songs in the studio. They will be just like things that we've done in the past, still us. I think those last two albums, there was a lot of pop, but I wanna try to do some more fun pop songs pretty soon.
[UNPUBLISHED:] Is that one of the things that you're hoping to do in 2024?
[MATT:] Yeah, we have some time set aside to record all of us going in the studio. And other than that we have the Mom Jeans tour and some other special things in the works for later in the year.
[UNPUBLISHED:] I notice that you all have been on tour a lot, which is exciting!!! But what do you do during your down time, how do you balance personal life with your career?
[MATT:] Hmm, it's tough, I don’t know. I feel like we've had a lot of downtime recently. But then it's like the holidays come up and after the holidays we'll go back out on the road, then studio time, then the mom jeans tour. Then there will be a nice break. I think the hardest thing is–I hear this from a lot of musicians, is coming back from tour and then having to adjust back into you're at home life. It can be kind of tough just to get back in routine. There's like, this weird, it's not like depression, but it's like when you come back from tour, it's like you went from like seeing people all the time. Like so many people all the time to then going home. And it's just like the people that are close in your life and they're just living their life. So it can be very tough because you are like, “let's go out and do stuff,” I’m ready to interact and be social.
[WINSTON:] I'm kind of the opposite. We go on tour for a month and when I go home, I don't want to talk to anybody. The hardest part about maintaining the work and home life balance is maintaining relationships. Matt's married, I have a girlfriend, so that's really hard on them. Even when I come home and see my roommates that I haven't seen in a month and a half, it's kind of awkward at first. Like adjusting back to that.
[ANTHONY:] Yeah, it's almost like you live a normal life for about a week or two. When you go back home, you haven't seen your friends, your family, people that are actually in your life that you know, that you care about. At least for me, everybody always wants to do something when you get back home and the one thing that you want to do is have a week of alone time and then you're ready to get back into it. But yeah, it can definitely be a little bizarre, having to get readjusted to the pace of the tour. You're always surrounded by people and you don't necessarily have a real space to yourself. The touring crew we have is amazing. It's just like a completely different way of living for a month and then you go back home. It's actually strange.
[MATT:] You're around the same people for a whole month or at least, like 18 hours of the day. So it's hard to remember. when you get towards the end of the tour that everyone's going through the same thing. The reason that you feel this frustration with each other is that you have been around each other for so long.
[UNPUBLISHED:] You guys got a lot of things thrown at you on tour. But I would say that you guys did a great job. You have one more mini tour and then hopefully some deserved rest.
[MATT:] We're sitting here and we're just, like, spewing all this bad stuff about touring. It’s also really, really fun. You get to meet so many bands and so many different people. And it gives you a refresher into understanding again, why you actually do what you do.
