Bands Through Town
FINDING BALANCE WITH st. lucia
story & photo: cory weaver
It’s always an interesting time negotiating interviews at Austin City Limits Music Festival—finding a semi-quiet location with bands playing all around you, the heat and the shortness of time to try to squeeze out five questions with a band while their manager hovers. Finding the balance to accomplish a well-done interview is all about timing and commandeering an unused media tent that has a fan.
Decked out in matching red button-down outfits and black hats, we sat down with Jean-Philip Grobler and Patti Beranek, the duo that defines St. Lucia, and talked about maintaining the balance of music, marriage and family. Within minutes, I knew that St. Lucia would be on the cover of our print edition.
In 2012, after dating for 10 years, Grobler and Beranek married and released their first, self-titled EP. Fast forward 12 years, and St. Lucia’s discography includes four albums, they’ve added a couple of kids, and they currently reside in Berlin. To say there have been several chapters in the life of St. Lucia would be an understatement. The duo’s sound has evolved both musically and personally in that timespan.
“Oh, god, it’s been a long journey since When The Night, it’s been like 12 years or something, right? It’s funny, because I always say, whatever chapter we’re in in our life, I feel like musically or personally, it’s kind of a time capsule that we capture, you know,” Beranek said. “And I feel like we both like a lot of different kind of music, and we both have a lot of eclectic kind of classic taste—so it’s hard to say, ‘Oh, this is what it was then, and this is what it is now.’ I feel like there is a through line of where it comes from, that binds it all,” she continued.
"I’ve always wanted to be a mom, and I love being a mom, and I think it’s part of this journey together. It’s challenging, I think, because we’re both in this together."
-Patti Beranek
Time is fleeting, and capturing it in an album is the best way to encapsulate a copious amount of time versus a moment. In the age of ordering something and having it at your door the same day, music output has adopted the same behavior.
“We’re definitely focused on making albums—like that’s what I grew up listening to—that’s what affects me mostly. Obviously, I love individual songs, but I feel like a lot of the best songs come from an artist working from the perspective of a bigger whole,” Grobler said.
“You know, to me it’s a bit like gardening,” he explained. “I mean, you’re sort of planting all these seeds around, and the plants are kind of growing, and then, you know, it’s all beautiful. But then there’ll be the one, like, really, really beautiful flower. That’s kind of like the single that you release. And so, we’re always coming from an album perspective.”
And perhaps their newest single, “Fear of Falling,” is that moment that St. Lucia happened upon. It’s a culmination of feelings that hit you all at once when you have a child—time stands still and then, your life sort of flashes before your eyes and you wonder where you’ll be with them 20 years from now. “Fear of Falling” will hit a listener who has children differently than the ones who don’t, I suspect. It’s a track chock-full of fear and hope, wonder and expectation. “The magic of that time inspired this song, which to me always makes me think of lying under a blanket of stars on top of some mountain with my kids when they’re older,” Grobler expressed.
Later that day, on the IHG stage, St. Lucia played “Fear of Falling,” coincidentally, the same day it was released. Written over five years ago after the birth of the duo’s first child, the group shelved the song. “It just didn’t feel ready,” Beranek said. Grobler added, “It’s the first time we’ve ever released a song and played it for the first time live, fearful!”
Just as “Fear of Falling” seemed to go against the duo’s grain, their preceding disco-inspired single, “Falling Asleep” (also being played for the first time live at the festival) didn’t exactly align with the album either. Releasing two stand-alone singles may seem like waving your hands in the crowd—signaling to someone trying to find you—versus the pomp and grand announcements that come with a new album. But for St. Lucia, it felt like the right thing to do.
“We had to make a call. Okay, well, these two don’t quite fit on the album that we’re releasing, so let’s, like, release these standalone things. I think almost every song that we’ve released ends up on an album somehow apart from these two,” Grobler expressed. “We basically decided to not have [those songs] on an album, that they’re essentially standalone singles because we had, like, just so much material that we felt really good about that.”
Grobler added, “I do wish that people could hear the album first, obviously, you know? But it’s like…you got to release a trailer before you release the film, unfortunately, to market it to people somehow.”
“Falling Asleep” has a catchy disco vibe that this interviewer embarrassingly mistook for samples. “There’s no samples in it at all,” Grobler kindly educated. “It’s all real live strings that we recorded in Berlin with these amazing string players (Jean-Louise Parker and Jonathan Dreyfus) in these old, orchestral halls that they built in the ’50s. And, yeah, it’s just, it’s all, like the band playing, us singing, but it has that vibe, you know.” He added thoughtfully, “But, it totally could be a sample.”
“Falling Asleep” has a dreamy intro, then you’re hit with breakneck-paced violins interlaced with Grobler’s airy, echoed vocals—eventually the breakneck pace is knocked down to half-speed—serving as one last end-of-summer dance party rager.
Beranek added, “I think, like, we can have one song on there that is, like a love ballad, and then one that’s like a synth shred or something, you know? I mean, it could be completely different, and it might not fit, maybe it shouldn’t, because of the place where it comes from.”
"I’ve worked with huge mixers before, like really big ones, and you sometimes get the feeling that, like they think they have the ears, and you kind of don’t have the ears, and so… they don’t necessarily trust your opinion."
-Jean-Philip Grobler
One constant throughout the band’s album mixing process has been the talented Chris Zane (The Walkmen, The White Rabbits, Passion Pit, Geographer, Tokyo Police Club and Mumford & Sons). “We’ve worked with him on every album,” Grobler said. “I’d say, half of When the Night was mixed by him and our friend Andy Baldwin. Then I produced Matter together with him, and then…our last album, Utopia was mixed by him. And now all of our upcoming music was mixed by him.”
“We just have a great working relationship. What I love about Chris is he has, like, no ego when it comes to his work. I never get a sense of like something I’m telling him is annoying him, you know?”
There’s a passion in Grobler’s voice as he describes his relationship with Zane—like he’s part of the team, even after the band leaves the studio and the album is finished. “I’ve worked with huge mixers before, like really big ones, and you sometimes get the feeling that, like they think they have the ears, and you kind of don’t have the ears, and so…they don’t necessarily trust your opinion,” he said. “Whereas with me and Chris, we have such a good working relationship, he’s totally open to anything that we say, and he’ll always do his best to accommodate what we’re asking.”
Just after Matter, the couple welcomed their first child and during the pandemic, their second. Beranek explained, “I’ve always wanted to be a mom, and I love being a mom, and I think it’s part of this journey together. It’s challenging, I think, because we’re both in this together. So, this is really difficult. Because on one hand, it’s super beautiful, especially when the kids were really small, we could go on tour with them, or could do everything together. Now, [our oldest] has started school, and it’s like, yeah, what do we do? One of us always has to make a sacrifice.”
The balance between being a parent and being a creative is a jagged edge. Being present as a parent, making music and creating art as a way of life, coupled with maintaining a sense of individuality, and as a couple and as a family unit is a layered mindset.
“A very different mindset, yeah. Being a parent and being in the parent space and being creative and sometimes it’s, I mean, we have to do so much social media stuff these days, you know what I mean?” Grobler said. “I can’t!” Beranek exclaimed. Grobler continued, “I mean, I take care of basically all of it, you know. And it’s sometimes like, you’re just having a great moment with your kid, and then you’re just like, but I have to come up with a post for today. It’s a challenge, absolutely.”
When I first heard St. Lucia’s “Elevate” on 96.5 The Buzz while living in Kansas City in 2013, I was immediately hooked. The multi-layered lush instrumentation, captivating synth and passionate, storytelling vocals from a classically trained singer (Grobler) that you feel could project sans microphone is a rare treat from a group placed in the “pop” genre. The duo’s danceable, synth-pop ballads are ever present, still channeling ABBA, Bowie and other ’80s inspirations like Talk Talk, Roxy Music and Phil Collins.
Grobler wrapped up our time together with, “I feel like all those influences come out at different times, but I feel like the thing that ties it all together is there’s always kind of this feeling that, at least for me, from my perspective, I know that I’m always trying to sort of capture, and it’s not a conscious thing. It’s almost like describing life in its totality through music, in some way, the way that I see the world, you know. In its joy and sorrow and good and bad and all these different things, and in some way that you know, that joy wins out over sorrow in the end. To me, that’s kind of what ties it all together.”