For Danny Miller and Max Harwood, their musical journey as Lewis Del Mar is one that is continuing to take on new shapes and layers with each show they lock down. Their debut EP dropped this year and off the back of its release, the duo have already impressed at SXSW and as we were to find out, The Great Escape in the UK. Before their Brighton journey was to take off fully, I sat down with the New Yorkers at a cafe just off Jubilee Street to find out more about how they’ve come to this creative point they’re thriving on presently.
“Before, Dan and I were in this blues rock band,” Harwood says. “It was a lot of fun; you’d go into the basement and you’d just jam and play loud music, drink beer, all that. With this one, I think we took a step back and thought, ‘What kind of music do we want to make and why?’ When you’ve been making music for long enough, you start thinking, ‘What can I give to the world? What am I giving to everybody else, by making this music?’ I think that totally changes your perspective on what you make.”
“It’s been an intense learning period,” Miller adds. “I think that because we’re such a young band, from hour to hour, I feel like something occurs to me differently to try something new – it’s a lot of trial and error. It can be a really beautiful thing; you learn so much about yourself through your art. It’s a very cyclical process, it’s nice.”
A clear direction moving forward and a defined grasp on the sort of music they wanted to make were two things both Harwood and Miller were set on establishing before they even set foot in a studio.
“Max said it explicitly the other day,” Miller says. “When you go to a museum and you see a painting or a sculpture, there’s always a plaque next to it that says who the artist is or where they’re from and exactly why they made that piece of art. There’s so much music that we feel gets made without intention so with this project, we really wanted to make music where the meaning and the overall picture and package created, was very intentional.”
“We sat down before any of this happened,” he continues. “Before we even picked up our instruments, we laid out founding principles of what we were trying to do sonically. That in itself is going to impact what you do in your everyday life and in the way that you treat other people and the way that you react to other things. I think it’s changed our process because when you get down to it, like anything else in life, it’s a balance of those two things.”
Having arrived in the UK just in time for their Brighton showcases, Lewis Del Mar had kicked off their European run of tour dates with a visit to Amsterdam. The tour would have them on the road for a few weeks – a decent introductory visit for the duo who have already begun generating solid momentum surrounding their music.
“It’s very humbling to be here because you’re around some of the best bands in the world.” Miller says of The Great Escape. “I think, when I come to an event like this, I want to see as much music as possible. I want to meet people. I want to soak in the entire experience of being in a really rich community of musicians – it’s a very inspiring place to be.”
“Compared to Austin, this is beautiful and tame!” he laughs. “It’s very nice. You’ve just got to pace yourself and for us, we’re on a long tour, so it’s very important just to take things slow and not burn yourself out. Personally, and this is almost separate, when I go to a different city, I much more would rather walk around and see things, go to a coffee shop, just observe how life there is, rather than run to a museum and then run somewhere else. It fits well with touring.”
While the EP has been gaining some solid traction with positive reviews and increasing crowd numbers at each show, both Miller and Harwood are already focused on backing up the great foundations laid with their debut offering, with their full album release. They’re not taking things too seriously at the moment, however, remembering to enjoy the ride Lewis Del Mar is taking them on, as much as thinking too far ahead.
“They’ve been going well.” Harwood says of recent shows. “I mean, I don’t think we’re going into it with a lot of expectations right now. This particular project is very new; Danny and I have been playing in bands all our lives and we’ve done things with different bands and different tours, but this project is so new that we’re not going in with any expectations.”
“It’s also fun,” Miller says. “We’ve been working on the album for so long and we were putting the finishing touches on it before we left. When you’re doing something like that, you’re very immersed in the core principles of your project and you’re thinking about the big picture of a lot of stuff. It’s fun to be on the road and just take everything one moment at a time. Before we go on stage every night, all we’re thinking about is just playing a solid show and really being in sync with the other musicians on stage. It’s very much about living in the moment when you’re travelling like this and it’s very refreshing. You don’t have to think about the bigger questions all the time.”
A solid show is a goal Lewis Del Mar seem to be nailing each night too; if you follow the band’s updates on social media, recent shows have been turned on their head. Upcoming dates include a return to England in August for Reading and Leeds, while they’re also eyeing up an enviable support set for Foals‘ Lollapalooza after party in Chicago this year.
Closer to home, Lewis Del Mar have sold out the Bowery Ballroom – a feat that’s struck a particular chord with the duo. If they didn’t yet have a proper gauge on how far their music has reached in the past 12 months, this year is certainly going to bringing it crashing home.
“We live in Rockaway Beach,” Miller explains. “It’s about half an hour to 45 minutes outside the city, depending on where you are. It’s this really beautiful, small community. Right now, there are some artists there, but it’s not an artist-heavy community like Brooklyn might be. It’s nice; there’s a lot of isolation to it which, to us, lent itself to us being able to figure out more about ourselves and to make the music we felt only the two of us could make.”
“We just sold out the Bowery Ballroom, it’s a very historic venue in New York – we only have our EP out, so it was really a wild moment! You dream about those things your entire life and then when you’re actually there, it’s such a strange sensation. There’s none of it we take for granted, because we’ve been doing this for so long together; we’ve been sleeping on floors and travelling in Max’s mum’s station wagon, doing all this shit and so when you have a moment like that, it really feels so worth it.”
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Find out more about Lewis Del Mar, HERE.
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