Superchick Interview

July 2, 2010
Creation Northeast Festival 2010

Superchick has been supporting the campaign “Operation Beautiful.” What is this campaign about, and how did the band become involved with it?

Tricia Baumhardt: Matt’s a huge supporter of it.

Matt Dally: Yeah I’m a big supporter. I found this girl’s blog on the internet and I was just really impressed with the fact that she’s big on empowering young women-

Tricia: He’s lying right now.

Matt: -to be beautiful. What she does is she takes little sticky notes and puts them on bathrooms, or any other place, that says stuff like “You’re beautiful”…

Melissa Brock: …just the way you are.

Matt: So it kind of just makes you smile. When I go into the girl’s bathroom-

Melissa & Tricia: *laughs*

Matt: -and I see sticky notes that say “You’re beautiful,” it makes you feel warm inside.

Melissa: No, but seriously…

Matt: That was a pretty good answer, even though I’ve never answered it.

Melissa: He is pretty close though.

Tricia: Somebody from our label actually just happened on this girl’s blog and found this chick and she had a ton of followers. I don’t remember how many people were following her but, it started out she just blogged and she started thinking it would be cool to leave little notes in places to make people smile. She started posting pictures that she would take with herself and she would write a little note on a mirror. Her blog grew so much because girls thought it was so interesting and girls started doing it and sending her pictures of what they were doing. So it ended up, she started a website and kind of started this whole thing.

Matt: She helped start a revolution really.

Tricia: She doesn’t sell anything; it’s not to raise money. It’s purely to make people smile. So, we started doing it. She uses our song “So Beautiful” on some of her video montages where she shows a bunch of people from all around the world that are sending in pictures of their way of making someone smile. We try wherever we go to take little post-its and leave them and take a picture. So, we were just in Europe and we did it there. It’s a little way to do a good deed and make someone feel good about themselves. To remind them “smile, you’re beautiful.” It’s kind of those simple things in life I guess. But I think it’s interesting that so many people have gravitated towards it. You want to think that there are good people who want to make someone feel beautiful or make someone feel special. And there are; they’re all over.

Superchick recently released its second remix album. What made the band decide to release another one?

Matt: I think it’s almost been a trend where after we do two full-length records and say, “Wow, there’s a bunch of songs that we did that if we had more time we could’ve done this better or done this differently.” And so, luckily, we own our own studio and kind of do everything ourselves. So we have the opportunity to constantly go back. But there’s times when we turn a record in and right when we turn it in we’re like, “Oh, we should have done this.” And Max goes to work and starts writing a remix. So, it’s something that’s fun for us. It’s really cool to able to take a song that maybe we felt like, “Wow, this is such a fun, poppy song. How do we make people hear the seriousness of this lyric?” Sometimes it’s just darkening a song or having a serious song and making it more poppy. It makes it a little more fun. I think, for our music, our lyrics are very serious and sometimes people mistake it for the pop music that’s behind it- that it may not be as powerful as it really is. But it’s funny when you change the music how lyrics start popping out, and how themes start popping out that sometimes you didn’t even realize like, “Wow, that lyric is deep, that’s a deep song. That’s not just a little pop tune that was fun to write.” So it’s cool. And there’s new songs too, which is always exciting- to be able to put new material out there.

Tricia: There’s three new songs, and we’re working on the next album.

How is the process of recording a remix different than recording a regular song?

Tricia: What’s cool is you keep all the lyrics and pretty much the vocal melodies. There’s kind of a freedom about it because when you’re originally writing it’s like, “Okay, well do you like that guitar part?” Because everything you put kind of changes the song. With our band, we tend to triple guess ourselves like, “Here’s another take, I added this guitar. What do you think?” And you really have to decide- like, “I’m shaping the song.” When you do a remix album, you get to take it apart and have fun with it. It feels like there’s a freedom of like, “This isn’t the original, we’ve already got the original, but now we get to have fun.” So I feel like the boys take chances that they normally wouldn’t and go edgier on things- more punk or more rock or more hip-hop, because they can. It’s expected to be a little more dramatic on a remix album. It feels like playing, so it’s a lot of fun.

Do you play any of these remixed versions live?

Tricia: Yeah, actually our last remix album, the “One Girl Revolution” that we play live is from the remix album. And we’re playing a couple of the songs when we play them live.

Matt: We think the remixed versions are better sometimes. A lot of times when we play a song, if there is a remix version, chances are we’ll play that.

Tricia: Or maybe it’s new and we’re tired of the old version. But I think it’s cool for the crowd to hear a song in a new way. So even if they’ve heard it one way on an album and we play the remix they can still sing along. But they’re like, “Woah, that sounds totally different!” So it’s kind of cool; it gives them something new.

Melissa- I hear you’re writing a book titled Courage. How far along are you with that, and can you tell us what the book is about?

Melissa: It was just about a month or so ago that I setup the email for people to write in. And I’ve gotten so many emails, so many stories and things like that. So right now it’s just the sifting through process. I met with a woman who works with Mercy Ministries in Nashville and she deals with eating disorders. So she’s kind of helping me with the actual writing process because she’s written some books and she’s knows a little more about it- kind of how we’re gonna incorporate stories into my stuff. I don’t want it to be just stories; I want it to have help in it like, “You can read this and then here’s some things you can do if you’re in this situation. Here’s some websites you can go to or here’s a number you can call.” I don’t want it just to be like, “Well, here’s some cool stories for you.” Someone who’s really in a desperate situation, they need to talk to someone. So, I want it to be kind of a well-rounded book. It’ll be finished hopefully by the end of this year.

Melissa and Tricia, you both traveled to Uganda earlier this year, what did you guys do down there?

Tricia: We went with Compassion International. My sister Melissa has two kids down there that she sponsors, so they kind of try take artists and let them meet the kids that they sponsor, if they can. She went there one other time, so we went and she got to see them again. We were there for five days and we went to see all these different projects. They have projects where they’ll have classes to teach women who are pregnant- how to have a clean, safe pregnancy, and then health- how to take care of their kids and make sure they’re getting enough nutrients. So many people there get sick and they die because they don’t go to doctors. So, it’s like basic stuff that they’re teaching these mothers to keep their kids from getting malaria. Every day we would go to a different project, one was with kids and mothers who had AIDS. So Compassion gives them food and medicine to keep the AIDS on hold. They can live a decently long life on it. It’s amazing to see in these little villages, like maybe fifty kids would be in the sponsorship and how different there lives are from the other kids in the village.

Melissa: The biggest purpose of these trips is that when we’re out there at shows trying to get people to sponsor these kids, we’ve seen that it really does make a difference. We’ve seen first hand that the projects really do exist. And we’ve seen the kids that have food on their table everyday because of somebody’s sponsorship. It’s a cool experience to get to see. We’ve worked with Compassion for five years, so we believe strongly in what they do.

Tricia: You stand on stage and talk about it, and they [Compassion] want you to know that you’re not talking about a myth- like a check goes somewhere and maybe a kid gets it. But these families, usually the kid you sponsor, the whole family can have enough food because of the help that Compassion does. So it doesn’t just affect them, it’s the whole family. And they do it all from a local church, so that family can see the church helping them. It’s not just like these rich people from the United States, you know? And they also help them start businesses. A lot of the women make jewelry and things like that. So sometimes Compassion will give them a small business loan that they pay back to start up a business selling vegetables or fruit in their town. It’s really neat. It gives them a chance to step out of poverty. Most of them don’t have enough money to ever consider starting a fruit stand. But with a little help they do, and then they pay it back and they keep going. So it’s really neat.

Any tour plans for the fall?

Melissa: Yes, a Reinvention tour.

Matt: It’s us, Manafest, Me In Motion, and Bread of Stone.

Tricia: Yeah, so we’re excited. We don’t have all of the dates yet, but look up our website; come see us!

From L to R: Tricia Baumhardt, me, Matt Dally, Melissa Brock, Chase Lovelace