“I will readily confess that I’m a coffee addict.”
― St. Lucia
“When you work together in a creative way, you have to be less selfish about your ideas and learn to let both parties feel valued. Of course, that’s also a really great quality to have in a relationship, too.”
― St. Lucia
“Generally, when I come to festivals, I just wander freely and see what happens.”
― St. Lucia
“Everyone knows Earth, Wind & Fire. We know ‘September,’ all the big sort of hits from going out and dancing and stuff. When I was developing St. Lucia, I really started listening a little bit deeper, listening back to their stuff from the ’70s and ’80s, and really dug into it.”
― St. Lucia
“We’ve always enjoyed touring, which is fortunate because we’re always on the road. The most difficult part is that time passes by so quickly. It’s hard to pay attention to your normal life because shows are all-encompassing.”
― St. Lucia
“I had to embrace just basically writing and recording on my laptop. On long drives through the Rockies, I would take my laptop and mess around with ideas and make rough sketches of songs.”
― St. Lucia
“The name came about from me just closing my eyes and sticking a pen on a map of South Africa. St. Lucia was the fifth place that the pen landed on.”
― St. Lucia
“The album that really got me interested in how to create weird sounds, and pretty much changed my life, was ‘OK Computer.’ Funnily enough, my parents bought it for me because it was recommended to them, and the first 2 times I heard it, I absolutely hated it.”
― St. Lucia
“One of my favorite things is producing other artists because, in many ways, it’s a lot more freeing than working on your own music.”
― St. Lucia
“You can hear ‘Human Nature’ all over our song ‘Elevate.’ It’s an amazing song. That hooky arpeggio in the beginning is great. Unlike most Michael Jackson ballads, even though I’m a huge Michael Jackson fan, this song is kind of restrained. It’s not a huge, crazy song you can dance to – it’s just this beautiful piece of music.”
― St. Lucia
“I love so many songs from the ’80s, but I’m obliged to the big ones.”
― St. Lucia
“It took a while of performing and pushing the boundaries and starting to involve the audience to feel comfortable.”
― St. Lucia
“The first city I ever came to in the states was Des Moines. I was 12 and was in a boys’ choir.”
― St. Lucia
“It sounds kind of cliche, and a lot of people say it about our music, but I think a good place to hear our music for the first time is on vacation, or somewhere warm, on the beach or something like that.”
― St. Lucia
“The music has a very strong escapist quality to it. In the moment where you feel like you need to escape, or when you are escaping, that’s a good time to listen to ‘When the Night.’”
― St. Lucia
“My favorite pieces that I’ve written, either for St. Lucia or for myself, have always had a transporting quality to them, where they take you out of the moment and somewhere positive that feels nostalgic and happy but sad at the same time.”
― St. Lucia
“I find that when I’m under pressure, I work really well, but then you have those days where you sleep for four hours because you drive to a venue overnight and arrive there the next day, and you’re cranky and not dealing with it very well.”
― St. Lucia
“The longer I lived overseas, the more I appreciated being from South Africa.”
― St. Lucia
“St. Lucia represents, for me, where I found myself musically once I stopped trying to be cool, in some way, and stopped stopping these guilty pleasure influences I had from coming through.”
― St. Lucia
“It is funny to me that people think of St. Lucia as this, like, feel-good band.”
― St. Lucia
“When I’m making the music, the songs that I get most excited about definitely make me feel good, but often, it’s a really good feeling combined with some kind of melancholy element.”
― St. Lucia
“To me, St. Lucia isn’t just purely feel-good; there are these other juxtaposed elements as well.”
― St. Lucia
“I was born in South Africa and lived there until I was 19.”
― St. Lucia
“St. Lucia was a place were we used to go on vacation – not every year, but we went there a couple of times. I remember the last time that I went there, I was really small, and the only memory that I have is that my dad was going swimming or fishing one day – and I really, really wanted to go – but I was too young.”
― St. Lucia
“The ’80s definitely influence my music in a big way.”
― St. Lucia
“A short story can be really interesting and enriching and powerful, but a novel just contains so much more information and richness and depth. That’s what I strive for in my music. I want to create something that’s like a longform statement.”
― St. Lucia
“I like confusing people and challenging myself.”
― St. Lucia
“With Prince especially… he was a really great songwriter and keyboardist and singer and was so good at so many different things, you couldn’t pin him down. That really inspires me.”
― St. Lucia
“I feel like a lot of bands have done amazing covers, but whenever we start working on it, whenever we try it in rehearsal, it never feels right for me to do the song.”
― St. Lucia
“We have such an energetic live show. We have so much fun onstage. We swap instruments. We might possibly be the sweatiest band in the business.”
― St. Lucia
“I like my music to transport people somewhere.”
― St. Lucia
“I think the job of the first single is kind of like being a diplomat for a country.”
― St. Lucia
“I guess you could say it’s one of the great equalizers: that it just feels good to be bad.”
― St. Lucia
“You can’t be 100 percent selfish when you’re working with somebody else.”
― St. Lucia
“I basically work all the time.”
― St. Lucia
“I try to not be self-conscious in my writing process. I think it’s important to just be in your subconscious mind – at least when you’re starting an idea.”
― St. Lucia
“When I start working on an idea, I immediately record without judging it.”
― St. Lucia
“I really believe in albums, even though some people believe the year of the album has passed. I love singular pop songs or tracks, but what really affects me most deeply is if there’s an hour of music or 45 minutes of music that flows really well and tells a story.”
― St. Lucia
“I feel like, for me as an artist, it takes me a while of living with the tracks and living with the body of work to realize what it’s all about.”
― St. Lucia
“I think there’s no way of avoiding the South African or African influence from coming into my music, just because I spent 19 years of my life there. Being a kid, my early musical experiences were there.”
― St. Lucia
“I was in this boys’ choir for five years, when I was 10 until 15.”
― St. Lucia
“Nothing beats looking out to a sweaty, packed house full of fans.”
― St. Lucia
“I was always very ambitious from a young age.”
― St. Lucia
“I was always into things like Boyz II Men and boy bands, and then I got into Radiohead and alt-rock.”
― St. Lucia
“I went through all these different phases. But it always felt like I was impersonating something, so I went back to some of the music I grew up with, like music from South Africa and the ’80s stuff. I stopped suppressing it, and I stopped trying to be cool.”
― St. Lucia
“It’s pretty rare that something I’ve written is close to something that’s pre-existed.”
― St. Lucia
“I’m always very cautious, because I don’t want St. Lucia to turn out like everything else. I want to have a personality and be unique in some way that maybe limits our appeal to everyone in the world but makes us more special in some way.”
― St. Lucia
“I’m kind of a little allergic to that whole, ‘Let’s go to L.A. and write a bunch of hits.’”
― St. Lucia
“We don’t put limits on ourselves.”
― St. Lucia
“You can only absorb when you look back at photos: like when we played Coachella, and there are thousands of people in the audience, and you just walk on stage.”
― St. Lucia
“The reason I decided to become a solo artist in the first place was because I always felt that the results that I got from working as a team where everyone had equal say… ended up with compromised, watered-down results.”
― St. Lucia
“I don’t think I necessarily write about dark things.”
― St. Lucia
“My lyrics are quite train of thought, and they are all over the place, but they evoke something.”
― St. Lucia
“The music I used to make was a lot more rock, so I come from this background of head banging a lot, and it took me a while to figure out how to do it in the context of our music.”
― St. Lucia
“When ‘OK Computer’ came out, that was so crazily different from anything that I’d ever heard; it was just amazing.”
― St. Lucia
“The upside to doing commercials is you have to work in a lot of different genres and make stuff that you never thought you’d be making.”
― St. Lucia
“With my own stuff, I’ve always held to the belief that it should take as long as it takes until it feels right.”
― St. Lucia
“When I left the country to study in the U.K., I suddenly realized, and I’m still realizing, how much other stuff is out there – like My Bloody Valentine, who millions of people are passionate about, but they’re still considered an ‘underground’ band.”
― St. Lucia
“I like to make bombueti, which is basically the South African national dish. It’s basically a South African curry shepherd’s pie kind of thing.”
― St. Lucia
“My secret talent is doing the chipmunk voice.”
― St. Lucia
“I used to do this huge jump off the drum riser. I had a good way of landing so I wouldn’t hurt myself, but then one time, I landed on my elbow.”
― St. Lucia
“St. Lucia in South Africa is this exotic place where you might go on vacation, and it evokes this nostalgic, hazy vibe.”
― St. Lucia
“At a festival, some people are just there because they’re waiting for, like, Calvin Harris to come on later.”
― St. Lucia
“I just believe that you have to allow each other to grow in the way you’re meant to grow and not be afraid of losing that person, because if you grow apart, then you grow apart, and that’s the way it was meant to be.”
― St. Lucia
“It’s easy when you’re working together to let work things overtake your life, when all you’re talking about is work, and you never leave that space.”
― St. Lucia
“One of the secrets of having a long-term relationship is realizing that even if you think the other person’s great, at some point, they’re going to mess up and annoy you.”
― St. Lucia
“It’s important to let things go.”
― St. Lucia
“I was really into Radiohead and Live.”
― St. Lucia
“When I was a kid, pre-1994 was still apartheid, so we didn’t get a lot the subversive music from the States or from the U.K. A lot of the music we would get was the poppiest pop music, so I’ve never really had a bad association it.”
― St. Lucia
“I feel like people associate us with the tropical Hawaiian print because, for a long time, we were wearing a lot of bright colors to exert our personality.”
― St. Lucia
“I feel like Hawaiian shirts have definitely made a comeback.”
― St. Lucia
“In the past, I never wrote any love songs. That was not my thing.”
― St. Lucia
“On the first recording, I wasn’t singing out that much; I was shy with my singing.”
― St. Lucia
“I always like to push the extremes of what anybody thinks St. Lucia is.”
― St. Lucia
“We like to try doing new things in the shows and doing things that we haven’t done before.”
― St. Lucia
“I feel like when you’re in your late teens and early 20s, you just don’t think about certain things in your life, and as you get older, you think about your parents getting older.”
― St. Lucia
“We love the idea of having a really great lighting production.”
― St. Lucia
“Even though we’re really, really happy with what we do, sometimes I think – as an adult, you think, ‘Should I be more responsible with my life choices?’”
― St. Lucia
“We love the idea of really putting on a show. It’s not just a band playing on the stage. There’s a theatrical element to what’s going on.”
― St. Lucia
“Images and music are very connected.”
― St. Lucia
“Hearing about a visual artist’s approach can change the way you think about songwriting.”
― St. Lucia
“When I was a teenager, I never knew anything about art. I think in South Africa at that stage, no one was really exposed to it. There were no museums that had great artists in them.”
― St. Lucia
“I’m very interested in how visual artists think because I think the way that I think about music is similar. I’m very inspired by aesthetics and space.”
― St. Lucia
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