Currently co-headlining a tour with ZZ Ward, Delta Rae has had a breakout year after releasing their debut album, Carry The Fire. The band draws from acapella roots and delivers great harmonies combined with strong backing music. Prior to seeing their show this Wednesday at TLA in Philadelphia, I got on the phone with vocalist Liz Hopkins to talk about the tour and their music. Take a minute to see what the band is all about, find tickets to a show, and check them out!
Stay tuned for the review and photos coming later in the week.
Arin: How did you personally get interested in music and come together with the band?
Liz: I was interested in music from a very young age. I started singing as soon as I learned how to talk and I got on stage when I was in first grade. I was in a musical version of Sleeping Beauty in elementary school and I didn’t really stop performing after that. My dad was a musician; and although he left when I was very young, for the few years that we were all living together, every morning he would wake up really really early and play the piano and start singing and play the guitar, and I was a little girl and I remember going and joining him at the piano and singing with him, so it always felt very natural. I sang in musicals all the way through high school, I was also in choral groups, and I was also in an acapella group which is where I became good friends with Ian, Eric, and Brittany who are the other three vocalists in Delta Rae. So I’ve been doing it my whole life.
A: The debut album came out last June, so what’s it been like to have that out and watch it grow?
L: It’s been really exciting. I think it’s a body of work that all of us are the most proud of in our lives. It’s a compilation of songs that are very, very close to our heart. We all moved in together into a big house in North Carolina kind of in the country, the four of us, to start the band out and those songs are basically about what we went through. A lot of them are about what it was like to start this band [and] what we went through. A lot of them are our personal stories. Ian and Eric have the amazing ability to kind of get inside my heart or my head or Brittany’s heart or Brittany’s head to express an experience that one of us went through, and then later we’ll sing it and personally relate to it so much even though they’re the ones that wrote it. It’s all very close to our hearts and I’m very proud of it.
A: When it comes to the live show, what can people expect to see? Since it’s a co-headline, how are the nights you close different from the nights ZZ Ward closes?
L: I would say that no matter what, we just bring a huge amount of energy. We all are dripping with sweat by the end of our show and I don’t think that changes whether we are opening or whether we are closing. We just… We get wrapped up in it; we want to take the audience with us on a ride. We stomp and we jump and we run around, and I beat up a bass drum on a few songs while singing which is an incredible feeling. It’s incredibly exhilarating. I think people can expect to be taken on a ride.
A: Do you have a favorite aspect of the live show?
L: It sounds really simple, but I just love singing my heart out to people. I love feeling like I can be vulnerable on stage for a moment and sing memories of having my heart broken out to an entire room of people, and I always feel like the entire room knows where I’m coming from. There are always people in the room who are… They make eye contact with me and I can tell that I’m singing their story too. I can tell that they’re going through something that I’ve gone through too, and for that reason, they love the song even more. I love the feeling of catharsis that I get from singing the songs and the emotional release that comes from singing a song that is so intertwined with what your story is.
A: Social media is huge now especially while on the road, so how do you stay in touch and keep people updated?
L: It’s super important and also really fun. Brittany is our wonderful wizard when it comes to Facebook. She’s really great about updating fans with stuff that’s going on on the road and updating them about our shows. Grant, who is our bass player, and myself, we’re a tag team on twitter. We also do Instagram pretty often as well and just recently started using this app called Vine to tweet little videos from our life on the road.