(Scrlett from left to right: Austin Burdick, Cameron Ellerbe, Dalton Kirby, and Barry Simpson)
Interview By: A.G.M. (Life on The Charlotte Scene)
Hailing from Sumter, South Carolina, shoegaze band Scrlett brings their dreamy, distorted, and textured sound across North and South Carolina borders. Loosely founded in 2019, the group of friends, consisting of lead guitarist Austin Burdick, vocalist and rhythm guitarist Dalton Kirby, bassist Barry Simpson, and drummer Cameron Ellerbe, created Scrlett as a means of pursuing their passion for music; the band vicariously serving as a cathartic outlet for both Burdick and Kirby. At their Jambox show alongside bands Daisy Lace and Bluegill, I spoke to Scrlett about the therapeutic release of songwriting, the community found within the local music scene, and, of course–moshing grandmas.
LOTCS: How did you all meet?
Barry: School.
Dalton: We all met at the same high school in Sumpter. I met Austin first, we had almost every class together, and then that same year, I met Cameron–we had gym class, or as I call it, “Naked and Afraid”.
Barry: I knew Austin before [Dalton], because I graduated earlier and became a band instructor.
Cameron: Barry and I were in marching band.
Barry: Yeah, Cameron and I were in marching band together, then I graduated. I wasn’t “hired” to become a band instructor- it was more like “under the table”, basically making 2.50 an hour.
Cameron: Austin became our roommate, and he just practiced guitar all the time. One day when we got back, we were just like: ‘Hey Austin, you wanna jam?’, and he was like, ‘Yea, man’. And he just fit right in.
Austin: I was a fanboy-turned-bandmate.
Cameron: Yeah, it was like camp, we converted him.
LOTCS: You guys had already been a band pre-Covid?
Cameron: Yeah, we came back with a whole different sound: different mindset, different livelihoods. We broke up because of COVID, just ‘cause we were all going in different directions [at the time], and we ended up just coming back after a brief break in everyone’s lives. We were just like: ‘Fuck it, wanna be in a band again?’ I was in a previous band, so I kind of had that introduction to the scene. When we came back, Phillip [of Daisy Lace] had texted me and said: ‘You guys wanna play a show?’, and I was like, ‘Which band do you want?’ and he said shoegaze- and that was kind of like our “In”. Everyone [in S.C.] was just like, ‘We want Scrlett!’ That’s kind of been how we’re riding at the moment.
LOTCS: What are Scrlett’s musical inspirations?
Cameron: All four of us have completely different music tastes, but they’re all different subgenres of each other, so we bring all that together to the table. Like, he [Dalton] takes inspirations from We Are Nothing, and a lot of deep, heavy, shoegaze.
Dalton: I think for a while, we were all sending each other like, Have A Nice Life and Waiting For Burial.
Austin: Just like: ‘Here you go, this is sad as fuck, listen to it.’
Dalton: Barry fucks with Hum.
Barry: Yeah, I like 90’s stuff, Hum, Failure, Shiner. I’m really getting into Doom and Stoner recently.
Dalton: They hate when I play Solo when I’m high.
Cameron: And then Austin’s been getting there recently, but I like faster stuff. Like, for a while, we had this one song called Pillsick, and we just played it so fucking fast.
LOTCS: Was that the last song you guys played?
Cameron: Oh, that was FMT. That’s our heavy hitter.
LOTCS: What does that stand for?
ALL: [Laugh]
Dalton: Do we want to expose it?
Austin: Let’s do “Fuck Mike Tyson”. No actually, “Fuck Margaret Thatcher”.
Cameron: There’s a funny story behind that [song], actually, I was just talking about it: Barry’s taking a shit, and he [Dalton] was in the other room doing his thing, and Dalton showed us a new song. Austin put a lead part on it, and I was like, ‘We need a cool drum intro’, so we did that. And the little effect thing before [the song]–there’s another band called Gollylagging, and they start a song called Purge with that noise, and I was like, that’s cool, and I found out one of Austin’s pedals did that. We ended up just doing the effect, starting the drum intro, and it just became a song. But like, FMT’s developed so much since we first wrote it, it’s been crazy.
LOTCS: How would you describe your songwriting process?
Austin: Uhm…I sit alone in my room, with an acoustic guitar. ‘Cause I have a motto, if I can’t play it on acoustic, I don’t want to play it on electric. So, on the strange occasion we have to play an acoustic set, it’s ready.
Austin: Usually [Dalton] will bring up an idea, he’ll bring up a riff- It’ll start with a riff, and then usually either I’ll add a lead part, or Cam will add drums. It’s whoever catches Dalton in a jam. [Laughs]. I think it usually takes 45 minutes to an hour to structure a song.
Barry: I like to wait until they have their parts written, and then I come in, ‘cause I hate having to redo shit.
Austin: The mood does change sometimes. It sounds like something when you have two guitarists, but then when you add a bassist or a drummer on it, it kind of changes. I have a notebook somewhere with every single song we’ve ever written. Like, the process of it all, it’s pretty neat. It’s hard because this guy [Dalton] keeps it all in his brain, and he doesn’t know how to communicate it, so we’ll be like: ‘Which one is this? What’s the chorus?’, and he’ll play it, and we’re like, ‘Okay…so how do you want it?’
LOTCS: Whats your favorite part of making music together as a band?
Austin: I feel like Dalton and I can agree on this: I feel like when we write shit, we put a lot of emotion, and past experiences, and trauma into it, and then, to play that live, and for people to enjoy it–it kind of like gift-wraps itself. I think the one song that I sing in, it took me a minute to write that one, [because] it was kind of an issue for me, but every single time I play it, it’s almost like therapy.
Dalton: I don’t know, it’s almost like I open the wound, and then stab it a couple of times, and then I just seal it.
Austin: Especially with that finger- he [Dalton] used to like, rip off his fingernail every other show, ‘till it was like a nub, and he just had a bloody finger constantly.
Barry: I guess for me, I have no real emotion to deal with- so I just like supporting other people’s emotions.
SCRLETT: [Laughs]
Barry: I just like expressing their emotions.
Austin: We leave it out on the floor, hot, wet and sticky.
LOTC: So mainly for lyrics, it’s you guys, [Dalton and Austin]?
Dalton: Usually, when I first started writing again, I wrote during break-downs. That was my only time I ever wrote: it was if something was wrong, or I had to get something off my chest. So, we have this song called Pretend It’s Nothing; I went through a really bad eating disorder when I was about 18, and it lasted a couple years. I kind of took that phrase, Pretend It’s Nothing, which is a common phrase when you have an eating disorder, you always say,“It’s fine”. I was like, well, ‘Pretend it’s nothing’- you pretend that [the problem]’s not there… so I was like, y’know, we’ll dish that out. The song Happier Place To Stay , that’s about me wanting to kill myself. Untitled is about rape, Flesh is about… precipitation.
SCRLETT: [LAUGHS]
Cameron: It’s about not liking people, not because of who they are, but…I don’t know. It’s about hating people. It’s great too, ‘cause when we used to play it, and we’d get a really big crowd and everyone was energetic– usually we don’t start with that song, it’s kind of like a second or third– and he [Dalton] would go: ‘This song’s about hating people’, and it would just be like, a drum tap-in, and it was great.
Austin: Usually I like, scream the entire second half [of that song], but I just got back from a festival so I couldn’t really do it–I went to go do it and my voice was just like, ‘you’re not gonna do that’.
Cameron: He [Austin] gets all red, and his bangs stick out, and he stretches out and he’s like, ‘AAAAAH’!
Austin: I think we used to say like, we write really sad lyrics, but it sounds happy. It’s like that ‘Pumped-Up Kicks’ song, it sounds like an upbeat song, but it’s about school shootings or something, I don’t know. That was like the whole gift-wrapping analogy: it’s a’lot of shit that you put in a pretty bow, and you call it a day.
Cameron: One big thing about it is, if someone can actually hear the lyrics- I don’t know if you can hear the lyrics live, but if someone ever relates to it, and wants to come up and have a conversation… I know it’s kind of hard with shoegaze [hearing the lyrics], but I just want to open it up, mental health is very important.
Austin: Honestly, sometimes it’s nice singing a song where they can’t understand [the lyrics].
LOTCS: What’s your favorite part of playing together as a band?
Cameron: Man, the feeling afterward, when you’ve done a really good show, or even a really bad show: When everyone runs up to you and you’re out of breath and you feel like you’re gonna throw up, and everyone’s like: ‘That was the coolest fucking thing! You’re the best drummer, you’re the best guitarist- you guys have the most locked-in sound!’ Like, when we played upstate in Melon Barn in Greer [S.C.], for the first time–it was like the sweatiest, most intense venue we’d played–we had such a huge crowd, and afterward, they were like: ‘You guys have the tightest sound, from soundcheck to the first song, to the whole set’, y’know, and even if I feel like I did the worst, like I did really bad on a lot of the songs, and you’re like pissed off at yourself, you kind of feel better about yourself once you get back to the car ‘cause everyone loved it.
Cameron: So like, when we watch our live sets back on YouTube and we’re like, agh, we messed up here or there, but then, just remembering this one kid was like: ‘No, that was the first time I ever heard shoegaze and I cried’, which is a true story, we were told [that]…we were told that someone broke their leg in the mosh pit; the previous show we played, some guy had to get staples in his head.
LOTCS: Tell me about that real quick.
Cam: Oh yeah, we played FMT [that last song in the set], we were at Daisy Lace’s house playing, and we were like: ‘This is our last song’, and he [Dalton] goes ‘Don’t do drugs’, and as soon as the drum intro went off, everyone’s just pushing and shoving each other, and so then, the drummer for the band Buice in Atlanta [who were on the bill], he just split his head open, had to go to the hospital.
LOTCS: So Scrlett really enjoys playing with other bands, it seems like.
Cameron: Oh yeah. It’s great to see what else is out there, y’know, ‘cause half the stuff I listen to now is just local shit. It’s also just a crazy feeling to go to a show, and to get in for free or for like, 5 dollars, and seeing a band from like, 2 doors down, rather than going to a huge fest where you paid 500 dollars, and you’re sitting in a stadium seat- it’s more of an intimate experience [local music]. You get to meet them [the artists], you get to talk to them, and then, they eventually become fans of yours- and it’s like that Spiderman meme where they’re both pointing at each other.
LOTCS: What do you guys like about playing locally [in S.C.]?
Austin: The South Carolina scene is pretty sick. There’s some really good people who run [the music scene] and organize it…playing out of state is fun because you get exposure in places that you’re not from, it’s exciting, it’s like vacation. Like a work vacation.
Cameron: The only real difference is a long drive. Going out of state, it’s a big pressure, like learning the roads and all the laws and shit. Literally once you cross the border, everyone drives differently.
Cameron: Playing in our home state, we have friends, stuff like that. Playing elsewhere, its uh- we’re lucky we’re playing with Daisy Lace, but if we were playing by ourselves, it’s a little scary going out of state sometimes, [if] you don’t know as many people.
LOTCS: You guys mentioned playing with Daisy Lace a few times?
Austin: Oh yeah, a’lot. We went on a tour with them, I think like a 3-day, 4-day run of shows, back in January. We pretty much went around all of Georgia and South Carolina. With my other band, we kind of like, came up together. Daisy Lace has completely their changed sound, since then. They used to be a Ween cover band. They really got into shoegaze; they’ve kind of matured their sound, and they’re really tight now. It’s really good, we love Daisy Lace. Phillip always talks to me, he’s like ‘Scrlett, come play with us’.
LOTCS: What have been the bands’ favorite shows?
CAMERON: We used to do this thing, where like–we got it from this band called the ‘68, its this duo guitar and drum band. The guitarist makes his pedals go crazy, and he pulls the drum parts slowly while the drummer keeps going- we used to do that quite a bit. We did it one time at Tua Lingua [ a venue in Charleston, SC] on our first tour with Daisy Lace, and we were wearing dresses, it was a weird night, for sure. But it was great, ‘cause that kind of put our foothold in the scene, like, in South Carolina, because we’d never played in Charleston before, and we haven’t played in Greenville a’lot, we’d just kind of just played in Charlotte, in like small little garages and basements. So that was kind of our first venue [show] as a band–just for us to do that, y’know, something different. It was really cool.
Austin: We did this house show in our backyard, and it was our first show ever- and all of our friends wanted to come see us, and they weren’t able to see us in Greenville or Charleston, so they all came to Sumter. So there was-I would probably say 80 to 100 people in maybe a 30 by 30 building. We got done with the third song, and I saw this white-haired woman walk through the crowd: I looked at her, she had this black hoodie on, I was like, ‘There’s an old lady in the crowd’, and I looked at her [again]- and it was my Grandma!
Austin: And it was a hardcore bill– so there’s a bunch of crowd-killers and moshers there, and there’s my Grandma, right up in front! And my Mom was right behind her, and my Dad and my Brother were in the back: Like, they came out unannounced, they did not tell me they were coming. And so, we were about to go into Flesh, which is the one song where I scream, and I knew it was ‘gonna get crazy, so I went over to the mic and I was like: ‘If you hit my Grandma, I’m gonna fucking kill you‘, and then Cameron [on the drums] goes: “TSS TSS TSS”.
Cameron: It was a very intense moment.
Austin: Every Thanksgiving, Christmas, family holiday from then on out- they bring up that story, ‘cause like my Grandma got to have her little moment.
Cameron: The photographer that was there that night, he took a bunch of pictures of us, and they were really good-and then there’s just a picture of his grandma just like, dancing in the pit, she’s like smiling and she looks so happy.
Austin: I’ve gone to shows up in like, Charlotte, Charleston, Greenville- and sometimes, people will be like: ‘Was that your grandma at the show?’, and they weren’t even there. So, my grandma, she’s kind of infamous.
LOTCS: You guys should get that picture and put it on some merch.
Austin: We have one sticker now- I crashed into a ditch, it was literally right by our house- I ran down the road and I got Cameron, and I took a picture of it. So if you go and look at [that sticker], it’s my car in the ditch [LAUGHS].
Barry: And the car is fine.
Austin: Yeah, the car is fine now.
Barry: We just had to get it out.
LOTCS: What do you hope people take away from Scrlett?
Austin: Better yourself. Better yourself for sure, talk about it maybe, find an outlet.
Dalton: Just like: ‘You’re not alone’. ‘Cause like, I wrote these songs for me, I didn’t write them with the intent of, ‘I’m reaching out to someone’- but the more I play them, the more I’m like: if this reaches someone that’s suffered from similar [issues], I would like to open up that conversation. Y’know, to be like: ‘This is how I got better, or how I worked on it–I can help you’. The music’s just there as a little motivation.
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Scrlett’s new E.P, Pretend/Stay, releases this Friday, October 13th. You can keep up with the band on Instagram at @scrlettband.
(Album art credit of @brianstweart1997)
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