Interview: Curtis Roush—The Bright Light Social Hour

Psychedelic Texas groovers, The Bright Light Social Hour, are making their way back to Ybor City this Saturday, April 5th. After making a cannonball-sized splash at 2011’s Tropical Heatwave, presented by WMNF, the band has performed between Tampa and St. Pete over 14 times, including 2021’s Gasparilla Music Festival. TBLSH’s most recent album, 2023’s Emergency Leisure, pushes the band deeper into their exploration of Cosmic Soul, while also giving us glimpses of a return to their earlier album energy. As the band hit the road starting their spring tour, guitarist, vocalist, and founding member, Curtis Roush, took some time to talk with me while I snuck away from work.

JC: Now that y’all are piled back in the van, what does touring look like these days in comparison to the twenty-somethings on the road fifteen years ago?

Curtis: You know, it's certainly more moderate. We're all kind of clustered around our 40s now. Mia is the youngest at 34, so it's like, 34 to 42. So, there's fewer late nights, fewer going out to bars after the show, more getting rest and eating sensibly, less fast food. But we still run the same schedule, so it actually is a little helpful to feel better, to maximize sleep and eat real food when we can.

JC: On the road, have there been any places that have been a surprising pocket of energy or support outside of Texas and major cities like New York or LA?

Curtis: Sure. You know, sometimes they rise and fall. I think a decade ago—if we’re talking past and present a little bit—New York and LA were great places to get a big scene going, but the live music cultures there have quieted a down a little bit. And it could be a variety of factors—cities just change over time. They get a little more expensive to live in, and a little bit harder for artists and musicians to hang out and go to shows and make music and stuff like that. So, we see a shift to like, Denver, and Minneapolis, and Chicago having become our primary live music cities outside of Texas. Early on for us, Florida was like that too. Tampa, from the jump, really opened its arms to us.

JC: Having seen you play several shows over the years, ranging from party-like sets to trance-like sets, do you ever tailor your shows to particular crowds?

Curtis: Sure. You know, some nights you can just tell there’s a more dance-oriented crowd, and we can lean a little more on that side of our sound. And there’s some environments—like if it’s a daytime set at a festival or something, we’ll just kind of lean a little more to the rock ‘n’ roll side. Even though there’s a lot of songs—really most songs—that are bits of both, we’ll kinda tilt it one way or another.

JC: One of the major themes of Emergency Leisure seems to be this kind of optimism and celebration in the face of loss and destruction, specifically in “Prefecture” and “Most High”. Has that always been your outlook when starting new?

Curtis: When we can [laughing]. When we're at our best—the angels of our better natures or some such. Optimism and pessimism for us, even as a band, I think wax and wane. Some of our records are in a good mood, and some of our records are in a bad mood. They were kinda like that from the jump, you know? Our very first album, the self-titled one, is really high in the sky—very optimistic. We were just young men in Austin, Texas, in our mid-20s, playing in an Indie-Rock band. It was super fun—not a care in the world. I think by the time of our second album, we got a lot more interested in politics and culture, and a little more about how we fit into our culture, and what we want to say as artists. And that record might've been a more pessimistic mood, because sometimes when you open your eyes to the outside world, at first, you can fixate on the negativity and the darkness. But that's also a choice, and I think we can get amped up again on the spiritual side of what we do—like trying to make people feel good at a live show, or make a rhythm that makes someone's body move, and just help kind of heal where they're at. I think Emergency Leisure is one of those records, you know? It's really about community, and abundance, and dancing, and taking a break from the world. We're working on some new music right now, and it's probably back to the bad mood—back to the entrenchment of like, we see some darkness and concern, and we’re gonna write some pissed off music about it.

JC: On that outlook of optimism and celebration, did you have that approach when rebuilding the band?

Curtis: Yeah, sure. It was a joyful thing to rebuild the band. I think some of the folks that we were traveling with at the end of the last decade were really tired of touring, and tired of doing the band-grind. Because it’s not just touring, it’s when we're home—to keep up with recording two, to three, to four times a week, and maybe work on the business side one or two times a week—it's really like a full-time-plus-plus job. It’s easy to get burnt out if you don’t take care of yourself and your personal life, and those folks were just ready to go. And we had a community around us of musicians that we were just fond of as friends, and we kinda tapped them one by one, starting with Zac Catanzaro, and linked in 2019. He came on the drums, and being close personal friends of [bassist, vocalist, and founding member] Jackie [O’Brien] and myself, brought a lot of joy to that position in the band—a lot of creativity and new ideas on the drum set. Next, we brought Mia Carruthers, now my wife—was not my wife at the time, we got married last year. She came in on keyboards and singing and brought harmonies back into the focus of the band, and brought a lot of energy there. Then, shortly after, Juan Alfredo Rios came on percussion and brought just a lively kinetic energy to those rhythms that we all find so important to share.

JC: You mentioned leaning a bit more political after your first album, which is a theme I noticed throughout a lot of the singles, like “Tear Down That Wall”, “Guillotine Billionaires”, and “The Sheriff”. How does the approach differ with those more political songs that stand on their own outside of an album?

Curtis: I think we found it a little bit difficult putting explicitly political songs on longer form albums. Usually, we’re trying to tell a story throughout the whole album, or some kind of larger narrative concept, where really specific political things would kind of break you from the trance of the record. So, a lot of those songs have found their place in singles where I think they work a little more effectively. The band has a pretty easily agreed upon set of core values that makes it easy for us to make political art, because we all kind of see eye-to-eye on some basic issues and values. It’s been with us as an aspect of our writing from day one. I think our records can be political too, but usually political in more oblique ways—more conceptually.

JC: I came across an interview in which y'all said the Rolling Stones’ “Miss You” has kind of been your North Star.

Curtis: [laughing] Yes.

JC: Which I can totally see—in the Disco drumming and Blues guitar—but are there any influences specific to Emergency Leisure’s synth, or vocals, or the recently introduced percussion?

Curtis: Yeah, absolutely. We are all also students of dance music—from all eras. Funk, soul, those big band arrangements of the late ‘70s—like The Gap Band or Parliament—where everybody is doing this little dancey thing that connects like a puzzle to make one very funky rhythm. And we’re big fans of Electronic Music too, so on the synth side, building some sequences, and arpeggios, and textures on synth pads comes a lot from our love of House and Techno and Ambient Music. I feel like a lot of that kinda peaked in the ‘90s for some of us—Apex Twin, Chemical Brothers, the Dance Remix culture, Industrial Music—all that kinda stuff.

JC: I've also noticed y'all have been playing a couple of new songs lately. Are those being built towards an album or are they going to be more standalone singles?

Curtis: Yeah, we're pretty deep into an album at this point. We have—I think—14 songs in the in the hopper at the moment, all nearing completion. So, it's really getting to that point where we're starting to play around with sequences. We’re kind of in that stage of building the narrative across a set of songs and making a coherent album come to life.

JC: One last question about one of those new songs: Besides the best al Pastor in Austin, what can we expect from “Tacos El Charly”?

Curtis: [laughing] We were just kinda transfixed. There’s a couple things behind that song for us. Obviously, it’s our favorite taco joint to check out, and it's really iconic in a number of ways. They have an LED sign that they purchased for their trailer and they have not yet programmed it to say anything, so there's just a default “LED sign” that sort of flashes over. This place is absolutely slammed, to the point where merchants started selling their wares in the parking lot. We love this place, and it tickled us. We also have this big love of that song, “Low Rider”, by the band, War, and the story of that song. One of the band members just walked into the studio on a day when they're just jamming on a rhythm, and he had recently purchased a Lowrider, and was starting to kind of get embedded in that ‘70s, Los Angeles, Lowrider scene. He just stepped into the booth and had a simple few lines to say about his Lowrider. We loved how simple, and pure, and what a good vibe that is, so “Tacos El Charly” is a bit of homage to that kind of song.

JC: Well, I can’t wait to hear it.

The Bright Light Social Hour will be playing at Crowbar in Ybor City on Saturday, April 5, 2025 with support from local Florida psychedelic bands, Liquid Pennies and Florida. Doors open at 8:00 PM, show at 8:45. Tickets are available at www.crowbarybor.com.

Interview by J.C. Roddy