Fans don’t know whether to dance or act out at a Cliffie Swan show. And that’s just fine with Sophia Knapp. Her philosophy: Let ’em do whatever they want.
“I like a rowdy audience,” says Knapp, who plays guitar and shares lead vocals in the Brooklyn trio. “Last time we played at Union Pool, there was a guy at the front of the stage air drumming throughout the entire set … Some people will make out during the slow songs. I really enjoy a show where people can cut loose, so that’s always a pleasure.”
No wonder the crowd’s all over the place: Cliffie Swan contain multitudes. Knapp’s long been obsessed with psych-rock; drummer Linnea Vedder, the group’s other lead singer, shoots from the soul. But Memories Come True (Drag City) is best experienced as ’70s soft-rock threaded with mid-’90s distortion. Think Fleetwood Mac with a Breeders chaser.
It’s their first release as Cliffie Swan, but Knapp and Vedder spent much of the past decade playing as Lights, with two albums to their credit.
“It’s not a completely different band, but we just felt that it [was] appropriate to have a change to kind of mark this new phase,” Knapp explains.
There’s a simple explanation for the name change—avoiding confusion with a Canadian musician who plays as Lights—but there’s more to it than that. “The band had been through a lot of mutations throughout the years,” Knapp says.
She and Vedder started playing together in 2004, and with the help of a succession of bassists, they turned their once-sparse sound into something heavier than their feathery vocals would suggest. Now that Knapp splits her time between Brooklyn and Austin, songwriting’s a solitary endeavor, but everything jells when the band comes together in the studio and to play live.
Whatever the crowd’s doing, the ladies on stage are ready to put on a show—with fashion rather than pyrotechnics. “What you wear, that really reflects your mood,” says Knapp. “And the music is pretty fantastical, so it feels natural to wear something flamboyant to sort of match the energy level of the songs.”
—M.J. Fine
