by Nicky Tcherven
Nicky Tcherven: Straight off the bat, where are you from, what’s your name, and your role in the band?
Tristan Kelly: My name is Tristan, I play bass [in Shallowater], and I’m originally from Lubbock, Texas, same as our drummer. Our guitarist, they’re originally from Booker, Texas, which is about three hours north of Lubbock, Texas. [It’s] up in the panhandle of Texas, kind of in the middle of nowhere.
NT: Is Arlen a real place like Arlen, Texas? (Note: King of the Hill reference)
TK: Yeah well it’s based on a Dallas suburb, I forget which one it is, but it’s like one of those local suburbs around Dallas but like the people in the show [King of the Hill] are very much more like the people that I like grew up around.
NT: Oh shit in like in Lubbock?
TK: Yeah, West Texas just has its own vibe. It’s basically where the Midwest of America starts, and that’s kind of the vibe of King of the Hill. It’s a weird place, but we all live in Houston now, we moved in 2022. We’ve all been living here for about three years, and it’s definitely a lot different. It’s nine hours away [from Lubbock], anywhere else that’d be like multiple states away but in Texas it’s just so fucking big.
NT: What kind of genre would you say best fits Shallowater?
TK: Well, what we wanted to do was make like a slowcore project, but since we’re from Lubbock, I didn’t even see my first show, a concert, till I was like 17. So we were all pretty far removed from the current scene. We were pretty unaware that shoegaze and slowcore were a big deal. We initially aimed for slowcore, but it ended up being more country. We mixed in elements of shoegaze, and I think that isolation made us a little bit different than like other slowcore and shoegaze bands.
NT: True, I was gonna say, when I saw you guys, it reminds me a bit of Wednesday, kind of like country shoegaze a bit.
TK: For sure, when I discovered Wednesday and Jay Linderman that definitely blew my mind. It made me feel like I wasn’t insane. It felt a lot better to not feel like I was the only person doing this. We all felt that way. We were like, Is this a viable thing? Is this something we can actually…are we like trying to reinvent the fucking wheel right now? But it was a huge relief to find out there were other people currently doing it.
NT: That’s sick man, they’re also from a southern state, too, right? They’re from like Tennessee, right?
TK: No, they’re from North Carolina, up in Asheville. We actually recorded our second album with the producer that has made all the Wednesday and all the Jay Linderman albums. I just dug into them and wanted to figure out everything I possibly could. It just led us to recording with Alex Farrar.
NT: Where does your name come from?
TK: So Shallowater is the name of a small town outside of where I grew up. It has a population of like 900 people. There’s nothing but a Sonic fast food restaurant and a couple of gas stations, and some houses. The rest of it’s just fields, but it’s right outside of Lubbock. I grew up always seeing like the exit on the highway to go to Shallowater, Texas. I always liked the way it was spelled out; it looks cool. We changed our name up a lot when we first started. We decided on Shallowater, that one that one stuck.
NT: What are your biggest influences?
TK: I mean, if you ask me, you’re gonna get a lot of shoegaze stuff and like the og math rock stuff. Blake is super into like old country and Smashing Pumpkins. Ryan’s into prog rock, and I feel like you can hear that within all the music. My personal influences would be bands like Codeine, and Tortoise. In a way, at the very beginning, when I started learning bass when I was like 22 it was American football [that got me into it]. I wanted to make songs that had that feeling. I didn’t want to make Midwest emo, but I wanted to bring out that feeling that you got when you went to do an American Football song.
NT: What’s your most hated band?
TK: [Laughs] It’s so tough because I hate so many bands. I think right now my most hated band would probably be Nine Inch Nails. I tried so many times to get into Nine Inch Nails, and I just don’t get it. I didn’t get it like at all. I see the t-shirts everywhere, but I just don’t understand how you can listen to that. It’s like someone saying their favourite food is like artichokes or some shit.
NT: How was your tour?
TK: It was fucking sick. That was like the first time we’d ever really headed out in a big way. Because we get stuck in Texas, just because it’s so big. You can do a whole tour in Texas. Bands would come through, and we would do the San Antonio, Houston, Austin, Dallas, route with bands, and then they would drop us off and keep going on to California. World’s Worst was the first band to ever take a shot and take us out around the country. It was an absolutely life-changing time in my life. It was the coolest thing I’ve ever done. I’m glad that like we waited a little bit before we did it. It was a lot of build-up, and we kind of had a little bit of a following before we headed out. Going out there and meeting people who have been listening to our album for a year and a half. People drove like six hours to come see us in some places, it was the coolest fucking thing. I would do it again; I wish it had lasted longer. We were out for three weeks. I wish we could’ve done a full month, but that’ll happen one day.
NT: What was your favourite show on tour?
TK: Oh man, honestly, I love New York so much but it’s a tie, it’s either Montreal or New York. Montreal is fucking sick, dude. We had so many people come out, the venue was fucking so sick. I don’t know, that was my first time out of the country, and going to Toronto was already mind-blowing enough, but going to a place where everyone’s like speaking French…like I’ve never been around anything like that. I’m from a small town in Texas. I never thought I’d go to Montreal in my life so that was just like a cool cool cool thing. Then we got to meet our internet homies, Truck Violence, out there. If you never listen to Truck Violence, you definitely need to listen.
[END OF INTERVIEW]
Listen to Shallowater’s new album, God’s Gonna Give You a Million Dollars:
“I grew up always seeing the exit on the highway to go to Shallowater, Texas. I always liked the way it was spelled out”
“It made me feel like I wasn’t insane. It felt a lot better to not feel like I was the only person doing this. We all felt that way. We were like, Is this a viable thing?”
“It made me feel like I wasn’t insane. It felt a lot better to not feel like I was the only person doing this. We all felt that way. We were like, Is this a viable thing?”