Meet Carson Lund | Songwriter, Mines Falls

We had the good fortune of connecting with Carson Lund of the band Mines Falls and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Carson, where are your from? We’d love to hear about how your background has played a role in who you are today?
Because my lyrics have been fixated for a long time on the past, I suppose it’s easy to say my background and upbringing are absolutely critical to the music we create as Mines Falls. But there’s nothing particularly extraordinary about our past; it was a suburban American upbringing in New Hampshire, one in which we attended school, had friends, played sports, played in bands, and never missed a meal. I don’t write about these details in my music anymore, because simply retreading nostalgia isn’t necessarily very interesting to listeners or to myself. What I do write about is how my brain remembers these conditions of my youth, and the tension between what bits have been involuntarily turned into memories vs. what bits haven’t. Exploring the creation of identity intrigues me more than writing songs about how I’m feeling today or how I might feel tomorrow.

We now live and work in Los Angeles, which is about as far as one can get from New Hampshire within the continental United States. This had less to do with wanting to get away from our home state than it did with wanting something radically different to stimulate our creativity. We wanted to feel jostled by our environment, and Erik and I both have a restless curiosity about new places and experiences. While that curiosity may have originated from spending so much time in a cozy, pretty, safe bubble, we’re nonetheless very fond of our hometown, and now I get inspired going back there and immersing myself in parts of it that I never noticed as a kid when I was too preoccupied with other activities. Ultimately, I feel like everything I do and everything that interests me is framed by my experiences in New Hampshire and the ways in which my brain has processed my time there.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
We see writing music as one piece of an artistic whole; it’s not the only pursuit for us. Having studied design and filmmaking, respectively, Erik and I often handle our own art, video, design, production, photography, and even press copy. We’re certainly open to collaboration, but over the years various logistical, geographical and financial constraints have encouraged us to be self-sufficient and to hold complete ownership over our ideas and their execution. This is not some total anomaly in a world where so many elements of artistic production have been democratized for the everyday individual and amateurism is no longer so easily distinguishable from professionalism. But we’ve been commandeering every aspect of our musical output for so long that we believe it’s transformed from a necessity to an ethos. Hopefully that comprehensive from-the-ground-up artistic vision is something that jumps out at people when they first learn about Mines Falls.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
Los Angeles is always a tough city to recommend to the uninitiated because of its size and breadth. Without a knowledgeable guide, you will almost certainly waste most of your time commuting and spending too much money on stuff that isn’t the cream of the crop. Having lived here for 7 years now, we’ve settled in and feel like we can curate a great vacation for a likeminded traveler. So when you get off the plane, stop at 106 Seafood Underground, a transcendent, unassuming Mexican lunch spot in the backyard of ceviche maverick Sergio Penuelas. With a belly full of raw fish and Modelo, proceed through downtown (maybe stopping at Grand Central or the Bradbury Building if you’re intrigued by LA’s architectural history) and stay somewhere in Los Feliz, Silver Lake, Echo Park, Eagle Rock or Mount Washington. The one touristy thing you should do is marvel at the cityscape from the Griffith Observatory at sunset, which is unlike any view in any major city in America. Go to a Dodger game and appreciate yet another stunning view at sunset. See a film on 35mm at the American Cinematheque in Los Feliz, the New Beverly in Hollywood, or the Academy Museum in mid-city. Enjoy some top-notch Szechuan cuisine in Monterey Park, preferably at Chengdu Taste or Szechuan Impression. Then, since you’ll be way on the outskirts of the city, take a drive through Alhambra, Pasadena and eventually Sierra Madre; the streets get less and less cluttered with cars and the windy roads take you past some glorious midcentury homes and stunning mountain views. Now, let’s assume for the sake of this lengthy paragraph that you have to get back to your flight. On your way back stop at Mercado La Paloma, a charming food court in a quiet, industrial part of downtown right next to the bustling 110. You might not expect to find some of the best Yucatecán food in the city there, but you will if you feast on Chichen Itza and Holbox under a canopy of trees. At that point you should have a sense of what LA really is beyond the stereotypes cultivated by Beverly Hills and Santa Monica.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
It’s always tough to narrow down the helping hands in your life to just a select few, as it runs the risk of excluding people who were just as instrumental in your path forward as anyone else. So we will concentrate on the most incontestable influences: our parents, Lisa and Peter Lund. Both of them have genuinely strong taste in alternative music and have often tipped us off to contemporary indie bands before we’d even heard of them. (There’s a picture from maybe fifteen years ago of them backstage with The Strokes.) With that said, their support has never come across as performative or disingenuous, like they’re simply doing what parents are supposed to do. They’re our biggest fans and it actually restores the confidence that sometimes can prove elusive in this merciless music environment.

The other people worth noting are our longtime friends and former bandmates Dylan Vukelich and Eric Bolton—who now release music under the monikers DV Olson and Holy Smokes, respectively. They were our first musical collaborators, with whom we recorded and performed in the band Old Abram Brown for nearly a decade. We still play together when Mines Falls needs to fill out its lineup, and the possibility of a new project is always on the horizon. There was a tumultuous period around the time OAB disbanded, but we all recall those days fondly, as it was the kind of healthy, lively, sustained musical project that can motor one’s entire creative life.

Website: https://minesfalls.bandcamp.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mines_falls/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/lund_carson

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa8efIkxsDEufaXv2Ajy2Mw

Other: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/mines-falls/1302531784