I caught up with The Helio Sequence five weeks into their marathon tour in support of their new album Keep Your Eyes Ahead. The album is their first since 2004 and has almost unequivocal support from listeners and critics alike. The duo, consisting of Portland, OR natives Brandon Summers and Benjamin Weikert, have managed to maintain the swirling landscapes of sound and their well-honed pop sensibility while pushing their sound in a more mature direction concurrently. The new album definitely has a folk-tinged nature to it. This is, undoubtedly, due to lead singer Summers’ episode in which he lost his voice and had to slowly nurture it back, which he did in part by teaching himself the solo acoustic songs of Bob Dylan. The Helio Sequence manage to meld the atmosphere of dream pop with an almost post-britpop aesthetic and the ability to wrap them both together around some solid, solid hooks. Keep Your Eyes Ahead isn’t an about-face for the band, in fact it’s an understandable progression. What is pleasing, though, is that the duo felt compelled to push their sound in a different direction as opposed to resting on their laurels. The following conversation took place in the cramped green room at the Echoplex in Los Angeles, where the band headlined a show on June 12th, 2008.

Have you spent a lot of time in Los Angeles? What’s your favorite venue?

Brandon: Yeah. A lot of time over the years. I think one of the first places we played outside of Portland was here in LA. Most of the time we’ve been here we’ve played at Spaceland in Silver Lake. I like the Troubadour a lot, and the Henry Fonda.

So I know that you lost your voice in the intervening period between these records. You’ve had to talk about it a lot, I know, but just tell me a bit about what that was like.

Brandon: We put out Love and Distance in the middle of 2004. We had already been touring a bunch by that point. We spent six months on the road supporting the record and by the end of it, my voice was just wrecked.

Was is poor technique? What made this happen?

Brandon: Yeah, it was that. It was a lot of things. I was drinking a lot before shows, not warming up. Show after show it caught up with me.

What I’ve read is that you made a lot of changes in the way that you do things to combat this problem. Now that you’re back out on the road, have you maintained your discipline?

Brandon: Oh yeah, big time. Absolutely. I don’t drink at all at shows anymore. It catches up with you after six weeks on the road. You can do it for a week and then you’re like, “I feel like crap and I have five more weeks left to do”.

What was going on in your head when you couldn’t sing? Were you frustrated?

Brandon: Yeah, I was pretty terrified because at first I didn’t know what was wrong. It turns out that I just severely strained it. It was a really tentative time for a while but I think coming out of it and looking back at it, it was good for us.

Was it ever in question as to whether or not you would continue this project?

Brandon: I was scared I wouln’t be able to.

What would you have done? Would you have stayed in music?

Brandon: That’s the kind of stuff that you freak out about in that sort of situation. I don’t know at all

What do you guys think about when you’re on stage?

Brandon: It’s different every time. I’m feeling the audience and what’s going on, but it’s weird, every moment on stage becomes a micro-moment almost. There can be like a million things going on at once.

How do you write your songs? I know that on this album you had a lot of time to nurture songs into fruition, but are your songs usually borne out of jamming?

Benjamin: Sometimes, I mean “Harmonica Song” was a song we jammed on, but not usually.

Brandon: On the new record, jamming in the sense that Benjamin would bring a sequencer or loop that we elaborate on. But we don’t ever sit down and go like, “bring me a bassline!”

Benjamin: We didn’t do any jamming for this record at all. Most of it was written separate and then passed on.

Click here to read part II of the interview!!