St. Lucia Quotes

At a festival, some people are just there because they’re waiting for, like, Calvin Harris to come on later.

I used to do this huge jump off the drum riser. I had a good way of landing so I wouldn’t hurt myself, but then one time, I landed on my elbow.

The music has a very strong escapist quality to it. In the moment where you feel like you need to escape, or when you are escaping, that’s a good time to listen to ‘When the Night.’

We don’t put limits on ourselves.

It took a while of performing and pushing the boundaries and starting to involve the audience to feel comfortable.

With Prince especially… he was a really great songwriter and keyboardist and singer and was so good at so many different things, you couldn’t pin him down. That really inspires me.

I’m always very cautious, because I don’t want St. Lucia to turn out like everything else. I want to have a personality and be unique in some way that maybe limits our appeal to everyone in the world but makes us more special in some way.

Nothing beats looking out to a sweaty, packed house full of fans.

We like to try doing new things in the shows and doing things that we haven’t done before.

When I was a teenager, I never knew anything about art. I think in South Africa at that stage, no one was really exposed to it. There were no museums that had great artists in them.

I find that when I’m under pressure, I work really well, but then you have those days where you sleep for four hours because you drive to a venue overnight and arrive there the next day, and you’re cranky and not dealing with it very well.

A short story can be really interesting and enriching and powerful, but a novel just contains so much more information and richness and depth. That’s what I strive for in my music. I want to create something that’s like a longform statement.

I was in this boys’ choir for five years, when I was 10 until 15.

When I start working on an idea, I immediately record without judging it.

We love the idea of really putting on a show. It’s not just a band playing on the stage. There’s a theatrical element to what’s going on.

I don’t think I necessarily write about dark things.

I always like to push the extremes of what anybody thinks St. Lucia is.

I try to not be self-conscious in my writing process. I think it’s important to just be in your subconscious mind – at least when you’re starting an idea.

Generally, when I come to festivals, I just wander freely and see what happens.

We have such an energetic live show. We have so much fun onstage. We swap instruments. We might possibly be the sweatiest band in the business.

Even though we’re really, really happy with what we do, sometimes I think – as an adult, you think, ‘Should I be more responsible with my life choices?’

With my own stuff, I’ve always held to the belief that it should take as long as it takes until it feels right.

I guess you could say it’s one of the great equalizers: that it just feels good to be bad.

I had to embrace just basically writing and recording on my laptop. On long drives through the Rockies, I would take my laptop and mess around with ideas and make rough sketches of songs.

When I was a kid, pre-1994 was still apartheid, so we didn’t get a lot the subversive music from the States or from the U.K. A lot of the music we would get was the poppiest pop music, so I’ve never really had a bad association it.

St. Lucia was a place were we used to go on vacation – not every year, but we went there a couple of times. I remember the last time that I went there, I was really small, and the only memory that I have is that my dad was going swimming or fishing one day – and I really, really wanted to go – but I was too young.

When I’m making the music, the songs that I get most excited about definitely make me feel good, but often, it’s a really good feeling combined with some kind of melancholy element.

It sounds kind of cliche, and a lot of people say it about our music, but I think a good place to hear our music for the first time is on vacation, or somewhere warm, on the beach or something like that.

I feel like when you’re in your late teens and early 20s, you just don’t think about certain things in your life, and as you get older, you think about your parents getting older.

I will readily confess that I’m a coffee addict.

I’m kind of a little allergic to that whole, ‘Let’s go to L.A. and write a bunch of hits.’

On the first recording, I wasn’t singing out that much; I was shy with my singing.

The reason I decided to become a solo artist in the first place was because I always felt that the results that I got from working as a team where everyone had equal say… ended up with compromised, watered-down results.

I love so many songs from the ’80s, but I’m obliged to the big ones.

One of my favorite things is producing other artists because, in many ways, it’s a lot more freeing than working on your own music.

I think the job of the first single is kind of like being a diplomat for a country.

The name came about from me just closing my eyes and sticking a pen on a map of South Africa. St. Lucia was the fifth place that the pen landed on.

I feel like, for me as an artist, it takes me a while of living with the tracks and living with the body of work to realize what it’s all about.

My secret talent is doing the chipmunk voice.

I think there’s no way of avoiding the South African or African influence from coming into my music, just because I spent 19 years of my life there. Being a kid, my early musical experiences were there.

I just believe that you have to allow each other to grow in the way you’re meant to grow and not be afraid of losing that person, because if you grow apart, then you grow apart, and that’s the way it was meant to be.

The album that really got me interested in how to create weird sounds, and pretty much changed my life, was ‘OK Computer.’ Funnily enough, my parents bought it for me because it was recommended to them, and the first 2 times I heard it, I absolutely hated it.

The upside to doing commercials is you have to work in a lot of different genres and make stuff that you never thought you’d be making.

I like confusing people and challenging myself.

I was always very ambitious from a young age.

We love the idea of having a really great lighting production.

The ’80s definitely influence my music in a big way.

We’ve always enjoyed touring, which is fortunate because we’re always on the road. The most difficult part is that time passes by so quickly. It’s hard to pay attention to your normal life because shows are all-encompassing.

I feel like people associate us with the tropical Hawaiian print because, for a long time, we were wearing a lot of bright colors to exert our personality.

Images and music are very connected.