"We want to thank Cursive for everything tonight," Jess Williamson says from the small stage set up in the backyard of The Sidewinder in Austin. "We're all really big fans of them, and I'm sure all of the other bands are too!"
There were only a few dozen people in the crowd listening to the young Texan singer and her band on that damp November night — a crowd so sparse that a possum ran clear across the floor just seconds before the show started without anyone even blinking an eye —but Tim Kasher couldn't help but smile at the heartfelt appreciation thrown in his direction.
"She was great, wasn't she?" Kasher said the next day of Williamson and her powerful indie band. "That's the kind of stuff that I'm into now. I'm definitely going to look her up."
But while Kasher may believe that Williamson and some of the other guitar-based upstart artists around Austin are a piece of the future of music, many of the bands in Bat City that weekend for the inaugural Sound on Sound Festival likely wouldn't be there without Kasher, bassist Matt Maginn, guitarist Ted Stevens and the rest of the Cursive crew. Along with artists like Descendents, Big Boi, and Thursday, Cursive was one of the bands at the Renaissance Faire-turned-festival grounds whose influence could be felt far beyond their set. Of course, the guys behind now-classic albums like The Ugly Organ and Domestica don't hear their own genre-bending sound in every complex indie and alternative act of today.
"We have friends that we're friends with who are only like four years behind us, and they say they're influenced by us," Maginn says, sitting in the tent set up between a wooden bar area and mock medieval castle left over from Sherwood Forest's usual activities. "It's hard for me to pick out. I think there are some people who lyrically have taken leads from Tim..."
"I think it's hard for me to discern what might be a direct influence from what we're doing just because we're in the middle of it," Kasher adds. "I can listen to someone like Spoon and then another band and hear how they sound like Spoon, but I can't sort it out for us."
"Or I think when we hear it, we think it's the influence that we took it from," Maginn responds. "I think 'These guys have really cool influences' instead of thinking that we're the influence."
"Instead of 'Oh, this band's ripping off Cursive,' I hear 'Oh, this band's ripping off Fugazi,' which is what we do," Kasher says jokingly.
By the time Creepoid's set ended and Cursive was ready to take the stage out back of the small bar hosting one of the Sound on Sound preview shows, the patio was packed with fans — some just wanting to see "The Recluse" and "Sierra," while others stood eagerly awaiting the entire set. With a handful of other exclusive pre-fest concerts going on that night (including Guided By Voices just down the street), the folks at The Sidewinder that night weren't just there for a free show. The entire crowd was there specifically to see Cursive, and just about all of them — particularly those who took part in one of the most polite mosh pits ever seen during "Art Is Hard" — would be watching the band for a second time the next day when they took to the Ren Faire-themed main stage (complete with a massive fire-breathing dragon) to play their actual festival set.
"The intimacy is just so much better," Kasher says. "For big shows, it's about everyone being on their game and relating to as many people as possible. We're not going to play to thousands of diehard Cursive fans. We're going to play to a lot of people who are like 'Oh, my brother listens to Cursive' or people who are just there to see 'The Recluse' so you just want to play well."
In the last handful of years, getting the chance to see Cursive live in a setting big or small isn't a common treat. The geographically separated group hasn't exactly been a full-time band recently, but fans can't really blame them for only going on one real tour (a 2015 trip celebrating the deluxe reissue of The Ugly Organ) since supporting 2012's I Am Gemini. Kasher also juggles a solo career and The Good Life, and the entire band recently launched their own label, 15 Passenger Records — which happens to be releasing Kasher's latest solo album in March. But as busy as they are, no one in Cursive is interested in calling for a breakup or "indefinite hiatus" for the third time in the band's 22-year career.
"Whenever we do these one-offs, we're always chagrinned and pleased that people anticipate it so much," Kasher says.
"I think it's surprising to us every time," Maginn adds. "We haven't really talked about anything tour-wise, but I think we'll go out sometime again."
"We're back to being a band in our own slow way," Kasher says. "With my third solo record coming out, that's where my headspace is going to be for a while, but Cursive has never really fallen off of the back burner for me. I think we're just going to keep meeting up every few months or so, and then I think in maybe a year or two we'll start meeting up in more than one city at a time."
Part of the fun for longtime Cursive fans is wondering which version of the group they're going to get. The band's most beloved album (The Ugly Organ) features a very prominent cello, while several of their most iconic songs feature a wide array of near-cacophonous sounds in a similar manner to At the Drive-In, Brand New, or even early-2010s Kanye. Depending on the era, fans have seen Cursive with everything from a straightforward lineup of four to the full album-quality sound of a sextet once again featuring a cellist Megan Siebe and multi-instrumentalist Patrick Newbery.
"We put a lot of effort into [appropriately replicating album sounds] for a given tour or a given show, and I feel great about this current lineup," Kasher says as an employee of the venue in a floor-length Game of Thrones-like dress pokes her head into the tent to check on everyone. "For a lot of years, we toured as a stripped-down traditional four-piece even though we haven't recorded that way since [2000's] Domestica, so we'd be playing stuff from The Ugly Organ, Happy Hollows, and [I Am] Gemini without all of the parts. I think it's still a good show, but it's different. You have to retool the songs, and it's a whole different approach. We always very much want to be a live band, and I think we've been able to maintain that as well. You don't want to be that band where people walk away saying 'That was boring. You can just go listen to the record because it sounds exactly like that.' That's never good."
"You have to do a good job, but I do not like it if it sounds just like the record," Maginn adds. "You have to add something different to it."
"I'm always amazed at how many sounds Patrick can make," Siebe chimes in. "He's got a whole box of tricks in there. It's great."
While seeing a full Cursive show now may seem like a rarer treat than in some previous years, the truth is that Cursive hasn't really been a full-time band in over a decade. Despite landing on the Billboard charts with every album since The Ugly Organ and seemingly releasing a new record every three years up until I Am Gemini, the group has never actually planned anything beyond the immediate future since 2003. As far as possible upcoming records go, don't expect any filler albums of half-hearted releases. Cursive is cool with playing the material they have for the fans that pack their headlining shows and the thousands of others who turn out to see them at festivals, so a new release will only happen if they've got something worthwhile to say.
"I was always surprised we even hit the three-year mark," Maginn says. "I feel like we would have no plans once the last record was done, so I was always shocked."
"The only time we were actually consistently a band was Domestica through The Ugly Organ," Kasher adds. "Ever since then, we'll do a record and be like 'We might not do another one.' Then we reconvene later and see how everyone feels about it. The most precious thing to us is our catalogue. We don't want to taint it or ruin it, so we're very careful about each thing we release."
On Thursday and Friday of that weekend, Cursive gave their fans a taste of just about everything from their seven records (including all of the fan favorites and a heavy dose of The Ugly Organ, because they're not some pricks who won't play their biggest songs at festivals). Although Thursday night might've been a more intimate set for the band's diehard fans, Friday evening featured a crowd dotted with shirtless strongmen picking up acrobatic ladies in full Ren Faire outfits and jugglers tossing hula hoops with sticks. It was the kind of setting neither Cursive nor their fans will likely soon forget, even if the passing of time surrounding it will leave vastly different impressions on the two parties.
"We have fans who came out to see us who listened to Domestica in high school or even elementary school," Kasher adds. "When they come see us now, it's 1000 years later for them, whereas we're the same kids who made that record. They say things like 'You guys have been around forever!' and I'm like 'Well, I've been alive for kind of a while, but it's not forever.' We've been doing this now for over half of our lives, so it's just part of who we are. There are people out there who think 'The Martyr' is such an old song, but to us, we play it all the time. It feels fairly current to me."
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