Interview with The Spill Canvas: The Bigger Picture

The Spill CanvasNot only is Nick Thomas, the lead singer of the guitar driven band The Spill Canvas, but he is also one of the humblest people I have ever had the pleasure of speaking to on the telephone. Describing the members of the band as “boring” and “pretty laid back,” Thomas could not think of one interesting fact about the band when I posed my infamous Snapple Cap Fact question to him. He finally gave up and told me that his band’s fact would be blank except for the words, “The Spill Canvas.” How plain.

Though the band members of the South Dakota based quartet may not be that exciting, one could never begin to apply the same adjective to The Spill Canvas’ upbeat, but mellow alternative pop songs. Fans that range in age from tweens to twenty somethings have held this band dear to their hearts since the release of Thomas’ solo acoustic EP’s back in 2003. As a full blown band and recently upstreaming to Warner Records this past year for the band’s latest release, No, Really I’m Fine, The Spill Canvas are proving that being in a band has its rewards as long as you are in it for the sake of the music.

On their way to band’s first date for the kick-off of their summer headlining tour with Ludo, I caught up with Thomas to talk about the recent mainstream success of the band, his hard partying ways for his birthday, and how everything started for the band with a single acoustic guitar.

Your headlining tour for the summer just began with Ludo correct? Are you excited to get back on the road?

That is correct. We are very very excited about it. We are en route right now to Milwaukee actually.

So what have you been doing on your days off leading up to tour?

You know, it was my birthday a couple of days ago, so we have just been relaxing and kind of just preparing, practicing here and there, and preparing for the road. It’s exciting to get ready for a big tour, especially a headlining one.

Well Happy Birthday! What did you end up doing that day?

Thank you. Well, we flew into town to do some promotional things all day for tour and then that evening we had some friends over. It was a good time. We definitely celebrated as hard as possible.

Since the tour is pretty long, how do you plan on beating the heat this summer?

For this tour we are doing the van. We keep cool the best we can, but we enjoy being outside. Last year was a bit more grueling since we had some dates on Warped Tour and were outside, but this time around we are lucky enough to be playing air conditioned venues and stuff like that. We’ll do our best though, I think.