With a new album out on Sub Pop and a lengthy stretch of 49 shows
this spring, Vetiver is garnering attention far beyond its San
Francisco home, and transcending the freak-folk label the band has
casually endured.

But Andy Cabic, the band’s singer, songwriter and core since he
began using the Vetiver name almost a decade ago, says his approach is
largely the same as it was when he was plucking an acoustic guitar by
himself in a cramped apartment.

A Virginia native, Cabic was living in North Carolina when his band,
The Raymond Brake, split. He broke for the West Coast, landing in San
Francisco.

“I didn’t have an electric guitar anymore, just an acoustic that
somebody gave me,” he says via cell phone, stepping out of a sound
check in Asheville, N.C. “I was living in basically a hall closet. It
was the height of the dot-com era, and it was hard to find a place. I
was learning to fingerpick and writing songs.”

Trying to fit a new band together, Cabic befriended some Bay Area
musicians, including Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom, who both
played on Vetiver’s 2004 debut.

Cabic has always had a strong pop sensibility at the core of his
songwriting—which manifests itself strongest on this year’s
Tight Knit, a layered and breezy record of melodic folk-rock
that recalls Southern California in the 1970s. Tight Knit mixes
the acoustic with the electric, the soft and slow folk ballads with
bouncy, up-tempo tunes that sound like a more soulful Grateful Dead.
Cabic is a relaxed yet focused songwriter, turning out tunes as catchy
as they are laid-back.

“There’s a general tenor of my songwriting that has stayed somewhat
similar,” Cabic says. “It’s the mix of sweetness and melancholy, but
there’s been a shift in how the pop elements influence the songwriting.
With the electric band arrangements, I’ve been getting closer to having
the resources and ability to do what fits the songs.”

Vetiver began talking with Sub Pop while doing the initial tracking
for Tight Knit, but didn’t sign right away. When the contract
was signed in October, the highly regarded label announced the move
online, saying, “At last! Vetiver is ours!”

Cabic says he was drawn to Sub Pop in part because of its central
role in the West Coast folk-pop revival, the woodsy and bearded side of
indie rock that fits with Vetiver, whose members are friends with the
Fleet Foxes and Shins.

“That was one reason. It seemed like Sub Pop has a proclivity for
working with artists who have an acoustic instrumentation and pop songs
that flirted with folk idioms,” Cabic says. “But I think that sort of
thing cuts both ways. It’s not inherently all good that Vetiver is on
the label that has all those artists, because people have a tendency to
make a knee-jerk reaction to lump us together.”

Between the band’s self-titled debut and 2008’s all-covers Thing
of the Past, Vetiver changed labels, going from DiCristina to
Gnomonsong (which Cabic and Banhart co-founded), both affiliated with
Revolver Distribution.

“I felt like I’d done three records under the umbrella of Revolver,
and everyone there is really great, but I felt like at this point in my
life, I wanted to try something different,” Cabic says.

Despite the disconnect between a covers album and a new batch of
original material, there’s a continuity between Thing of the
Past and Tight Knit. Both albums were recorded in the same
studio, with mostly the same set of musicians. It was an approach that
allowed Cabic to “test the waters” prior to Tight Knit.

“I didn’t go into it with a certain sound I was looking for. I
usually take things song by song. The instrumentation and studio
resources available helped create the arrangements for each song. It’s
partly adapting to having a band, and partly writing songs in
arrangements that fit,” he says. “To me, the record is an amalgamation
of approaches we’ve done on the earlier records. It’s the culmination
of four albums we’ve done with the engineering and production of Thom
Monahan. This one, really, you can hear all that we’ve been through in
it.”

The current touring version of Vetiver includes Cabic on vocals and
guitar, Sanders Trippe on guitar, Otto Hauser on drums, and two members
new to the band: Daniel Hindman on bass, and Sarah Versprille on
keyboard.

Friday’s show at Plush will be Vetiver’s first in Tucson since a
2004 tour with Banhart and Newsom. That tour was filmed by
musician/filmmaker Kevin Barker, whose finished product, The Family
Jams, saw its first screenings this month in Florida.

This article appears in Apr 9-15, 2009.