Pearl and the Beard, a creatively diverse, Brooklyn-based trio, continue their West Coast run tonight with an L.A. stop at the Echoplex. I had the good fortune of speaking with member (and cellist) Emily Hope Price, who delved into the group’s origins and latest goings-on (their new album Beast drops in July).
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Whether it’s their straight to the gut songwriting or their evocatively rendered harmonies, Pearl and the Beard are far from derivative. Though they each bring their own musical stylings to the table, Emily Hope Price, Jocelyn Mackenzie, and Jeremy Lloyd-Styles have carved out a seductively unified vision of heartache, longing, and deliverance, as evidenced by such tracks as “The Lament of Coronado Brown” and “Reverend.”
I opened up the interview with a brief discussion of Brooklyn, an area that has been considered a flourishing breeding ground for artists, culinary enthusiasts, and, I don’t mean this as a pejorative – “hipsters.” As a Brooklyn resident, Price offered up her thoughts on the area’s substantial growth over the years.
“The rumor was, if you were a Brooklyn band, you were kind of like the undiscovered cool,” says Price. “And now you come to Brooklyn to kind of catch the bug and hopefully the label of Brooklyn will benefit you.”
Along with discussing her work as a cellist on Sting’s ambitious musical The Last Ship, Price also talked about Pearl and the Beard’s latest album Beast and elaborated on the group’s dynamics.
“The three of us, which is why our album is actually called Beast, are very emotional creatures. We work really hard to get along – we work really hard to compromise. We work really hard to collaborate. The more time that has passed, the more we have gotten to know each other – it comes out. Those emotions come out.”
