Overseas

Overseas is a collaborative supergroup made up of indie songwriters/multi-instrumentalists David Bazan, Will Johnson, and brothers Matt and Bubba Kadane. The four had become friends over the course of many years playing shows together in their various respective projects like Pedro the Lion, Centro-Matic, and Bedhead, and shortly after the 2009 death of their mutual friend Vic Chestnutt, the quartet assembled in a Denton, Texas studio to work on what they thought would be material for a tour-only EP. Instead, the group (some of whom had worked together before in an amorphous project called Undertow Orchestra) came away from the session with an album’s worth of basic tracks, playing off of each member’s strengths in collaborative improvisations that were later whittled and polished into fully realized songs. Over the next three years, the friends solidified into a full-fledged group in the process of molding their studio work into a presentable album. It would be 2013 before the end result, a self-titled 12-song album, would arrive, but in that time Overseas began playing live shows and were already into the writing process for a second album. ~ Fred Thomas