Kim Ruehl: Are you on tour right now, or are you just doing a bunch of shows at the Philadelphia Festival?
Anthony da Costa: With me, at least for the next year and for the past four years, the words "on tour" can be confusing because I don't actually tour. The most I actually go without coming back home is usually three or four days for a folk festival or maybe a long weekend, or something. I mostly have to be based here in Westchester. I do book a lot of shows, mostly on weekends. I just did a couple house concerts. Tomorrow night I have the finalist [round] in the Independent Music World Series that DiscMakers runs. Then I have Philly Folk this weekend. My big thing is at the end of the month, I’m going to Denmark for the Tonder Festival.
How did you get hooked up with going to Denmark?
Louis Myers who runs the Folk Alliance was contacted by the people who run the festival and they talked about me. We sent them stuff and they liked what they saw. They came to Folk Alliance, too, and I met them there. They're all really nice people. They really love American music over there, and they seem to be really excited about this festival. I am, too. That was just a chance meeting, I guess.
You're still in school, right?
Yep, I'm still in high school. I have a year left.
Are you just stoked to get it all over with so you can go do a big long, normal tour?
Most definitely, yeah. I’m definitely stoked to get it over with. I know it's something I have to do, but at the same time...I have plenty of people that I respect that have told me, what do you need college for? You already have a job and you know what you want to do. Why don't you just graduate and go [on tour]? There have been days where I've felt like doing that. But I know it's important for me to go to college. It's important to my family and to my mom and dad especially. So I do plan on doing that, but I basically just try to book as much as I can during the year.
The last couple years, my formula has been mostly weekends and then over the summer I just book a whole lot of stuff and then I start making a record. I've done that a couple of times where I've started a record in August and had it out by January or February. I've got a ton of wanderlust.
You strike me as kind of a sponge. You've played with a whole bunch of different people. Is there anyone you're just dying to make music with?
There's a great band from upstate New York called the Felice Brothers. They’re really great and a lot of fun. I met them at Clearwater for a second and saw them play there. I'll probably see them this weekend at the Philadelphia Festival. They sort of just creeped out of the Catskills and said, "Let's go play folk music." And now they're headlining the major folk festivals in the Northeast. They're headlining Clearwater, they played Newport, they're playing Philadelphia, but they're selling CDs out of the back of their van.
I'm [also] a big fan of the Corona Brothers. That's definitely a band to look out for. I've never met them before, but I'm into a lot of 'brothers' bands, as you can see. They're probably my biggest influence right now, the best I've heard in a long time. They've got a little bit of everything. Beyond that I'm a big Anais Mitchell fan. I've gotten to open for her and play with her a couple of times. I like her a lot. I like a good friend of mine Jonathan Bird who I've been playing with the last couple of years at all these festivals and stuff. I definitely want to do more stuff with him.
Where do you get your songs from? Your songs seem much more insightful than your average teenager could muster. Where does all that come from? Do you feel like you just channel it, or are you walking around inspired all the time?
I'm not part of that tradition of people who write songs about things they never lived through or didn't have any sort of contact with. I believe in experiencing first-hand a lot of stuff, so it's either that or I'm writing about close friends of mine who are going through stuff. So it's all in first-person. There's definitely a lot of songs about people who are close to me. I've never been a big story-song writer just because it doesn’t come as natural to me.
I don't know if you've ever heard of the Pullman Rail Car Strike...I just remember being in history class one day and learning about these people that worked for the Pullman Railroad Company. They lived in this one town that was a company town. Everything revolved around this one company. They had their own currency, every aspect of their life revolved around the company. They were sort of trapped in Pullman town. I wrote this story-song about it and I sent it to a friend of mine, and she said, "This isn't you." I've tried to write story-songs, but they haven't come out so well. So most of the songs come from me, or what's going on with a friend.
Do you remember the first song you ever wrote?
There was a song on the radio...I was in fifth grade, so I was 10 years old. This must've been 2000-2001. There was a song on the radio that went [sings] "I want something else to get me through this..." I forget whose song that was, but it was really popular on the radio. I took that chord progression [sings chord progression] and wrote some cheesy little stupid song called "Guardian Angel." I played it at a talent show. I had just started taking guitar lessons and I knew how to play...maybe three or four chords. That was definitely my first song, but I've been writing songs in this kind of style for probably about four years...meaning stuff I'm not 100 percent embarrassed about. Maybe more like 80 percent.
Read page two of the interview, where Anthony talks about his latest record
