Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Spaceport. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Spaceport, appreciate you joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

During the couple of years leading up to the release of our first record, I needed to redirect my thoughts and feelings into instrumental practice and writing. I was constantly flushing my brain of musical ideas by recording them into GarageBand at any and every hour of the day. I’ve never kept a diary, and I don’t journal, so this process was essentially that for me. It led to a lot of rag tag demos and raw, fragmented projects, and at some point I needed to clean up my desktop. I put my mind to sorting lots of bits and pieces into what I imagined had potential to converge and evolve into songs. At times, it felt a little like putting together a puzzle and also following a “recipe”–mix a little bit of this, a little bit of that, bake for 20 minutes at 375–there’s a chemical change that happens and then you’ve got something new. In my experience, songwriting and composing comes in fleeting glimpses of weirdness and synchronicity, but it can also be scientific, calculated, and summonable. It can be hectic and totally in your face, or slow and subtle. The ride is therapeutic for me as it helps me better understand myself. It takes patience and endurance and self-compassion and deep time and energy, strung together over long and short periods of life as creativity ebbs and flows. -Arianna Wegley

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

We’re a band! And we call ourselves Spaceport! We coagulated together in our current form in the summer of 2022. I have a predominantly classical background in cello, but during the pandemic I started composing and experimenting with mostly electronics and synths, and subsequently guitar–brand new avenues for me. These experiments ordered themselves into a series of home recordings under my name that existed more within the ambient realm than Spaceport does. One of my more standalone experiments during this time morphed into a song called “Hey Neighbor”, which was my first crack at writing a pop song. I sent it to Todd to see what he thought, and he replaced the sampled drums with live ones. This two-person back-and-forth collaboration gradually unfurled into a larger recording project, but there wasn’t a clear sense of where it would go from there. We’d both collaborated musically with our friend Liam, so we brought him in and started practicing for our first live gig at a small outdoor festival in June 2022 in St. Paul. Something really clicked for us as we worked out our demos into live rock band versions, and we also felt more enthusiasm to make a record together. For the rest of the year, we continued honing our songs by playing more shows and getting better at home recording for our debut album Window Seat, which we released in March 2023. -Arianna Wegley

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

There’s a special balance of intentional practice and chance, which is rewarding to notice; I reflect on times when I spend hours playing the same thing on guitar until I really figure something out, and times when I just pick it up at the right time in the right mindset and something flows on the first try. When these moments of inspiration and realization happen with other people, it’s extra special. It’s rewarding to know your craft solidly enough to the point where you can trust yourself to bring to life what’s in your imagination. A certain magic fills in the blanks, especially when you are collaborating with other people. Playing together as a band has us reacting to each other, attuning ourselves to each other’s patterns and whims, intimating ideas, trying new things. It’s really cool to share that and marvel at how everyone still experiences it in their unique way. -Arianna Wegley

What do you think is the goal or mission that drives your creative journey?

Something I’ve personally struggled with in the past couple of years is a tendency to draft too much music alone, in my own little vacuum. The collaborative aspects of our first record came after I had most of the arrangements and lyrics put together. I definitely require room and freedom to experiment and create things alone, and some great ideas necessitate that kind of solitary attention in their early stages. Now that Spaceport is more solidified as a band, I’m really aspiring to default to true teamwork and all the different ways we’re figuring that out together–lyrically, instrumentally, logistically. Music is just better when you make it with people you admire and trust. We’re starting to work on a second album, and are trying to be intentional about writing more collaboratively than we have in the past. -Arianna Wegley

Contact Info:

• Website: https://spaceport.band/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spaceportband/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/spaceportband
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/spaceportband?fbclid=IwAR3yY5_ZHxLfjxnT1nMh0-mXXLqWIrY-OGMTKu1l32wGLU30IJRJRYo1hwk
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@spaceportband

Image Credits
Main group photo – Jake Olson (@slopmotion) Film photo – Karl Remus (@karlremus) Digital photo with projector screen background – Siul Reynoso (@gabachomusic) Photo of Arianna and guitar – Siul Reynoso (@gabachomusic) Photo of synths / looking out into audience at album release show – Emily Kastrul (@sisterspecies)