lluvii, a Latin-indie band made up of bassist Ryan Gordon, keyboardist-vocalist Felix Kimbrell, guitarist and lead vocalist Carol Gonzalez, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Sophia Nance, and drummer Kaylin Martinez, made their Austin City Limits Music Festival debut Saturday on the Beatbox stage. The Daily Texan sat down with the burgeoning local band to talk about their ACL debut and musical journey.
Daily Texan: Talk about the moment you found out you were playing ACL for the first time. What was that like?
Felix Kimbrell: We were supposed to have a practice later that day … I’m at IKEA with my girlfriend, trying to find hangers. … I get like three calls from (Sophia) when I’m at checkout … she’s sending a voice message screaming … (and) sends screenshots of the email, and I fall to my knees at the IKEA checkout, and everyone’s looking around me like, “What the hell?”
DT: Does it mean more to make the ACL debut since y’all are an Austin band?
Sophia Nance: 100%. … When you dream about playing a festival when you’re in Texas, what’s the festival you’re dreaming of? ACL. That’s the Texas festival you want to play.
DT: Now that y’all have played your first ACL set as a band, what are the emotions like?
Carol Gonzalez: Contentment, euphoric, joyfulness, gratefulness: it feels amazing. There’s a lot of preparation that went into this, and we didn’t really know what it was going to be. You can’t really plan being on stage in front of that many people playing your songs, and so once it actually happened, it was such a moment. We were all looking at each other, smiling and laughing, and it felt really good.
DT: Y’all played South by Southwest in March. What has changed since then?
Kimbrell: Every single time we get to play a show, we try to do something different. From South by, we got to learn about how to make a big set. A big show in front of a big audience deserves grandioseness. It deserves a big theatrical performance. We took our lessons from South by, and we brought a 10-piece band to ACL. We got two horn players, three background singers, a percussionist, a whole screen design and set design with a bunch of plants and different things that we tried to make into a Mexican-Colombian backyard experience, and I think we nailed it.
DT: How did y’all land on the name lluvii, and what does it mean?
Gonzalez: It started off as my solo project, and we were like, “We need a different name; it’s not solo anymore, it’s super collaborative.” It was just Ryan, myself and Kaylin at the time … we were trying to come up with anything and everything. I really am influenced by rain, and the Spanish word for rain is lluvia, so we’re like, “Let’s do a play on that,” and ultimately, lluvii came about.
DT: What’s the lluvii song you’d recommend to people who have never heard the band before?
Gonzalez: If I’m thinking from my brain, I would say “junii” because that one is a perfect example of our sound. We mix a lot of different stuff — it showcases a little bit of everything we do. But if I’m speaking from the heart, I would say “Gruvii,” but not the recorded version, the live version. That is just my personal favorite song. It brings me so much joy.
