And Contributing Writer: Jill McKeever

Named after a remark made by Beyonce (”I’m tired of being sexy”), CSS is a lighthearted pastiche-pop troupe from Sao Paulo, Brazil.

The band brought its infectious music and its energetic stage presence to its largest arena yet, the Austin City Limits festival.

I caught up with the band shortly after their performance in the draining Austin heat, and they were kind enough to answer a few questions.

Joshua Wright: The crowd seemed really into your performance. You had so much energy.

Carolina Parra: We were…almost dying.

Ana Rezende: We almost died in the heat, but it wasn’t hard to have that much energy because the crowd was giving us so much. It depends so much on them being into it. I think fifty percent of it is the crowd.

CP: It’s so great to watch from the stage. People were doing choreographed dances. It was amazing.

AR: It was honestly one of the best festivals we’ve played

JW: Do you prefer festivals to the smaller venues?

AR: It’s very different. Both are great, but with festivals, the public is there to watch shows the whole day, and it’s amazing to play for that kind of crowd. With venues, though, the people have paid to see you, basically, and they know the songs. The atmosphere is very different, as well as the kind of day we have, because a festival is trees all around, and venues have, well, restrooms.

JW: And air conditioning!

AR: Yes!

CP: I think we were lucky because we played very early so the people weren’t dying from the sun.

JW: Do you get to DJ often?

CP: We love to DJ. Everybody goes and I put one song and she puts the other one.

AR: We go back to back to back to back. We really enjoy it.

JW: Best and worst experiences on the American tour thus far…?

CP: We’ve had a lot of good experiences so far.

AR: Honestly, not to be cheesy, but we didn’t have a bad experience really.

CP: There was one bad experience when we came back from the show and all our booze was stolen.

AR: They were professionals! It was professional work. It wasn’t like that they stole the beer or they stole the vodka or anything. They stole everything!

CP: It was pretty bad. They stole even the ice bucket.

JW: Wow. What city was this?

AR: It was in Los Angeles. Totally crazy.

JW: Sounds like a terrible loss. Do you drink a lot before going on stage?

CP: No. Well, yes. A little bit. And if we get really excited, we continue the party.

AR: We’ve been touring for two and a half years and, in the beginning, it was pretty wild.  It’s not like we’d get wasted or anything, because it’s every day we have to play a show. We can’t get wasted and then wake up on stage going “ehhhh” with a hangover.

JW: So that energy is totally natural…?

AR: Totally natural!

CP: This tour was amazing. We were playing with two other bands. One was SSION from Kansas City, Missouri. The other was Tilly and the Wall from Omaha, Nebraska. They’re really good friends of ours, so it was very great to hang out every day.

AR: Yeah, great bands.

JW: Was this your favorite show? I heard you tell the crowd that it was the best of the tour.

AR: Yeah, this one was tops. It was really good. I just wish the other bands were here with us because they were really cool bands to warm up to.

JW: You’re going to the UK next, yeah? Do you enjoy touring in the UK?

AR: Right now, it’s home for us.

CP: We live in London, and it’s good to go back to your home. I’m feeling a little bit sad, though, because I know the weather will be shitty — rainy and cold, but the crowds in the UK are amazing — very energetic.

AR: Really great crowds — very into music. It’s like Austin everywhere, except for the bad weather and food. It feels like home for us.

JW: Now that you’ve toured everywhere, are you planning on settling in London, or is there someplace you’ve visited that you prefer?

CP: Everywhere is our home and nowhere is our home.

AR: We just want to have a house where we can cook and have our own toilets. That’s just so amazing to us right now. I never thought that something so little would be so important.  I don’t really mind being in London because we don’t really leave home when we are there. We just stay there watching TV and cooking because it’s so rare we get to do so. I don’t know if I’ll live in London for the rest of my life, but we enjoy it right now.

JW: Do you have any pets waiting for you to come home?

AR: Aww, we can’t have pets. I have my bonsai tree, though! How about that?

JW: After you finish your UK tour, will you continue on?

CP: We’ll never stop touring! We’re going to tour in Europe and then we’re hitting Japan. After that, it’s back to the US in December.

AR: And then we will have a big time off we’re looking forward to. We’ll tour Australia in February, but we’re looking forward to the time off. Since the first album came out, we’ve never stopped touring. We need some vacations.

CP: We have to rest, to live a normal life, because otherwise you just…go insane. We can’t record another album on tour. We have to have real subject matter, to write about something besides touring.

AR: We’re not complaining about this lifestyle. It’s the most amazing life you can get, just touring and going everywhere, but it’s very, very intense because you’re living it 24 hours a day. It’s not that you can go to your job at 9:00 and come back at 5:00. It’s been basically three years and a half years of that intensity, and we just need some down time. I mean, it’s great that we’re having such a great tour, because we could be so tired, but this tour is one of the best we’ve done.

JW: Do you feel pressured to continue, or do you feel like you can take some time off and people will still come out to your shows?

AR: We have a great label and the management really respects us. It’s not like someone is really the boss of us. We can just say we need time off and it’s okay.

CP: Yeah, it’s good to disappear a little bit or else people are like, “Oh! Here they come again!”

JW: Switching gears a little bit: What is your dream collaboration?

AR: I would love to have the voice to do VH1 Divas live with Aretha Franklin, Christina Aguilera, and all of Destiny’s Child. I’d love to be one of them, but I’m just not that kind of person.

CP: You are on the inside.

AR: I am! On the inside, I’m a really freaky gay man that loves Cher. I’d love to do that, but I don’t have the voice for it. I don’t have the power. We collaborated a bit with Donita Sparks from L7. She sang “Pretend We’re Dead” with us in LA once, and that was amazing. And we’re friends now, which is really unbelievable.

JW: Time for my favorite question: What is your favorite synthesizer and why?

AR: Oh, the Moog. Absolutely. It’s everybody’s favorite synthesizer. I like that you have to tune it. I have the updated analog version. I mean, it’s digital, but you have to still tune it from song to song, which sucks but is kind of cool. I mean, I tune my keyboard. MicroKorgs are good, and every band in the world today has a MicroKorg. We have two. I can’t play them because the keys are so little. The new one is big, but the old one, which is the good one, has very little keys, like a Casiotone. I don’t play keyboards — I just play the songs in the band, so I need big keys.

JW: Any last words?

CP: We want talk about the elections.

AR: Yeah, we want to tell everybody to please vote Obama because it makes a difference for everybody else in the world.

CP: It’s not all about America, and everybody’s going crazy about this Sarah Palin. What’s going on?

AR: And come on, Creationism is not something that happened. I find it crazy because we have 300 years of science and oh no! It’s just God. Not science. It’s crazy.

CP: Good luck with your election. Unfortunately, I think you’ll need it.