My Body Is Filled with Nerves

San Diego dream-pop indie band Little White Teeth headed into SDRL Studios in April of 2009. Fourteen months later, Little White Teeth, whose songs are tinged with influences from Low, Yo La Tengo, and Galaxie 500, released their debut s/t album on June 22.

“He’s got a great ear. He shows up late, but everybody in town knows that Pall [Jenkins] is going to be an hour or two late,” jokes Phil Beaumont, singer and bassist for Little White Teeth, about recording at SDRL Studios with Jenkins (Black Heart Procession, Three Mile Pilot, Mr. Tube).

Between sips of iced coffee at a Banker’s Hill coffee shop, Beaumont, former bassist for experimental indie band Maquiladora, says that busy work schedules — Beaumont is the principal at the Children’s Museum School and his wife-drummer Yuko Sugiyama is a landscape designer — and scheduling conflicts with Jenkins, who left for tours with Three Mile Pilot and Black Heart Procession, prevented the band from mixing and mastering the songs until September 2009.

During the break from recording, Little White Teeth recruited Matt Resovich, multi-instrumentalist for the Album Leaf and Black Heart, to add violin tracks to a couple of songs. “We planned on having some other people play on some other songs, but after hearing what Matt had, we didn’t feel it was necessary to round up anyone else,” writes LWT’s guitarist Dmitri Dziensuwski in an email.

Resovich will accompany Little White Teeth for a ten-show West Coast tour with San Diego indie-rock band Pinback, in which cofounders Rob Crow and Zach Smith will be playing a stripped-down version of their songs. The tour, which kicks off July 1 at the Detroit Bar in Costa Mesa, includes shows at the Independent in San Francisco and Doug Fir in Portland.

The West Coast jaunt will be the first tour for the band, and the venues will be the biggest they have played. “I think the capacity is somewhere around 250 to 500 people. To get a tour where there’s a guaranteed amount of bodies in the room, we’re pretty fortunate,” Beaumont says of touring with longtime friends Crow and Smith.

Writes Dziensuwski about opening for Pinback, “Actually, we’re coming up on ten years since I was kicked out of Pinback. My body is filled with nerves.”