Apollo Sunshine [ tickets ], an Andover, MA-based indie-rock trio, has gathered a devout cult following since its formation in 2001. With an eclectic sound influenced by music from the late '60s and early '70s, the group has received positive feedback from the New York Times, Amazon and Rolling Stone, as well as local alt-weeklies.

Apollo Sunshine will interrupt their current US club tour for a quick jaunt to Ireland in support of their third studio album, the recently released "Shall Noise Upon."

Apollo Sunshine [ tickets ], a Massachusetts-based trio of eclectic rockers, are finishing up a US club tour in support of their recently released album, "Shall Noise Upon."

LiveDaily contributor Jed McGowan spent a few minutes with group members Jesse Gallagher (bass/keyboards/vocals), Sam Cohen (guitar/pedal steel) and Jeremy Black (drums/violin), discussing their musical tastes, the current tour and much more.

I think all of your albums could be called eclectic, including the newest one. I'm really interested in what drives this eclecticism. Does it reflect your listening habits?

Jesse Gallagher: Yeah, maybe. I think it's maybe just us or that we see eclectic music as all having an underlying similarity. To us, it just seems that what comes out of us doesn't really seem too eclectic.

Who are you listening to this time around?

JG: Harry Mudie's really good. He's a reggae guy who worked with King Tubby but he went to England and recorded a bunch of string sections along with some old dub music, so it's a really cool juxtaposition of things. We listen to a lot of psychedelic stuff from the late '60s and early '70s but from all over the world. I think right now there's a resurgence of finding all these tapes from all over whether it be Turkey or Nigeria, a bunch of different places and you see that there's definitely a common, really crazy scene of music going on at that time. We listen to everything though.

Jeremy Black: We all like the new Ratatat record. We've been listening to it.

JG: We listen to all kinds, like old junky folk music to funny Japanese '80s--really anything you can think of.

You can hear that in your sound. You tie it all together nicely. Also, listening to the album, it seems like the band gets a lot of inspiration from the natural world, like songs like "Breeze" and "Singing to the Earth," for instance. What do you find inspiring about nature? I know you even recorded the album out in the Catskill Mountains, right?

Sam Cohen: I think when you go out and really enjoy yourself in nature and really let go of all the modern-world stuff and routines and things, it's so much bigger and, as an artist, better than what you can try to do, so it's really inspiring to see the shapes and the patterns and the orders and the genes and the cycles that go on. For me, what I enjoy about going out into nature on a hike or just staring at a plant or a dog or something--any kind of art I'm into, like if I'm into modern art for right now, I can go out and see that in the natural world and be like, "Oh! That's so much cooler because it's got all these tiny details and it still makes that overall bigger shape." Or, if you're on a nouveau trip, you can go out and see a weeping willow and be like, "Oh, that's so much better!" To me, that's what I like about it. It's just perfect in every way.

JB: Or if you're playing guitar and you go out and there's some whipping wind, you're like, "Dude, that's so much better than my feedback!"

JG: Nature definitely speaks to you. I think sometimes when you're writing lyrics too and you sit out in nature or climb up on a big hill and just let it come out a little bit more, you start coming up with concepts that are a little bit more than the "this girl broke up with me and I'm bummed out" idea.

Tell me a little bit about the band's history. I know you all went to college together, right?

JB: Not exactly. Sam and I went to college together.

JG: I met them a bit after. They had a band called Cash and they needed a bass player and someone referred me to Sam, a good friend of ours who was always like, "You should meet this guy Sam. You guys would hit it off," and we were all living in Boston at the time, so they called me up and were like, "Hey, can you play bass?" I hadn't played bass in years but I went and just sort of faked it and we all hit it off. We had similar interests in music. I played with that band for a bit and then we started Apollo Sunshine in 2001. I think August of 2001 we recorded the first couple songs. We were just kind of messing around. I don't think we really had a band name or anything.

Some of you received formal music education, right?

JG: We've all been trained as musicians, I guess.

Has it been a help or hindrance?

JG: It's a help. I remember taking violin lessons when I was seven and I took piano lessons when I was 10. You learn so much that then you can forget it and have your own style. I'm definitely in favor of learning things.

SC: It's not like we're saying everyone needs to do that or only listen to stuff if people sound like they know how to break down what they're doing, but, sure, in our lives, we did that and it was fine. We're making music now and it didn't turn us into squares.

JB: You can definitely utilize that knowledge. You never know when it's going to become useful. Sam and I actually studied music production in school. There are a bunch of beautiful instrumental tracks on the new album. How did those come about? Were they conceived as instrumental tracks from the get-go or did you just realize lyrics would be unnecessary?

JG: Sam wrote that track "Happiness," which is a really nice instrumental.

SC: That was sort of pre-conceived. It had all the parts. Other stuff--like "Green Green Lawns of Outer Space" is just an improvisation that got recorded that we thought was really nice just as it is so we put that on the record. There are various ways that it comes about, really planned or not planned at all.

You're currently on the road. How's that going?

JG: It's cool. We actually just flew out to Los Angeles just to do a bunch of radio things and things like this to promote the album. We're playing one show and then we fly back home to the East Coast and start a tour down South and to the Midwest for a month. It's actually been a year since we've been on tour, which is crazy because we're a band that stayed on the road a lot for many, many years. It's strange. We're like, "Wow, we haven't toured in about a year!" We're all looking forward to it. It's nice to be able to perform when you have new songs and a new vibe that's more current with the way you're feeling. It gets hard when you're still playing off a record that's three years old and you're still on the road. It's hard to relate sometimes, but it's still really fresh to us and it's enjoyable.

How would you describe one of your live shows? Do you stick closely to the album or is it a whole different thing?

SC: I'd say it's probably a whole different thing.

JG: We stick to the songs. We try to sing the songs as good as possible and just keep it as real as possible. We don't try to do too much from the nuances of the record just because it would be crazy.

JB: It's way more electrified.

Do you play as just a stripped-down three piece?

JG: Yeah, just bass, electric, drums and some keyboards and pedal steel. It's more of a rock show, definitely.

JB: A lot of the songs, to pull it off the way it's on the album, we would need probably three more people on tour with us, at least. The versions we do are pretty awesome live.