Churchill plays the contrasts

A coustic indie rockers Churchill came together about two years ago in Denver, and just a few weeks ago, they put fresh ink on a record deal with A&M Octane. With two EP’s and one full-length record to their name already, they’re working on the next LP and heading out on tour.

We got three of the five band members on the line — singer/songwriter Tim Bruns, mandolin player Mike Morter and drummer Joe Richmond — to talk about, well, everything.

So what’s the band up to these days?

Tim Bruns: Well, we recently signed a record deal with A&M Octane, so because of that we’ve been really busy kind of working on new songs in the studio and also getting ready for some shows this weekend, and we’ve got a couple more big shows coming up and we’re going on tour in October.

Tell me about The Change EP. Is there a change in the music that reflects the changes for the band? Or is that reading too much into it?

Mike Morter: I would say our music didn’t change. It may have changed a little bit from our first stuff. We just play what we wanna play and put it out there. I think the song in general (“Change”) — it’s weird because the song has helped us with getting on the radio, so in a sense, yeah it’s changed a lot.

Speaking of album titles, your 2011 LP Happy/Sad is incredibly fitting in the most simple way.

TB: That whole record kind of spawned out of the last track on the record, a song called “Happy/Sad,” so that whole album was kind of themed around that kind of contrast. Some of the songs were written in really happy times and some in really dark times. It worked out really perfectly in the way that expressed lyrically — it tied together the whole album.

Tell me a little about your musical backgrounds and how that all came together.

Joe Richmond: We kind of came together in kind of a random way. Tim was writing songs and doing the singer/songwriter thing for probably as long as I’ve known him, and he was out in Nashville. Before that, Mike and Tim were playing together out in Pennsylvania. They ended up in Colorado and it was really this folky kind of thing. Then they asked me to record an EP for them and when I recorded that, I ended up, kind of in a weird way, joining the band. I was like, ‘I really like the music. I’d like to play if you need me.’ I came from a rock background and I just played what made sense to me. And that’s where our bass player came from too — that kind of solidified our rhythm section, that rock sound. And Bethany came from a classical background … She definitely brought a whole different dimension to that as well … We ended up just kind of playing what we all felt and in some weird way it fell together.

The band has been getting a lot of attention lately, and when that happens, bands tend to skip out of Denver. Think you’ll stick around for a while?

JR: I think it feels like, to me, that we really made Denver our home, and kind of as a family. At different stages in the last couple years we’ve lived together and we’re really connected to the Denver music scene and Denver music fans, and we wouldn’t be where we are without the fans and the scene. We wouldn’t want to leave.

So are you working on anything else or just focusing on the tour?

JR: We’re doing the tour stuff, but part of the thing with A&M is that we’re working on putting out another full-length next year … We got a ton of new songs. I’m actually at the studio right now, looking at our board of new songs and it’s dizzying.