When indie-folk duo Whitney first began recording, guitarist Max Kakacek and drummer Julien Ehrlich didn’t expect it to come to much.
The pair had been longtime friends and members of indie-rock band Smith Westerns. Following that band’s breakup, they were living together in Chicago, each working on his own music. Soon, they started collaborating and fell in love with the results.
Their debut album, “Light Upon the Lake,” was released nearly a year ago, and they’ve been touring behind it ever since, playing to increasingly large crowds.
amNewYork spoke with Kakacek.
What made you and Julien realize you had something special as Whitney?
When we wrote “Golden Days” — it was the third song we wrote — we had this moment of, “This is a beautiful song. We’re proud of it.” We romanticized that song to ourselves. From then on, we just believed in the project enough to see it through.
What influenced you as you were writing these songs?
First and foremost, the friends we had were really supportive. Music-wise, we got really into this artist named Jim Ford. He was a late ’60s/early ’70s singer-songwriter who never got big but wrote all these great songs that sound in between Van Morrison and Sam Cooke. We thought, “This is the kind of music we want to make.”
What was happening in your lives as you recorded it?
We’ve talked a lot about how we had both been in Smith Westerns and that band ended. We had both been in relationships with the first people we ever fell in love with, and both relationships ended. We were both aimless. At one point while we were writing, we lost our apartment, so we were technically homeless and sleeping on people’s couches. There was a lot of transition and figuring out what we were doing with our lives. Making the record was our anchor.
Did those difficult times bring the two of you closer together?
I don’t think we became best friends from making the record. We were already best friends when we started making it. It felt really organic. Other bands I’ve been in, or albums I’ve worked on in the past, seemed forced in a way. The collaboration felt like work. This felt more like expressing what we were feeling and making music we were excited about. The whole band started with us sharing these songs that we made with our friends and it blossomed into what we have now.
If you go: Whitney is performing at Brooklyn Steel on May 24 at 8 p.m., 319 Frost St., Williamsburg, bowerypresents.com/brooklyn-steel, sold out.
The band will also be performing at BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! on Aug. 11 at the Prospect Park Bandshell, enter at Prospect Park West at Ninth St., bricartsmedia.org, FREE
