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Brooklyn-based musician Kevin Devine.

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• Lollapalooza 2009: Day one

On Friday, August 7 at Lollapalooza in Chicago, the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter Kevin Devine took a moment to pull aside a lounge chair and chat backstage with buzz about his time in the wake of his latest release Brother's Blood.

buzz: How have Chicago and Lollapalooza in general been treating you so far?

Kevin Devine:We just got here, but once we got here it's been great. We were staying out by the airport, so the drive took us two hours to get here when it should have been half an hour, twenty minutes at most. But, it’s a lot to take in and I really haven’t had the chance to take it in yet. Hopefully the weather...if it holds like this [steady rain], it will be alright. But, if the heavens open up and it gets really messy that could be a bit of a pain in the ass. I’m such an old man. I don’t want to be slinging mud around or anything like that, but so far so good.

buzz: You often vary between solo performances and those with backing band The Goddamn Band. Will they be joining you today?

Kevin Devine: I have The Goddamn Band with me today, yep. The only other festival I’ve done like this in the states actually was in 2007 when I did Austin City Limits, but I did that solo. So, today it’s nice to be able to have the band and especially with the Brother's Blood stuff, to present it the way it is on the record.

buzz: With that, do you have a preference in which format you perform?

Kevin Devine: I think it depends on the room and on the crowd. Not to sound like a hippy, but it really is the vibe. This tour I’ve done out to and I’m doing home from Lollapalooza...it’s solo acoustic and smaller rooms. It's me doing requests and stuff like that too, so that’s really cool to do by yourself. Some of the bigger places, though, especially when you’re supporting bigger bands and playing in front of 2,000 or 3,000 people, it's nice to have the ammunition to kind of fight the crowd noise. I like that. I like being able to switch it up...to have that ability, because I know a lot of people don’t.

buzz: You just released an album, Brother's Blood in April, which happened to leak several weeks early. How do you feel about the presence of downloading on your work?

Kevin Devine: The record leaked and that was kind of frustrating, because you can’t really get too upset about it. I mean, it’s a fact of being a modern musician. It's really hard to keep that kind of thing away from the greedy hands of the Internet, but I also think that it's flattering and it's sort of a marker for me to know that there are actually that many people out there that are interested in downloading my music that they would go though that process. It didn’t seem to harm the momentum of the sales or the response to. In fact, I think it's the best response that I've ever receive critically and at this time, 3 months in, it’s the most that we’ve ever sold of anything. It’s a moderate victory, but I’m able to do what I do pretty much outside of the claws of the music industry as much as possible and I still get to relate enough to do things like play at Lollapalooza and that’s a pretty rare little place we’ve been able to carve out so I feel lucky for that.

buzz: What do you have coming up in the next few months?

Kevin Devine:After Lollapalooza and [the previously mentioned] short little tour, I go home for the better part of two months. I'll probably play some college shows and raise some plants...have a home life with my family and friends, and do normal shit. Then I go back out with The Get Up Kids in October and November and that’s going to be a really fun tour. [Brother's Blood] just came out in the UK. I spent a lot of the summer getting that set up, and I’ll probably go over there again. The next year will probably be a lot of touring, and I hope we’re going to start getting things set up in Australia and Japan. The record comes out in Europe in the fall and the vinyl comes out in the US this fall, so (breathes heavily) it’ll be busy…a lot of movement.

I’m really happy though. All I ever wanted to do is like…you can always look up and see people and wish you were in their position, but I can also look behind and see that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of people that would love to be able to even get up at an open mic in their neighborhood and play a song for people. The fact that I get to travel around and people come to the shows and seem to really relate and connect to the music, (even if there aren't millions of them)...it keeps moving a step up on the ladder. The fact that this is what I get to do for a living…it's a pretty amazing way to spend your time.