We caught up with Brooklyn’s Dinosaur Feathers at their Sound Situations taping at Marsh Windwoods in raleigh, NC while they were in town to play the Hopscotch Festival. As a matter of fact, Spin Magazine just wrote that they were one of the 8 Best Moments of the Hopscotch Music Festival.  The questions featured are from the likes of Buried Beds, Jamie Randolph and the Darkhorse, Aunt Martha, Margot and the Nuclear So and Sos.

We found the band to be incredibly charming. Check out our interview (and viewer beware: their answer to the first question was kind of muddled – but you can see they say “Museum of Natural History“) and then if you are in New York City, go see them tomorrow night when they play with Oakland’s Man/Miracle at Piano’s.

Dinosaur Feathers began with a man carrying a suitcase full of beats and a girl-sized hole in his heart. Greg Sullo moved to Brooklyn in the summer of 2007 to pursue his musical dreams and songwrite his way through a break-up, and found himself unwittingly living on the same block as his college singing buddy Derek Zimmerman. After Sullo debuted his beat-smithing skills at local favorite Bar 4 in Park Slope, a tipsy Zimmerman and bassist Adam Fetcher volunteered to join him in filling out the sound with backing vocals, keys, and general swirling nonsense.

Fetcher left the band before the first show could be played, lending his skills to an equally worthy cause — the 2008 Obama presidential campaign. Now a 2-piece, the boys sang extra hard and played extra funky, and gained the respect of South Brooklyn’s Local Correspondents songwriters’ community. Soon after, folk-rocker Hannah Fairchild and folk-shocker Tom Curtin (of The Warbles) came on board and helped transform the group into the creamy mix of 3- and 4-part harmonies that have since defined the Dinosaur Feathers sound.

In 2009 the group played many, many shows (at least 90 in the NYC area alone), and underwent line-up changes as Fairchild and Curtin left to focus on the development of their solo work. The single “Know Your Own Strength” and the free, home-recorded EP Early Morning Risers helped the band earn the attention of local bloggers, and their general persistence earned them the title of the “hardest working band in Brooklyn” from Earfarm.com.

The group’s sound became more skewed and more rockin’ with the addition of Ryan Michael Kiley on the bass. A screaming, stomping master of the pedal-board, he worked with Sullo and Zimmerman (as well as Curtin and Fairchild) on their self-produced debut full-length titled Fantasy Memorial. The band borrowed a bunch of money from generous (if slightly skeptical) parents in March 2010 to facilitate a self-release, and Dinosaur Feathers toured extensively across the country in support of it, thereby earning the chance to play awesome sets at the SXSW, CMJ, and Sasquatch! festivals.

In late 2010, feeling a lack of looseness in their live sets, the band enlisted Sullo and Kiley’s old bandmate Nick Brooks to join on drums. Brooks’s commitment to technique helped to keep the rhythmic complexity of the drum machine, but his experience playing in rock bands allowed the bands to reach new levels of balls-to-the-wall intensity on stage.

2011 sees the band preparing their second full-length album (as yet untitled, as they continually think up unbearably goofy or filthy names for it which are immediately vetoed). Working with producer Eli Crews (Deerhoof, tUnE-yArDs, Thao and Mirah) at New, Improved Studios in Oakland, the band lived in a yurt in a generous friend’s backyard for 5 weeks, putting together what they hope is a bracing representation of their newly expansive and slightly harder-hitting sound.

They hope to release the new tunes in late 2011/early 2012 and are actively seeking a label to help get their music out. As promotion for their Summer Tour, the band released the Game of Thrones-themed single “Please, Please George” to music bloggers, fantasy enthusiasts, and the general public (check their website for links to download it). Plans are in the works to release another free, home-recorded EP later this year as well.