This Sunday, June 28th, catch Hey Marseilles on the Main Stage of the Capitol Hill Block Party @ 3:45 p.m.

Hey Marseilles (pronounced “mar-SAY,” get it right!) has had a better than average summer. You could probably close your eyes and point to any spot on a map and they’ve performed there. When their second full-length album, Lines We Trace, was released in March, the group of six — with double the amount of instruments — hit the ground running and hasn’t really stopped.

If you take a look at their tracklist, songs like “Madrona,” “Rainfall,” and “Tides” make it pretty clear that Hey Marseilles is a Seattle band. The songs are, at times, heartbreakingly beautiful. Matt Bishops’s voice floats next to the viola, while the fading in and out of the cello leaves you aching for more. There are many layers to Hey Marseille’s “folkestra” sound, so much so that I had to look up videos of their live performances just to see which instruments they pulled from their bag of tricks.

I chatted with Sam Anderson of Hey Marseilles over the phone Friday at a rest stop somewhere in the state of New York about his first time at Capitol Hill Block Party, performing for KEXP, and not taking himself too seriously.

So I saw that you’ve traveled 3,000 miles in the last 4 days — how’s that been?

Not too bad. We got kind of a slow start the first day of travel (which was on Monday) and we didn’t calculate the pace that we needed to avoid doing this all-night-marathon type of driving. We made that realization after the first night and we were like, “Aw, damnit!” We also actually got pulled over but we didn’t get a ticket. Another thing that helps is that two of the band members flew [to Rhode Island for the Newport Folk Festival], so we all have bench seats in the van that we don’t have to share and can sleep on.

Have you hit any bumps along the road besides the cop? Any flat tires in some Midwest ghost town?

Yeah — actually that same day one of the belts on the van broke so it made the wheel this kind of lopsided shape…one of our bandmates actually has a video of this. All of us were just driving along for a good 20 minutes while there was this really intense shaking of the van. I don’t know how we put up with it for so long. If you watch the video, it sounds like a helicopter.

What did you think it was?!

We thought it was the road! (Laughs) The roads down there are really bad and it started kind of slowly and kept getting worse and worse — then finally we pulled over. Our tour manager is actually a very skilled mechanic. If any of us would have pulled over and checked it out we would have been like, “Yep! It was the road!” (Laughs)

It seems like all six of you genuinely get along really well. Do you and your brother also work well together?

Yeah, absolutely. We’ve been a band for six years, going on seven. We’ve all known each other for a long time and know how to make it work.

I swear I heard you guys at the Sea-Tac Airport a couple weeks ago. How did you get involved with the Music Initiative Program there?

I don’t recall exactly how we got involved in that. But I do remember when it came up it didn’t seem like that many people would be exposed to our music that way. However, the reality is that at least every week we get people who tell us that they just returned from a trip and heard our music in the airport and how much it meant to them.

It seems like there’s a lot of support from the community here to involve artists in any way they can. I think it’s really great.

Yeah! I do too. At first, I made the comment that it didn’t seem like that big of a deal. But now it’s something that I really appreciate. I think at the beginning I took Seattle and the community here for granted. Touring really helps you to appreciate this city so much. When you’re touring in smaller cities with a population of like 13,000 people, it’s a cool experience because people are very appreciate of what you have to offer…. But when you return to Seattle, you’re blown away. I came back and I was like, “Wow, this city is incredibly supportive of the artists and it’s incredibly rich culturally.” All of those things jumped out to me that I totally took for granted.

Is that part of the reason you chose to include so much of Seattle in the video for “Heart Beats”? How did you go about choosing all those places?

Well, that was the product of Hayley Young (the director of the video) and her vision. Even more specifically, the video is places that are relevant to each individual of the band. For instance, the ferry was my scene. That ferry travels between Steilacoom and Anderson Island, which is where I grew up. It was intentional to include Seattle but it’s definitely more specific than people think.

I know the “Hey Marseilles Makes an Album” video is a joke in some sense — but is some of that actually pretty accurate to how Lines We Trace came about?

(Laughs) Yes. My good friends (and creators) Justin Henning and Nick Simmons are close with the whole band personally and know us to be funny, weird dudes who aren’t above embarrassing ourselves and doing weird stuff on camera. So a lot of the video shows our quirkiness, but there are definitely still elements of truth.

Is the house in the video where you actually recorded some of the album?

Yeah! That’s the house that three of us live in.

What was that exorcism scene right before the counseling? I didn’t quite get that part. (Laughs) 

(Laughs) That was a fun one! The B-roll for that scene was hilarious, there’s a lot of good outtakes.

In nearly every article I’ve read about your band, they mention you were classically trained. Would you describe yourself as truly classic? Or do you just have a classical sensibility?

I started playing violin when I was three and I started in a very classical environment. I started playing cello when I was six, but I was also playing different styles of music at the time. I was playing the mandolin and I was also playing in blue grass bands. By the age of 8, I was teaching the mandolin. Up until this year, I’ve been playing a lot of classical music. However, it’s not really worth it or fun to play classical music when you don’t have the time to rehearse 5 to 10 hours a week. The nature of the instruments that both my brother and I play are very, very difficult and if you don’t have an extensive background in studying those instruments — maybe this a grandiose claim for me to make — it would be very challenging.

Some really incredible artists have performed on the main stage at Block Party. Is it daunting at all to return home to that after being away from Seattle for so long?

Well, two weeks ago our schedule was that we had Newport Folk Festival on Friday and then we had a day off on Saturday and then we did Block Party on Sunday. So we would have had a day off in Seattle to stay in our own beds, maybe check out Block Party a day early…. But now we’re flying in Sunday morning and heading straight to Block Party. Truthfully, it is a bit daunting because we’ve never done anything quite like this before. But we’ll see how it goes!

Do you have any good memories or stories you can share from Block Party?

Yeah, so many that I can’t share. (Laughs) Actually, one of my favorite memories is the very first time I went to Block Party and the first time a lot of the band had been to Block Party as well. It was maybe 2008 or 2009 that the band was asked to play in the Bean Room for KEXP. We hadn’t had a lot of exposure or connections to the KEXP staff yet. I remember it being a very fun show and where things really started for our band. There were quite a few people from the industry there who really liked what we were doing and were impressed. We had a great time. And since then, KEXP has been really, really supportive of us.