Elliot Bergman on his new band and his second home.

Lately Elliot Bergman has been making waves along with his sister Natalie Bergman as the Chicago-based duo, Wild Belle. Although their debut full length album hasn’t even hit yet (scheduled for a March 2013 release), the pair have already been featured as Vogue magazine’s band of the week and have heavily circulated three well-received singles (“Keep You,” “Backslider” and “It’s Too Late”). However, back before Wild Belle was in existence, Elliot hung his hat in Ann Arbor where he studied music at U of M, worked at Encore Records and was part of the Ann Arbor-based band, Nomo. We got to catch up with Elliot about all of that and more in anticipation of Wild Belle’s Ann Arbor 19 show at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor.

I know you have a lot of familiarity with Ann Arbor.

Yeah, I love Ann Arbor.

What do you love about it?

I went to school there, so a lot of my fondest musical experiences were around Ann Arbor and Detroit. My band started in Ann Arbor. There’s just a little scene there. It’s a supportive community. I love the Blind Pig. I love Encore Records. There are just great things about Ann Arbor, and it’s kind of a second home to me.

Are you guys excited to play as Wild Belle at the Blind Pig?

I’m definitely excited to come back with Wild Belle to the Blind Pig.

What are some of your favorite Ann Arbor hangouts?

I worked at Encore for a number of years during college. That’s a special spot for us. And Treasure Mart. One of my favorite things about Ann Arbor is there are so many amazing things that are recycled and reused – and they use them to build instruments. I’ve found really cool instruments there. But really the whole recycling culture in Ann Arbor is so much more developed than almost everywhere else in the country that that’s one of the things I really love about the town. There’s a real consciousness about the environment and not being wasteful. I appreciate those things about Ann Arbor.

I know that you’ve built your own instruments. Why is that appealing to you?

The process of creating a new thing is always kind of rewarding and fun. And you make this thing that’s got all of these idiosyncrasies. It’s kind of crude but then it makes all of these unusual sounds. You kind of find that there’s a little song inside of each thing that you make, so you’ll start playing it and something will emerge, and it’s different than what you would come up with if you were playing like an acoustic guitar or something. It’s just another tool when you’re composing to have in your arsenal – and something that you built yourself.

I know you guys recorded at Key Club Recording in Benton Harbor, Mich. What made you choose that location?

I’ve done a bunch of records there. They are just really great people to work with, really creative and hardworking and really fun to be around. We’ve done almost all of the Nomo records there, too, so it definitely feels like home.

What are you most proud of with the album Wild Belle is about to release?

I’m proud of my sister. She’s really grown so much in the past couple of years. I’m proud that it’s really a family affair. We’ve just had so much help from our friends and family making everything come together. It definitely feels like this thing that we couldn’t have done without the support of a lot of people, so the record is very meaningful to us. We even ended up using some of my mom’s paintings. My mom died about six years ago from brain cancer, but she was really an incredible artist and musician. We were just going through some of her old slides a few months ago, and we kept coming back to this one image that’s sort of this weird island, space ship type looking thing, and there’s all of these geometric shapes coming out of this landscape in really beautiful, earthy colors. It’s something she painted when she was in college, but it somehow seemed like just the perfect image to represent our record. She would be very excited about it. We’re sad we can’t share it with her.

It sounds like you had a really unique, artistic family background. Is that true?

Ya, everyone in my family is involved in arts in some way. My sister, Elise Bergman, is a really great designer. She’s doing a lot here in Chicago. Then our youngest brother, Bennet, he’s a really cool writer. And he actually shot our video for the song “Backslider.” It’s a great thing, and we are kind of unusually close for [siblings our] age.

You guys have a very interesting aesthetic visually and in your sound that has a dreamy, throwback 70s-esque quality. What inspires that?

Definitely the music that we love. We really love a lot of soul stuff from the 60s and 70s, but we try to walk a line between incorporating those production values and keeping things in a modern context.

I’m sure everyone asks about the band name. I know Belle is Natalie’s middle name, right? 

Yeah.

But why the wild? Where did you get that idea?

Well, you must not have met my sister, but … she’s… no, I’m just kidding. It’s not necessarily her persona or anything like that. It’s just we wanted to do something that was sort of wild and beautiful, and that’s kind of a way you want to live your life – not being constrained by other people’s expectations of you and doing what you’ve done before but being able to be creative and be able to push yourself. So that was kind of where the idea came from.

And what’s the inspiration behind your Tumblr? Is it Natalie that maintains it?

It’s mostly Natalie that does it. I just have a few sporadic contributions, but it’s mostly Natalie’s personal, visual taste and just kind of things that we’re drawn to. You’ll find a lot of Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley. It’s just kind of being able to throw visual ideas up and have them catalogued in a way without having to explain too much. It’s sort of a visual notebook.

Why do you feel what you are doing is important?

I don’t know how important it is. It’s important to me. For one thing, it’s one way of connecting with people. There are always these songs that are kind of like, what we’re here to do is to show people love and joy and pain and share that with them. Music really does have the power to connect with people in ways that they don’t even know aobut. I saw with my mom when she was sick — she was all but in a vegetative state, but you put on some music, she could sing a little bit to some records. She was almost dancing in her bed. There’s different ways that music can affect people that we don’t really understand consciously.

What excites you most about your upcoming show at the Blind Pig?

Just excited to see all of my Ann Arbor friends. I’m excited to get something to eat and stop into Encore.

Wild Belle will be performing at 9 p.m. on February 19 at the Blind Pig in Ann Arbor along with Saturday Looks Good to Me. Tickets are $12 in advance and $14 at the door. Ages 18 and up.