Beach Weather play an acoustic set in The Current studio
by Mac Wilson
July 23, 2025
While in town for a concert at the Armory in Minneapolis, the Boston-originated indie-rock band Beach Weather visited The Current studio for a session hosted by Mac Wilson. Dipping into their catalogue, Beach Weather performed an acoustic set of songs before a lively conversation with Mac. Watch and listen to the music performances above, and find the interview and transcript below.
Interview Transcript
Mac Wilson: Hey there. I'm Mac Wilson from The Current, and I'm joined in the current studio today by the band Beach Weather. Reeve, Sean and Nick, thanks for joining us today.
Reeve Powers: Thanks for having us, Mac.
Mac Wilson: You are playing with Pierce the Veil, and I'm thinking about artists that you've played with over the years. Is there any pairing of an artist that you have performed with that seems like the most far out from what you do? Like, it seems like you jibe pretty well with Pierce the Veil. What's the furthest stretch that you'd make with anybody that you played with on a bill over the years?
Reeve Powers: Honestly, this might be one of them, because we have a lot of like, softer, lighter tunes as well, so we've kind of rocked it up for this tour. But it's been really fun, and it kind of does fit better than I had expected.
Nick Santino: I'm trying to think of all the festivals we've done and what crazy headliner, like, Post Malone was on one.
Sean Silverman: Yeah, Post Malone was a weird pairing.
Nick Santino: The Pretenders were with us in Brazil, remember, on the same stage?
Reeve Powers: Yeah, Pretenders. There was one festival where it was like, straight-up gospel band Then Us, which was pretty cool. And you know, they blew us out of the water. It was hard to follow. There was like 17 people on stage, but, yeah.
Mac Wilson: Well, like, whether it's chatting with bands or talking about the sets that they put together for different performances, whether you're headlining on your own or opening up for somebody, an example I come back to is the band Metric. I've chatted with them when they've played here for their shows, and then when they've opened up for the Smashing Pumpkins, like you have to be in a totally different headspace, like you're gearing yourself towards essentially somebody else's crowd. So you're talking about gearing your set list towards that — is it one of those where you really have to boil it down to the very best of the best? Or what are you trying to do with your set lists for these?
Reeve Powers: Kind of. We kind of just took our most like energetic ones — since we, you know, it's a shorter set, we only have like, 30 minutes, and it's before such an energetic couple bands.
Nick Santino: Yeah, something like, on, like a headlining tour, we're usually thinking of all the moments and scenes or whatever, like, where the middle section, we like to chill it out and do a little acoustic break, whether it's a full band, acoustic vibe, or something where, you know, and then we can dance it back up with some peppy, poppier songs, and then we can hit some harder rock songs. Where, yeah, this set list was, Sean specifically, was kind of picking his brain for months.
Sean Silverman: It was kind of a ski slope on this version.
Reeve Powers: It's like a 30-minute fireworks show.
Nick Santino: In this set we had in the middle, we had a song called "Seth Cohen" that we were playing the first few shows. And then we put out a deluxe version of our album Melt, and it had a couple more unreleased songs, so we swapped that one out the last show, or, yeah, the last show for this one called "Dressing Room Tattoo," it's a little bit more, kind of like punky, more rocking song. And I feel like, yeah, like, without feeling like we're only doing our rock songs, we definitely felt — you know, it feels like a cool set that we kind of wanted to do for a while, because when we do get to those songs in our set, everybody's a little bit more energetic. So having eight in a row like that, it's pretty cool.
Sean Silverman: I'm exhausted.
Nick Santino: Exhausted thinking about it.
Mac Wilson: Well, I've got good news, because "Seth Cohen," that's one that we've been digging into.
Sean Silverman: Oh, sweet!
Reeve Powers: Nice!
Mac Wilson: So I actually never watched The OC during its original run, but it's amazing, over the last two decades, the imprint that it's made where you don't have to have watched it to kind of know the impact that the show had, not just for the plot, but for the way that it incorporated songs from the time. Like, they dug pretty deep!
Nick Santino: Death Cab and The Killers. Rooney, yeah.
Mac Wilson: And they went sometimes even deeper with that, like relatively unknown artists who got pretty premium spots in the show. So I'm curious what — the ways that that show influenced your own lives. Were there any artists that you discovered from The OC?
Nick Santino: The three that I just said, yeah. Death Cab. I mean, Imogen Heap. Yeah.
Sean Silverman: Rooney was a big one.
Nick Santino: Rooney was a big one. Remember that scene when I think it was The Killers playing in, like, the bar, right?
Sean Silverman: I feel like it informed a lot of, like, the early 2000s kind of, like, post, like the New York era, like Interpol, Yeah Yeah Yeahs era. It was like, that was like the second wave of, like, the indie bands that you could find and feel like you were cool because you watched the show.
Nick Santino: And they were on Hollister Radio when you go to the mall, all those bands. We wanted to be on Hollister Radio so bad! But yeah, The OC, I mean, I personally loved the show when I was in high school. Me and my girlfriend and all of our friends would watch it on Thursdays. And Seth Cohen's character was like nobody else that, for emo kids growing up in the early 2000s, nobody else on TV was really like that, unless they were, like, mocking somebody, you know? So Seth felt like the most authentic character to like — kind of the life, besides being, you know, super rich, living in Orange County and all this stuff, me growing up in the suburbs of Boston, you know — it felt very relatable in a lot of ways. And I remember approaching Sean, like, two years ago, being like, "I'm re-watching The OC, and we could probably, we should write a song called 'Seth Cohen.'" And he was like, "How are we gonna do that?" You know? And then it took us a little bit, and we did it, and it's a fun one. People seem to be connecting with it, which is really fun.
Reeve Powers: Yeah, I was in elementary school when that show was happening.
Nick Santino: Yeah. We had to explain to him who Seth Cohen was.
Reeve Powers: I was not allowed to watch that.
Nick Santino: Not Seth Rogen, Seth Cohen.
Reeve Powers: Yeah.
Mac Wilson: We're here in the current studio with the band Beach Weather. So I have a question: Are you familiar with the phrase — not the terrorist organization — but the phrase, the Baader-Meinhof?
Nick Santino: Great start to a sentence!
Mac Wilson: The Baader-Meinhof. Are you familiar with this?
Reeve Powers: Is that, like, a beer?
Mac Wilson: No, it's the sensation of learning about something for the very, very first time, and then within like, days, you hear about it again. You're like,
Nick Santino: Oh yeah, that happens all the time!
Mac Wilson: I have never heard about this in my entire life, and now I've heard about it twice in two days. And that was absolutely the case with me and the Billion Stream Club on Spotify.
Nick Santino: You'd never heard that phrase before, and then you heard about it in a week.
Mac Wilson: Yeah, I heard about it with you reaching a billion streams.
Reeve Powers: Until we were in it, I didn't know about it, either!
Mac Wilson: So you'll see where I'm going with this. So first of all, congratulations on hitting the Billion Club.
Reeve Powers: Thank you!
Mac Wilson: "Sex, Drugs, Etc." It's almost silly to ask, did that have any impact, like, tangible impact in your life, beyond the ego boost, beyond that, was there any tangible impact from that?
Nick Santino: Yeah, they gave us, like, big dinner plates, that say, "1 billion." That's tangible.
Reeve Powers: Yeah. Now my family respects my decisions in life. Yeah, that's the only change it's made for me.
Mac Wilson: I kind of figured that there's only, like, marginal stuff in real life. But I mean, the idea that the billion people have streamed your songs, that's cool.
Nick Santino: Yeah. I mean, seeing the other songs that are in that, I remember, like, a month after it hit a billion, my wife sent me a text of a screenshot of "Bye Bye Bye" from NSYNC just entering the Billions Club, and I was like, "How the hell did our song enter a month before, you know, the Billions Blub before 'Bye Bye Bye'?" It's pretty wild.
Mac Wilson: And the second instance where it came up with me, I was reading about Linkin Park, where they're having a couple of their songs gradually hit the the Billion Club. They've got like seven or eight of them now. But like you said, with "Bye Bye Bye" by NSYNC, you're like, "This is a band that's been at it for 20-some years, and then we got there before them." That's cool.
Nick Santino: A band that sold like a million records first week, and it was a huge deal when they did it, you know?And now it's like, "Whoa, we hit a billion streams?"
Reeve Powers: I try to humble myself knowing that they had Spotify back then, they would beat us for sure.
Nick Santino: But I will say it's kind of cool to see all these like these legacy artists that are like, kind of getting their flowers. Now I even feel like Deftones are like, almost the biggest they've ever been now, because people, and me personally, too, just starting to really discover bands. Yeah.
Mac Wilson: I even saw one where AC/DC, "Thunderstruck" has been on the rock charts for like, the last four decades, or something like that. It's setting the record for, like, the longest streak. Like, it's been there the whole time. It's kind of like Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd always being in the Billboard 200, where, like, "Thunderstruck" has always been on the rock charts.
Nick Santino: When "Sex, Drugs" was starting to do its thing, that's when, like, "Running Up That Hill," the Kate Bush song was, like, going crazy, and so it's just wild, like, a song like 40 years later. You know, us, we're like, "Whoa, a song eight years old can catch fire." But then a song like 40 years old can, you know, it's wild.
Sean Silverman: Yeah, it's so cool.
Nick Santino: Super cool.
Mac Wilson: So you said that you recently put out the deluxe edition of Melt. So we're talking about the realities of the streaming era. Is this a case where you're like, "OK, we're probably going to release this as a deluxe edition at, you know, a year or so down the road." Do you consciously set out to record more in the first place that you can keep in the tank? Or do you go back into the studio to record some stuff?
Sean Silverman: Sort of, but we were pretty set on — the initial thought was like, "We're making a 15-song record."
Nick Santino: Yeah, or "We're making an 18-song record."
Sean Silverman: We had a big whiteboard of thoughts, and we were like, that's totally feasible in three weeks. And then it turned into...
Nick Santino: We gotta chop it down to 12.
Sean Silverman: Yeah. We had to chop it, because there was just, the brain space required to do 18 songs felt daunting.
Nick Santino: But it was nice, because it made us actually like, take the 18-ish that we had and go, which ones feel like Melt the most? And then which ones do we still love, but could be, yeah.
Sean Silverman: And it worked out nicely.
Nick Santino: And so it did work out perfectly, because...
Sean Silverman: The heavier songs kind of crept their way into the deluxe.
Nick Santino: Yeah. Like the song on the deluxe version called "Tulips" we loved from day one, and we wrote it in the same session as some of the songs that made it on Melt, but for some reason, we all felt like there's other singles that were going to be or other songs that would be singles, first or second. And like, even though we thought this song would, we were like, it might get buried. It might not get its chance to shine. So the conversation of a deluxe came up, and we were like, "Let's make 'Tulips' like the star of when the deluxe gets released, and then it has its own life." And it feels cool because we've all liked, you know, loved that song. And it does feel like these almost demo songs get to be treated like a single.
Reeve Powers: It's my favorite song, and I've just been like, shaking, to like release it for the past year.
Mac Wilson: We're in The Current studio with Beach Weather. Thanks again for stopping by, and best of luck with wherever the road takes you next.
Nick Santino: Thank you.
Reeve Powers: Thanks, Mac.
Mac Wilson: Thank you very much.
Songs Performed
00:00:00 High In Low Places
00:03:15 Melt
00:05:27 Sex, Drugs, Etc.
Songs 1 and 2 from Beach Weather’s 2024 album, Melt; song 3 from their 2022 release, Pineapple Sunrise. Both are available on Arista Records.
Musicians
Nick Santino – vocals, guitar
Reeve Powers – bass, vocals
Sean Silverman – guitar, vocals
Credits
Guests – Beach Weather
Host – Mac Wilson
Producer – Derrick Stevens
Video – Evan Clark
Audio – Eric Xu Romani
Camera Operators – Evan Clark, Ruben Schneiderman
Graphics – Natalia Toledo
Digital Production – Reed Fischer, Luke Taylor
External Link
Beach Weather – official site