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Mar 09, 2014 By Under the Radar Staff Ola Podrida

For Under the Radar‘s 11th annual Artist Survey we emailed some of our favorite artists a few questions relating to the important issues of the last year, as well as some quirkier subjects. Check out our current print issue and digital issue for surveys from My Morning Jacket, Foals, Amanda Palmer, Local Natives, Wild Nothing, These New Puritans, Lanterns on the Lake, Xiu Xiu, and Summer Camp.

Here are answers from David Wingo of Ola Podrida.

Top 10 Albums of 2013

1. Mazzy Star: Seasons of Your Day

2. Veronica Falls: Waiting For Something to Happen

3. Mikal Cronin: MCII

4. Julianna Barwick: Nepenthe

5. Califone: Stitches

6. Connections: Body Language

7. True Widow: Circumambulation

8. Kurt Vile: Wakin On a Pretty Daze

9. Destruction Unit: Deep Trip

10. Radar Brothers: Eight

What was the highlight of 2013, either for you personally or for the band?

For Ola Podrida it would be playing Fun Fun Fun Fest in Austin, my favorite outdoor music festival in the world. Getting to play on the same stage a few hours before several of my musical idols like Tom Verlaine, Johnny Marr, and Thurston Moore was pretty awesome. I have to say it was a pretty great year all around for me personally: we released a record, Ghosts Go Blind, that I couldn’t be more proud of; I had the incredible experience of touring North America and Asia playing bass with my friends and one of my all-time favorite bands, Explosions In the Sky; and I had two films (Mud and Prince Avalanche) that I scored (or co-scored with EITS, in the case of Prince Avalanche) come out within a couple of months of each other. Any other year any of those would be the highlight, but this year my personal highlight was most definitely witnessing first-hand every day of the year my wife Magali continued to heal and improve and get back to her old bad-ass self after being in a near-fatal and physically devastating car accident in 2012. She is a real-life superhero and I am certain that I will never be more inspired by anything else for the rest of my life.

What was the low point of 2013 for you?

Our dog Junebug dying.

What are your hopes and plans for 2014?

To work on David Gordon Green’s and Jeff Nichols’ new movies and to spend as much of August and/or September in the mountains as I can.

What are your thoughts on the passing of Lou Reed? Did his music influence you at all and in what way?

I have too many thoughts to really adequately cover here. He is, along with Neil Young, the musician I have probably listened to the most and been the most influenced by throughout my life. I’ve been listening and growing with his music for almost 25 years, and my thoughts about the possibilities of music took a very large turn pretty much instantly upon hearing The Velvet Underground & Nico for the first time when I was 15. He wrote more perfect songs, in my opinion, than anybody else in the history of pop and rock music, and covered way more ground in doing so than anybody else has ever gotten close to. I was on tour in Hong Kong with EITS when I woke up and saw the news, and got up and went for a walk in the nearby park listening to the self-titled Velvet Underground album on my iPod. I was trying to process it and thinking of how there was a good chance I wouldn’t be there on the other side of the world that morning if I’d never heard his music when I turned the corner and saw a group of octogenarians doing a choreographed exercise routine and took out my earbuds to hear what the musical accompaniment was. At that moment the guitar solo in “What Goes On” had just started, and I had one of the stranger experiences I’ve had: the melody in the traditional Chinese piece of music they were exercising to was honestly the exact same as the solo in “What Goes On,” to a point that I was genuinely very confused. I put one earbud back in to make sure I wasn’t imagining it, and it was indeed almost the exact same thing and they were almost synced up with each other exactly. This continued for another seven or eight seconds before it moved on to something totally different. I am generally a skeptic when it comes to magic, or whatever you want to call things outside the physical realm, but it was a pretty odd, incredible feeling. It certainly felt like in that moment there was some sort of organic and spontaneous cosmic tribute being paid to the man.

www.olapodrida.com