Live and let D-I-Y with SunDog

SunDog, to borrow an over-used sports cliche in service of a pun, have that dog in them.

By the time the ball drops on 2024, the psych-tinged bubble grunge trio out of Anchorage, Alaska, will have packed an absurd amount of activity into the year. That includes sandwiching an album release¹ with two tours, serving as go-to openers for the rock bands that can sellout the Alaska Airlines Center and deign to come to the Last Frontier, and gracing the stage at a pair of sizeable festivals, including Iceland Airwaves in Reykjavík.² That’s a lot of travel, a lot of performing, a lot of effort, just simply, a lot. Full stop. And according to the band, the opportunity to do all of that is the result of dogged work rather than some innate quality or vague X-factor.

“We’re not that special,” said Abi Sparkman during a Sunday morning video interview shortly before the release of SunDog’s third album. “I’m just willing to put in a ton of work to book a tour because I’m like ‘That sounds like fun. I want to go do that.'”

Sparkman is SunDog’s lead vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter. Bassist Deven Lind and drummer Philip Giannulis complete the band’s lineup.³ Lind and Giannulis joined Sparkman for the odd-hours interview. They heartily cosigned the “not that special” sentiment.

Instead their burgeoning success as a road band is owed to the sort of dedication that means doing things like crashing on floors when necessary, Lind said. Plus, SunDog approach their business in a way that defies expectations of what life is like for a band that, especially live, unapologetically rocks.

“There’s this weird notion that it’s still a party lifestyle, and there are bands that have a party lifestyle on tour, but we’re very much like that,” Lind said.

There’s still ample room for fun and, Giannulis said, and maybe a couple of beverages, but anyone picturing hackneyed, tear-up-the-hotel-room-style debauchery has it all wrong.

“It’s just so not what it takes to get this kind of thing done,” Giannulis said.

Instead, Sparkman said, booking shows for an Alaska-based rock band is a process that includes “a million” emails and plenty of research. It’s a process made more difficult by being based outside of the contiguous U.S., too.

“Nobody knows who we are,” Sparkman said. “I do all the booking stuff, and I have help here and there from a friend in Portland, but when I first started trying to book us out of state, it was a little daunting.”

Bandmembers said that performing at Treefort Music Fest in Boise, Idaho, seemed to make some inroads for SunDog in the Pacific Northwest. That helped to establish an identity, create connections and start building the sort of familiarity that eventually simplifies booking.

“The way I book, if I’ve never booked at a venue, I try to find a lineup, so it takes a lot of legwork and research,” Sparkman said. “But once you’ve played a venue a couple of times, and the booker knows you, it becomes a lot easier.”

As SunDog have played venues, both new and familiar, Sparkman, Giannulis and Lind have had a new collection of tunes to showcase, About You, the band’s third LP, was released in late September. The eight-song collection of slickly produced,⁴ alt-rock sounds breezy, but its cohesive, hummable sound belies months of steady work that made it possible.

The first song written for the album was penned in May 2022, according to Sparkman, and the band started recording About You in May 2023, and that processes extended into February 2024. SunDog chipped away at the project on the fringes of members’ day jobs and other obligations.

“Mostly weekend sessions,” Sparkman said. “We all go in for several hours on a Saturday or whatever. So that’s kind of how. It took a very long time to get it done.”

That slow-and-steady work was coupled with a new approach for the band. While past SunDog albums were somewhat blown-out, hard-rocking productions recorded with as much analog equipment as possible, About You embraces planning, melodicism and technology in a degree that’s novel for the band, according to Lind. He described the methodical approach as a “safety blanket” that let SunDog take some bigger swings.

“Having that pop angle going into the studio was kind of cool and fun to play with,” Lind said. “We finally had big structures that we could play with that we knew what they were. There were no variabilities that we were unsure of. There was no stuff like, ‘Oh, we’ll do it when we get to the studio.’ It was all fairly mapped out, which was really nice.”

Sparkman quickly tagged that with a second adjective: “And torturous.”

The result is music that’s fun to listen to, enjoyable to perform, and that provides a tuneful foundation for harder-edged live performances.

“I think it’s a bit heavier, a bit more dynamic live than it is on the album,” Giannulis said. “We try to really hit the highs and the lows live.”

1. SunDog released their third LP, About You, back in late September on Dog Yard Records. It’s a collection of loud-quiet-loud alternative rock straight our of 1996 in the best way. I was a fan. ↩︎
2. The other festival was Treefort Music Fest, a gem of a festival held annually in Boise, Idaho, that boasts consistently awesome lineups. ↩︎
3. SunDog’s lineup has been consistent since the band formed nearly a decade ago. While it’s been reported that the band formed in 2015 while the trio were still in high school, that’s not exactly right. “We just met in high school and played one show together,” Sparkman said. “I’d say we didn’t start until 2017.” ↩︎
4. About You was produced by Anchorage’s James Glaves, who the band effusively praised. ↩︎