Hoot property | Bangkok Post: Arts & Culture

Conducting interviews at a music festival must be the bane of any sane journalist's existence. Running from one stage to another is hard enough, but when thrown into a pressroom near the stage where it's too loud and stuffy, it can get even more frustrating. That's what happened during our short slot with US electronica act Owl City, aka Adam Young, at the recent Silverlake Music Festival in Pattaya. He was propped up on stage while I was fielding him questions from a chair off stage _ communicating through microphones. It looked like a scene from an Asian arthouse movie where, at any minute, Young might get off his high stage to bite off my head, and then butterflies would rise from the ground to eat my corpse.

But Young's boyish appearance, sweet temperament and apparent eagerness took the edge off the weird setting. He chatted breezily, and seemed appreciative to be in Pattaya playing for the Thai crowd, even if he only had a day and a half to enjoy the country.

Yet another internet success story, Young started posting his self-composed music online around 2006 when he was fresh out of high school, and loading Coca-Cola on to trucks in his hometown in Minnesota. Positive responses came pouring in, and before he knew it, he was signed to Universal in 2008. One year later, the LP Ocean Eyes arrived, and single Fireflies became a global hit. Fireflies didn't just bring him a worldwide fanbase, it also brought him truckloads of criticism, mostly on the subject of similarity to The Postal Service, a fellow American electronic indie-pop outfit.