Brattleboro, Vermont’s Happy Birthday are really easy to love — they make indie rock as unpretentious as it comes, heavy on the hooks and light on the sarcasm. Their self-titled debut took us at Verbicide by surprise, and I personally have kept the record in heavy rotation over the last few months.

Recently, we caught up with Happy Birthday’s lead vocalist and guitarist Kyle Thomas and talked with him about Vermont, SXSW, pop music, and being a teenager.

So, what’ve you guys been up to?
We just got back from a short tour with the Vivian Girls and Wetdog. It was rad. I’ve been working on songs in my head, so we’re gonna start figuring out some new stuff for the next album. Right now, I’m just chilling in Vermont for a second before I go out to Los Angeles for my grandma’s 80th birthday bash!

You guys have a total feel-good story to your origins — you were only supposed to play one show ever, correct?
Yeah. Chris [Weisman, guitar and bass] was asked to set up a show for our friend Ryan Power, so he asked me to play it, [with the intention that he] and Ruth [Garbus, drums] would be my band. We worked on the songs and they came out really good, so we just kept doing it. It’s a feel-good story because we are really good friends making music with each other for only that reason. We love the music, and we’re just being ourselves.

How was SXSW for you?
It’s like the best shit ever. We did 10 shows and some were better than others.  I’m weird because I really love being around so many people. I like looking at them. Also, you can’t get tacos in Vermont, so we got really fat.

You’re based in Vermont, which not exactly Brooklyn or Austin. Is there an active music scene up there that we’re not writing about?
It’s active in an abnormal sort of way. There’s actually a lot of people here doing music and art but there really isn’t very many shows or anything like that. Chris Weisman and Ruth Garbus both make amazing music on their own, as does Chris’s brother, Kurt. There are also people here like MV & EE and Dredd Foole. But what’s maybe even more exciting to me are the younger bands that pop up sometimes. We used to have a show space called the Tinderbox, and we had lots of punk shows. This kid Pat the Bunny (Wingnut Dishwashers Union) got a lot of bands to come play. It’s mostly a bunch of artists and outcasts living the dream up here, doing nothing and loving it. Also, my friend Jeremiah Jones is a wonderful teenage pop grunge fuck-up.

You seem to have a very open, very affectionate relationship with pop music (you’ve got Beyonce and Lil Wayne in your top Myspace friends, after all). What impact does that sort of Top 40 goodness have on a band like Happy Birthday?
I find a lot of inspiration in that music. It is, after all, the most popular music, and there’s a reason for it. The songs are written to keep your attention the whole time and get stuck in your head, and usually nowadays they have something weird about them, too, like odd sounds or extra beats and stuff. That is what we try and do with our music, too. I also get into listening to the production on headphones because it’s so over the top, and, honestly, I wish I could make my shit sound like that.

Would you care to go into the inspiration for “Maxine the Teenage Eskimo?”
I was thinking about what Quinn the Eskimo’s daughter might be like.

So where did that crooked music note album art come from?
We were looking for an album cover that was very simple and iconic. We had some other stuff that was good, but it just wasn’t simple enough or powerful enough. I just started drawing that symbol in my journal a bunch, and then just for the hell of it I painted it in black ink on one of the blank white test press sleeves we had of the record. It just seemed like it fit. It’s cool to keep it black and white. And it kind of describes the sound we’re trying to do a little bit, “music with zig-zags on it.”

One last question, do you guys miss being teenagers?
I honestly still feel exactly like I did when I was a teenager, so no, I don’t miss it.