Thanks very much to the age of MP3s and all-digital album releases, avid music listeners are the target for a thousand and one different night club venues, more festivals than $3 bottled water opponents care to count, and Twitter- and Facebook-friendly publishers and promoters. With all the fuzz getting between you and your music, a Philadelphia-based band, Drink Up Buttercup, is still making the extra effort to catch audiences the old fashioned way — by putting on mind boggling performances that, as singer Jim Harvey puts it, “punch you in the gut.”

Drink Up Buttercup’s debut LP, Born and Thrown on a Hook, came out March 23rd, and they played more than 10 shows during the South by Southwest music festival in Austin. I had the chance to talk to Jim on his drive to SXSW about playing music in Philly (a town with a toned-down, localized music scene), the impact of playing a massive festival such as SXSW, and their songwriting and recording process.

Have a few minutes to do a quick interview?
Oh yeah man, I’ve got a lot a long time, I’m driving to Texas, right now and I’m in the driver’s seat.

Oh, You are? Is this a bad time?
No, no, I was saying this is perfect!

I didn’t know if you were comfortable driving and talking on the phone .
Yeah, I think you’re not supposed to, but I do.

I’m calling from Jersey where it’s against the law, so I’m just looking out. First off, how long is the drive to Texas from Philly?
I think its like 24 hours. We’re stopping tonight in Tennessee, so we’re kicking out half the drive today and [half] tomorrow; we’ll get in late tomorrow night, I guess.

Is there anyone in particular you’re looking forward to seeing at SXSW?
You know what, I’ve been so concentrated on doing our thing that I really haven’t really given too much thought to that. We saw a band on Friday that was really cool that we want to check out called Letting Up Despite Great Faults, so we’re definitely going to try and meet up and check those guys out. Doctor Dog and all the other Philly bands, we’ll be trying to check them out. Other than that, I haven’t been checking out too much stuff because I’m so wrapped up in my own crap.

Speaking of Philly, what’s going on in Philadelphia in terms of a music scene: is it big, or is it minimal because it’s kind of a smaller city?
Well, that’s the thing about Philly — it’s not a city like New York, where you can have on the same block as many venues that are worth playing as there are in the entire city of Philly. So it is a scene where you don’t want to overplay. You basically have a lot of house show kind of things — that seems to be the scene that’s taken over. One band, Grandchildren, they’re supposed to be playing SXSW and I know they’re really big in that house-show scene. There are so many [house-show venues] — there’s The Ox, Big Momma’s Warehouse, the Danger Danger Gallery, all those places. It seems like the bands tend to play those type of places rather than actual venues, and then you get the touring bands playing the actual venues. They play the house shows too, but yeah, its an interesting thing where it’s more of a non-traditional type scene, I guess you could say.

I saw you guys at a couple of shows during CMJ and I kind of concluded that your shows are very involved with your audience; you like to get into the faces of the people who are watching you. Are there any big plans for SXSW to catch a new audiences’ ear?
Oh, yeah! That’s why we’re playing so many shows down there, we want to get as many new ears as we can. And like I said, the reason we haven’t been really checking into other bands is because we’re playing three or four shows a day so we’re not really going to have time to do much, aside from getting our equipment from one place to another and play. I’ll be amazed if we have a chance to eat and grab a beer ourselves.

When I see you guys live, you have a big cavalcade of percussion — you have tool boxes, garbage cans, maracas, and stuff like that. What was the influence for wanting to get into that hard of a dynamic with your sound?
Well, that was actually [due to] Ben, who plays bass, key, and percussion. He was a carpenter, and all day he would hear these kind of percussive sounds at work — throwing scraps in the trash can, etc. When I recorded my demos, the only thing I had was this big metal table for percussion at my house — I didn’t have any traditional instruments besides my guitar. So the combination of him hearing that and the sounds of the demos came together and kind of birthed that whole thing that we do with live auxiliary percussion.

Your sound is kind of a mesh of many different styles — how would you describe your sound?
I’d say we play classic pop songs with a harder edge to them. [The harder edge] comes off a lot more in the live shows. On our album we just tried to create an entire listening experience, with a lot more variety. With our live show we kind of punch you in the gut the entire time

Yeah, I’ve noticed that. (laughter) Where does a band like yours see itself in two years?
Basically, [this album was] a long time coming…because we got so caught up in playing shows and recording at the same time. We’re probably going to end up touring this album at least through the end of this year. We have a lot of plans for [the US], and for the UK. We’re not quite finished with this round of songs yet, but obviously we’re gonna have another, and tour the heck out of that too, I’m sure, and just keep doing what we’re doing — doing it bigger and better. More songs, and hopefully a bigger budget to make our live shows crazier.