Bernard Fowler is a singer and musician who grew up in New York City who has been a touring member of the Rolling Stones since 1989 when he was asked to come on board as a singer for the Steel Wheels tour. In fact, Fowler will join the Stones on stage at Mile High Stadium on Saturday, August 10 for the No Filter Tour . But by the time Fowler became involved with the Stones, he had already been hired to do backing vocals on Mick Jagger’s first solo album, 1985’s She’s the Boss through the auspices of his friend and professional associate musician and producer Bill Laswell. Prior to that Fowler had worked with Laswell on the 1982 Material album One Down as well as various other of Laswell’s projects including the 1985 Compact Disc by Public Image Limited and, later, avant-garde composer Philip Glass’s 1986 record Songs from Liquid Days. Fowler’s power, versatility and taste has made Fowler an in demand talent in music for decades and his discography also includes performances on records and live with artists as diverse and respected as Herbie Hancock, Yoko Ono, Sly & Robbie, Ryuichi Sakamoto, James Blood Ulmer, Alice cooper and Bootsy Collins. Fowler has been around.
In 2019 the singer released a project that has been in the works for a few years now as an idea that had to become a reality and that is the album Inside Out comprised of Rolling Stones covers. But it isn’t merely a covers album. Fowler went through the Stones’ catalog and selected songs whose words struck deep and resonated with issues of racism, political corruption and class that were in the forefront of public consciousness at the time of their writing and the ways in which those cultural issues are very much at the heart of political discourse today not just in the United States but in the world generally. That approach to finding the songs with the appropriate words went hand in hand with doing the music in an almost entirely different style in the form of jazz and the spoken word and jazz fusion that was embodied by the East Harlem, New York City collective, The Last Poets. But unlike one of the other progenitors of hip-hop, Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets’ music wasn’t as widely accessible.
“Gil Scott-Heron, lucky for him, he was one of the spoken word artists that actually got played on the radio,” says Fowler. “So I heard him on the radio like everybody else did. But The Last Poets was a different story. The Last Poets was not something we heard on the radio. People learned about The Last Poets by word of mouth and the music played on the street. My older brother brought those records home. So we played The Last Poets at my house.”
Fowler was just slightly to young to have seen The Last Poets when he was coming up but in later years he met and hung out with Jalaluddin Nuriddin, one of the founders of the group before he passed away in June 2018. The collective still operates today with a 2019 album Transcending Toxic Times produced by Philadelphia-based bass player Jamaaladeen Tacuma. For connoisseurs of rap, The Last Poets are some of the founding fathers of the art form starting as spoken word poetry with a backdrop of percussion until 1973’s Hustler’s Convention where other instruments were added and gave the group’s music a more jazz and funk vibe. But the whole time, The Last Poets wrote sharply observant songs about life in the inner city in ways that hadn’t quite been articulated in the arts the same way up to that time.
“The things they were talking about were the things we were going through in the black community,” says Fowler. “Things are rough now but it was even rougher back then. And they talked about those things—poverty, corrupt government and children being hungry. It is also part of what influenced me to do this record. I just wanted to do something different. Someone wrote a comment about it being a vanity project. A vanity project? What’s so vain about doing something different? When I saw that the first thing that came to my head was ‘Fuck you, you don’t even know what you’re talking about.’ It’s like telling an artist known for abstract painting to not do portraits. Don’t paint portraits because we only want to see you doing abstract painting. People just want to put you in a box and if you step outside that box, oh, it’s a vanity project. This record is important for a lot of reasons, I think. It’s important because it mirrors the time we’re living in now and more important than that it shows how strong a songwriters that the [glimmer] twins are.”
Give Inside Out a listen and discover the real impact of the words written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Fowler stayed away from most of the big hits and chose songs that maybe some fans glossed over but whose lyrics struck Fowler deeply. In the liner notes of the album Fowler writes “Could it be that the Stones are actually some black guys disguised as English gentlemen?” And why so?
“Because the lyrics could have been written by a black cat from the inner city of New York,” offers Fowler. “Those lyrics were that strong. Obviously to be able to write and relate the way that they wrote they had to be going through something similar where they were. We didn’t have the internet back then so I’m sure they had an idea what was happening here but didn’t see it first hand. When you think about it, they did go through some shit. That’s where Exile On Main St. came From.”
Perhaps the only radio friendly song Fowler chose for Inside Out is “Sympathy For the Devil,” which is an oddity in radio play due to its length alone. It’s also the only song for which Fowler used the original chord changes and played by keyboardist Mike Garson. Otherwise the songs are rhythm driven and performed by some ace players in the jazz world including Ray Parker Jr. who many people really only remember for the 1984 hit song “Ghostbusters,” a song he also wrote and produced. Parker Jr., though, has had a storied career worth delving into including writing with Marvin Gaye, session work with Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Jean-Luc Ponty, Tina Turner and Herbie Hancock, to name a few. Parker Jr.’s guitar chops and creativity have graced numerous records including Inside Out and brought the jazz sensibility Fowler was looking to create in homage to The Last Poets’ style. So he also brought in other Midwestern jazz musicians like George Evans, Vince Wilburn Jr. and Darryl Jones – the latter two of which performed with Miles Davis – as well as jazz horn players like Keyon Harrold and Tim Ries. The result is an interpretation of Rolling Stones songs unlike any you’ve ever heard and which highlight the heft of the poetic clarity and heft of the lyrics of The Glimmer Twins. What do the Rolling Stones think of the album?
“They love the record,” says Fowler.
Catch Fowler on the road now with The Rolling Stones but keep an eye out for live performances of tracks from Inside Out when Fowler takes that music on the road to perform live beyond his home town of New York City.
The Alarm is currently touring North America with Modern English and Jay Aston’s Gene Loves Jezebel with a stop in Denver at the Oriental Theater on Friday, August 9. All three bands came up at around the same time and were on even mainstream radio in the early 80s. At that time post-punk bands of various stripes were enjoying varying degrees of popularity and commercial success. In addition to the above groups like U2, Simple Minds, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Cure, Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees helped to define the sounds and look of that style of music for decades to come.
The Alarm’s roots in music go back to Wales where singer and guitarist Mike Peters cut his teeth as a live band playing in the punk band The Toilets in 1977. Peters says the fledgling group played with bands like The Clash, The Buzzcocks and Sioxsie & The Banshees. The band would go to London’s now legendary The Marquee Club, where the Rolling Stones played their first live show in 1962, to see bands including Chelsea whose James Stevenson once drove original Alarm guitarist Dave Sharp home one night because he’d had a bit to drink. Stevenson now plays in The Alarm as well as Jay Aston’s Gene Loves Jezebel. The same social milieu meant that Peters went to a clothing store on London’s King’s Row where Billy Duffy worked before the latter joined The Cult. At that time The Toilets had dissolved or rather evolved into a group called Seventeen. “That was fairly directionless in a way and we experimented with echo, power pop, rockabilly and we got lost in the learning curve,” comments Peters. “But we got a tour with the Stray Cats by pretending to be a support band at gigs and we played The Marquee Club and the guy who ran the club thought we were horrible.”
That club manager refused to book Seventeen from thereon out from one of the premier venues of the era. But a year later Peters and company had reconfigured and focused its ideas into The Alarm. And still the guy at the club recognized the members from being Seventeen. “[He] said, ‘I’m not gonna have them play,’” recalls Peters. But Chelsea Singer Gene October offered to get The Alarm a gig as a support band but needed an alternate name so The Alarm played The Marquee Club for the first time as The Black Sheep and the club manager said, “That band’s going places.” At that The Alarm’s manager quipped “That’s the band you wouldn’t book. That’s Seventeen!” And from there The Alarm became a popular band throughout the 80s even though savaged by the English music press. It’s 1983 single “Sixty-Eight Guns” broke into the top twenty in England and it’s 1987 single “Rain in Summertime” cracked the American top ten Mainstream Rock chart, the latter remaining a staple of college and Modern Rock playlists for decades.
Though known for unabashedly positive up-sweep to its music, The Alarm’s catalog runs the gamut of emotions with luminous songwriting that sounds like the band is striving to connect with something bigger than themselves. By 1991 in the wake of the then new album Raw, The Alarm called it quits. Peters went on to a respectable solo career but also engaged in a short-lived project in the late 90s with his previous acquaintance and now then friend Billy Duffy—Coloursound. The group recorded demos, no official releases, but it did perform live. “Pardon me saying so but those recordings have a kind of cult status for fans of the bands,” jokes Peters. The band sounded like a fusion of the great sounds of mid-80s post-punk and Peters says that in the audience of that first show were Ian Astbury, The Cult’s singer, and Eddie MacDonald formerly of The Alarm.
“The next morning the phones were ringing off the hook, says Peters. ‘Let’s get The Cult back together! Let’s get The Alarm back together.’” By the turn of the century or so both groups were back and active.
But by then Peters had already recovered from a bout of lymph cancer only to discover in 2005 that he had chronic lymphocytic leukemia. He formed the Love Hope Strength Foundation shortly after to support people suffering from cancer and leukemia. Peters and The Alarm continued to write and perform music perhaps more actively than in its previous iteration and in the wake of Peters’ wife/band mate, keyboardist Jules, diagnosis of breast cancer in 2016 The Alarm has put out four albums in three years beginning with Blood Red and Viral Black in 2017, Equals in 2018 and Sigma in 2019. It wasn’t just the urgency of health issues that has inspired this flurry of creative activity either. Peters took on the challenge of his creative legacy as well and not to just rest on past laurels like a band celebrating live a kind of museum.
“I think a lot of that stems from arriving at that point in 2010 or 2011 and an era of fortieth anniversaries for The Alarm,” says Peters. “And I like to look forward so I took that as an opportunity to re-present ourselves as a modern band even given the dynamics of who we are, our age, and even though we have active and inactive members but all part of the family—you become a history of the band. You go away but you never really leave. So I wanted to re-establish the band in the modern era given the weight of our history and make music that can stand up to that and live up to that and represent itself through itself against that history. With the new records it challenged us to re-establish ourselves. That’s a stronger calling, I think, and that’s what’s fueled all the new music we’ve made. And more the will to survive, my wife diagnosed with breast cancer and my leukemia relapsed. There was a lot of reason in the air and to make music that could be a soundtrack for us not just as human beings but as a band as well.”
With the new configuration of the band Stevenson, a versatile instrumentalist, has taken on a greater role playing bass pedals as well as guitar as Peters plays a special guitar called The Deceiver which looks like an acoustic guitar but has greater capabilities than the standard instrument. Peters also has microphones set up across the stage so he can move about and in general the music can be presented in ways that had not been possible previously. To perform live for the anniversaries of their respective releases, the first two albums 1984’s Declaration and 1985’s Strength have been revisited and reinvented given the new live format and not hemmed in by the technological and creative limitations of the time of their original release.
In 2017 The Alarm performed on the Vans Warped Tour side by side with much younger bands but earned the respect of musicians and audiences who, given the era, shared The Alarm via social media platforms and giving the group a new audience that only truly knows the modern band and not influenced by expectations of years past. And the younger audience is having an impact on The Alarm’s older fans through social media.
“That’s re-invigorated our old audience and they see younger people talking about the music in social media. And they can say this band is making music today and it validates their reason to like the band in the first place. As long as we’re enjoying it and our success isn’t getting number one on the Billboard charts but maybe to still be there. It’s about longevity and creating a life in music. We’re still learning what we’re capable of. In the 80s we had big hair and western clothing but that’s only one facet of our history and people can discover other facets of us and doors open for us as we play and opportunities arise when we stay true to the core values of the band which is to to be restless, never be happy with what you’ve be created, make things better, make it around the next musical corner, live for the day to find that chord and keep on dreaming and the thrill of the music.”
Modern English and Jay Aston’s Gene Loves Jezebel have also been releasing some of the best music of their careers with 2016’s Take Me to the Trees with the former and the latter’s 2017 album Dance Underwater. Modern English in particular has always made interesting and moodily haunted post-punk but most people probably only remember the band for “I Melt With You,” which was commercially beneficial but has perhaps eclipsed its other fine offerings.
“A lot of bands can get overshadowed by a massive hit,” comments Peters. “I remember playing with Radiohead in Albany, NY in 1995. They were massive Alarm fans and struggling with the weight of ‘Creep.’ It became a sleeper hit in a way and they’d just released The Bends. And they were saying no one wants to hear The Bends, ‘They only want to hear ‘Creep!’ And it was killing them. Thom Yorke was really struggling and I talked with Jonny Greenwood and told him you’ve got to put your arm around this guy and stick to what you believe in and keep playing your music and it will come out from under the shadow. They stopped playing ‘Creep’ for awhile and I admire them for that because that’s what bands have got to do sometimes. That’s what’s great about seeing Modern English on this tour and spreading their wings and playing the music they love and playing ‘I Melt With You’ at the end of the night. It’s great seeing them and Jay and James playing songs from Dance Underwater. It’s as good as anything they’ve done. What’s good about this tour is that all three bands are as much about tomorrow and we’re all bands that have survived but the ethic of the band has stayed intact and that’s what people are experiencing when they come and see the tour.”
The term “supergroup” gets thrown around a lot, but few bands are as deserving of the title as Old Man Gloom. With members whose day jobs have included Cave In, Converge, ISIS, Sumac, Doomriders, Mutoid Man and myriad other projects, the band has become one of the most enduring enigmas in the world of heavy music, simultaneously stunning fans and critics with jarring and creatively extraordinary releases while confusing nearly everyone with bizarre social media posts and even taunting the music press. After all, this is the band that slipped review copies of its album Ape of God to music journalists only to reveal months later on release day that what they’d distributed wasn’t the actual record.
“There’s been so many things that if any other band had done the things that I do they would be slaughtered for it, and they would lose fans and people would be outraged,” says Santos Montano, Old Man Gloom’s drummer and the band’s primary online presence. “But because we do it so consistently people don’t even think about it for more than a day. When we did the Ape of God thing,” any other band that did that, publications would be like ‘fuck these guys.’ The labels would be like ‘fuck these guys.’ There’s so many people that would be like ‘Great, you want to play jokes? Go fuck yourself and fuck your stupid band.’ With us, we’re so consistent in our bad behavior that it didn’t affect us in any way.”
Old Man Gloom began in 1999 in Santa Fe, New Mexico as a project between a group of friends who all happened to be professional musicians. Aaron Turner (guitar, vocals) was the frontman of the band ISIS at the time and now fronts the art-metal group SUMAC. Nate Newton (guitar, vocals) plays bass in the frenetic metalcore band Converge. Caleb Scofield (bass) was a member of Cave In and the Old Man Gloom side project Zozobra.
After releasing a handful of sporadic recordings in the early 2000s, the band went completely dark for nearly a decade, only to reemerge seemingly out of nowhere to release a new record, NO in 2012. The record was barely advertised but still got a lot of attention from fans and the press and was followed in 2014 by the now-infamous Ape of God.
By any measure, Old Man Gloom has done a terrible job promoting itself. The band doesn’t tour and largely eschews the typical PR relationship for Montano’s bare-bones self-promotion techniques. That’s by design according to Montano. Because Old Man Gloom is a side project for all its member (Montano is a set dresser for television and films), there’s little pressure to tour, release albums or even behave professionally.
“We don’t need people to listen to us or come see us play live or do anything,” he says. “We don’t need any of it. We just do it on an as-needed-by-us basis. It just so happens that it works for everyone else. If it all stopped tomorrow, we’d all be like ‘Well that was pretty good. Too bad it’s not all still happening.’ There’s just no consequences for us and it’s pretty great.”
That same attitude follows the band into all aspects of its existence, he says, including the studio. Montano says sometimes he’s as surprised as everyone else when he hears the band’s completed records.
“Have you heard our albums?” says Montano. “It’s like 70 percent gobbledygook. There’s literally moments in the studio where we look at each other, and Aaron’s in there doing something really fucking weird, and we’ll look at each other like ‘Is this real? Is he serious right now or is he fucking with us?’ Sometimes it sounds really terrible and we’re not sure it’s going to work, then Aaron takes it away for six months and comes back and it just so happens it’s really good stuff. We never know what it’s going to be or if it’s any good while we’re doing it. And we don’t really care. Whatever it ends up being is just fine by us.”
That’s not to say the band has had an easy go of things. In March of 2018 the band and the heavy music community at large was dealt a terrible blow when, on a highway near his home in New Hampshire, Scofield hit a concrete barrier with his truck and died from his injuries. It’s hard to put into words how devastating the loss was to Scofield’s family and friends. Aside from his musical family, he left behind a wife and two young children. He was 39.
Caleb Scofield, who played bass in Old Man Gloom and Cave In, died in a car accident in New Hampshire in March of 2018. His bands have forged on, with Nate Newton taking over bass duties in Cave In and Steve Brodsky doing the same in Old Man Gloom. Photo by Josh Withers.
Montano, like the others, still struggles to talk about Scofield’s death.
“It’s just so hard to imagine that it’s real” he says. “I guess it’s a little over a year now and it still feels pretty surreal. It still feels like it’s not really possible that what’s happened has really happened. But then obviously it has.”
Montano says his feeling go up and down, from extreme grief to fondly remembering funny things Scofield said or did. It’s a rollercoaster that more often than not ends with an empty feeling that’s hard to escape. Keeping the band going, he says, helps.
“On a day to day, I could not think about it for however long and then something happens and something will hit me and all the synapses will start connecting and I’ll sort of remember the reality and get really fucking bummed out,” he says. “But then we’ll get together and we’re all in the same place and we’re all going through it together. It’s really healing to get together and talk and laugh and tell Caleb stories. It’s what we all need. Saying all that, none of that speaks at all to what his family is going through. What we’re feeling is just a drop in the bucket, which leads us to keep doing things to support his wife and kids however we can. It’s what we’re all kind of focused on right now.”
That focus has not only helped friends and bandmates honor Scofield’s legacy, it has made a very real impact for his family. A GoFundMe campaign in Scofield’s memory raised more than $100,000 and ongoing efforts including auctions of memorabilia and music-related items continue to bring in money for the family. Montano says the outpouring of help has been mind blowing.
“It’s been pretty crazy, the amount of support” says Montano, adding he was particularly shocked by what fans and even relative strangers were willing to offer just to help out.
“I had all this old Hydra Head (Turner’s record label) stuff and we marked it up really high and all of that money went to Caleb’s family,” he says. “I met a woman who bought this ISIS sawblade, like a CD attached to a sawblade. I think we made like ten copies, and she bought it for 300 bucks. And you know, she didn’t want to spend $300 for a CDR attached to a sawblade, but she was like ‘hey, it’s a cool thing to have, it’s yours and all that money goes to Caleb’s family.” And it’s like, you don’t know me, and you still want to funnel that 300 bucks to [the family]. We did these raffles and you know people didn’t give a shit about the stuff we were raffling. They thought it would be cool, but the bags were just overflowing. They bought all the raffle tickets and the raffle people started having to make [tickets] on napkins just to keep it going. And again, it wasn’t because they wanted a fucking signed drum head. It’s because they wanted to give that money and give support. It was unbelievable. People really came through.”
Losing Scofield, he says, made the idea of continuing Old Man Gloom both sad and exciting: no one ever wanted to do the band without their friend, but continuing was something they all knew he would want. In the end, Montano says, they decided as a group to push on.
“It’s really made this all feel important again in a way that it hasn’t,” Montano says, “and I think we all have sort of a renewed enthusiasm for Old Man Gloom. It’s like we’re here and we have the ability to spend this time together and we’re so grateful for the time that we got to spend with Caleb through Old Man Gloom.”
Newton says it’s been hard to write and record the new Old Man Gloom record, in large part because they are using ideas Scofield sketched out before he passed. Finishing Scofield’s songs has been fun, weird, sad and challenging, sometimes all at once.
“It’s crazy,” says Newton, obviously emotional about the situation. “It’s hard to put that one into words. It’s difficult on an emotional level, but it’s also hard because his stuff isn’t easy play. He definitely had his own voice.”
In the end the band decided to do things the only way they know how.
“We’re kind of approaching it the way we do every record,” he says. “Everybody brings a bunch of ideas to the table and we just see what works. Because they aren’t fully formed songs, we’re taking some of those ideas and figuring out how to make them work. Then trying to stay true to what he would have done.”
This, he says, is where things get emotionally tricky, but also brings them the closest they can get to paying homage to their friend.
“Every record, Caleb would write a bunch of songs and we’d take one and do it a totally different way,” says Newton with a chuckle. “We’d take a day when he wasn’t there and completely redo his song so when he showed up to record, it would be a totally different song. How do you do that in this situation? It’s new territory, trying to do things in a way that honors Caleb’s memory, but without Caleb.”
One of the overarching themes in Old Man Glooms music has always been how much the members enjoy playing music together. To keep that spirit alive, they enlisted Cave In frontman Steve Brodsky. He’s one of their oldest friends, Newton says, and the only person who could even begin to step into Scofield’s shoes. Newton, however reticently, assumed Scofield’s spot in Cave In for the same reason.
“It is still fun,” he says. “And with Steve involved, he’s part of the family. I don’t know if anybody else could have done it, just like nobody else could have stepped into Caleb’s shoes in Cave In. We needed someone else who knew Caleb like we did. Being able to relate on that level is important because once we relate on that level we can start making jokes about it.”
It would have been easy, Montano says, to focus solely on other things – family, work, other bands – and let Old Man Gloom fade away. But no matter what has happened, the members have always managed to get together, however irregularly, and make music.
“We’re all over 40 and we all have kids and Old Man Gloom was really the only time we saw each other,” says Montano. “Now, in retrospect, thank God we pestered [Caleb] into doing this with us. Otherwise we probably wouldn’t have seen him in the last five years. This was a great excuse to be together.”
And now, he says, the band is an even greater excuse for the remaining members to keep that passion alive and do what they love, as a family.
“We’ve never had the shitty times that other bands have had,” says Montano. “We’ve just never gone through that, like getting sick of each other, all that stuff. We’ve never had it because we’ve never been a full-time band. It’s special and we’re pretty grateful.”
Laraaji was born Edward Larry Gordon and as a youth he learned to play a variety of instruments and did voice training before going to college at Howard University. In the 70s Gordon was living in New York City and studying Eastern spirituality and mysticism when he picked his first zither in a pawn shop. From there he modified the instrument to be electronic and performed and composed with the zither in unconventional ways. He was busking in Washington Square Park when he met Brian Eno and the two came to work on one of the first several albums in the “Ambient” series released by Eno in the 70s and 80s. 1980’s Ambient 3: Day of Radiance was markedly different from other entries in the series as the zither as processed through effects was still fairly organic and brought endlessly fascinating textures to the collaboration.
Laraaji has gone on to have quite a prolific and varied career as an artist and spiritual practitioner. He has done albums with Michael Brook, the inventor of the “infinite guitar,” with Roger Eno, Bill Laswell, Jonathan Goldman (a practioner of healing through sound) and avant-garde noise folk sculptors Blues Control. In the mid-80-s Laraaji released recordings collectively called Vision Songs and broadcast on his public access television show as a practice and example of raising spiritual consciousness through music. He also holds workshops in Laughter Meditation worldwide. Laraaji will perform at Rhinoceropolis on Saturday, July 12 with Free Music, J. Hamilton Isaacs, Goo Age and Fragrant Blossom.
We recently interviewed Laraaji via email and discussed his blending of music and spirituality, the aforementioned Vision Songs and Laughter Meditation as well as his more high profile collaborative projects.
Tom Murphy:When you were studying Eastern mysticism did you find any connections between what you learned that route and the music around you at the time? How would you describe those connections?
Laraaji: I observed that drone music at that time reflected the sensation of eternal present time which is emphasized in eastern philosophy—the continuum of consciousness. Also deep yogic level relaxation and meditation as reflected in the music of Stephen Halpern. The heightened sensation of bliss and ecstasy as reflected in the music of Iasos at the time in the late 1970’s. Terry Reilly.
How did you turn a zither into an electronic instrument? Was anyone doing anything comparable at the time you started doing that? Did you process those sounds early on or was it more for amplification?
My first autoharp/zither was acoustic. And after exploring alternative tunings I investigated ways to amplify it. [I then purchased] an electric pickup made especially for autoharps. I dove into amplified autoharp/zither research and decided to add sound treatment with the MXR 90 Phase shifter. After recording the album Day of Radiance with producer Brian Eno my interest in other [effects] pedals expanded to include chorus, delays, flangers and reverb.
How did you meet Brian Eno and as a producer how involved was in shaping the sound of Day of Radiance?
Brian introduced himself to me while I was playing Washington Square Park [in New York City in] 1978 and extended the invite to join him in his Ambient album productions. His suggestions to depend more on live studio microphones and Eventide effects, mixing as well as overdubbing a second zither helped to shape the Day Of Radiance sound.
You’ve worked with Michael Brook. How did you become familiar with his music and what lead to that collaboration?
Michael Brook was involved in my initial collab performance tours with Opal Evening, a tour project in the late 1980s to mid 1990s. Michael was a performer as well as sound engineer for the tour. As a result his live recordings of all the shows contributed to eventual record releases.
Tell us about Laughter Meditation and why you think it is beneficial to people in practicing it.
Daily Laughter as a mindful practice treats our energy presence to heightened functioning. Included in this is our immune system, our blood flow, our hormone flow, our breath flow. The reduction of stress and emotional tension through mindful laughter prepare us for meditative relaxation and stillness. In this practice our focus is not to find something funny at which to laugh but to explore self-willed laughter as a force for therapeutic recreation and and inner spiritual self connection.
Vision Songs seems like a further expansion of music and art as spiritual practice. Did you broadcast performances of that music on your public-access show in New York? Why were you drawn to that way of putting the music and those ideas out there? What about performing Vision Songs in the live show format do you find interesting and powerful now?
Vision Songs is where I was at the time in the early 1980s seriously investigating spiritual consciousness and sharing my awakening through [spontaneously] inspired songs and music with an expanding spiritual community in the USA. Sharing the songs in live show allows me to free sing the themes and lyric contents of these songs into fresh listening.
Certainly artists like John Coltrane and Alice Coltrane have had their music described as spiritual in philosophy, practice and in the impact of the music itself. Nusraat Fateh Ali Khan and others have been practitioners of Qawwali as part of their fusion of musical and spiritual practice. Who are some artists now that you feel are operating in those modes that you find compelling?
Artists who seem to be performing in these deep intentional spiritual modes [include] Don Conreux, Gong Master, Jon Serrie, Constance Demby, Stephen Halpern and Pauline Oliveros to name a few.
The Dandy Warhols are celebrating their twenty-five years together as a band with its current tour with a date on Tuesday, May 14, at The Gothic Theatre in Denver. In the 90s, The Dandys were undeniably one of the hippest bands in the American indie/underground whose imaginative records were always decidedly outside prevailing trends with a keen awareness of what was already being overdone. The band had then and has now a knack for discovering methods and sounds that could inspire themselves into consistently creating music that combined experimental elements with solid pop songcraft. Its psychedelic glam sound fused with electronic composition catapulted the band into the mainstream abroad and indie success in the USA by the turn of the century. Who hasn’t heard “Bohemian Like You” at some point? But the group’s entire catalog is worth exploring as the band has always tried to do something different with each album rather than stick with the dubious virtue of duplicating a previously successful formula.
The group’s new record, 2019’s Why You So Crazy, finds the band pushing its boundaries in an even more experimental direction with the electronic side of the songwriting taking center. At times the songs sound like a weirdo 70s library music funk track, other times like country folk rendered in futuristic tones, then minimalist ambient post-punk and all around one of the band’s most rewarding listens. Perfect for a band over two decades into its career and still endeavoring to forge new paths.
We recently had a chance to speak with the band’s frontman, the engaging and thoughtful Courtney Taylor-Taylor while he was at the 930 Club in Washington DC ahead of the group’s gig there. As you’ll read below, we talked about his days as a young musician and developing his craft of recording. We also discuss the inspirations behind the band’s recording/production space The Odditorium, how Why You So Crazy is a departure from earlier records, how the 70s was an era where no one seemed to know the rules of what was acceptable as widely accessible weirdness in music, film and television and Courtney’s thus far only graphic novel, the Baader-Meinhof and German art noise inspired One Model Nation.
Tom Murphy:You had bands before The Dandy Warhols.
Courtney Taylor-Taylor: But none that toured or released anything. I was a drummer who produced recordings and I would produce and write songs sometimes. So I learned to do all this stuff from the position of being a drummer. Pete moved back from New York City and moved in with me and talked me into making a band where I was singing, finally.
Did you grow up in Portland?
Yeah, we’re all Portland kids.
Where did you go to see stuff coming up?
Satyricon and Starry Night. Which is now called Roseland Theater. There was a great club called the Pine Street Theater which became an internationally known club called La Luna in the 90s during the grunge and indie era.
Did you see the Wipers.
No, I never saw the Wipers. Or maybe I did and didn’t remember. As a kid I was going downtown at fifteen at the time. It was a blur trying to get in and not get carded, sneak in the back. Just hanging out. So many bands, constantly seeing bands. My whole life has been devoted to rock and I have a lot of back stage and club…a whole lifetime. If I counted up the hours it would probably be fairly gross.
Obviously your band started up the Odditorium awhile back. Was it inspired in any way by DIY spaces in Portland?
That was completely inspired by two things. Andy Warhols Factory and Trent Reznor’s studio in New Orleans.
What about the Factory that inspired you?
When you know about the Factory it’s in your head forever. We had an apartment, Peter and I, that pretty much had people in and out of it all the time. Our freaky friends and our whole team was very Andy Warhol Factory-like, which is why we named our band that in the first place. So you always think of that, “We’ll have a Factory one day too.” When we went to Trent Reznor’s studio I was expecting some kind of really freaky, tripped out design. I walked in and it looked kind of like a suburban dentist’s office. Periwinkle trim and light mauve, beige and gray patterned wallpaper. Went into the kitchen and it definitely had a real suburban hotel-ish look to it, fluorescent lights. Except there’s all these dudes covered in tats with shaved heads wearing cowboy hats and black camo pants. They’re all just sitting on the counters and talking in super angry voices. That’s how they chit chat—angry, pissed off. I was like this is the most laden with irony rock and roll mullet I’ve ever experienced.
Just to be funny to break the ice with these guys, because I was introduced like, “Hey man, this is Courtney from The Dandys, you guys.” They look and don’t say anything and look back at Trent and keep barking at each other. I said, “Jeez, man, this is really nice, I wasn’t expecting this, did your mom decorate this, do the décor?” He said, “No, my girlfriend’s mom.” So I knew I that if I ever did have my own Factory going it was going to look like something off a 60s Star Trek set. I wanted extreme, I wanted super intense style in each room. That’s kind of what we did. The gray all lit by red rectangles set in the walls and hanging from the ceilings was my mixing room and I always referred to that as The Trent Reznor Room because I thought that would be his ultimate mixing room. The roof fell in on that a few years ago and I redesigned it to have amazing features in the geography of the room. It’s a lighter color because Zia was like, “Okay, that was fifteen years of that. Can I have a room that I can walk into and not go immediately to sleep?” “Oh, alright, I’ll lighten it up a bit.” So now it’s gray lit by amber rectangles of light. It’s a more clement shade of gray for getting things done in the afternoon.
You’ve opened the space to bands that aren’t famous.
Yeah, if they’re poor and cool and local. The Strokes have practiced there and recorded there. New York Dolls, Sylvain has recorded there. It’s just a place to go if you’re a band and you come through. A rock band. I don’t think a lot of pop bands have ever heard of us. Cage the Elephant and Foster the People were there on the same night. All the rockers from The Black Angels, obviously The Jonestown, Dinosaur Jr—everyone hangs out there. I also built a wine bar. We haven’t had in house management for a decade and I noticed the management offices had access to the sidewalk so I built a wine shop in there so that I have a place to go get drunk every once in awhile if I want to because I don’t waste my liver on hard spirits or beer. You’ve only got so much time in your life for alcohol in your body. I get wholesale prices and people bring me catalogs hoping I’ll buy wine from them at half of what it costs at the store so that’s been fun.
What part of town is it in?
It is in the Pearl District. I’m a West side kid and never really had a residence on the East side. It’s different over there. It’s where suburban kids’ bands come from so really not a lot of really great bands have come the West side. Back in the day the Hell Cows and Heatmiser and all those East side bands, Spinanes, the bands that would have most likely been on Kill Rock Stars. When those guys wore makeup they would have eyeliner and lipstick and smear it to be ironic. On the West side boys wore makeup to be pretty. I’ve managed to keep my life on that side. It’s sweet and cute and it’s safe for grandmas to retire there. I’m in the industrial part of it which has gone through a big change. Now it’s condo world around me. So instead of it’s the only building that looks like it’s kept up at all and now I look like the ghetto building compared to these new buildings, the Rock Gym, the space age event space and of course the massive, towering condos.
Portland probably looks different now compared to when I was last there a decade ago.
I think everywhere does. I’m sitting at the 930 Club now [in DC] and I don’t think we’ve been here for two years. This is sketch. I’ve seen really horrible fights between cabbies and pedestrians here. Now it’s condo world.
You’ve probably seen cities change a lot across your career.
Yeah, it’s our twenty-five year anniversary so I’ve seen the world grow more intensely upper middle class, it feels like. The Western world. London is so much nicer. New York is so much more cleaned up. I don’t know if the Midwest…I’ll see Chicago and Minneapolis soon.
Chicago is very different. I was there a few years back on tour with a band and they played at a place near where Cabrini Green used to be and it’s been torn out.
And they put up condos.
Yeah and I was thinking, “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
I probably never would have gone to Cabrini Green right because you’d get a cap busted in your ass.
Denver’s been going through something similar for awhile now too.
Denver got Portlanded really bad because you were the first state to have weed legalized. So you got hipstered super hard. Which is great because you have hipster food and hipster style. Unfortunately, finding an old cool house for $180,000 and rehabbing it is just not ever going to happen ever again in the United States unless you move to Tulsa.
Why You So Crazy seems fairly electronic in a lot of ways with almost sound design elements.
For sure. Peter and Brent have gone slowly deeper and deeper into super modern laptop methods of recording. We haven’t had a really electronically driven record since Welcome to the Monkey House. That, besides The Faint, Monkey House was the first major label kind of 80s throwback in the age of The White Stripes, The Strokes, Jet and The Vines and those great guitar bands going on. I was feeling a little tired of that so I went 80s electronic and really got into Gary Numan and Duran Duran’s first record. This record, Fat Head showed up with a bunch of songs that had Dr. Dre elements and Scientist dub electronic elements. We work the song for months or years and we’re always working in the studio. And we got to where it started to look like a record. I laid down the classical instruments with horns and lots of string instruments and hand drums and took it in a more organic direction. Then Pete came in and he had a bunch of new pedals that were super futurism in them and dirty as well. I guess the icing on the cake was going to be electronic too. It’s interesting how it made it possible to remove tons of redundant guitar tracks. Our record doesn’t sound like anybody else even though everybody is using electronics and real bass and guitar. We somehow managed to have a very outside the box sound.
With the band you’ve managed to stay ahead of the curve and even with mixing the electronic with the rock in the past. This is like a really different permutation of that.
Yeah, and I’m very excited that it wasn’t me doing it. Zia also playing real bass on half the record was great. She’s in a band with three pretty sick bass players for her to pick up the real bass and coming up with bass lines for these songs she had to be awesome at it. She just laid down the sickest bass lines of her life. Having sick bass lines makes mixing so much easier. You let the bass line carry it. You can thin out all the other instruments and you can really gauge what it’s going to sound like other stereos if it’s driven by nice, and tidy low end. If you have to bury the bottom end and if you’re using for warmth the low end of guitar or string pads or cellos or whatever it doesn’t tend to reproduce on the stereos of the world and the ways people listen to music is infinite. Also a synth bass is very uneven. When she plays the Korg it’s a beautiful sound but it’s fairly uneven sound and that’s a bear for me to get even mixes. The prime directive of the band is to not do or reflect anything that’s idiosyncratic of the current era. During the Jack White era with The White Stripes you listen to the radio and everyone sounds like The White Stripes. Wolfmother, everyone’s doing The White Stripes. And we didn’t really want to sound like that or The Strokes. Or The Shins—make sure you avoid any Shins-like elements at all. The Strokes provided a very difficult hi-hat couple of years for us. We can’t have a hi-hat because people will think The Strokes.
We didn’t want to have current references in our music. And you still have to create emotional power. It’s the other side of same side of the coin of the need to be unique, it dulls the emotional power when you hear something else current. At least for me it does and I’m pretty sure it does for Peter, Fat Head and Zia too. It makes you go, oh, you hear music and it immediately engages you and the guy comes on and he sounds like another famous singer and the guitar comes in and it sounds like someone else’s guitar. I don’t know who would have a huge guitar sound now except maybe Greta Van Fleet but then of course you think they’re just doing Jimmy Page. If it’s keyboard-y it’s like “That’s Imagine Dragons” because of the vocal production. Everyone’s a producer now having grown up with Garage Band and having access to powerful recording equipment.
I grew up with a cassette four-track as a teenager and that’s how I learned the job of making cool records. Just finishing a song at three in the morning and taking a huge bong rip, rewind and hit play and lay on my bed and close my eyes and have this perfect song that made me feel elevated, pure and clean of any problems or mistakes that I’ve made or are making or social foibles and resentments—that all went away. I could get five or seven minutes out of that with songs with vocal harmonies, doing that from fourteen-years-old to twenty-five when I formed The Dandys is why we had a completely developed sound out of the box with our first record. Clearly somebody knew their way around a studio. Back then it was myself and we built our own studios and recorded in them. We’ve never really made a record in a real studio. We mix in them but we never bothered to waste money to record in them. We cobbled together the gear would need and we used to find an empty warehouse and rent it for a grand a month and just start recording and spend a couple of years recording in there.
In ’02 we built our own studio. I bought a quarter of a city block in the homeless, shitty, no sidewalk part of town then remodeled it and that’s The Odditorium. We did videos in it, photo shoots, all the installations you need to get the job done—studio, recording rooms, mixing rooms, a bar, a smoking room, green screens, live performance room. We have an industrial kitchen and a dining room that seat about twenty so if we have friends over we have some chefs we can draw from.
Like a far more expanded version of what you were doing as a teenager.
Yup. Oh yeah, that is interesting. I remember taping sheets together to get a white, psych background. When I was in college I took dark room photography and studio photography and I did film and all that stuff so I kind of knew what I needed to do this job. Particularly for back then TV era when you needed to make a video for cheap that they would play on their alternative late night show. You need to be able to make a record that didn’t sound like it was trying to be slick and failing. If you were going to fail at being slick because you didn’t have the gear then great! Then you don’t have a choice, you can only be expected to make a cool record that you think is cool and have a strong opinion involved in the sound and that worked. It got us exactly where we wanted to be in the late 90s with bad kids staying up late watching MTV shows.
120 Minutes or whatever.
Yeah, those were the days.
You probably remember Night Flight as well.
Night Flight was great because they would show indie movies. So you could get more culture than just, “Oh, The Jesus and Mary Chain. Awesome.”
That and stuff like Fantastic Planet.
That was cool. A mind fuck.
Maybe something like Night Flight exists now but I don’t know about it.
Well, you have to dig. Dig through all the YouTube. Fortunately there is the genius connector elements that if you put in “Heavy Metal” you’ll also find Fantastic Planet which will come up underneath it. Do you remember Twentieth Century Oz? It’s The Wizard of Oz as an indie, 1976 Australian film. I think it’s this chick goes to see a local band and gets in the Volkswagon bus with them and she hits her head and the band is gone when she wakes up. She walks down the street trying to get back to where she’s from and she goes into a second hand clothing store and this big, queenie guy tells her she has to go see Oz because he’s playing his last concert and he can get her home. So she has to travel across Australia to see this guy called The Wizard, that’s his name. This trucker is trying to rape her the whole time trying to get her into his truck. She hitchhikes with this mechanic who’s the Tin Man and they accidentally run into this biker’s bike and he’s a nasty guy and she slaps him and he cries. It’s amazing. There’s something almost heartbreaking about the production level. Bruce Spence is the main guy she’s traveling with and he’s the scarecrow. He played the guy with the whirly copter in The Road Warrior. It’s a really interesting little peek into what the 70s were in a way I haven’t really seen ever.
It’s hard to convey exactly what it was like back then to anyone who grew up with having a lot of access to so much on the internet. Yellow Submarine would come on TV on one of maybe four or five television stations or Sid and Marty Krofft shows being so out there.
Right, Sid and Marty Krofft, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters. Nobody knew what the rules were. In the early 70s you had AC/DC and you had disco. You had Bowie, The Sweet. It was fucking pretty wacko. You’ve seen The Warriors? A queer gang movie. A hairdresser’s fantasy of what New York City gang world was like. How did that get made? And how did it get huge? It’s awesome. It’s more camp than a tent. It is unbelievable. There’s nothing else at all like it. Was it because of the cult of success of Rocky Horror Picture Show? Somehow gangs were a hot item and so “Rocky Horror Gangs.”
It is that level of weird. Like bizarre gangs that would never work in the real world.
Yeah, no. The Orphans. They’re all weak and pathetic and emaciated. I would hang out with that gang, I would go play Dungeons & Dragons with them.
You did a graphic novel called One Model Nation in 2009?
Me and my friend Donovan Leitch invented a German, art noise band that disappeared in 1978. Have you seen Rosencrantz & Gildenstern Are Dead? I took that theory, I told the story of the arc of the demise of the Baader-Meinhof Gang from the point of view of a rather insignificant or not remembered, historically forgotten band that was involved with them. And what their lives were like because of the existence of the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the increased government and police control over Germany because of it. They were like an industrial, electronic and noise band and they’re constantly being hassled and harangued and they start to believe they’re public enemy number one. They start to make decisions in the decisions they make because now they’re not just trying to be a band and artists and fulfill their vision of what they want themselves to be and how they want to be perceived. It’s sort of my “Here’s what I’ve learned as an artist” on a big scale. Just don’t listen to anyone else. Don’t try to control the press. You can’t control what other people do so don’t really get involved. Don’t let people make movies about you. Don’t do interviews with big press which has an ax to grind against you. It’s a lot of that stuff and lessons for life and how to make decisions about what’s really impossible. Is your ego and ambition getting the best of you or is it not? I let this band to be a platform to launch a subtext about how one should live if you’re a committed artist for life.
I did a good but spotty job on the dialogue and adapting it to graphic novel form. A lot of the quips come off pretty ham fisted. But I tried to have little dialogue and no exposition at all. No, “Meanwhile, blah blah blah.” No, fuck it, let the subtext do the talking. I wanted the thing to be told in pictures mostly and it has to be in a graphic novel. The version that came out on Titan Books is the good one. It’s the better one that got a little tighter with the dialogue and it has a lot of great extra stuff. That is all exposition, it’s just me stoner blabbing how it went down, why we did this and what was going on in my life. I’ve been told that’s more fun to read than the dialogue in the book. But the story is phenomenal and historically accurate too, the end of the terrorist era in Germany.
It’s also Nina Hagen, Klaus Nomi, Kraftwerk, Can, Neu, all those guys. We made the record as well. We went out to my country house and set up a lot of bicycle frames, pots and pans and hammers and made this clangy, bangy electronic record that’s supposed to be “The Collected Known Works 69-77” [released as Totalwerks, Vol. 1 (1969-1977)].
I read reviews of the record and I thought, “Did these people get it at all?” I thought it was pretty good.
Yeah, I listened to it the other day and its so good! The reviews from ten years ago? Now the dude from Thee Oh Sees made an electronic record, Malkmus just made an electronic record, The Decemberists. Everyone knows about German, electronic art noise now. Back then it was “Ten minutes of a bicycle going around and Russian numbers being randomly spoken into a microphone? This record sucks!”
One Model Nation’s music has some resonances for the new record with how electronic and different it was.
Definitely. When we made that record ten years ago no one was making anything noisy. A lot of people were sounding like Coldplay. I guess they still do if you listen to commercial radio. Coldplay is probably the biggest influence on how light in the loafers guitar bands have become now. A friend of mine, who is an engineer, calls it The Generation That Never Rocked. There is no Sabbath or Priest or not even cheese metal like Motley Crue.
I think there is a generation of musicians who have embraced that but it’s not too much in the more mainstream music realm.
I do love that. That anyone who’s good at a certain sound can make enough fans around the world to get in the van and go see it, go rock it, or trance it or house it or whatever they do. Coldplay it.
There’s a whole swathe of music that’s very polished in a way that I wouldn’t expect to come out of someone working on music in their bedroom.
Lotus performs tonight, April 26 at Summit Music Hall and tomorrow, April 27, at Red Rocks. The five-piece has been playing the jam band/livetronica circuit since near the turn of the century. But its compositions and sets transcend clichés and have more in common with the early 70s experimental jazz and Krautrock that informs its sound and song structures. Its imaginative use of tone and texture and incorporation of the methods and aesthetics of electronic music production has pushed the band out of being stuck in a creative rut resulting in a fairly consistent run of fascinating records and live shows.
Formed in 1999 at Goshen College in Indiana, Lotus didn’t have much in the way of an outlet nearby to perform or like-minded peers. Certainly the jam band and improvisational music world existed and groups of no small artistic merit like Widespread Panic and Gov’t Mule had already established themselves. But groups that had the electronic element were not yet so, pardon the reference, widespread. Two years prior Umphrey’s McGee had formed at the University of Notre Dame. And there was a bit of a circuit Lotus cultivated, recalls bassist Jesse Miller, a circuit playing in college towns like Kalamazoo and Grand Rapids, Michigan. In Goshen, “[there] was terrible hard rock and rap rock,” says Miller. “At the school it was more people doing folk music.”
“The local place we played was this really dumpy bar called Courthouse Pub,” says Miller. “It’s crazy to think about how people just smoked everywhere back then and that that would never change. Instead of ventilation it would be fans blowing cigarette smoke back down at you.”
Miller’s description of Courthouse Pub could apply to many dive bars and other small clubs across America regardless of the style of music you played in the late 90s through about the middle of the 2000s. But Lotus had some options for relocating to where it could easily tour the east coast and cultivate a regular audience and Philadelphia seemed like a place where they group could get some momentum going. Disco Biscuits had established itself and played bigger places. Brothers Past was active during that early 2000s period. The Ally, with whom Lotus drummer Mike Greenfield once played was also based in the Philadelphia area. Lotus went from a place with few like-minded artists to a place that seemed to have a genuine scene where it could develop and expand its fanbase. And, of course, Lotus has has since built itself into one of the most innovative and popular acts in all of the realm of livetronica.
Miller and his brother Luke, the guitarist and keyboardist in Lotus, had grown up in Lakewood, Colorado where they had a high school ska band called Put That Down, Chris that in the late 90s played events like People’s Fair, shows in the park, gigs at church community spaces. But it was nothing too serious, just friends playing and having fun, and Miller’s own interest in composition was something he pursued when he went to college. Miller garnered a healthy appreciation for jazz, particularly the late 60s and early 70s era including the spiritual jazz of Alice Cooper, the fusion era of Miles Davis (especially Bitches Brew from 1970) and Joe Henderson. Miller particularly enjoys “the textural stuff they were doing with percussion but also the groove, and trance-like nature of that.”
However, unlike, say, the Dap Kings, Lotus has never been the band to try to recreate a faithful rendering of a studio sound or era. There is a fluidity and well crafted layers of sound and dynamics that is almost its own kind of fusion—that of the aforementioned era of jazz but one that includes not just jazz, rock and funk but also more modern electronic sounds and hip-hop production. Its 2018 album Frames Per Second is a fine example of the way Lotus integrates its musical interests with its unique alchemy of ideas.
From early on in the band, Miller’s imagination was impacted by music that doesn’t seem to fit in with the image of a jam band and yet The Orb, the legendary UK production duo, exerted a strong and early influence.
“The stuff we were hearing from the Orb were so different from a rock band but we heard a lot of similarities in how they would extend things and the idea of minimalism and using sounds as part of the composition process,” says Miller.
On the new record one can hear a scintillating collage of sounds and textures that are reminiscent of the likes of Flying Lotus’ wide rangingly ethereal sounds and Daft Punk’s smooth yet renegade beats. “When I think of Daft Punk compositionally they’re very into this idea of looping, really short loops, sometimes one bar or two beats,” says Miller. “When I was writing ‘Cold Facts,” it was based around this simple bass line that’s one bar long but the way it’s set up rhythmically you can almost be fooled as to where the downbeat is. Those kinds of loops can go on for so long because what’s interesting about it is already built into the loop and it doesn’t ever need to change. That simple bass line and very simple beat frees up the space for the more complex harmonies that are happening with the keyboards and the guitar.”
As a bassist Miller is bit unorthodox in he becomes a bit of a lead player while also holding down the rhythm. Rooted in funk, Miller and his band mates approach the writing process more like Krautrock.
“[We keep] this propulsive thing going and [break] off from that and [come] back,” says Miller. “Sometimes I think of it as a sequence that’s running and I’m manipulating the synth. I’ll keep a pattern going and I’ll make subtle changes to the effects or how I’m articulating the line. Give it the idea of filtering in and out.”
In building in that ability to go off the map yet maintain a dynamic center, Lotus’ songs can sprawl where they will without losing coherence. The hallmark of a great jam band of any kind. And Miller doesn’t mind being put under that umbrella.
“I’m fine with being slotted in with that,” says Miller. “There are advantages and disadvantages to that. I think to have a unique voice you need to look for influences outside of that stuff. Honestly I can’t really stand listening to jam bands even though we are one. Once you’re inside of that you’re really exposed to the excesses and flaws that style can be and hopefully avoid them. The downside is that people have this idea that they know what you sound like without actually listening to you. That’s frustrating for any artist.”
Church Fire at Titwrench 2015, photo by Tom Murphy
Denver’s Church Fire recently became a trio with Kate Warner (formerly of Mirror Fears) joining Shannon Webber and David Samuelson in crafting a sound that melds noise, industrialized hip-hop influenced beat making, electronic dance music and emotionally charged pop. Church Fire also infuses its performances and words with political content that dives deep and examines deeply rooted issues of systemic, cultural and personal issues that can be tricky to examine much less untangle in a way that the band, with its visceral presentation doesn’t abstract so much as clarify in a way that isn’t intellectualized even as it doesn’t lack for sophisticated thought and nuanced emotion as manifested in art.
Recently the band released its video for the song “Mechanical” from its fantastic 2018 album Summer Camp Doom Diary. Visually it’s striking and on par with the more imaginative dark fantasy and horror cinema. It also represents well the feel of the band’s shows that operate as a cathartic, mystic, pagan ritual dance. It’s a song and video that embraces and works through, integrates and transcends personal and cultural darkness in a productive way that doesn’t preach yet doesn’t wax vague in its meaning. Church Fire is nothing if not direct. We recently sent some questions to the band regarding the video done with Cheyene Grow of the video collective 75 Ohms. Read on after seeing the video immediately preceding.
Queen City Sounds:How did you come to work with Cheyene Grow and why was working with him a good fit?
Shannon Webber: Cheyene and Ryan Peru (75 Ohms) are fantastic visual artists who have veejayed a lot of shows we’ve played over the years. We love their glitched out retro VHS style and the way they live-loop video recordings and add fascinating and fun effects. Having seen what they do live, it was really exciting to have the chance to visit Cheyene’s studio in Colorado Springs to do some filming, and we couldn’t wait to see what he’d do with the footage. Cheyene’s been active in Colorado underground scenes for years, dragging a huge analog setup to shows to create live visuals like no one else. The splicing of organic, live footage with retro neon effects and glitchy visual noise feels like a natural visual representation of our music. As an artist, we trusted him to take full creative license to create a new version of our music through his visual art. ‘Mechanical’ is about transformation in a lot of ways, and we were thrilled to see how Cheyene would transform the song.
There’s a kind of “lost VHS tape” quality to the video. Was that an aspect of the video you discussed with Cheyenne? What do you like about that kind of aesthetic?
This style is pretty quintessential for Cheyene and 75 Ohms and it has a lot to do with why we wanted to work with him. In our music, we like to get lost in darkness and light and to hold more than one extreme at a time, and Cheyene’s video techniques do the same. Using direct footage of something as simple as our heads gives it a natural, intimate and raw feel. Combined with his visually noisy techniques, bright colors, distortion and glitchiness, one gets an experimental, dark and exhilarating feeling watching the clips. It adds a striking intensity to some already pretty intense but simple headshots and keeps the momentum of the video and music going strong.
While not new and it now occurs to me resonant in ways with the name of the band and pagan black metal, there is a kind of tribal pagan mystic aspect to your performance garb including an antler crown. What is the significance of that for your band? With a lot of those early Norwegian black metal bands there was some reference to cleansing the land of non-native religious structures built over traditional Viking holy places and thus a call for a return to an older, more primordial native spirituality. American black metal bands like Wolves in the Throne Room, of course, are more obviously oriented toward nature and the preservation of that as part of holistic view of our existence.
Our identity as a band definitely continues to grow and has developed a lot even after changing our name to church fire in 2012. When David made this crown, it felt like a portal was created for us to step into when we perform and write. The crown itself, actually preceded our aesthetic. Initially, it wasn’t an idea inspired by anything in particular and honestly had no greater vision behind it other than it was curious to us and felt powerful. It was a very organic transformation for us. I think the image and feeling of the crown and our masks have felt more powerful for us as time goes on, and allows us to let go of our everyday identities and step into the new worlds that we’ve created with each other through our music. It feels transcendent and liberating to us but is not connected to any existent culture, image or community for us – not intentionally, anyway.
That said, after we stepped into the crown, the flowers, the lights and the masks, we have been able to even more fully relish in a dark, earthy but surreal experience. There is a sense of the divine feminine and of the power of nature in those images, of a softness, a strength, and a darkness, and that’s where we come from when we write and perform. To keep these unshakable, powerful and ancient images in our minds when we create and perform makes our own experience with our art more fulfilling and transcendent, and we hope others tap into those feelings and are inspired as well.
Church Fire’s Shannon Webber at Hi-Dive for December 29, 2018 release of Summer Camp Doom Diary. Photo by Tom Murphy
“Mechanical,” tell us a bit about what inspired this song and its tones and sense of urgency.
I was sitting on a beach in Oregon watching the waves roll onto the shore, sifting through rocks and shells, thinking about how drastically these artifacts have changed over more time than we can fathom; how they used to be huge and jagged, perhaps, and are now smooth and small and have creatures living inside them. I started thinking about all the ways that we transform throughout our lives and beyond our lives, transitions that we have no awareness of having undergone whatsoever; how some of the most powerful things that make us who we are, make reality what it is as we know it, are really tiny, delicate waves washing over us, so small we can’t even feel or see them; and that this version of everything we see, feel and know to be true is only what it is in this instant and instantly is forever changed again under a new wave.
We fancy ourselves in so much control, able to eliminate our desires if they don’t suit us, able to cure illness before it ever afflicts us, but the waves will still take over. It’s beautiful to be tiny and insignificant. It’s unrecognizingly powerful to transform and to be changed by the earth and Her elements. In writing the song, the meaning started to transform as well. In watching Cheyene’s video, the meanings continued to change, touching on gender and identity and transformation of these aspects of ourselves as well.
In 2018 Church Fire played a kind of one-off, special set that was some kind of black metal/noise/industrial set. Was this video a kind of precursor to that or inspired by that? What about the sorts of feelings you’re able to conjure playing that side of your music do you feel are different from and/or complimentary to what most people have seen/heard from Church Fire? I feel like your live performances always had that dark yet cathartic quality and that your latest album brought that out more in your recordings.
We’ve been secretly playing some doomy sludge guitar/drums drek for fun for a few years now, and when we were asked to play the Noise vs Doom festival last year it seemed like the only appropriate way to show up! [The] March 14th [show] at Ophelia’s Electric Soapbox, with The Drood, blackcell and DJ Mudwolf, [was] our first show with David playing drums and Kate Warner (Mirror Fears) on electronic music. We’re not a duo anymore! We feel honored to work with one of the most talented and hard working musicians in our scene and to transform our own music and push our limits in new ways.
Statement from the visual artist (Cheyene Grow)
One of the many things I find compelling about Church Fire is how they can simultaneously occupy seemingly diametric spaces. You could argue they are too noisy to be pop, too poppy to be noise. Too theatrical to be punk, too punk to be theatrical. Too goth to be cyber, too cyber to be goth. The list goes on.
I wanted to embody that contrast with visuals that would occupy conflicting spaces. So went for a look that felt aged and dirty, while also being clean and cyber-futuristic. Shannon has an intense and very engaging stage presence that I wanted to feature. So, instead of trying to put forth an actual narrative of transformation (which the lyrics capture well), we went with a performance piece and tried to incorporate transformation elements into the performances and the visual effects. The video glitches serve as way to mechanically degrade the image and make it feel like old film, while the core image maintains a certain high-end integrity.
Motherhood is a trio from Fredericton, New Brunswick in eastern Canada that has been developing its unique and eclectic sound since 2010 when its members met while at university. When critics and fans make unusual and diverse comparisons between a band and personal musical reference points, you know the band in question is onto something refreshingly different from prevailing trends. For this writer, hearing Motherhood there are resonances between the band’s music and the otherworldly, carnival-esque sounds of a Danny Elfman soundtrack, the frayed folk art punk of the Mekons and the strongly thematic and sonically diverse yet focused conceptualization of Rubblebucket. Some might hear in its songs the sort of amalgam of slackery looseness and precision that has made Pavement so interesting and unpredictable. Of course Motherhood, as you’ll see in the interview below with bassist/keyboard player Penny Stevens, doesn’t really sound like any other band touring in the underground precisely because its influences are so disparate even as the alchemy of its creative process and its evolution over several years has resulted in music that one might expect from artists who developed early on in a small city (Fredericton even now has a metropolitan area population of under 110,000) with no entrenched musical sub-scene to easily access.
On March 1, 2019, Motherhood celebrated the release of its new album Dear Bongo (out on Forward Music Group) and its songs informed by humor and brimming with tender emotional immediacy even as it explores the folly of seeking and demanding perfection in our lives whether through our relationships, our psychology or in our creative work. Motherhood is currently on tour throughout North America including the following shows coming up in Colorado and at the Treefort Music Fest in Boise, ID.
Queen City Sounds:Your band has been around longer than I had assumed. Has it been around for about eight years?
Penny Stevens: Yeah, Brydon [Crain] and Adam [Sipkema] have been playing together since high school and I joined them during our university days. 2019 will make nine years since we formed Motherhood.
How did you meet them?
They’re from a small town kind of in the middle of nowhere and they moved to Fredericton, which is where we all live now, to go to college. I needed a place to live and I ended up moving in with them and we started jamming in the basement.
Did you grow up playing music?
S: Yes, I’m the only one that took actual music lessons in band except I took a semester in classical guitar and Adam took two drum lessons, I think. I took classical piano lessons while growing up. So I write the piano stuff. When we started out we had a bass player and when he quit I took over bass duties and had to pick it up pretty quick. We’ve been playing music all our lives. I guess a lot of it has been at this point in Motherhood and we learned to play instruments while in this band. A lot of of artists have had other projects that they developed in and formed something later on but we kinda grew up with Motherhood. It’s been a constant for a long time. We didn’t experiment too much outside of Motherhood so we spent our experimentation years inside this band and we sound completely different now than when we started out. Now we can identify what we’re going for. There’s a more clear vision of where we’re headed next.
We all had little projects in middle school and high school but this is our first “real” band that played actual venues. It took us a long time, when we first started out, to figure out how to BE a band. Coming from a really small town with not a lot of other bands around it took us some time to learn how to book a show, make a record and stuff like that when there’s not really anyone else to follow.
Was there a local music scene and places to play for you starting out?
There’s one sweet venue where we booked one of our first shows, The Capital. We were horrible but they kept booking us and asking us to come back. We still play The Capital all the time. The record label that we’re on now, Forward Music Group, is based out of Halifax but it was formed in Fredericton and a lot of bands that were on the label we consider kind of the grandfathers of the music scene there. A lot of them are still playing in awesome bands. They’re older and have families now but we kind of came up going to see those bands play and watching them. Grand Theft Bus is like a prog jam band, they’re pretty cool and still playing. Bands like Force Fields, Share, The Slate Pacific—they’re not as active anymore but those folks are still around and will come and see us once in awhile. That was the only record label we were familiar with coming up so nine years later we’re working with them and it feels pretty good to be a part of the family after all these years.
Is The Capital an all-ages venue?
No, it’s a bar. Some friends of ours started booking there in the late 90s, taking a risk because there wasn’t really any live music happening in Fredericton and touring bands weren’t coming through much but they begged the owner to have a show there and it went really well. The guy that started booking the shows now owns the bar and he’s a huge supporter of the music scene and keeps the Fredericton music scene alive and he does a lot for other bands too.
Did you get a chance to see many bands not from there coming up?
It comes and goes. There’ll be a few years when a lot of touring bands are coming through and there’s a lot of activity. We’re in a little bit of a quiet space now. I lived in Fredericton when I was a teenager and I would sneak out of my mom’s house and go see all-ages metal shows when I was 14 or 15. Those were my first shows and I didn’t even know you could do that thing. That scene isn’t really alive in Fredericton anymore. When we released our record Dear Bongo on March 1 we put on a big all-ages show and we had probably close to seventy high school kids come out. It’s pretty rare to have an all-ages show in Fredericton right now but I hope they’ll be able to have the kinds of experiences I had when I was a teenager going to see all-ages shows and thinking, “Oh, I should be in a band!” That show was at the Charlotte Street Arts Centre, which is a community art center that has a big auditorium.
Presumably this isn’t your first big tour.
This is the biggest we’ve done yet, it’s six weeks long. Last year we were gone a month. We came through Denver [at Seventh Circle Music Collective] and across to Idaho and Northern California and up the coast and back. We won’t have to drive as long this time but we’ll be out longer. Our music is diverse so we can fit into a lot of different places. We can play a legit venue and we can play a punk house and it’s not really that different for us. It translates to a lot of different audiences. In Boise we’re playing at Treefort on Thursday and Saturday. We played Treefort last year at Neurolux and another place. It’ll be nice playing with DIY bands we’ve been in contact with across the US like Charcoal Squids from Missoula, Montana and Lloyd and Saviour from Idaho.
Dear Bongo is not your first full-length.
We’ve had two full-lengths and put out our first in 2013.
Dear Bongo is a name I associate with something people might name their dog but I assume that isn’t the case here.
No, but a lot of people make that association. The dog’s name is Tesla.
You made a video with footage from a GoPro attached to Tesla?
Yeah, we made the video for “Bird Chirp.” We shot that in one of our favorite places in the world called the Nashwaak Flats. You gotta know it to know it, you’ve got to know where the little path is but it’s very close to where we all live. We can bike there from where we live in a few minutes. You basically leave downtown and follow a little path for a few minutes and come out onto this huge, open field. It’s close to downtown Fredericton but it’s quite secluded so we spend a lot of our summer there hanging out and having fires and stuff. We took Tesla down there, she loves it there, and she rants around for twenty-five minutes and collapses and has a naps. So we just strapped a GoPro to her and took her off leash and had a really good day at the Flats. She’s a greyhound and she’s so fast so it kept flopping onto the side so we had to stuff socks between the leash and her shoulder blade so it would stand up.
Kyle Cenjuk took photos and did some performances on the new record?
Yes, he co-produced the record and he runs Forward Music Group so we asked him to produced the record not having any knowledge of how we were going to put the record out. When he came to produce the record he kind of fell in love with it a little bit and asked to put it out on Forward Music Group. We were super stoked about that, obviously. He plays in a bunch of Canadian bands and he plays upright bass so we had him play upright bass on a couple of tracks. He helped with vocals and arrangements. Right now he’s touring with David Miles, who is a pretty well-known folk, pop artist. He also plays in Olympic Symphonium, which is a five piece chamber folk group and he plays in Force Fields, a really intense post-rock band. He has his fingers in many pies as far as East Coast music goes.
When people hear your music they probably accept it for what it is but it gets interesting comparisons like The Mekons, which seems fitting.
Usually when we get comparisons a lot of the time we don’t know the projects. I don’t know who The Mekons were until someone wrote that about us and I checked it out and thought, “Okay, I can kinda see that.” We get Primus a lot, which is fine. I don’t think that makes a lot of sense but I can see where they’re coming from.
There’s some playfulness in the music and it’s not obvious if there’s some genre it’s coming from.
Yeah. When we write something with an obvious influence we like to make it very obvious. Our influences are thinly veiled but very diverse. On Dear Bongo we have a song that we were like, “Let’s try to make this sound as much like a Beach Boys song as we can.” Because we all love the Beach Boys. There are songs like that throughout the record, homages to artists we really care about. Either way, we’re not trying to sound like any particular band but there are bands we like to pay our respects to for really setting the stage for us.
On the Forward Music Group there was a reference to a story associated with the new album about a painter who was pursuing perfection, which is something many people aim for but don’t really find.
S: Pretty much every album we produce is conceptual and completed in one album. So there’s a running theme that carries through every song lyrically and sonically. The lyrics for sure play a part in telling the story but also in the music we have themes that will repeat in different songs in different ways to add cohesion and completeness on the album. This record tells the tale of a painter who is going through a horrible breakup of some sort, falling out of love with someone. He uses painting to try and solve his problems, to paint the world that he wants to see but perfectionism doesn’t mean it can be too perfect. There’s a lot of metaphors and it’s not just one kind of painting. He paints lines on the highway, his house and pictures. By the end he’s playing every blade of glass, tree trunks, trying to paint the world as he thinks it should be but he’s never going to get it quite right.
Lot Lizard is a post-punk band from Sioux Falls, South Dakota. If you’ve not been to South Dakota maybe you only think of the Badlands or Mount Rushmore and that scene from North By Northwest and not a place from which interesting music hails but it’s long been a fact that relatively isolated areas is where you find a good deal of spark and originality as creative people there have to be more or less self-inspirational. Also, one of America’s great record stores is located in Sioux Falls: Total Drag. The latter has been the regional stop for touring bands on the underground/DIY circuit since opening its doors around half a decade ago.
Lot Lizard’s sound is haunted, ethereal yet brooding and urgent. Like a goth-y Pere Ubu or resonant with the eclectic roots of newer bands like later period Iceage and Protomartyr. Currently the group is on a tour with Frankie and the Witch Fingers with dates in Colorado listed below before the interview. The band is nearly finished with its debut full length with an anticipated release on vinyl through both Different Folk Records and Total Drag Records. Patrick Nelson, the group’s bassist, recently answered some questions for Queen City Sounds illuminating some of the band’s history and how he got into post-punk.
Queen City Sounds:Sioux Falls, South Dakota is not the first place people think of when it comes to post-punk. What brought your band together and what kinds of places did you play locally before branching beyond?
Patrick Nelson: It’s true, South Dakota is not a place know for its post-punk (or insert any genre) bands or for its boundary pushing culture in general. This band was brought together essentially by our drummer Brogan who basically reached out to all of us separately about the idea of starting a new band. All of us, at the very least, knew of each other and had seen each other around at shows and/or in other bands. We started playing the typical places available to bands: small clubs/bars, basement shows, and most importantly our local record store that doubles as an all ages DIY space.
How did you get into post-punk and noise rock (referencing Lord Bronc’s mention of Jesus Lizard on your Bandcamp page)?
That’s a good question.. I’m sure the answer would vary greatly per member. Post-punk was a weird one for me as it took me quite a while to “grow into.” An acquired taste if you will. To a 15-year-old me it was just kind of weird boring music that I didn’t get at the time. When you’re that age and full of youthful insanity blasting, I don’t know, classic early punk from NY, LA and the UK or early hardcore stuff like Minor Threat or Black Flag, bands like The Fall or Joy Division are just kind of weird and out there sounding. Not energetic or shocking enough. Of course you grow up a little bit and figure it out and realize you were totally wrong.
Noise rock on the other hand was something that grabbed me right away and was part of my musical experience at a young age. I think that has to do with that it was having a sort of heyday in my formative years. Like that whole Amphetamine Reptile scene or bands like Butthole Surfers, Sonic Youth or Jesus Lizard. All super abrasive in their own way but were getting press, major label contracts etc.. I was lucky enough to see Jesus Lizard AND Sonic Youth at Lollapalooza in 1995. It’s always interesting to see what other bands people link your band to. I don’t really see the Jesus Lizard but we’ve gotten it more than once. Although I won’t deny the influence of that rhythm section on my playing and I can see a connection with Ben’s guitar work as well.
Did you play different kinds of music before starting this band? What bands? What kind of music?
Oh yeah. I’ve played in plenty. In addition to this project I’m currently involved in a moody post-hardcore project called Roman Ships. Prior to that I’ve played quite a bit of guitar and a little bass in projects that range from street-punk/power-pop to new-wave/space rock, to even a ska band back in the 90s. I can honestly say I’ve been a fan of at least one band every one of the other guys has been in. Lindy had this killer Goth/death-rock project called Angie Hosh. Ben fronted a cool noisy post-rock band called Talk Rock. Brogan’s been involved in a ton of bands (as drummers in this town, and presumably most towns, are known to do). Most recently a garage project called Weathers Rest and in the early 2000’s a chaotic screamo band called Sinking Steps…Rising Eyes.
What made what you do now more interesting for you initially? I know, it’s not as cut and dry and by the numbers like that. That live video you sent and your demos reminded me a little of another band whose post-punk and other musical roots come from a little different direction as well and that is Protomartyr. Did you start out sounding sort of like that? Did you evolve into that sort of sound?
This has been an interesting ride so far for many reasons including the fact that song writing has been very organic. We didn’t go into this with the idea that we would create something that sounds like band A crossed with band B sprinkled with layers of C and D. Of course we talked a bit about bands we liked and such… but that can be an exhaustive conversation with this crew as we all like a huge variety of music and have a lot of respect for different styles. The Protomartyr connection is interesting to me in the fact that I think most of this first record was created without everyone in the band really knowing about that band and their records…. That being said I can see some similarities particularly the idea that much of the music is rhythmically driven via the bass and drums while the guitar often textures in these tasteful atmospheric licks. I think at this point I can speak for everyone and say we are indeed fans of that band now though. Recently saw them live, they killed.
Is there an active local music world that you connect to right now? What is life like for a band like yours in South Dakota in terms of playing shows and connecting with other artists to share bills? How did you get hooked up with those shows in Colorado?
The Sioux Falls music scene is doing pretty well currently. In terms of venues/spaces hosting live original music I think we’re thriving, the best we’ve been in over a decade! Whether people realize that and get out to support live music as much as they should is certainly up for debate. We’re a small city and so it’s tight knit and for the most part I think we try to support each other. The city is growing fast, and has been for [many] years now, so I’m very interested to see where we end up in 5 or 10 years.
As for connecting with other artists and how we got connected to the Colorado shows, we played a gig with Frankie and the Witch Fingers in Sioux Falls a little over a year ago. They dug our band and on top of that had the next day off so we became friends and were lucky enough to connect with them in Denver and Ft. Collins.
Like-minded or at least adjacently-minded bands we should know about or hear that maybe no one outside of South Dakota or regionally?
There’s plenty of talented musicians here that’s for sure. Two I’m particularly excited about are Bodega Sushi and Velcro Ultrasound (both are in the middle of full length albums). Rifflord and Green Alter are some other friends, both in the heavier realm of things, that are working hard and deserve a shout.
“Lot Lizard” is a term I grew up knowing (as a child of the 70s and 80s), is there a story behind why you chose that name or a significance to the name that has come to fit your band and its music?
Ha, yeah there’s a bit of a story. So I had written this bass line and had an idea in mind for how I wanted the song to sound sonically. I was describing it to the guys at practice and tried to put them into this landscape, this frame of mind. I believe it went, “Like some lot lizard out of gas and stranded in the middle of nowhere on some desert highway.” To which Brogan said, “What did you say? What’s a lot lizard?” And after a laugh and an explanation on my end he responded, “That’s it, that’s the band name.” There was definitely a little apprehension as we weren’t trying to be overtly offensive or whatever. We asked for outside opinions, including those of our girlfriends/wives. It stuck. And I think it fits. It’s also fun to forget about the social term and just use it as more literal in terms of reptiles. And the alliteration. I mean heck, it might just be the perfect band name.
How did you get connected with Total Drag and why is that a significant place for your band and maybe for the local underground music world?
Brogan [Costa], our drummer, actually helped open and is a part owner of Total Drag. On top of that I’ve know Dan and Liz [Nissen] for as long as I can remember. We’ve attended and played a lot of gigs together over the years. Total Drag is an integral part of what is happening in Sioux Falls. Lot Lizard played our first gig there and it continues to be the place we most often play locally.
In any city the importance of a space that hosts all ages shows cannot be stressed enough. At a most primal level, a music scene will have a hard time surviving without it. Music is evolved by the youth. A scene being engaged by youthful energy and ideas will hopefully foster growth and longevity.
Since 2015, Portland, Oregon’s Alien Boy has been establishing itself as one of the most intriguing guitar rock bands in the American underground. Its sound could be roughly described as a mixture of pop-punk, post-punk and shoegaze. The jangle-y riffs and melt-y, fiery tones propelled by urgent rhythms could certainly be considered to be an amalgamation of all of those styles of music. But Sonia Weber’s vocals, expressive, poignant, unafraid to go off of conventional and sanitized melodies anchors the songs in relatable human experiences which aren’t ever perfect. But that willingness to embrace flaws is its own perfection by speaking to emotional truth and it’s what makes Alien Boy more compelling than many bands that seem to write music where everything is ultimately okay. This band’s music isn’t about bravado, it’s about being real and honest with oneself and others.
In 2018 the group released its debut LP Sleeping Lessons on Tiny Engines [soon to be included on Queen City Sounds’ Best Albums of 2018 list]. Currently the group is on another iteration of touring in the wake of the release of the record including tonight February 20 at Larimer Lounge. We recently sent some questions to Alien Boy which vocalist/guitarist Sonia Weber was gracious enough to indulge.
Queen City Sounds:Since hearing about Alien Boy a few years ago I’ve thought of the band as punk even though your songs are musically not reducible to a single genre. Do you think punk as music, culture and ethos informs your own music? If so, how so? If not, why not?
Sonia Weber: Yes, absolutely. That’s the first type of music I felt really passionate about when I was younger and I think it always shows no matter what. No matter what I’m always kind of searching for that heaviness/energy and style even though I don’t listen to that kinda stuff as much anymore. Ethos too, I think punk taught me so much about how I want to interact with the world and it has a lot to do with why it’s important to me to express that this is a queer band. I think if you’re going to have any kind of platform it’s important to acknowledge it and use it for some kind of good.
When your band, or previous bands when you were younger, started out, where were you able to play? Was there a scene you were able to plug into?
Yeah! I started playing in bands when I was 16ish and played a lot of shows at Satyricon, Backspace, and Laughing Horse Books when I was a little older. We got really lucky, there were a lot of people my age starting bands at the same time and when I think back I think that time was really special.
Was there and is there an active realm of DIY or unconventional spaces where you were able to develop and where newer bands can come up?
Yeah, absolutely! I think there was and is and will always be somewhere even if you’re not plugged into it there’s always stuff you don’t know about and people doing inspiring stuff for DIY to make it happen. Laughing Horse Books was big for me when I was younger, then Anarres Infoshop, and now places like Black Water and houses in Portland are doing really great stuff for DIY.
The Ghost Ship fire had a direct connection to Denver and many other places and the aftermath of the tragedy deeply affected our underground art and music community including harassment from alt-right types. Did that event affect you and your band at home and in terms of trying to tour?
You couldn’t go somewhere without knowing someone who knew someone that was there or affected by it. It was a huge dark cloud over something that was usually a place that made us all feel so good and safe. [It] and was just so, so, so, so sad. As far as how it affected tour stuff it lead to a lot of DIY spots closing down or being harder to access but on the other side of that I think it made spaces that were able to keep going realize things they could do to make it safer for everyone and I appreciate that. Mostly it just devastated so many people including myself, I felt hard to get through and we’re all still working on it.
The 2018 KEXP article on your band mentions how being devastated was a feeling that inspired many of the songs on Sleeping Lessons. Why do you think that emotional state leads to vital songwriting?
I think music and art are at its best when you’re feeling a type of extreme emotion and can be honest about it. The stuff you’re too afraid to say yourself but then you hear it in a song and it feels important. I think that’s where a lot of connection comes from.
Your Facebook pages lists a band not many people these days cite as an influence (maybe in Portland it’s more likely) and that’s the Wipers. What is it about that band that you find inspirational and affecting?
I love the Wipers so much. We draw a lot from their guitar sound which is I think where the influence shows the most, especially on our first few EP’s. I think that band is so emotional in a way a lot of punk bands weren’t back then, I think we’re similar in that way too even if it doesn’t sound that way immediately. I really relate to the song “No One Wants An Alien” and obviously “Alien Boy” which is where the name is ripped from. It’s all about being isolated and lonely and different from other people and I think it’s done in a really beautiful way. That’s the kind of punk I hope shines through a little in our stuff.
“Only Posers Fall In Love” has a long lost Smiths with Robert Smith guesting like he did with Siouxsie and the Banshees sound. What is it about that sort of guitar style do you find appealing and interesting to play?
It’s my absolute favorite kind of guitar playing. I’m totally obsessed with how Johnny Marr plays guitar and got that way right before I started Alien Boy. I can’t even really describe what I love about it but it was the first time since being younger that I was super excited about guitar again. I’m obsessed with chorus pedals.
Why do you think shoegaze and pop punk compliment each other so well? Your music demonstrates they definitely do.
Most of the song structures are the same! I feel like I realized most songs are similar it just depends on how you play them and that if I felt like mostly pop punk was coming out but I wanted it to feel a different way it was totally possible. I want the same thing from both genres, they’re both so emotional I think that’s the main reason why it works so well together.
Your songs fulfill a similar function to writing a journal in terms of externalizing feelings and thoughts so they don’t just, or no longer, sit in your body. What does the process of doing so look like for you?
When I was writing sleeping lessons it was really the only way the feelings were being expressed in a genuine way. They would come out in little bursts and I’d forget and re-listen and be like, “Damn that’s how I feel about that? Okay”. And then once the record was done it really felt like I had gotten it out of my body. I felt a lot lighter it was pretty unbelievable to feel it in that way.
A long time ago “pop” used to be kind of a dirty word in punk and underground music. Did you ever have to reconcile pop with the music you came to love as an adolescent and beyond? What are examples of, conventionally or unconventionally so, perfect pop songs?
When I was younger I definitely felt super ashamed liking pop music but as I got older there was a point where I was just like, “Fuck that this isn’t fun at all I’m gonna like whatever I want,” and seemingly everyone got the memo at the same time, haha. Music has been much more exciting since then. Coming back to the idea again that most music is structured the same way, I like the same things about all the different types of music I like and most of it comes down to chorus pedals and relatability.. What I can relate to changes all the time too! So it’s always changing.
Examples of perfect pop songs to me? There’s so many! “In A Big Country” by Big Country, “Celebrity Skin” by Hole, “Blank Space” by Taylor Swift, “Baba O’ Riley” by The Who, “I Wanna Be Adored” by The Stone Roses, “The Jerk” by Joyce Nanor. Conventional and not all those songs are perfect.
Queen City Sounds and Art 
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