Getting To Know Tree River

Getting to know

tree river

Get to know the newest additions to the BSM roster, Brooklyn’s Tree River.

Brooklyn four-piece Tree River have been a band for over a decade, but their name is criminally only just reaching our shores. Unsurprising really when they admit to writing songs for themselves and never trying to promote themselves. With a knack for big, bright, rollicking hooks, if it’s gargantuan pop-rock songs you’re after, then look no further.

Tree River has been a band since 2010 - tell us how you first started? Trevor Friedman (vocals/guitar): Phil (Cohen, vocals/guitar) and I met on Facebook in Summer 2006 before starting at the same university in Washington, DC. We bonded over music and started sending each other every single shitty little song we’d ever made. But I moved to LA two years later to chase a girl (who dumped me a year after that) so our musical collaboration kind of went on hiatus for a bit. Around 2010, I started making psychedelic, escapist folk songs under the name Tree River, which was a play on the name Trevor. Phil started writing the coolest leads I’d ever heard over my songs and increasingly we started writing together. Then in 2012, I moved back to DC with another girl (who also dumped me a year later) and reunited with Phil who still lived there. We turned Tree River into a real band with Phil as the other main member and made a record called Inward which was mainly based on those songs. We moved to New York a couple years after that and the rest is history.

How would you describe your music to someone that has never listened to you before? Phil: Generally speaking, we’re shooting for colorful, loud, and super polished songs that try to evoke and synthesize elements from all our favorite rock music of the past 30 years, whether that’s a really technical, satisfying guitar lead or a hooky chorus melody that sounds weirdly familiar in some deep crevice of the listener’s subconscious. There’s a lot of dynamic range and variety in our sound, so we’ll go from heavy to mathy to tender to enormous. We love an over-the-top, massive, epic outro. But we

try to prevent our albums from sounding like straight up mixtapes by having a very consistent authorial voice, of which the main hallmarks are warmth, emotional honesty, and really intricately constructed lyrics.

What has been one of the biggest challenges you’ve faced since starting the band? Trevor: Basically, we’ve always sucked at marketing and promoting ourselves. It just wasn’t ever our forté or something we enjoyed and, as a result, we never had many fans outside of friends and friends of friends. We spent a lot of time writing and recording our first 2 records but at that time, we viewed the band as more of a studio project without many expectations so when it came time to actually get people to listen, we probably didn’t do as much as we could have. Starting with our EP Garden, it started to feel like we were really doing a disservice to the music by not hustling for listeners, which is why it’s been great to work with our beloved manager/publicist Jamie Colletta and Big Scary Monsters, who are all about (and quite good at) getting us in front of as many people as possible.

What has been a pivotal or most memorial moment for Tree River’s career so far? Phil: Honestly, hearing that Big Scary Monsters, a label we’ve been huge fans of for years and years, liked our music and wanted to sign us was just about the biggest “whoa!” moment we’ve had as a band. We love pretty much every single musician they’ve worked with and even just sitting alongside them on the website’s roster of acts is super surreal and exciting.

How has your musical style evolved over the years? Trevor: Our producer Kevin Dye once told us that he thought our stylistic arc is different than a lot of other bands. Their records usually start out poppy and super accessible, and as they get older and more established, they begin to make music that is weirder and less user-friendly. For us, our older albums were definitely more shaggy and cerebral and as time’s gone on, our lyrics have gotten pretty emotionally streamlined, our melodies are more memorable, and our sound, in large part because of working with Kevin, has gotten bigger and more refined.

What are some of your influences? Phil: We love bands that can put out records that simultaneously feel really specific and kind of sonically all over the place, like Say Anything and Weatherbox. We’re also constantly chasing the absolutely massive production style of bands like Jimmy Eat World and blink-182, which becomes a fun and sometimes maddening exercise when we realize we have 1/20th of their studio budgets to try and do it. And also the Van Wilder soundtrack.

You’ve got quite a lot of nature related themes on your re-released EP ‘Garden’. Can you tell me more about what drew you to these themes? Trevor: Nature-related themes have always been a huge part of our songs. Our first album Inward literally starts and ends with the sounds of a campfire and has song titles that feel very much rooted in the earth, like Riverbed and Rose. Whereas a lot of the lyrics on our second album Dark Matter dealt with space and the sky, so we ended up with songs like Skybound and Sunrise. And the EP is called Garden because it’s all about growth and coming of age. Even the name Tree River is itself a nature-based metaphor. I’ve also done a lot of psychedelics in forests and deserts so I’m sure that’s played a part.

What’s next for Tree River? Phil: We have lots of new music that Big Scary Monsters is going to start rolling out in a few weeks that we’re really excited to get out into the world. We’re also looking forward to playing shows again, now that that seems to be something bands are actually doing. We’ve been performing for piles of stuffed animals for the last year and a half and it isn’t quite the same.