Decorated Youth Magazine #15

DECORATED YOUTH ISSUE 15

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DECORATED YOUTH Quality over Quantity

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PURCHASE A COPY www.decoratedyouth.com

STAY IN TOUCH Email: heather@decoratedyouth.com Facebook: facebook.com/decoratedyouth Twitter & Instagram: @decoratedyouth

EDITOR & PUBLISHER Heather Hawke

Š 2012 – 2016 Decorated Youth Magazine All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without prior written consent from the editor, except in instances of review, as permitted by copyright law. For permission, please write to the editor at heather@decoratedyouth.com.

Issue design by Heather Hawke.

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Issue 15’s contributors (in order of work shown): Nicole Busch

Paige Wilson

Bossi Baker

photographer

photographer and interviewer

photographer

Cina Nguyen

Andrew Gomez

Konnor Durante

photographer

Carolina Londono photographer

Photographer

Emily Dubin

photographer

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Mickey Cerball photographer

Additional thanks to: Wesley Fuller Bassh

Kayla Kern

Grandstand Media Republic Records

Liza Darwin

The members of Sunflower Bean

Trevor Vaz of Dances

Winterman & Goldstein

PULSE Music Group

The members of ON AN ON

Right Angle PR

The Observatory in Santa Ana

The members of Drowners

Roll Call Records

Madador Records

The members of Bleached

BB Gun Press

Salty Management

Cody Sowerby

SonyBMG

Press Here Publicity

Adam Pearson and Mark Brown of EAT FAST

Pitch Perfect PR

Capitol Music Group

Mixed Management

Red Light Management

Patrick Phillips and Tyson Moore of Honduras

Stunt Company

Jamie Schulman and Noah Gersh of PartyBaby

Domino Records

The members of Night Moves

Motormouth Media

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PHOTO GALLERY’S Wild Nothing - 10

NAF (nice as f**ck) - 28

PWR BTTM - 42

Tame Impala - 12

PartyBaby - 30

Best Coast - 46

Oh Wonder - 14

SWMRS - 32

Broods - 48

Modest Mouse - 16

Porches - 34

Brand New - 18

BØRNS - 36

Weathers - 20

Hunny - 38

Local Natives - 50 Venture Out: City Life vs Nature - 52 Venture Out: Japan - 56

Savages - 40

INTERVIEWS Wesley Fuller - 64 Bassh - 68 Liza Darwin - 74 Dances - 78 ON AN ON - 84

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Drowners - 90 Bleached - 96 Cody Sowerby - 104 EAT FAST - 108

Honduras - 112 PartyBaby - 118 Night Moves - 124 Kayla Kern - 130 Sunflower Bean - 134

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LETTER & PHOTO FROM THE EDITOR When I launched the Decorated Youth site in November 2012, I never thought by this time we’d have 14, now 15, issues under our belts - let alone start creating them in the first place. I’d also never thought I’d have as many contributors and supporters as we do now.

This issue is in honor of our 4th anniversary so I wanted to really focus on the D.I.Y scene - even though some of these artists are more known than others. This issue fully captures what I want to showcase through the publication. With the musicians, I always want to support those smaller acts who’ve may never get to play the main stage at a festival just because no one knows about them.

This publication is my way of contributing to the scene to help these smaller musicians get their names out there so that when they do pass through a city, each room can be as packed full of avid listeners as possible.

With the behind the scenes feature’s, I want to showcase the various ways people can be artists in their own right and that it is possible to chase your dreams and do what you’re passionate about. Far too often I hear of people not knowing how to get into a certain field or even knowing that a specific job was even an option. I’m trying to help show these people that there are options and that there’s purpose to the things they’re really passionate about.

-

Heather Hawke

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Wild Nothing // May 20 The Regent, Los Angeles

by Nicole Busch

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Tame Impala // June 16 Merriweather Post Pavilion Columbia, Maryland

by Cina Nguyen

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Oh Wonder // June 21 9:30 Club Washington, DC by Cina Nguyen

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Modest Mouse // July 9 Midflorida Credit Union Amphitheater, Tampa

by Carolina Londono

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Brand New // July 9 Midflorida Credit Union Amphitheater, Tampa

by Carolina Londono

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Weathers // July 12 Union, LA

by Paige Wilson

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NAF (Nice As F*#k) // July 13 The Glasshouse, Pomona

by Andrew Gomez

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PartyBaby // July 14 PB&J's, Reno

by Heather Hawke

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SWMRS // July 14 PB&J's, Reno

by Heather Hawke

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Porches // July 14 Twilight Concerts Series, Santa Monica Pier

by Nicole Busch

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BĂ˜RNS // July 14 Twilight Concerts Series, Santa Monica Pier

by Nicole Busch

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Hunny // July 21 Observatory, Santa Ana

by Andrew Gomez

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Savages // July 29 Observatory, Santa Ana

by Andrew Gomez

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Best Coast // August 27 Cargo, Reno

by Heather Hawke

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Broods // September 1 Beacham, Orlando

by Carolina Londono

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Local Natives // September 15 North Park Theater, San Diego

by Andrew Gomez

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THE START OF CREATING MUSIC The first "song" I ever wrote and recorded (when I was 12), I entered into the WAM Song of the Year. It won the Under 15's category and I won some studio time with a producer/engineer called Ben Chase. I spent all of my paper route money over the next 2 years at his studio in Morley, recording songs I'd written. My friends would be at home doing their math homework and watching The OC and I'd be up late recording songs in a "real studio". I felt like a bit of a rock star. He taught me a lot about the recording process and filled me with confidence and inspiration. I knew I wanted to be a musician when I discovered The Beatles when I was 13. I was obsessed with all things Beatles as a teenager.

WRITING MUSIC – SOMETHING HE’S ALWAYS HAD TO DO OR SOMETHING HE’S DISCOVERED ALONG THE WAY Writing songs is certainly something I've always felt inspired to do since I was young as a form of expression. It feels completely natural but it certainly does control me. I never really felt that I'd have a normal life, go to UNI, get a degree, a good job, get married, have kids, buy a house etc... I feel compelled to write because I'm a naturally obsessive person. I find life's little details very interesting.

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LYRICS –WHERE, TIMPERIOD & PHYSICALLY, THEY WERE THOUGHT UP Most of the album tracks were written in 2013/14 when I first moved to Melbourne, with a few teenage tunes & more recent tunes in there too. I've been having a lot of fun times in Melbourne, I like to party hard and a lot of the songs cover fun stuff but it's just so difficult to be artistic and be able to support yourself financially. Day jobs suck, they're time consuming and emotionally & physically draining. A lot of these songs were written as an escape from the hohum of 9-5 corporate life.

WRITING, SOMETHING HE ENJOYS? Yeah I think as you're in the process of writing or creating something new there's always a buzzing sensation that what you're doing might be something pretty special. I think that's the rush that becomes addictive for most creative people.

SINCE THIS IS HIS DEBUT ALBUM HAVING A CERTAIN SET OF RULES HE FELT NEEDED TO MAINTAINED / DISCARDED WHEN CREATING THE ALBUM No rules (*throws the rule book out, Dr. House style "get this thing out of my sight!) The only rule, and I have the label's backing here, is that it has to be a killer album. And it will be!

EMBARCE OR SHUT OUT LISTENING TO OTHER MUSIC WHEN CREATING? I DJ at clubs & venues around town so I can't escape the music of other artists. I love listening to new music as well as discovering past classics.

I've certainly learned a lot about production and arrangement techniques from DJing, discovering what works and what doesn't. I think it's good to keep an open mind and be willing to try new things.

HOW HE WANTS TO BE REPRESENTED THOUGHTOUT THE BAND’S VISUALS I think anyone would be lying if they didn't answer this by saying they just want to look cool. Or possibly look shit, but in an ironic way that becomes cool.

WHAT OR WHO DO YOU THINK CHANGED THE MUSIC INDUSTRY Rock & Roll, The Beatles, The Civil Rights Movement, Feminism, computers, MTV, the internet, Kanye West...no just kidding. Although, If Bernie Sanders sang on the next Kanye album that would be impressive. #feelthebern MENTORS As I alluded to earlier on, Ben Chase was an early mentor during my early teens. He gave but honest, at times brutally honest feedback but always encouraged and inspired me, setting me on the path that I'm on now.

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BASSH

I want to start from the beginning.

Where are your roots in music? Did you start playing young? Was creativity a part of your childhood?

CJ Hardee: Yeah, my family was very musical, we always beat on pots and pans and shit when we were babies. We always had instruments around the house and we all just played and made stuff up as we grew up.

Jimmy Brown: Yeah, I grew up playing the piano and singing in the choir and that was kind of my first taste and then they kicked me out of the choir at an early age and so I started playing guitar. I learned a cover on the guitar of ‘Stairway to Heaven’ and I ended up playing in bars, playing cover gigs because I would always cover songs. That’s kind of the start of it.

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Describe your path to becoming involved with music. When was the first time you felt super inspired by a specific piece of music or an album? How did you know you wanted to be a musician?

Jimmy: Mine was ‘OK Computer’ by Radiohead. I remember listening to it every night. Before bed, I would listen to it 4 or 5 times in a row.

That was very inspiring. The music was so change-able and the lyrics were so crazy but somehow you could relate to it. It’s very emotional and human charged so that was a standout moment for me.

CJ: I remember my brother playing that Nelly song ‘Country Grammar’ it was sweet because I just listened to like crap music when I was really young. But then he would always play some crazy shit and I would get inspired and that made me want to go and open my eyes and ears to how much more is out there.

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So when you guys first started talking about doing this project, you guys were looking for something a little bit different. What was the goal with starting Bassh? What did you want to do differently?

Jimmy: Just to make a fucking mess, you know? Just to try to get some music together that was just on the right side of our skin and not to give two flying fucks about what anyone else thought of it, you know. That was the real thing. We just wanted to be ourselves and be free, you know play music that we want to play. I don’t even think we’ve done that yet. I think it’s just the tip of the iceberg, but you know, it’s a process and I don’t think we will ever have any goals or agendas. If we ever do that, we will probably have lost why we started doing it.

So, CJ, you decided to play drums for the first time since your teens, so what lead to that decision?

CJ: It was really just out of necessity. It was just me and him in the studio tracking so I just got on and played some beats for us. I’m not playing live, I’m playing bass but on the recordings, we just kind of had to.

What is the writing process like for you guys? Is it collaborative or is it individual?

Jimmy: It’s just different. Some songs we have written together and some songs I have started and then CJ will help with it. Another song I’d co-wrote with a guy and had the basic song there and then CJ heard it and rapped over the top of it and that became a song. It’s definitely collaborative, that’s for sure. I think that we wouldn’t be able to have the songs that we have if we weren’t working on them together. We push each other and challenge each other, and bitch at each other and piss each other off, you know, but at the end of the day, we get there with a song that we like so that’s probably a good thing.

Where do the lyrics come from?

Jimmy: Personal experience, really. I think sometimes it’s voyeuristic, too in a sense that you meet somebody and they’ll tell you a story about something they’re going through in their life or something like that and you’ll start to think about it and a lot of times for me I’ll pick up on something like that and it will really affect me. It’ll make me feel like it’s part of me if it’s someone I’m really close to or something. So, it’s a good way to write and to find that emotion that maybe you don’t have personally all of the time. But, it is personal because you are close to the people and care about what they’re going through so you end up kinda taking that on and writing something about it sometimes.

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Do you guys enjoy writing a lot?

Jimmy: Yeah, we love it. We’re always writing. Got a shit ton of songs for this project recording, tons of demos. When you get to write then go out and play songs for people and it’s just the two of us writing the songs and recording them, that’s a pretty good feeling.

Has your vision of music changed since you first began as musicians?

If so, how?

CJ: I think it’s always changing, yeah. Always growing. Every day is different for me, you know. I’ve played in a lot of different bands and they’ve all been totally different sounds, vibes, and instrumentations…

Jimmy: Yeah, I mean, I don’t even have a vision for music anymore, it’s just what I do. I used to dream about being in a big band but I don’t really dream about that anymore I just kind of want to be successful and I am doing that so I’m happy with that.

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I’m always trying to get better and improve to make the songs better and perform better and all that stuff so I think we are fitting our own path with what we’re doing.

We read an interview from this year’s SXSW that mentioned you’d be releasing a new single soon and then an EP, but you said you didn’t want to rush the album release and that you’re still defining your sound. So, do you feel like the visuals are a really important aspect to match the sound? Is that something you’re still working on?

Jimmy: I think so. Tomorrow we’re doing a video and it’s going to be high contrast black and white but it’s all going to be very stylized, pretty clean cut and it’ll be artistic in a stylized, editorial kind of way.

We’ve developed a little bit of that black and white thing. I don’t know why we gravitated towards that, but we did and we’ve stuck with it.

Have you had any mentors along the way? Anyone that you maybe want to shout out that’s helped you?

Jimmy: Bill Reynolds from Band of Horses helped us. Lincoln Parish who’s part of Cage The Elephant has helped us. Bill helped us a lot with producing the record and helped us build a plan for it. Our management are helping out a lot, so it’s a good group of people.

Any messages to any fans or anyone who’s waiting for more music?

CJ: Yeah, thanks for waiting. We’ve had that song ‘Body’ out for a while now and a lot of people are anxious to hear more but we’ve got to do what makes sense to us and so there’s a lot of music coming and we’ve written a lot of stuff, recorded a lot of stuff, so thanks for waiting, I guess.

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Clover launched in February 2016 and is delivered five days a week, compacted with short news items and features that allows teens to express themselves and learn about one another in a private space.

I want to start from the beginning.

Where did you grow up?

Nashville, Tennessee! When I was growing up all I could think about was how much I wanted to leave Nashville for somewhere bigger or with more things going on (although Nashville’s cool now, it wasn’t when I was a kid!). Now I love it.

She’s regularly contributed to publications/brands such as Refinery29, The Guardian, the New York Observer, Noisey, Style.com, Racked, and Urban Outfitters and she also launched Sweet (Hearst's Snapchat channel) back in November 2015. Her digital consulting/copywriting experience includes work for Kate Spade, Quiksilver Women, and PROJECT Trade Show.

While working at NYLON.com as the digital editorial director, back in 2014, she oversaw all of the content on the website, managed the editorial team, and helped to grow the publication’s newsletter.

During the time frame in which she held that title she also set the highest traffic record for the site.

She’s also held positions as an editor at NYLON Guys and MTV.com.

However, she got tired of seeing so many mainstay teen-focused media sites that were using clickbait headlines to chase the traffic with a mix of viral stories on superficial topics sitting beside more serious articles on body image issues. To aide in this problem she, along with Casey Lewis (a former senior online editor at Teen Vogue), Co-founded the e-mail newsletter Clover Letter which is specifically made for teen girls.

What was your childhood like?

Was creativity a part of your childhood?

My childhood was awesome. My younger brother and I were both really close and equally into creative hobbies, whether it was guitar lessons (him), piano lessons (me), or acting in school plays and running the newspaper. I definitely was one of those kids who tries a million things and drops half of them a few months/years later, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing. By testing out a bunch of different interests, you can figure out what really sticks.

What came first, your interest in music / entertainment or journalism?

I’ve always been interested in music, especially growing up in Nashville. It’s a totally unique experience, having first-class musicians playing on nearly every street corner. But I never really imagined writing about music until I had already begun my journalism career. I originally intended to be a fashion writer; but after a few years of that, I decided to shift my focus to music and feature writing, as opposed to runway reviews.

Describe your path to becoming involved with journalism. Do you feel like writing is something that you’ve always done, or is it something that you discovered along the way? When did you know you wanted to professionally be involved in the industry?

My path to becoming a writer started pretty early, in high school—even though I didn’t realize it at the time. English has always been my favorite subject (I was an English Literature major in college), but it wasn’t until I became involved in my school newspaper that I started to think of writing as a viable career path. I became editorin-chief of the school paper my senior year in high school. That summer, I randomly pitched myself as a freelance writer to the local Nashville newspaper, The Tennessean. I think the editors there were a little taken aback since I was so young, but they were interested enough to have me in for an interview. After that, I started writing a handful of arts and style pieces for them to build up my clips. I went to Vassar for college and studied English Literature. I decided that I would rather get a liberal arts degree instead of journalism, and I don’t regret that decision one bit. I was able to take classes in tons of different areas, from art history to Italian to Political Science. My sophomore year, two friends and I founded CONTRAST, the first-ever Vassar College style magazine. We wanted to focus on style as opposed to fashion—so the emphasis was on creativity and personal expression, instead of just clothing. I interned every summer throughout college at publications like Harper’s Bazaar, ELLE, and Style.com (now Vogue Runway). When I graduated from Vassar, I was lucky enough to land a job as the web writer at NYLON, which was one of my absolute favorite magazines. It’s been a wild ride ever since!

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Has your writing style / interviewing style changed at all since you first began writing?

My writing style has changed (improved, I hope!) with each new experience or job. When I first started out, I was very much reserved and didn’t want to ruffle any feathers.

I was hesitant to ask “hard questions” (even though, in the scheme of things, they’re really not hard questions at all). I also used to have a list of questions and would stick with them—never veering away from what was planned. Over the years I’ve learned to go with the flow and see where the conversation takes you. Who knows, the discussion could move into an entirely different and more interesting direction—which would produce a better article for the reader.

What is your favorite thing about the writing/ interviewing process?

My favorite thing about being a writer is the fact boredom isn’t an option. Every day brings something different, whether it’s a new assignment, an exciting lead, or an awesome idea that you can’t wait to pitch to the editor.

Journalists sometimes get a bad rep from other people in the industry. What do you think is the biggest misconception about this job is?

I think many people assume that journalists have some sort of ulterior motive, like they want to uncover a deep dark secret or present the subject in an unflattering light.

Which, fair, maybe some journalists do. But in my experience, most people just want to get a great story, and that doesn’t mean sacrificing someone else’s reputation to do so.

Have you had hurdle(s with starting / running Clover? If so, how have you overcome them?

SO MANY. Starting your own business is incredibly tough.

We had no idea how many challenges it would present when we first decided to start Clover; but I think that this naiveté is almost necessary in order to start a business.

You’ve got to be at least a little naive (and extremely optimistic) to take the plunge. Our biggest challenge has, ironically enough, been totally unrelated to the letter itself. It’s mostly been nitty gritty things about creating a company, like legal issues, creating a business plan, or dealing with tech problems. We overcome them by not being afraid to ask other people for advice—there’s no room for an ego here!—and also figuring out which things are worth stressing out over and which aren’t. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself worrying about every single thing.

When you have your own company, the highs feel so much higher and the lows are much lower. It’s important not to take every little criticism to heart—this is where having a business partner-slash-friend is helpful. Both Casey and I help each other keep things in perspective.

How long was the time period from when you and Casey Lewis thought up the idea of Clover to when you actually had the company up and running?

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We had the idea for Clover in early December. Once we polled a bunch of teens and girls and found out that the idea would be something they were into, we decided to go for it. So we quit our jobs right before the holidays and launched February 1st.

Did Clover go through any revisions between the first thought of it and the time of launching?

We knew that we wanted Clover Letter to be an email newsletter, but we didn’t anticipate having an app, too.

After a few months in we had accumulated hundreds of (awesome!) feature stories that are a bit longer. They’re also more evergreen, so they’ll be relevant three months or three years from now. We created the app in order to have a searchable, mobile archive that goes everywhere our readers go. Early next year, we plan to make Clover bigger than your inbox: we're expanding into an exciting new online destination (more on that soon!), as well as real life events and merchandise.

Do you two feel as though you both had sort of had an obligation to start Clover?

After six years each in the digital media space, we felt that the internet was undeserving teen girls. There’s an overabundance of celebrity news and clickbait, yet there’s a really scarcity in news about what matters (like the election, Planned Parenthood, or international issues).

Teen girls probably won’t go to traditional news outlets like CNN or The New York Times to get it, either (because let’s be real, those articles are REALLY long). We wanted to create a digestible news source that you could read in just a few minutes, yet feel informed after doing so.

What is the one writing piece you’re most-proud of?

Last year I wrote an extensive reported piece on Hillary Clinton’s style (and why it matters) for the Observer, and the story seems all the more relevant now.

What has your favorite/ most memorable interview been?

Ellie Kemper from The Office! I interviewed her for NYLON back in the day. We went out for coffee in the East Village and ended up bumping into Aziz Ansari, who is friends with Ellie. He ended up hanging out for a few minutes, which was so awesome for me as the ultimate Parks and Recreation superfan.

Who haven’t you interviewed that you would like to?

The list is long, but my number one is Michelle Obama (followed closely by Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen).

Have you had any mentors?

There are so many amazing women in media who have helped me out along the way, but Faran Krentcil was my first real boss at NYLON and she truly taught me the ropes.

She helped me inject my personality into my writing (among so many other things), and we stay in touch today.

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Interview with Trevor Vaz

GROWING UP I grew up an only child with a single mom that spent most of her time working, so I was super quiet and kept busy with drawing. I drew a lot of pro wrestlers, basketball players, and rappers. I didn’t start playing guitar until I was 11 or 12.

WHERE HE GREW UP AND HOW IT IMPACTED HIS CREATIVITY Growing up and living in New York City has absolutely had an impact on my creativity. My mom and I moved apartments almost every year, so I spent time in a lot of different neighborhoods, and they each had their own aesthetic. The “New Yorkness” that tied them all together intrigued me, and I still use that unknowable thing as a creative compass here and there.

I also had the freedom to take trains, explore the city and party with other creative kids at a very young age. I went to lots of shows and got to play CBGBs when I was 15. All of that fed my imagination and led me to believe I could do whatever I wanted if I stayed here. I don't know how true that sentiment is, but I did stick around.

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FORMAL / NOT FORMAL MUSICAL EDUCATION I had a guitar teacher for a couple years when I first started playing.

He was young and had just moved to the US from Argentina with $300 to his name. He loved to shred and taught me a lot of Metallica and Pantera riffs. That’s what he was into. He thought my Nirvana obsession at the time was boring and made fun of punk music, but he’s the man. I saw him a few weeks ago for the first time in 10 years, and we got super drunk. I thanked him for everything, and he told me he was proud of me for not giving up on music. He sells headlamps online now, and he’s doing extremely well.

I also studied music theory throughout high school but don’t remember much of it. My teacher for all four years was an incredible jazz guitarist that used to play with Joe Pass. He matched his socks to his suspenders, smoked cigars, and drove a white mustang. He hinted that he was a freemason and claimed to have written “Yesterday” before Paul.

He really looked out for me and became sort of a father figure over the years. I wish I remember more of what he taught me formally, but he gave me the confidence to think I was worth something musically, and he taught me how to tie a tie.

The sweet thing is that playing music has given me a lot of focus and identity, and I skirted the postcollegiate “what do I want to do with my life” haze I’ve seen a lot of friends struggle with. I’m lucky in that sense.

THE FIRST TIME HE FELT INSPIRED

BY MUSIC I think it was when I saw the “Smooth Criminal” music video. I was pretending to be Michael Jackson before I could really talk. I would imitate his moves wearing a cowboy hat, because I didn’t have the kind he wore.

But of course the music industry is half-fantasy, half-reality. I’m not sure to what extent I'm involved in it. I’m writing and recording music, and I’m playing shows to engaged crowds, and for all that I'm very thankful.

FINDING A WAY INTO THE MUSIC SCENE Before I wanted to be a musician, I wanted to be a star athlete. I think for such a quiet kid I just weirdly wanted to be famous, but I’ve been 100% set on music since I started playing. Again, 11 or 12 years old. I have the same attitude about it today as I did back then. I don’t want to do anything else, even if things go poorly, and my conservative Indian family is still calling it a phase.

NYC MUSIC SCENE I think and hope there’s something special happening in NYC, if only because of the sheer number of musicians working here. Everyone and their mother is making music, and that’s beautiful. And for such a gigantic scene, people actually seem to know each other.

Musicians that do very different things and are at very different stages hang out together, so I do get the impression that there’s a real sense of community here, though sometimes I worry it’s more of a drinking community than anything else. Of course, I’m too zoomed into my own nonsense to really know what the “scene” looks like. I’ve also never been part of a scene anywhere else.

THE START OF WRITING MUSIC It’s something I’ve been doing for a long time, and it’s not something I do too consciously anymore. Most decent songs I’ve written have just arrived in my brain – sometimes on the train, in the shower, in my sleep. I can’t sit down and purposefully write something, though I still try all the time. I don't want to be lazy about it, but laziness works best for me.

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BAND FORMATION In college, I was in an electronic rock group that I was proud of, but I was tired of programming and producing songs before I could play them with or for people. The momentum of that project naturally died, so I wrote some simple rock n’ roll songs and recorded demos of them with some friends (members of Jangula and Anamanaguchi). All of those guys were too busy to be in my band, so I saw it as a sort of solo project.

Around that time, David (drums) and I had a music production class together. He was a freshman and I was a senior. One day after class, it started pouring rain, and he asked to share my umbrella even though we’d never spoken before. I thought that was cool. He was very quiet and had just moved to NY from Beijing. I mentioned that I was vaguely forming a group, and he revealed that he played drums. I didn’t quite believe him, because he seemed so meek. Later that night he sent me recordings of his high school band, and the songs were cheesy but the drums were insane. He sounded like Dale Crover.

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Sam (bass) joined later. We met through an old friend of mine that he went to college with. The week he moved to NY from Texas, we hung out and ended up very drunk at my apartment at 5 am. I knew he played a little guitar, and I asked if he’d ever played bass. He said no, but I made my eyes big and asked him to join the band regardless. I played him one of our demos, and he started singing harmony over it there and then. Turns out he was a choirboy growing up. It was all fairly organic.

David, by the way, has since left Dances. He's living in Paris right now, and we're all on good terms.

Matt Gaffney just joined, and he's a brilliant drummer. I'd seen him play in other bands over the years and approached him soon after David broke the news. It took a few months of convincing, but he's fully with us now.

BIGGEST HARDSHIP THAT’S INSPIRED THEIR WRITING I'm not sure, but here's one: I’m the only non-catholic member of my giant extended family, so my relationship with spirituality and religion causes me a lot of confusion and guilt.

It also further divides me from a group of people I’ve never felt like myself around to begin with. I find my catholic upbringing and the internal conflict its caused me weaving its way subtly into my writing all the time.

In a more obvious way, a lot of the songs on ‘Keep Talking’ were written about and during a dramatic breakup I went through with a girl I'd been with for 5 years.

Since I got that subject out of my system, my writing has gone back to being more abstract.

WRITING PROCESS - INDIVIDUAL VS GROUP EFFORT I'm always writing material on my own that I'm eager to test in a band setting, so I'll usually bring an idea to the other guys, and we'll elaborate on it as a group.

Sometimes the arrangement presents itself immediately, and sometimes it never comes together. We've scrapped a lot of songs. Everyone writes their own parts, so it's collaborative at the end of the day.

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LYRICS –WHERE, TIMPERIOD & PHYSICALLY, THEY WERE THOUGHT UP Lyrics usually come to me in spurts.

Sometimes I'll write the lyrics to several songs all at once after long periods of not being able to conjure one useable line. Until I have lyrics I like, I just mumble nonsense while singing the melody. I have a lot of songs currently in that state. I think I'm deeply calm when the best lyrics get written, but I'm not often in that headspace.

FAVORITE PART OF THE ALBUM CREATION PROCESS When writing music, my favorite part and proudest moment is when a song starts to take shape on the guitar or piano and I can finally hear out loud some of what I initially heard in my head. At that moment, the song starts to sort of write itself, and it all happens in what feels like a single, long breath. I only ever experience this while alone, but it's a lonely triumph that gets me super excited.

WHEN AND HOW THE ALBUM TITLE ‘KEEP TALKING’ CAME ABOUT "I Keep Talking" is the name of a song on the record, which we shortened for the album title.

There's a verse in that song that goes: "Money is coming someday/ I don't know when/ 'til then I got cheap talk/ so I keep talking/ even in my dreams/ I'm sleep walking"

ARTWORK – CONTRIBUTE IDEAS OR REMAIN HANDS OFF Daniel Greer is a talented collage artist and photographer that our manager at the time was friends with. The process was actually very hands off. He tried a few different ideas, and we picked the one that spoke to us.

ARTWORK – AESTHETICALLY COOL PACKAGE VS COVERSATION BETWEEN LYRICS AND ART I think it should be a conversation between the two that is aesthetically on point. There are many approaches to making album art attractive, but it's not easy to come up with something compelling that hasn't been done to death.

HOW THEY WANT TO BE REPRESENTED THOUGHTOUT THE BAND’S VISUALS (PRESS PHOTOS, MUSIC VIDEOS, ALBUM ARTWORK) We've put a lot of work into our music videos in particular. Our good friends Alec MacDonald and Bernardo Garcia have directed, shot, and edited all of them, and we made them with no budget. All the production value in the videos came from long days and kind favors. The videos are just an extension of what we're trying to express aesthetically and emotionally through our music.

That's what visual representations of the band should be. We're really proud of those videos.

SHIFT IN HIS VISION OF MUSIC I never stopped enjoying the process of writing music, but for a while, I was too concerned about getting my foot in the door and feeling legit. Now that we've toured and put out a full-length, I'm less concerned about where the band is going and more focused on the quality of my work. I'm still ambitious, but I know no amount of hustling, press, etc. can get me where I want to be if the art doesn't speak for itself, and loudly.

WHO / WHAT CHANGED THE MUSIC INDUSTRY The internet, for obvious reasons.

Nobody buys music, because they don't need to. As a response, more people are making music, which I'm down with. The only sad thing is that artists often need to sell their music to movies and TV shows and ads to make money now. They also have to tour to an unhealthy and often unsustainable extent. The industry has changed so dramatically and rapidly that I'm sure it will be unrecognizable in another few years. For whatever reason, that comforts me.

MENTORS Yes, I've had plenty. Right now I feel like mentioning my closest friend Daniel Bachrach (of the band Jangula). He's older than I am by just under a month, and he's taught so much of what I know about making music, being an honest human being, and surviving. If I'd never met him, things would be wildly different for me.

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ON

Their debut album, Give In, was released via Roll Call Records in January of 2013 and they soon headed out on a tour through Europe and the U.S. that would last a year and a half. The group knew this tour would be a long term decision, but it was something they knew needed that level of dedication.

Back in June the group announced that they were going on a hiatus and taking a break from touring with the reasoning behind it all being a positive decision. Ricci is making ambient music and starting on some big art projects (http://cargocollective.com/nomadi cs). Estwing is working on two music projects, the first one for a couple years under the name Louis (http://louistheband.com) and the second is an electronica project called MLMO (http://mlmomusic.com). Eiesland is working on a music project call COMO in which, over the past couple years, he’d record whenever he sat down to write and would talk to the recordings so it’s as if he’s sitting next to you when you listen to the music, the release date of his stuff is still TBA.

O ANON AN With a new mindset after this extensive touring, the group opted out of returning to Toronto to record their sophomore album, And The Wave Has Two Sides (July 2015), and instead headed to Los Angeles. They entered Sunset Studios with legendary producer Joe Chiccarelli with the determination of using live tracking instead of multi-tracking like they did on their first record.

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ON ON

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Interview with Nate Eiesland

GROWING UP Growing up in Brainerd, MN was great. We never had a lot of money, but we always had food on the table. I remember getting two bags of groceries on our front step one time. If it was because we really needed it, or just someone being really nice, I'm not sure. I grew up spending a lot of time in the woods and in the lakes. Brainerd has 500 lakes in its surrounding area and forests all over.

CREATIVITY BEING APART OF HIS CHILDHOOD Creativity was always encouraged in our house. My parents were very supportive and they lent me money multiple times to buy guitars or whatever. I got a four track cassette recorder when I was 13 or 14. I locked myself in my room and played with layering sounds and flipping the tapes over to play backwards. My parents brought us to Pentecostal church growing up, so that's where I got turned on to harmony, Rock and Roll and all the power and emotion in groups when they sing together.

FORMAL / NOT FORMAL MUSICAL EDUCATION I never took lessons seriously. I remember having one drum lesson and one piano lesson when I was little, but I knew when I just explored the instruments I got way more out of the experience. I took a music theory class for a semester my sophomore year in high school.

I learned enough to figure out that if I got any deeper into that side of things it'd hold me back. Learning all the rules was blocking me in, so I dropped out.

I was in Choir in junior high and high school. I enjoyed that for the most part. That's where Alissa and I really became close. We were in choir together and we even traveled around Norway singing in cathedrals when we were 17.

THE FIRST TIME HE FELT INSPIRED

BY MUSIC I always loved singing. Like I said, we grew up in church and all the hymns was an education. Then there was a time when our family friend lent my big brother a guitar to learn on. He didn't take to it that much. But, all the sudden there was a guitar in the house. I spent weeks with it. Until then I'd really only had access to the piano my mother had in our house. I was 13. I immediately started writing songs even though I could barely play a chord.

FINDING A WAY INTO THE MUSIC SCENE I don't remember the very first song I wrote. But those early ones are better left in the past. It's all rolled back into the creative soil.

RECORDING DURING THE DAY (FOR THEIR NEW ALBUM ‘AND THE WAVE HAS TWO SIDES) VS RECORDING AT NIGHT (FOR THEIR DEBUT) - HOW IT SHIFTED THE PROCESS We were on the clock for ‘ATWHTS’. We were working from 11a-11p six days a week. It definitely created a different vibe, but the process with ‘ATWHTS’ was different from making ‘Give In’ on almost every level. Some things were better, some things worse.

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FIRST TOUR THEY DID WAS A YEAR AND A HALF LONG - HOW IT SHAPED THE GROUP Touring so hard, and so early, heavily influenced how we made the next album. We had formed a chemistry playing shows that we wanted to capture on record. We tracked as much of ATWHTS together playing in the same room as we could.

WHEN AND HOW THE ALBUM TITLE ‘AND THE WAVE HAS TWO SIDES’ CAME ABOUT It was pretty late in the process. We had been in LA for a while and I brought up a Quote from Brian Eno, "A line has two sides." We had been learning to surf on our Sunday's off, plus waves are a foundational aspect of sound. The title evolved from all of that.

WRITING / RECORDING ON THE ROAD A lot of song ideas and seeds start on the road but it's rare that anything has the time or space to bloom until I can be home for a while.

BIGGEST HARDSHIP THAT’S INSPIRED THEIR WRITING My Father and Alissa's Mother dying two years apart when we were in our twenties.

HAVING A CERTAIN SET OF RULES THEY FELT THEY NEEDED TO MAINTAINED / DISCARDED WHEN CREATING THEIR SECOND LP Not rules as much as limitations.

We wanted to track as much as we could all at one time. We wanted the album to sound like we sounded in that room playing together. We wanted to use less reverb. A lot of little things, but we never make rules.

FAVORITE PART OF THE ALBUM CREATION PROCESS FOR ‘AND THE WAVE HAS TWO SIDES’?

Probably the time I spent in Alissa's Grandpas house writing. We stayed there between tours a few times and I got to have a spare room that was dedicated to writing and recording demos. That was awesome.

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WRITING PROCESS - INDIVIDUAL VS GROUP EFFORT It's been both. Moving forward it will be more individual. We tried using a collaborative writing process with some songs on ATWHTS and it was a good exercise for us.

LYRICS – INTENTIONALLY SITTING DOWN TO WRITE VS HAVING IDEAS IN YOUR HEAD AND THEN THEY COMES SPILLING OUT It can go either way. I sit down to write and I know songs will come.

But, a lot of the time is exploration and following mistakes. Mistakes can become some of the most interesting musical foundations. It's not calculated that way. That's my favorite.

WRITING, SOMETHING HE ENJOY’S? I deeply enjoy writing. I do it as much as I can- as much as I feel inspired to. I never force it and that keeps things flowing creatively. I find when I try to hold onto something or catch something it can start to get away from me. So I just let it happen now. A lot of my best work won't ever be heard.

Sometimes it's catch and release.

I'm not too precious about it.

ARTWORK – CONTRIBUTE IDEAS OR REMAIN HANDS OFF Liss did all the art for the album. I threw her some ideas, but that's been her for both records.

ARTWORK – AESTHETICALLY COOL PACKAGE VS COVERSATION BETWEEN LYRICS AND ART I think the most aesthetically cool packaging of an album usually speaks to the music in some way, whether it's abstracted or not.

MENTORS No. We've been figuring things out on our own since we were kids.

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DROWNERS

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Hitt went back home to his parents’ house in Wales for two months to renew his visa and while there penned down some of what would become the first batch of Drowners songs. After returning back to NYC they recorded their debut EP 'Between Us Girls', which was released in February 2013.

Proceeding their EP, they recorded their self-titled debut LP with producers Gus Oberg and Johnny T. Yerington, which was released in January 2014. For the album, they wanted the sound to be similar sounding to the EP, but this time around the recording session was more organic.

Since the first LP was half way written by Hitt before the band came together, their second LP ‘On Desire’ (released on June 24, 2016 and produced, recorded and mixed by Claudius Mittendorfer) saw them mold into a more collaborative effort. As a result of the collaboration the second album came out to be slower, a bit darker, and more reflective than the first. Since the band took longer for the recording process it also saw this album come out sonically more complex.

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Interview with Matt Hitt

GROWING UP Idyllic Welsh hillsides…most of the time observed from my bedroom window. I got a guitar when I was about 10 so I spent most of my time tinkering with that.

FORMAL / NOT FORMAL MUSICAL EDUCATION I went to guitar lessons for a while. Did some music theory stuff in Secondary School… Started spending all my lunch hours in the music room playing in numerous bands. My time at school was pretty music centric.

WHEN HE STARTED TAKING SONGWRITING SERIOISLY I think I had played guitar in bands for so long that after a while I wanted more control beyond writing secondary guitar parts. I also wasn’t playing the kind of music I wanted to so I figured the only way out of that was to start writing myself.

YEARS OF MODELING HAVING SHAPED HIS WORK ETHIC / TAKE TO TOURING EASIER Yeah I think so. It taught me how to communicate with different types of people which is obviously very helpful when you're traveling to strange and new places.

HAVING A CERTAIN SET OF RULES THEY FELT THEY NEEDED TO MAINTAINED / DISCARDED WHEN CREATING THEIR SECOND LP I sort of imposed more rules on myself when writing the first one. With this one, everyone was a part of the writing process so it was a lot more open and experimental. I think we sort of drew a line after the first record and wanted to try new things. I think I got better as a songwriter too by being more open to other ideas.

EASY CHOICE TO HAVE ‘CRUEL WAYS’ BE THE FIRST SINGLE? I guess it’s a song that is the biggest link between the first and second record, so yeah I think it was. We figured it would be interesting whilst also not alienating to people who liked the first record.

NYC / EXTENSIVE TOURING HAVING AN IMPACT ON THEIR ALBUM I think the fact I’m 3 years older than when we started had an impact on it. I guess I was pretty starry eyed when I came to New York and after living here for a while you start to stop looking up and sort of see the less appealing aspects of living here. I still love it though.

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NYC MUSIC SCENE Right now, I couldn't say. I think there’s probably a lot of stuff going on but I’m not looking in the right places. A lot of my friends are all in bands so I think it’s always thriving and new stuff going on…it just doesn’t really feel like a ‘scene’. Everyone’s kind of off on their own. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing…

LYRICS –WHERE, TIMPERIOD & PHYSICALLY, THEY WERE THOUGHT UP I guess it was written over the course of about nine months. It’s interesting writing with other people because, all of a sudden, you’ve got four people’s moods and emotions being expressed instead of just one person’s.

That’s good though because there’s always someone who wants to express something and the others can bounce off it.

LYRICS – INTENTIONALLY SITTING DOWN TO WRITE VS HAVING IDEAS IN YOUR HEAD AND THEN THEY COMES SPILLING OUT I guess it’s different every time but more often than not a lyric comes in my head, complete with melody and then I build the rest of the song around that. I listen to very rough demos and ideas for a long time to figure out which ones I still like when they’re a few weeks old. After we stopped touring I sort of switched my songwriter radar back on so I was constantly looking and listening to people for a spark of something to write about.

WRITING, SOMETHING HE ENJOYS? Yeah, sometimes it’s really difficult but I enjoy the process of fitting words into a certain number of syllables in a melody and things like that. I did English Literature at University so writing and being interested in words has been a sort of constant thing for all of my adult life. I like the struggle of writing songs.

FAVORITE PART OF THE ALBUM CREATION PROCESS I really enjoyed the whole thing. I suppose getting those first mixes back so you can sort of reflect on what you’ve all come up with was my favorite bit.

WHEN AND HOW THE ALBUM TITLE ‘ON DESIRE CAME ABOUT I wanted to call it something completely different…but my title was a bit long winded. Then I was with Erik one day talking about the lyrical theme and he suggested they were all about desiring someone or something. I liked that ‘On Desire’ made the record seem like a collection of essays that were variations on a theme.

ARTWORK – CONTRIBUTE IDEAS OR REMAIN HANDS OFF As with all the other releases, we did it totally by ourselves. Erik and I came up with different ideas. One of my references was a close up sketch of a nude model and you kind of couldn't tell what body part it was. It sort of de-sexualized a naked body and it became biological or something. I liked that contradiction and Erik took photos of a friend of ours and I loved the one of the back - I think it’s really beautiful and sort of looks like a weird landscape.

ARTWORK – AESTHETICALLY COOL PACKAGE VS COVERSATION BETWEEN LYRICS AND ART I think it’s a good opportunity to set a reference for the sound of the record. We’re lucky in that we have complete control over the artwork so it’s kinda like we get to choose our own frame for the painting we did. I feel like you gotta do something that looks good the size of a thumbnail cos that’s how most people look at it on their phones.

HOW THEY WANT TO BE REPRESENTED THOUGHTOUT THE BAND’S OTHER VISUALS (PRESS PHOTOS, MUSIC VIDEOS) I think we just go for a true reflection of who we are.

We’ve put a lot of our mates in our music videos and the photos, if not in a studio, are taken at places we actually hang out…

MENTORS Claudius Mittendorfer, our producer, became a great mentor for us on this record.

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Other times it was only Jen and Jessie writing, like the earlier days when they played in their parent’s San Fernando Valley garage mimicking their punk idols The Slits, Black Flag and Minor Threat.

Once in the studio they focused on pre-production and challenging the songs, while still keeping their cheeky, California-punk in the forefront. Joe Chiccarelli and coproducer Carlos de la Garza (Paramore, YACHT) helped shift their vigorous songs into immense pop melodies.

The writing process differed on this release opposed to their previous ones. Sometimes all three girls spent time out in Joshua Tree at a remote house writing, a first since bassist Micayla had never supplied on the songwriting front.

Although Welcome The Worms showcases the typical themes of romance long destroyed, it also showed Jen that when writing the album she could embrace both the positive and the negative sides of life and to learn to overcome the obstacles through the power of music. The album is about embracing the the darker sides of life instead of ignoring it because it’s all beautiful and they’re not in search perfection, they’re simply trying to make music that’s as real as who they are.

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Interview with Jennifer Clavin

I want to start from the beginning. What was your childhood like? Was creativity a part of your childhood?

My dad and my mom were both into playing music, like our dad played guitar and he had a bunch of guitars laying around the house that he like made himself. Our mom is a singer so we would go to family barbeques and we would play covers like Linda Ronstadt… Jess and I were always welcomed to playing music, or taking lessons if we wanted to but I feel like because we were trying to rebel against our parents, we got more into punk and we weren’t interested in the kind of music that they listened to or played when we got older like when we were in high school and we were rebelling. But our parents were very musical and liked the fact that Jess and I were also musical.

Do you think where you grew up impacted your creativity and what you’re doing now?

Yeah, I feel like definitely growing up in LA, in the valley we were really far from a bus stop, so we had the plan to start a band but I think because we had nowhere else to go, it just really forced us to play music all day. We’d start bands from our parent’s garage, and then on the weekend we’d have like one friend that drove, so she would drive all of us to a show. I think living in LA, there's so many venues and events. We’d drive like an hour to an hour and a half if it was a band that we really wanted to see. I think just being in LA, there’s so much to sing about and think about.

Did you have any formal music education? Or did you learn it on your own?

Yeah, totally self-taught. My dad would try to give me in lessons but I feel like I just didn’t care to listen to what he had to say because it was my dad. I feel bad looking back, but now, I totally respect what my dad has to say or teach me. If it’s something with guitar or melodies, he’s impressed, always. He’s like, “How do you know that going from this note to this note, that you’re still in the key of G?” and I’m like, “I don’t know, I just go off of ear.” But now, I’ve had some lessons and now I get it.

Do you remember the first time you felt super inspired by music? Was there a certain artist or album? How did you know you wanted to be a musician?

There were two times that I remember very well. One of them was, I had this VHS called “Girls Bite Back” and it was The Slit, and Nina Hagen and Girlschool, Lilliput, and there was this one Siouxsie and The Banshees performance where she plays two songs. One she’s singing and dancing on stage, and one she plays guitar and then after she does this interview and they ask her– I don't remember exactly what it was– they ask her.

“Why are you the best female musician?” and she says something like, “I’m just the best. It doesn't matter that I’m a woman, I’m just the best.” and I thought that was so cool, and her performance was so cool, and so empowering. The other time, I remember, I was at a show and this one band was opening called F Minus, and they have two girls in the band. I remember it didn’t occur to me until I saw this band that I was like, “Wait. Why don’t I have my own band?” and so like, being in that place just inspired me to go home and start playing music with Jessie, as a band and the next day we started a band after that show.

Were you guys involved with Riot Grrl, or were you inspired by any way with that movement involving Kathleen Hanna?

Well, when I got into punk, I actually wasn’t into Bikini Kill and BratMobile at all. My best friend loved that music. I really liked Black Flag and Minor Threat and listened to a lot of male dominated punk from Orange County. But then, I read interviews and that was their favorite bands. I think it kind of makes sense that we’re obsessed with the same bands that they were obsessed with, and we ended up making music that I think sounds more like Bikini Kill at the time.

What’s the LA music scene like right now and how have you seen it change over the years?

Yeah, I feel like it has changed in a positive way. When we were younger, the only venue we could go to and feel comfortable at and like, felt like a part of was The Smell.

Every other venue was 21 and over, or if it was all ages, you had to have these giant X’s written on your hands or stay in a certain area of the venue. We would play certain venues that would kick us out after our set because we weren’t old enough to be there. Now I feel like it’s so different, there’s so many all ages venues.

What was your favorite part about the writing / album creation process of 'Welcome the Worms'?

I would say just like diving into songs for the first time.

Like, going to the desert and just totally clearing my head and like escaping any drama that's happening in LA and just reflecting on my life and myself at that time and just starting from scratch with a new song. Just being really honest with the lyrics because at that time it’s just a demo that only I’m hearing so I wasn’t worried that someone was going to hear it. I’m not thinking about that. I think that's the most fun for me, and I usually don’t end up changing the lyrics because I’m happy with them, but it's also cool to know that if I don't actually want to say something, I can change it down the line.

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For 'Welcome the Worms', what was the writing process like? Was it an individual thing that comes together over time, or is it a group effort?

Well, we did it in different ways but most of the time I write alone with my guitar just because that's just when I feel most comfortable. I feel like no one is there to watch me make weird melodies that don’t make sense or tell me to change. Then a lot of times, me and Jessie will write together. We work really well together. She trusts everything I do, and I trust everything she does so when we're writing together she does these guitar parts and rhythms, and melodies that work really well with what I’m singing and playing. The third way we experimented was with our bassist writing with us so we did writing sessions like that too, where it was just the three of us all writing.

On two songs, we actually partnered up with another person, a friend of ours, and he was drumming and helping us write songs too.

Where did the lyrics come from? Where were you at physically, mentally when you wrote them? Was there an event or a specific timeframe where a large chunk of the lyricism came out?

A lot of it was written in the desert, or we had this really small studio in North Hollywood that we were wrote. I write all the lyrics so, at the time, I was just really depressed and in a really unhealthy relationship. It was also not just that relationship, my previous relationships were really unhealthy and I felt like I was stuck and trying to understand life. I was like, “Are these things I have to go through to finally find peace and happiness and stuff?” and I was just reflecting on everything and really digging into what I was going through and feeling. It was easy to do that when I would go out to be by myself because I could actually hear my thoughts and not have a cell phone to check messages and see what was going on. Also, LA is so easy to get sucked into if you allow it to suck you in, so yeah, I was rethinking a lot of unhealthy behavior. Now it’s cool because I feel like I’ve learned so much from that time. I think sometimes you have to realize the bad just so you can see the good.

Are you ever intentional when you sit down to write or is it more like you’ve been kicking something around in your head for days, weeks, months, and then suddenly it comes spilling out? I know you went to the desert to write, but did you already have an idea of what you wanted to write about?

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I feel like I don't really think about it until I sit down with a pen and paper and writing. If there's something that happens in the day, like if I see or hear something I’ll write a note just to reference it later.

When and how did the album title 'Welcome the Worms' come about in the album creation process?

That kind of goes back to what I was saying before about seeing the bad to realize what’s good. I had been doing mushrooms with friends all night. It was like 9AM and we were walking around Echo Park Lake still tripping on mushrooms and this freaky religious couple handed us a religious book that they made themselves, and we started flipping through it and one of the things said “welcome the worms” and it was like a cut-and-paste sentence of those three words. I was like, “Woah. This means this record to me.” Because we were coming close to finishing the record and hadn’t figured out a title yet and we were just really trying to think of a really good title and when I saw that I thought that it was summing up all the lyrics to me.

Welcome the worms, like embrace the dark side because it is there and it's happening and by embracing the dark side I think we can see the light, the positive in life. I felt like that’s what I was trying to do with my life. We wouldn’t know what was good if we didn’t see the bad.

I know that the original plan, before you thought of playing live, was to focus on your visuals, primarily your music videos. How big of a priority and how you want to be represented throughout your visuals for the band (press photos, album artwork, tour posters, merch.)?

I feel like we are all very visual. When we first started the band I wanted that to be a big part of it. One of my favorite bands visually and musically is The Smiths. I just like how you see a Smiths record and you know that a Smiths record no matter what. So from the beginning, I wanted to ensure that was a thing. Jessie and I think that growing up around Hollywood and our dad working at Universal as a sound engineer, we were always around the movie industry. So I feel like it’s also just in our blood to be visual people. Also, I remember watching old music videos and thinking that they looked so cool. So, I think it’s cool to consider a record visually, too. We have the platform to do it so we might as well take advantage of that.

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With your artwork, how did you interact with the artist/designer? Did you contribute ideas or remain hands-off? Was there a revision process?

For me personally, it is super hands on. When we did all the press photos, one of my oldest friends from high school took all the photos and we discussed everything we were going to do, and we got all the outfits, and that’s what I’ve been doing since the beginning like even old photos have been from other really old friends of mine who have taken the pictures. Just feeling comfortable and working together, like we are doing this project together. The photo for the album cover of ‘Welcome the Worms’, we didn’t plan to use that photo, but then I thought it was so good– it reminded me of The Clash record, so we started experimenting with it. Our label has an art guy so me and him would talk and talk ideas and then that turned into samples and then he’d throw something together and send it back to me and discuss things to do and I was really stoked working with him because I think he did such a good job by making it kind of look like a book. And then all the lyrics, I wrote out on postcards that I found at different thrift shops. I’d say it’s a team process.

How important is it to you for the album artwork that accompanies your music to represent the sound and the lyrics? Do you aim for a conversation between the two, or are you more interested in an aesthetically cool package?

When we first started, like for the first 7” [vinyl] I wanted to pick photos that said a lot. The first full-length record, ‘Ride Your Heart’ is a girl in a car driving and you have no idea what’s going on, you’re like, “Where is she going? Is she super happy in life? Did something really bad just happen?” There’s so many scenarios.

The lady that took that photo, she was taking photos for that cover and I wasn't really happy with anything that we did that day, so I was looking through her old photo catalog to see if there were any examples of things I liked, and I saw that photo and I was like, “Oh my god, can we just use this photo? This is so amazing.”

She was super stoked to let us use it. Then we made it that color to match the aesthetic of the other record. But, I’m not thinking about the lyrics with the visuals as much as it is all just coming from me. The lyrics come from me and the artwork is in my brain, so it all comes together that way. One thing I did think was cool was when I wrote all the lyrics on postcards, I was thinking about people writing postcards to each other before life was internet-heavy and how people didn't get caught up in things as much. With the internet, we can let things stir and fester and I feel like back when we just had ways of connecting with each other through writing a postcard it was like difficult, of course, but more simple.

Simpler times.

Have you had any mentors along the way?

Yeah, there’s been a lot of people along the way. The people that stand out most in my mind are Dean and Randy from No Age and Jim from The Smell. They opened up this whole new world to me, that I did not know existed. When I found The Smell and met Dean and Randy, they taught me how to book my own tours and that you could be an indie band and still make that your main passion and not have to have a day job. I feel like if it wasn't for them, I probably would have ended up not being in music as much as I am now.

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GROWING UP I grew up in Boro (Middlesbrough), which is a small, industrial town North East, most famous for the Transporter Bridge and Parmos.

Creativity was a massive part of growing up, my mam and dad are both artists, so it's something I've always been around, and encouraged to do. My mam used to make and illustrate these little books for me.

My dad had this rundown shop/ flat at one point with no running water and electricity, we built this treasure island- esque set once in the front room, and made a film.

It culminated in setting off fireworks behind these sheets of plexi-glass. I was about 8. It was pretty cool. Both of them used to take me to see exhibitions and stuff, I remember seeing one when I was really young, these photos of sick, like loads of them like tiling the wall, which thinking back has probably had a big influence on my work, that beauty/ disgust duality.

It was totally mesmerizing- technicolor vomit.

LOCAL MUSIC / CREATIVE SCENE IN NEWCATLE The scene in Newcastle is thriving, there's a lot happening here, it's quite an exciting place to be at the minute. People putting on exhibitions... good music, good art, good bands.

THE START OF CREATING ART I left school and went straight to art college for two years, then after that I went to university to study Fine Art.

I didn't go with the intention of building a career out of it, it was more to do with the freedom it offered- time to mess about, read a lot, think, that kind of thing. When I graduated, I was really fucked off with the whole thing and didn't make much work for quite a while, it's only been the last couple of years I've been able to get a studio and get back into doing stuff. I do this on the side, I work full time in a library at the minute which is cool. I guess at some point it would be sound not to have to work all the time and be able to concentrate solely on this but I need to pay the rent.

ART – EXPOSE, PROTECT OR HEAL I'm not sure it does any of these things. Maybe expose, coz that's always the case isn't it. Whenever you're putting anything out there, you're going out on a limb, and it's pretty scary, it doesn't belong to you anymore. I think I go a bit insane when I stop making work, I need something to think about and focus on.

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UNINTENTIONALLY WORKING IN THE MUSIC INDUSTRY No, it was never really intentional.

Favor for a mate, Brownie (Eat Fast) asked if I knew anyone who'd do some work for them for free, and the stuff I was doing worked well with the music they were putting out.

THINKING UP IDEAS WHEN CREATING – ANY ROUTINES? I'm not sure I have a routine. I read a lot (at the minute I'm reading a load of the SF masterworks seriesfucking brilliant!), look at other work, and just mess about in the studio until something starts to come together. I suppose it grows sort of organically, like one project feeds into the next.

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I'll work obsessively on something for a few months, or weeks, get it done and then not do much for a while apart from reading and getting images together, then it starts up again.

KNOWING WHEN IT’S TIME TO QUIT WORKING ON A PIECE In some respects, I'm the opposite. it's only recently I've been bothered about getting the right finish on stuff. It's almost like working backwards. I'll get the initial thing done, think it's finished and leave it a while. Kind of like a fear to push it too much, to destroy the original.

It's hard to tell when something is finished.

FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT CREATING ART When you get an idea, or a vague trace of an idea in your head, and you can't think about it too directly, because it's fragile, unformed, so you just let it grow in the back of your mind and it sort of comes together eventually of its own accord. Then the buzz when you finish something.

AESTHETIC EVOLVED My aesthetic has got a lot more refined, I guess. I've always worked with a kind of trashy, lo-fi, shit aesthetic, but it's taken a long time to figure out how to do that well, keeping the rawness of something but it feeling finished and considered.

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WHERE HE GREW UP AND HOW IT IMPACTED HIS CREATIVITY Depends what ‘creativity’. I think that where you live will obviously inform your art, and come as a product of it, whether intentionally or not. Places can hold accents beyond language, and into the way that people collectively think. That doesn’t dismiss individual thought, but it will inevitably be in dialogue with what that place values, for instance. Though everything is global now, and in some sense everyone with internet access has the opportunity to be culturally informed by any corner of the world they choose to be. In terms of rate of production, I don’t know if it does. Everyone has restrictions in their life; it’s about making time for what you need to do. No one is going to do it for you. That said, it took me leaving to another city to be able to have enough space to work as hard as I could.

Interview with Adam Pearson GROWING UP Creativity was not really part of my childhood. My household wasn’t particularly ‘artistic’. I grew up with my mom and my brother; writing poems and songs wasn’t high on her agenda for things to keep us busy and active. More just staying out of trouble. We all watched Top of the Pops on Sundays together each week when I was really little.

FORMAL / NOT FORMAL MUSICAL EDUCATION I didn’t have a formal music education. My cousin gave me his old electric guitar when I was 12. I really liked the soundtracks to all the BMX videos I watched when I was about 14. Got into stuff like Fugazi, Joy Division, Modest Mouse and Trans AM and loads of different kinds of music which I hadn’t heard before. A lot of good lo fi stuff in there too which I fell in love with.

Eventually I guess I became more interested in trying to make music than being unreal on my BMX.

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THE FIRST TIME HE FELT INSPIRED

BY MUSIC When I was 10 years old I learnt the Mission Impossible theme tune in a music lesson at school. I was chuffed. Also, I’m not sure whether I would term it inspirational, but the first tape I ever owned was ‘Blue (Da Ba Dee)’ by Eiffel 65. For about 3 weeks I listened to it every spare moment I got, I was totally obsessed with it! Even the B side remix. On Fridays I’d go and stay at a friends on our street and play Worms and have that on for hours and hours.

THE START OF WRITING MUSIC It’s always been there since I was a kid I guess. It’s only been recently where I’ve thought ‘I’ve got to do some actual work’. I pissed about for so many years being daft and writing and playing songs, but everyone in EAT FAST is really up for it and wanting to just enjoy it.

LYRICS –WHERE, TIMPERIOD & PHYSICALLY, THEY WERE THOUGHT UP The writing process last year (before I concentrated on getting the first batch of songs recorded for the first LP) consisted mainly of waking, baking, and sitting down with the guitar and interface at the bottom of my bed every day at 9 am.

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I’ve never worked like that on music, and to write 3 songs a day for months was canny mad. It wasn’t exhausting at all; it came really easily – like I’d needed to do it for years. Even days when all I do is program drums for 10 hours and my brain gets really fuzzy, it’s still rewarding and worthwhile. I started writing for EAT FAST around last January. I moved back home in April, by which time I had loads of demos. Showed Kingy, John and Brownie and they persuaded me to turn it into a live project rather than just a recording one. I got about 4 albums worth of decent material written and demoed last year. We rerecorded some stuff together in the summer for the first EP and LP. Now after finishing mixing at the end of last year, it’s great to be able to start again and be able to concentrate on writing again. I’m looking forward to writing some stuff collectively as well.

LYRICS – INTENTIONALLY SITTING DOWN TO WRITE VS HAVING IDEAS IN YOUR HEAD AND THEN THEY COMES SPILLING OUT Both really. I dunno, sometimes it’s just in your head and you want it out. Sometimes you try to write for days and you just end up with something that isn’t fully there, or sounds shit.

Sometimes I think of something when I’m wrecked and end up beatboxing the greatest tune that will never be recorded properly into my phone at 3am.

WRITING, SOMETHING HE ENJOYS? Yeah I enjoy it. If I can look back and be pleased with my productivity, and be able to say I didn’t hold anything back, that I just got on with it, it’d be sweet. Lyrics are hard because they are multidimensional – you have to get syllabic pattern, melody, and actual semantics all working with and complementing each other and the music. Best to break it down and do it step by step.

HOW THEY WANT TO BE REPRESENTED THOUGHTOUT THE BAND’S VISUALS (PRESS PHOTOS, MUSIC VIDEOS, ALBUM ARTWORK) My perspective is that I’d rather avoid having to do broody, emotional thousand yard stares for press photos if I can. We got our mate Cody Sowerby to do some art work for these first songs. That decision was based entirely on the fact that we all think her work is excellent, and the aesthetic in some of her compositions compliments the sound of EAT FAST.

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a While in high school they each had their own band’s, with Moore eventually playing in Phillips band before moving to Chicago for audio school.

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Pat Phillips and Tyson Moore both grew up in the small 100,000person college town of Columbia, Missouri and have known each other since elementary school.

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Phillips moved to New York around the same time, but they kept collaborating and sending demos back and forth through GarageBand. Feeling the need for a change and to getting back into the groove of playing live music, Moore moved to NYC to start up a band with Phillips.

The day after Josh Wehle graduated high school he moved to NYC and became roommates with Phillips and they started playing music on and off, but never officially starting a band. During this timeframe, in 2011, the band Paul Lizarraga was in got to the point where they didn’t feel connected to the surfy, shoegaze pop that a lot of bands seemed to be doing so he sought for change. Knowing the other members, of what would become Honduras, through the Brooklyn music community both connected and formed the band.

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Interview with Patrick Phillips and Tyson Moore GROWING UP Patrick Phillips: My childhood was spent mostly in my head. My parents divorced when I was two, and it was up to my mother to take care of two very young children. I remember her sadness, but I also remember her incredible work ethic. She worked graveyard shifts as a nurse at a children's hospital and I remember lying awake all night long waiting for her to come home. My father is also a musician (amongst other things) and the music he would show me when I was a kid left a big impression on me, and a lot of those records I heard when I was young are very sacred to me.

THE FIRST TIME HE FELT INSPIRED

BY MUSIC PP: I was always into different genres of music from an early age, and had some unique experiences I still remember. Riding in my dad’s car when I was 3 or 4 and listening to The Cure. Seeing The Four Tops play at the Goodwill Games in St. Louis. Becoming obsessed with Weezer's blue album in fourth grade. My first real concert when I was 10 was Public Enemy and Cypress Hill. Singing and rapping with kids in middle school. Music was a way to make friends and express myself, still is.

RELEASING THREE EP’S BEFORE THEIR DEBUT LP - HAVING A CERTAIN SET OF RULES THEY FELT THEY NEEDED TO MAINTAINED / DISCARDED WHEN CREATING THEIR LP Tyson Moore: With 'Rituals’ we maintained our general process in the studio. We rehearsed the songs intensely beforehand and came in well-prepared to lay down the tracks live, which we had done previously on the EPs. We've always felt our strength as a band was the live side of things and we've been getting more comfortable in the studio as we've spent more time there.

GETTING INSPIRED WHILE OUT AND ABOUT - VOICE MEMOS & NOTES - ANY MAKE IT INTO RECORDINGS? PP: Not really that I can think of.

But I’m constantly putting voice memos into my phone. The song "That Old Feeling" is based around a verse idea I put into my phone when I was walking home from work. Lately I've been better at revising the voice memos I have and focusing on the ideas that have the most potential.

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WRITING PROCESS - INDIVIDUAL VS GROUP EFFORT TM: Initially it would usually be Pat coming to me with a basic idea and we’d lay that down on my computer with some software drums and then we'd structure it out into a rough version of what the final song would sound like.

Then we'd take it to Josh and Pauly in rehearsal and see it fully realized.

Lately we've been writing together as a full band and creating songs out of jams that we come up with in rehearsal, which usually leads to some interesting outcomes.

LYRICS - ANY REVISIONS? PP: Yes and no, each song is its own thing. I do believe in the value of stream of consciousness and the initial inspiration or line that happened without much forethought. But revising lyrics is a very important part of the process.

I try to have the lyrics blend with the music to create a world of color and introspection. Music is therapeutic, and I'm hoping to write songs that allow people to be open with their feelings, and help get them through their day.

FAVORITE PART OF THE ALBUM CREATION PROCESS TM: We had a great moment towards the end of the recording process where we had some time to kill and extra space on the tape.

Pat had a chord progression and we starting jamming it out while our producer, Johnny, took a break.

After a short while it had turned into the song ‘Mirror’, which ends the record.

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It was a step forward for us to take advantage of the moment in the studio, which can be a very inspiring situation with great sounds in your headphones as you write–very different than the loud practice space. It ended up being maybe my favorite song on the record.

WHEN AND HOW THE ALBUM TITLE ‘RITUALS’ CAME ABOUT PP: I was thinking about the things people do on a daily basis that makes them most comfortable, happy, themselves. A lot of the songs on Rituals were written after a messy 3 year relationship where I felt I'd gotten very far away from my true self. The last year of the relationship I was very dishonest and almost felt I was playing a different character. I wanted to get back to the things that had always provided me comfort and relearn how to be myself.

ARTWORK – CONTRIBUTE IDEAS OR REMAIN HANDS OFF TM: On 'Rituals’ we were closely involved in the artwork process. Pat had a general idea for the colors and the figure in the middle. My wonderful girlfriend, Nicole, is a great graphic designer and artist and she sketched out the figure and did the typography. We played around with allot of different colors and combinations but ended up with pretty much the original concept.

MENTORS TM: After I finished school in Chicago I started working part time at a local studio. The owner, Brian Zieske, was a great mentor and instilled an enthusiasm in me for the technical side of the music making process. Getting excited about nailing the release time on an analog compressor is an art form in and of itself.

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Noah: Yeah, I think any parent wants to see their kids be happy and succeed and live their dreams, I just don’t think they wanted me to fail at it.

Jamie: I grew up in Detroit and my father was a composer for television and commercials and stuff like that because there’s a really big industry for that there. He had a studio in the basement of our house and when I was old enough to know how to play, I would sit at the top of the stairs and learn the music for whatever song he was working on and then I would come downstairs like an hour later and be like, “Hey, I have a better bass part than you,” and he would be like, “Alright, great well you’ve got to lay it down!” Our deal was that if I beat him, he would pay me for the spot and I would get royalties like from a really young age. Which is absolutely crazy. So, that was a really supportive community and I’ve been playing in bands since I was like 13.

So, did you guys have any formal music education?

I want to start from the beginning.

Where did you grow up? What was your childhood like? Was creativity a part of your childhood?

Noah: I grew up here in Los Angeles, and my parents just always played music in the house all the time. My dad’s worked on the business side of music for my whole life as well, but it was always around. I couldn’t escape it if I wanted to, and luckily I didn't want to. It wasn't exactly like I was born and bred to doing what we’re doing now, I think in fact, I was put to be not doing this now.

Jamie: But they were supportive once you put your foot down that it’s your life.

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Noah: I had none. I started playing drums when I was younger, and took a couple lessons. Yeah, I took a couple guitar lessons but to this day, I don’t know how to read music. Jamie did, though, Jamie went to college for music.

Jamie: I taught myself how to do everything by ear until I was 18 and it was like, “Hey, you’re going to college” and I was like alright well I could try to be a film person or maybe do art history but then I found out that there was such a thing as music school and so I went and bullshitted my way through four years of formal education and came out kind of, maybe, a little frustrated on the other side. But, it was on recording so it was actually pretty helpful.

What was the first time you felt really inspired by music?

When did you know you wanted to be a musician? Was there a specific piece or album that spoke to you?

Noah: I can’t really remember a time that I didn’t want to play growing up, truthfully. I think that it was always just what my sights were set on since I was really young. I think that there were seminal moments in concerts that I’ve seen over the years that maybe cemented it a little bit more and made it a bit more concrete. But, I don’t know that there is much more than just how much I’ve loved it. I don’t know how to do anything else.

Jamie: I think you [Noah] know how to do other things really well. But once you had what a taste of this is– and the same goes for me– once you get a taste at a very young age, you see something or you hear something, it’s not necessarily an aha moment but a combination of small sparks that all of a sudden start your fire and it’s like you can’t not follow it.

Noah: The thing that kind of keeps us going is small victories. So, the first time I ever played a show, to feel what it was like to be on stage and to see people react to music.

The first time you hear something coming back through the speakers that you recorded and put down and had written, and it sounds good and you're excited by it; that's a high that I chase daily. I can’t replace that in anything I’ve found and I’ve certainly tried.

Jamie: It's interesting because the more experience that you have in recording and production and all that, too, the feeling that we’re chasing is really the same thing as when we were 14 and I would plug a microphone into a boom box and like put it in the middle of the room and the whole band would play like garbage but it's the same thing.

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When did you start writing songs?

Do you remember the first song you wrote?

Noah: Yeah, I do remember the first song I ever wrote. In sixth grade we had planned to play our graduation party, which was happening at my parents’ house and we had set up in the driveway and played for all of the kids in our school. We planned all of this without ever really practicing. I figured that I had to write a song and I had just gotten one of those line 6 PODs (a guitar effect modeler) and it had this flanger effect on it. I wrote a riff on it and I wrote a song called “Redemption” and it was the start of something. It sucked but that was the beginning.

Jamie: I remember the first song that I wrote was before anyone could play. It was a band in school where you talk with your friends and you have a hypothetical band.

We were called The Insane Postal Workers, and we wrote the words to a song and we would sing it in the locker room or the bathroom and it was bit of a “fuck authority” kind of a song. We felt like bad boys. But then the first actual song I wrote was with a really bad, terrible, terrible band that I was in in seventh grade. I’m sure that my father has kept a recording; I’m going to find it and I’m going to haunt you with it.

Does it feel like writing music is something you’ve always had to do or is this something that you discovered along the way?

Noah: I think that it’s something that you kind of flex like a muscle. I go through phases where it’s really unnatural and then I go through some phases where I feel like I can’t shut it off. I’ll have written two songs in a day and it’ll be 3am and there's more stuff going on in my head.

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To me, the thing that always reigned true– and I think a lot of people talk about like “Wait till the inspiration strikes,” but there's an old Hemmingway quote that says if you’re a writer, you wake up and write every day and that's just how it fucking goes. Some days it's going to suck but if you're going to take on the role of saying you're a writer in the world well then you better sit down and write every day. That's the kind of thing that I subscribe to.

I know you two made your song "Your Old Man" on the spot while feeling very disenchanted from the whole process of making music for other people. At what point did you realize that forming a band and making an album was the direction you were heading in?

Jamie: I remember the night. It was like 3 o’clock in the morning, we had just finished this thing and we kind of went to bed and woke up the next morning got together to go to the studio which we always do every day even still, and we were both so frustrated with the process of working on this stuff that we sort of decided right then that we don’t really want to make that our main focus– to work for other people anymore. So we booked [studio] time two days later and we didn’t know if we could even record more than a song or two until a few days later when we finished the first couple songs in our studio and it was like a really late night but this time, we were very excited.

Noah: I think the sentiment is that we working on stuff that we thought we should do, which was just being working musicians. We had quit our touring bands and landed back in LA. We were working on music for other people and it's really easy to not realize that it's been awhile since you’ve been really excited and had that feeling that this is what you do this for.

We had a moment where we both realized that we weren't happy and the genesis of the idea of “Your Old Man” came out and it pretty instantly were excited again.

We had that feeling that we had when we were 14. It's therapy, its medicine.

Jamie: All of the sudden you regain your idealism and it’s a priceless moment.

You've both been in other bands before. Did you have a certain set of rules you felt needed to be maintained / discarded for this one?

Noah: The only rules were that there are none and that everything had to make us feel like we were excited again. That has to be threaded through everything that we do and we have to remind ourselves of that every day.

Inspiration for music can come at any place or time and it’s often when you least expected it that you come up with something. Has there been a specific time when you were out and about and unable to write down lyrics / sing into your voice recorder on phone and you didn’t want to forget what you had in mind? Did it ever end up making it into a studio recording?

Jamie: We like, write songs as we’re falling asleep and then you hear the song in a dream and you wake up and you're like “I'm never going to forget that, it's the best thing I've heard in my entire life,” and sometimes you put it down into a voice memo and it sounds like mumblings or ramblings of a crazy person. But when you’re awake and these moments hit for example is this song that we have called “California” and I had been playing with like the changes and the words for a couple of months and it was just very straight palm-muted guitar. Nothing musically exciting about it whatsoever.

I was on a hike because I hike in Griffith Park like every day, and as I was in the middle, and I’d purposely left my phone behind that day because I wanted to get in touch with myself and nature and reclaim my ideals and whatever. Like, four miles in, no phone, no anything, I have the riff and the drum beat which is the signature thing that makes the song. And then the whole song started to unfold from there, so I spent the next two hours running home as fast as I could, singing this thing on loop in my head until I got into the door of my apartment and my roommate was like, “what's up bro? What are you doing?” and I was like, “Shut the fuck up!” and I locked myself in the studio and I called Noah like 30 minutes later and I was like, “you’ve got to come over there's a demo and there’s a thing, it's a thing.”

What’s the writing process like? Is it an individual thing that comes together over time, or is it a group effort?

Jamie: It's a bit of both, actually. If we’re together and an idea starts, then we’ll probably work through it together but more and more now, too, we will start something on our own, kick it around for a second and then come together. Everything for us is pliable for a process.

Noah: the only rule we have in regards to writing is that nothing gets finished without the other one kind of going through the filter. The problem with bands that have a ton of people who write together in the same room is that the spark of an idea is a really fragile. It's one of those things that everyone needs to be quiet. Because you hear it, and you need to get it out quickly, however you know how to.

What can happen if somebody else is there, is that before you are able to fully get it out of you, they’ve taken a bit of it or the way they can understand it, and warped it into something else. It's like when you wake up from a dream and you’re trying to hold onto that one thing and you’re losing it and you’re like, “ah, fuck, it's gone,” So we’re really respectful of when each of us has a thing that we’re working on, we’ll do it and we’re honest about when we need help with things.

Jamie: Our boundaries of communication have been really open and established in that sense. We know how to coax each other and not hurt each other's feelings and make something really special.

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For the rest of your album, where did your lyrics come from? Where were you at physically, mentally when you wrote them? Was there an event or a specific timeframe where a large chunk of the lyricism came out?

Noah: The lyrics are pretty journalistic and in that sense they come from everything. Girls, being pissed off at the world, wanting your mom to call you back, not being hugged enough as a kid. It’s nothing that’s that different, it just comes out of our band and it's thrown through the blender a little bit. It is a bit more intense. We wear our heart on our sleeves and just go for it.

Jamie: I think we’re also just personally a bit manic. Whatever normal people are walking around with every day, our blender can maybe put it on acid.

Which tracks are you guys playing live right now? Are you finding new in those songs as you play them live that you did hear while in the studio?

Noah: We did it all backwards. We made the record first, then the band learned all the songs. So, we’ve definitely streamlined it all down. Through the process of playing all these songs live as much as we have now, the strengths of certain songs are pretty apparent.

We’ve whittled it down now to be a pretty streamlined version of who we are and you’ll get the whole idea and ethos of the band in 40 minutes.

Jamie: Now as time goes on, we realize that we have a really short period of time to take people in and make them want a bit more so we try to walk off stage without playing the two or three that we have in our back pocket.

What was your favorite part about the writing / album creation process?

Jamie: for me, personally, it's the spark of a new song in several stages, like when it starts and you think you might have something good, and then when it feels like it's a complete shell and then the first time that you hear it back and have something that you appreciate.

Noah: My favorite bit is the moment when you first start hearing it because we engineer and produce a lot of it ourselves, there's a lot of time where we’re like editing drums and in the span of a couple hours you can kind of like watch the thing come to life and if you've done it well, if you’ve done it justice it's the first time you’ve been excited about it since you wrote it. It’s alive now, it's not just in your head. Now there's physical evidence of it in the world and that night when you listen to it on the drive home from the studio it's like, “fuck yeah,”. That’s the shit that I love What is your perspective on how you want to be represented throughout your band’s visuals (press photos, music videos, album artwork)?

Jamie: We want to be cartoon characters forever.

Noah: It’s pretty important to us.

We’ve had a creative director whose name is James Bailey, or Yimmy Yayo, for the entirety of our band. He’s the first person that we brought on with us. James heard the record as we were making it and we had an ongoing dialogue on how we wanted it to be perceived.

Our biggest thing is what makes things like the Rolling Stones tongue or the Grateful Dead skull, these iconic logos, what makes them iconic? It has weight because of the context of the music and the industry but we kind of decided pretty early on that we wanted to be creating a really strong visual language. James is entirely credited to how good it’s turned out.

Jamie: His work is so defined and exact to what our sound is, that we had it blazoned on ourselves. We tattooed the logo on ourselves. It’s part of who we are because I think it was a piece that was always there that maybe we were missing.

What's the LA music scene like right now?

Noah: We have a group of friends here in LA that we share a studio with that our scene in and around ourselves in really collaborative and exciting and inspiring, but it's not what I imagine and hear like say the grunge scene in Seattle in the 90s.

It's just me and my friends fucking around, so hearing what we're all working on and that stuff is really inspiring but we don’t play out in LA that much and we’re always working so we don’t always get out to see too many shows.

Jamie: I think as far as the music scene in LA goes, if it's around, we’re outsiders, probably. Story of our lives.

Has your vision of music changed at all since you first began? If so, how?

Jamie: It feels like it’s refining more and more.

Noah: It focuses and then goes out of focus, and then focuses back again and when it focuses back again, you kind of hope that you’ve learned a little bit more.

Have you had any mentors along the way?

Jamie: I want to thank Noah.

Noah: I want to thank my friend Jamie, right here. I love my parents, big ups to my parents and my grandparents, and my sisters.

Jamie: Oh same. What’s up Mom, Alyssa, Dad, Lauren, Omi.

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They released Colored Emotions in 2012 and posted it for free on Bandcamp. Within weeks the album had generated so much praise that London label Domino Recording Co. signed them. The trio then went back into the studio to touch up the mixes and re-released their debut in 2013.

Their sophomore album, Pennied Days, was released in March 2016 and it documents the time frame after Colored Emotions where Pelant had a variety of older stuff (some that pre-dated their debut), new stuff, and freshly made material. He tried to get out of his comfort zone and pull from the various sounds and sonic elements that he fell in and out of love with over those time frames and, as much as he loved the sound of their debut, forced himself to make the second album into something that wasn’t Colored Emotions pt.2.

The album title of Pennied Days is a time capsule of these years between ages 23 and 27 where you're asked to make the first permanent decisions of your life and in which most people pick their career paths. For Pelant and Alfano, the time between the albums was monumental; they saw friends overdose and commit suicide and then others get married and have kids.

They saw some friends build up their 401ks and invested in property, while they took time off from their day jobs to go on tour. It made the members wonder what they were doing with their lives and if they’d be better suited for something else, but also, if they gave up on being a musician who would that make them. During this time period in 2014, roughly half way through the recording session of this second album, former founding Night Moves member, Ritsema left to pursue a solo project entitled Suzie.

This was the first time in their musical careers Pelant and Alfano had to get used to the reality of writing an album under the guidance of a label. It was new territory, whereas Pelant had produced much of their debut on his own with Thom Monahan acting as a re-engineer, this time around he was flown out to New York by himself to work on the album with producer John Agnello. This was the first time the members were opening up their creative process to outside forces and with this there was frustration and nervousness with what may come of the label meddling. Once back home they began to appreciate those outside forces and having been pushed to create material that was once outside of their comfort zone.

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Interview with John Pelant

GROWING UP I was encouraged as a youngin’ to create often, probably no more than the next guy, but yes my folks did buy me a guitar in the first grade and encouraged me to learn my instrument. I grew up skateboarding and playing hockey while playing guitar and listening to punk music, which gradually turned into more classic rock based stuff and indie music.

WHERE HE GREW UP AND HOW IT IMPACTED HIS CREATIVITY I grew up in Minneapolis, so for about 6 months outta the year you are kinda house ridden due to the cold and snow, maybe in some way that helped keep me in doors learning my instrument and writing songs.

FORMAL / NOT FORMAL MUSICAL EDUCATION I took guitar lessons from a teacher outside of school for about 5 years. Other than that I never was in school band or had any formal training. I still don’t know how to read music.

THE FIRST TIME HE FELT INSPIRED

BY MUSIC My buddies all starting picking up instruments around the 5th and 6th grade and it kinda pushed me to pick up that guitar my folks bought me in the 1st grade and take it more seriously, learn chords, rhythms, etc... That’s also the age when listening to music becomes more of an interest, figuring out that you like a certain “sound.”

First time I realized music blew my mind was seeing this Pepto-Bismol commercial that used the Shirelles song, “Mama Said” in the background. For some reason that sound stuck with me and made me feel really good inside, didn’t really know why, but thinking back I just knew that there was something intrinsically pleasing about melody and rhythm and this particular piece of music HAVING A CERTAIN SET OF RULE’S THEY FELT THEY NEEDED TO MAINTAINED / DISCARDED WHEN CREATING THEIR SECOND LP I was aware of the "sophomore slump” and this idea of "hype" and “buzz” swallowing bands and artists alike…It fucked with me a little cuz I knew the record had to sound “new” but not too new to the point where it was alienating to previous fans. I was also a little nervous cuz there had been so much personal growth since the conception of the first album that I felt there wasn’t going to be a continuity to the sound/band, but at a certain point you can’t worry about that, you just have to worry about making something that is honest and representative of yourself. When I initially started writing the record in 2014 it sounded very "Colored Emotions part 2," but as time went on I got farther and farther away from that tonal pallet and starting experimenting more with keyboard/piano based songs and vocal harmonies.

After about a year and a half I had a ton of stuff that spanned a vast tonal gamut, while all still being me- it felt very fragmented. In the end it resulted in this growth period that birthed Pennied Days.

GETTING INSPIRED WHILE OUT AND ABOUT – VOICE MEMOS & NOTES Oh yes, all the time. I have so many snippets of ideas on my phone that I have recorded. A lot of them don’t get used or get erased, some end up making the cut. I also had hundreds of little receipt papers with lyrics, track listings, or song ideas on them. The two bar beginning of ‘Denise, Don’t Wanna See You Cry’ was conceived walking to work one day. Also, ‘Alabama’ was conceived right as I was leaving to go out for the evening, I had all the lights off cuz I was just about to walk out the door, but I sat down at the piano cuz I didn’t want to go out to the bar too early- ya know? This chord progression and melody just came out while sitting in the dark and then I listened to it about 6 or 7 times on my phone while walking to the bar. I haven’t ever used the voice memos specifically in studio recordings, but the ideas themselves have definitely made many a cut.

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WRITING PROCESS - INDIVIDUAL VS GROUP EFFORT This record for the most part has been an individual endeavor. I usually write all the parts alone and then show my bandmates the demos and everyone plays the appropriate part. Sometimes people go, “maybe shorten this part” or “lengthen this” but often times it’s an individual thing that comes together over time- as is evidenced by the lengthy lay period between albums. I can get in my head quite a bit when alone, so that can be a good thing or a lengthy arduous thing.

LYRICS –WHERE, TIMPERIOD & PHYSICALLY, THEY WERE THOUGHT UP Most of the songs start out with 1 or 2 lines that spur the rest of the song’s lyrical theme. I finalized most of the lyrics at the end stages of writing Pennied Days...usually the lyrics come last. However, on ‘Leave Your Light On’ the 3rd verse lyrics were there back in 2010 when we were working on Colored Emotions, also ‘Carl Sagan’s’ lyrics were around back in 2010 and it just didn’t feel right changing them so I left them alone...

LYRICS – INTENTIONALLY SITTING DOWN TO WRITE VS HAVING IDEAS IN YOUR HEAD AND THEN THEY COMES SPILLING OUT It’s really all over the place, sometimes it’s one of those things where you are getting ready to go to work or the bar and stuff just hits you.

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I do know though that there have been times when I tell myself “I am gong sit down and write something right now” and it works, other times it completely fails. Still haven’t figured out how it all works. As of late I haven’t really been writing, but rather stewing all the stuff I have yet to complete in my head.

WRITING, SOMETHING HE ENJOYS? Yeah, when I get really into the lyrics I can write pages and pages of variations of a couple lines…it usually all comes down to playability though and if it sounds good sung. It’s great when the in depth poetic lines sing well, but that’s not always the case.

FAVORITE PART OF THE ALBUM CREATION PROCESS Being by myself late at night listening to the initial demos play back while sipping on hooch. That was always really satisfying hearing the day’s work, as well as the progression of it all.

WHEN AND HOW THE ALBUM TITLE ‘PENNIED DAYS CAME ABOUT It was the title of a song that didn’t make the end cut for the record. It was suggested along the way as a possible title for the record and I thought it encapsulated the overall age and spirit of the record nicely. I also liked that this was the same way that the title Colored Emotions came to be-- it was initially the title of a song that didn’t make the cut of the record, but then came to denote the collection of recordings.

I will say that we put out an EP 10” alongside the LP, which is very much so a companion piece and helps round out the breadth of what Pennied Days means to me.

ARTWORK – CONTRIBUTE IDEAS OR REMAIN HANDS OFF Yes, I was very much so involved. I had a lot of initial inspirations that I relayed to Darren Dominique Davis, the cover artist. A lot of the layers are from a collection of cutouts I did over the summer and gave to Darren. There were many revisions, I don’t even know— maybe 30 or so…He was really great in helping us realize our vision. Thanks Darren!

ARTWORK – AESTHETICALLY COOL PACKAGE VS COVERSATION BETWEEN LYRICS AND ART I think both are important, however sometimes it’s hard to have a harmonious relationship between aesthetics and substance. Navigating the style and fashion of the times can prove difficult. Although, I do think the cover ties together both areas nicely.

HOW THEY WANT TO BE REPRESENTED THOUGHTOUT THE BAND’S PRESS PHOTOS I don’t know I guess as long as it looks like us then I am fine. We don’t photograph well though, we often take hundreds of shots and end up using only 3 or 4…it’s best when you use a friend photographer because you are just so much more comfortable around them and your personality is more likely to shine through.

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What was your childhood like?

Was creativity a part of your childhood?

As a child, before cell phones and the internet were readily available to the masses, there was a lot of time and space to be bored.

Creativity thrives when as children we are forced to figure it out on your own. Growing up on a farm and lots of land, I can say that I wondered a lot, spent lots of time alone and daydreaming. Laying in the the tall grass staring at the sky and just imagining what’s above all of those clouds in the sky, watching them turn from white to orange, purple and red and the sun sets over the flat land. Out of anything, it was my surroundings that sparked my creativity, and that has greatly influenced how I work today.

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Kayla Kern Kayla Kern

I want to start from the beginning.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in rural Minnesota, in a small town of 300 people, with a small farm on a 40-acre plot. It was nothing like where I live now in New York City. I spent more time with myself, my own imagination, with more space to think than I might ever have again in my life.

There was something really magical about it. The days seemed to go on forever.

Describe your path to becoming involved in design and art direction. What got you into them?

How long have you been focusing on them? When and what made you realize you wanted to professionally be involved in the career field?

I really never saw myself pursuing the arts at a young age. I always excelled in math and science, and slowly that became my focus from high school into college. I majored in chemistry and wanted to be in the labs measuring and mixing. For me it was about the hands on part of it all, the process and outcome.

When it came time to choosing electives I always went with the drawing classes and I eventually started dedicating more of my time to those over those of my major. I think that was really the first step into explaining how I got to where I am now. I have continuously followed the path where I gravitate towards. I ended up going on to art school and after graduation I got a job in an illustration studio which is what brought me to New York City.

One job seemingly always leads to the next.

What schooling / work experience did you do to get ahead in this field?

I completed a BFA in Graphic Design at Minneapolis College of Art and Design.

Was it intentional for you to work for a publication / in the entertainment industry when you got into design?

I definitely fell into this type of work. I always had more of a desire to work within cultural or educational institutions. The longer I’ve been out of college I have learned the difference between what I am good at and what I started working with Anna Wolf on Tidal magazine from the get-go.

Being a part of that whole project has been really cool.

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What’s your routine when thinking up the art direction for each issue / spread of NYLON and with the online version of TIDAL Magazine, Current?

It starts with the voice. Who are we, what do we represent and who are we speaking to. It’s important to have a brand and define what that is, but also be flexible within that. Each story varies in concept, look and feel. When it comes to design, knowing that there is a bit of room to play, enhance and elevate what’s already there.

I feel like graphic designers have to have some level of being a perfectionist. How do you know when it’s time to quit working on a design spread?

It’s really hard to ever feel done.

Honestly most of the time things have to be done due to time constraints verses feeling like it’s perfect. There is no second guessing yourself, you just have to know what works best for the type of client you are working for.

Working in-house you know the brand in and out. Being able to have a general direction for everything I am working is a huge step in being able to get things done efficiently.

With design becoming so competitive, how are you trying to stand out?

I’m not concerned with standing out. I just want to make things that are fun, happy and playful. I happen to have a platform that allows me to share that with a large amount of people. If anything I hope to inspire young creatives.

What has been your most memorable design job?

I would have to say my most memorable design job was immediately out of undergrad at the Minneapolis College of Art and design, I had the honor of moving out to Brooklyn, New York to work with Mike Perry. It was a really great example that you don’t have to be doing an office job to be able to make a living and have fun doing it the way you want to be doing. It’s something school never really shows or educates you about. Most office jobs are in environments that are visually dull and uninspiring, as creatives we need to surround ourselves with the tools and visuals to enable ourselves to create great new work.

Has your design aesthetic changed at all since you first began designing? If so, how?

I really don’t think it has changed. If anything it has been a process of accepting what I am good at, honing in on it and not trying to be like anyone else. Being forced into a box that you don’t fit in sucks. I believe where I am now, I have finally got into a groove of what I am good at and what I enjoy. That’s not always an easy thing to find. So I just want to sit in it for a while. I do believe it is important to push yourself and grow into new things, but it’s also just as important to do what you do best.

Most of the time there are so many constrictions with the brand you are working with that it lends to very little creativity. When you spend four years plus in school exploring ideas with endless possibilities, it sets you up to think that’s what it will be like in the field, sadly it’s not.

What do you see happening for the future of design and print publications?

Right now a lot of top magazines in the U.S. are going strictly digital. It makes me really sad. But I can see it’s also on the upswing. People still want to hold a physical object, actually turn a page while reading.

With that I think it is a sink or swim kind of place to be in in the moment. You want to buy something to keep on your shelf or coffee table. It has to look good, and that is where I come in.

Have you had any mentors along the way?

Absolutely! I always consider the people I work with as mentors. I’m excited to work when I admire those I surround myself with. That is what will push you to consistently do your best work.

What’s the biggest misconception about working in art direction / graphic design?

That it is all design, most of the time it is coordinating, production and LOTS of emails.

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ER W O L F N U S

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N A E B

Julia: I didn't have any formal education for guitar and bass, basically my dad taught me. But I did go to a public performing arts high school for classical singing. I wanted to go to a conservatory for classical, but realized after a while that it wasn't really the music that I was passionate about. Plus, I had been playing in bands since I was like 13, so I was already pretty deep in the local music scene.

Nick: My mom had an acoustic guitar, so it was around the house when I was growing up. I would listen to music and try to strum it in time, and eventually that’s how I learned to play. I took brief lessons with a couple of people around the age of 11 or 12 but that was pretty much the extent of it. I never learned how to read music or any musical theory.

THE FIRST TIME THEY FELT INSPIRED BY MUSIC Jacob: There was always music happening around the house growing up. I think from an early age I wanted to be a musician but it wasn't until I found the NYC DIY scene that I really saw that it was possible. I always had the will, just had to find a way.

FORMAL / NOT FORMAL MUSICAL EDUCATION Jacob: My parents first had me take piano lessons when I was 7 and then from there I studied the sax pretty heavily throughout middle school and high school. My brother got a drum kit when I was like 14. He would never play them so I kind of took them over and would always be messing around. I didn't really learn to play the drums until my junior year of high school when I filled in in Turnip King!

Julia: My first memory is of wanting to be in a band. I remember this pretty distinctly on the playground.

Both of my parents are musical, although neither of them became professional musicians. So they played a lot of music in the house (like Jacob's house) and it was the fire that kept me going. It wasn't until I was 13 or so and a friend of mine was starting a band. She basically said, do you want to join?

And I was like, yeah, absolutely!

Even though I had no idea what the music would sound like and I could hardly play.

Nick: I was completely obsessed with the Ramones. They were my first love. That was it ya know, it’s been that since then.

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THE START OF WRITING MUSIC Nick: I had never written a song until I was a senior in high school.

All of the sudden I was writing a ton. It was as if something had just awoken in me instantly, it was like a light switch flipped or something.

Julia: Writing music is expression, and also a form of communication.

There are things you can express in songs that wouldn't make as much sense if you tried to just speak them to another person. At this point it feels like a need, something that I need to do in my life in order to be myself.

HAVING A CERTAIN SET OF RULES THEY FELT THEY NEEDED TO MAINTAINED / DISCARDED WHEN CREATING THEIR SECOND LP Julia: We took a different route than we had ever taken before while making "Human Ceremony."

We wanted to really expand on our sound, and explore parts of our taste that we hadn't been able to do before. For example, I am a huge Beach Boys fan, and we definitely incorporated some of that sound into the album we made. In the studio, the possibilities are endless, and I think we are really excited to go in and used what we've learned to make another record.

LYRICS – INTENTIONALLY SITTING DOWN TO WRITE VS HAVING IDEAS IN YOUR HEAD AND THEN THEY COMES SPILLING OUT Nick: It works in many different ways. most of the time it’s just from playing for hours. trying to hint something out of the instrument.

It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.

WRITING, SOMETHING THEY ENJOY? Jacob: For us, if we are in the right headspace it can be easy and we will get on a roll, so to speak. The past year has been difficult just because we have been on tour virtually the whole time. At first when we had a couple of days off we would try to write and just end up frustrated. I think taking space is important for us. Once we are done with touring this year we will get back to writing when the time feels right.

Julia: I agree with Jacob! It really depends on the time and headspace. Sometimes a song takes 30 minutes, sometimes it takes months.

FAVORITE PART OF THE ALBUM CREATION PROCESS Jacob: For me it was just the whole process. It felt great to get it done!

Julia: I think while we were writing and demo-ing, and finally hearing a finished demo and knowing all the parts are there. And then walking around, listening to that demo, and feeling so proud that it's finally come together. It's really exciting when you know a song is done.

She just came out to Nick's house, and we decorated his room (although the clocks and most of that stuff is there year round). A lot of our graphics and even some photographs are done by our manager Crista, who has been with us from the beginning.

ARTWORK – AESTHETICALLY COOL PACKAGE VS COVERSATION BETWEEN LYRICS AND ART Jacob: One of our wise friends told us that the album cover should look how the music sounds. So that's kind of what we were going for!

MENTORS Jacob: Matthew Molnar and Jarvis Taveneire who produced and engineered Human Ceremony have both had big influences on us. They have a lot experience and were the perfect guiding hand through the album process. And then there is our manager Crista Simiriglia who has been our biggest mentor for the past 3 years. Her work ethic, passion and vision has all driven us to do our absolute best and never sell our selves short of any possibility.

Julia: I agree with Jacob!!

ARTWORK – CONTRIBUTE IDEAS OR REMAIN HANDS OFF Julia: We shot the cover with our friend Ruby June, who also made the video for "Come On." She is a good collaborator for us because she really understands what we are going for, and listens, and it able to make a lot happen with a small budget and crazy time frames!

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stay in touch

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