DECORATED YOUTH ISSUE 19
arlie
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DECORATED YOUTH Quality over Quantity
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EDITOR & PUBLISHER Heather Hawke COPY EDITOR Jordan Fisher Š 2012 – 2018 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.
Cover photograph by Heather Hawke. Issue design by Heather Hawke.
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Many thanks to: Jordan Fisher Arlie Shorefire Media Bipolar Sunshine On Record Dream Wife Grandstand Sophia Ragomo Jade Bird Sacks & Co. Nik Ewing QUIÑ Rise Entertainment Sudan Archives Stones Throw Records Constant Artists Fatima Mohammed (FATIMØDÄ) Winnetka Bowling League
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Editor’s Note Have you ever heard a song and didn’t realize you’ve heard the artist, and have added their songs to a playlist of yours, before? What if that happened two times with the same artist? That’s what happened to me with our cover feature Arlie. I first heard “Big Fat Mouth” early last year, then heard “Didya Think” towards the end of it, put it on one of my playlists, then heard “Barcelona Boots” this summer which blew me away. After I had become an avid listener of the later track I saw they were passing through LA and knew I had to feature them. Their story is one of dedication and intention and how frontman Nathaniel Banks learned that music was the perfect path for him. In this issue, we also talk to: the experimental Sudan Archives who mixes violin with electronic music and various other textures, Nik Ewing who covered Dennis Wilson's only solo album Pacific Ocean Blue in its entirety, the fire signed women of Dream Wife, the G-Eazy and Syd collaborator QUIÑ, the powerhouse Jade Bird who found comfort in blues music growing up, the new LA by way of Manchester transplant Biploar Sunshine, and Winnetka Bowling League who’s taken over the LA airways with their song “On The 5.” This issue is all about new music and new beginnings, perfect way to close out the end of the year. Heather Hawke
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COVER Arie – 54 INTERVIEWS Winnetka Bowling League – 8 Jade Bird – 14 Bipolar Sunshine – 20 Dream Wife – 26 QUIÑ – 32 Nik Ewing – 38 Sudan Archives – 44
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Interview with Matthew Koma The Los Angeles-based quintet Winnetka Bowling League is fronted by Matthew Koma, the man best known for co-writing the Grammy-winning hit “Clarity,” as well as a string of dance tracks for EDM’s hottest producers (Zedd, Tiesto, the Knocks, RAC and Flux Pavilion). Kris Mazzarisi, Matt’s brother, is the drummer and the two of them have been in bands, both together and separately, since Matthew was at Seaford High School. Photography and Interview by Heather Hawke. Matthew and Kris grew up in New York, and because their parents were really into music, they got into playing instruments pretty young, and Matthew began writing songs shortly after. “We used to jam Nirvana covers in our music den. It was a common ground for us to bond as he’s a few years older than me so it was really special to have something we could do together.” Matthew says that Kris would also sneak him in to see his hardcore bands play VFW halls: “I was like 8 or something. He really was and is a huge part of why I started and kept going.” Matthew’s dad, who’s a singer and songwriter, taught him to play guitar when he really young: “eventually I’d cover songs, I think the first one was Soul Asylum “Runaway Train.” Matthew went to a lot of his dad’s shows and eventually his dad started bringing him up to play songs alongside him.“It took years for me to realize how special that was to have.
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Music is so its own language, to be able to have that connection with your dad like I do…I don’t take it for granted.” His dad taught him a lot about songwriting, “but not in the way where he sat me down and worked on songs with me.” Saying that he actually never filtered or interjected, he just exposed him to great storytellers and let him figure out how to tell stories his way. “It was so valuable to learn that way because I really got to form my own style while always having his ears and support.” Even though he says he was “absolutely terrible” at sports, Matthew’s parents had him in baseball and basketball. “I really sucked. I used to like pick grass in the outfield. They called me ‘wheels’ because I ran slow, but that doesn’t really make sense in retrospect.” In middle and high school, his friends were into the Warped Tour scene, so he went between that style and the singer songwriters his folks had turned him onto; Elvis Costello, Tom Petty, Steve Earle. His first concert was Bruce Springsteen at Nassau Coliseum on the “Human Touch” tour.
“It was an interesting mix. I remember Bleed American being a record I listened to a lot that felt like it accomplished having a foot in both worlds.” Matthew released his first solo EP, Parachute, in May 2012, and since then he’s collaborated with a lot of other musicians in assisting with writing, producing, and singing. He felt that, before now, he never got to make the music he really wanted to make, adding that there was always some string attached or something he had to be conscious of. There was a few years’ time in which he fantasized of starting a band, but he says he didn’t really have the vision or direction. “Even watching success in a totally different genre than I ever listened to starting to dictate where my career was going. It was all really confusing and hard to have any sort of accurate perspective. Maybe part of that’s my own fault.” In this last year, he’s gotten to a point where he’s just honest with himself and writes the songs he needs to write. “No hang-ups or past to pay attention to.” He just wants to have fun and make music with people that are fun to play with.
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Earlier this year, Matthew began feeling like the songs he was writing were driving him where he wanted to be. “It all happened really fast. The writing / recording process and finding people who all meshed. It was really organic and really easy actually.” He says that a lot of the bands he’s been in previously were really stressful or draining experiences, and he wanted Winnetka Bowling League to be the polar opposite. “It needed to be fun and the songs needed to come from a completely pure and true place. It’s music. It’s supposed to be fun and enjoyable and feel like the greatest thing in the world.” Matthew adds that as “life is a whole mixed bag and writing is a way to process and cope,” there wasn’t any specific event or experience that he’d cite as “the” inspiration for writing these tracks. “Everything sort of filters through me in the shape of words and it’s a daily thing,” he says. “I’ve had a history of pretty intense anxiety and the ability to experience high highs and low lows is sometimes overwhelming but feels bearable because of that outlet.”
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Winnetka Bowling League’s debut single “On The 5”, released in early August, Matthew says “just happened” in this three or four hour hang with his friend Dan. “That felt like the start of something. I was really excited by it and knew I wanted to be in whatever band that was & write a record of songs that supported that.” Matthew moved to NY with his girlfriend for a few months almost immediately after writing it, and so the rest of the EP was mostly taken from songs written and recorded in an apartment there. Since he felt there was a “definite focus” in terms of the world the music was living in, he says, all the tracks did feel pretty connected as a collective unit. “It was nice to chip away at a collection with an end goal in mind. Very different from how I spent the last few years making music.” He felt such freedom in making this music that the EP was written really quickly and that momentum continued after, with them having nearly an album’s worth of material completed now. Since many of the tracks were written while he was living in New York he says that they “totally take on a different life and spirit” when they’re out living in the world and being played in rooms of people. “I think that sort of context makes it even more fun to create the music, being able to imagine the live show and how it feels to play with this band.” The lyrics for the EP were pulled from a lot of places he says. “It’s definitely not a collection based on one thought or experience, but a snapshot of a period.” Having lived in LA for ten years and then moving back to NY, he says it sort of made him romanticize California and think a lot about the friendships and the life he’d built there, for both the good and bad. “And also, revisiting myself and all the versions living back in the place I grew up. That sort of thing brought up more in me than I even knew was in there.” You can tell that Matthew and the rest of the group have created something special when it comes to Winnetka Bowling League and he feels it too. “The whole thing has been so much fucking fun. I love it with all my heart and feel so grateful to be making it.” Their eponymous debut EP was released on September 21 via RCA Records and their full-length LP is due early next year.
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Jade Bird was born in Hexham, England to a young military family, and she moved between the U.S., Germany, and the U.K. until her parents divorced. At the age of 11 she moved in with her mom and grandma in Bridgend, South Wales. Her grandmother (who was also divorced) became a finance manager in order to get her own house, while her mom worked very hard to make sure they were able to have their own space. Seeing the strength of the women in her life taught Jade how to hustle early on. Photography and Interview by Heather Hawke. When she was little her parents favored EDM legends like Aphex Twin and the Chemical Brothers, who they’d blast in the car. “My grandma always tells this story of my parents driving up to the house with music blaring super loud (and they were into 90s trance mainly) when I was about 6 months.” She says that music was always a part of her life, it was only a question if she had the commitment to turn it into a career. “I’ve always had this inherent mixture of creativity and being a general showoff! If you see all the videos from when I was younger I’m always reading/dancing/drawing.” She adds that this creativity evolved into a kind of therapy when they moved in with her Grandma. Jade discovered her now longtime favorites like Neil Young, Bob Dylan and Crosby, Stills & Nash through a family friend when she was in middle school. She found comfort in the blues then, around the time of her parent’s divorce, when a theme in her own writing was the deterioration of relationships. “I started writing when I was 12, I’d played piano before then, but when I hit the guitar, I had all these pent-up emotions and it just flowed out.” Her first original song, that she liked, was called “When You’re Alone.” “Since then it’s been constant, and that’s why I think I’m meant to be doing it because it never stops!”
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Music education, Jade says, is such a finicky thing because your relationship with music, no one can really teach you, they can just guide it. “Sometimes people can suffocate the unique part of your expression, the mistakes so to speak.” She says that she found learning to play music mostly frustrating, up until college when it was about collaborating. “I learned so much from different cultures and their music and there were so many kids from all different backgrounds, it was great to find out what they were into.” In her teens, she entered into a series of vicious open mic nights in pubs around Wales, before winning a sixth form place at the Brit School, the famous performing arts hothouse. She credits those early experiences for her natural stage presence today. She continued to perform gigs around London three times a week, at points lagging on her schoolwork, and was fretting that nothing was coming from it. Feeling the need to be proactive, that May she recorded 13 tracks in her friend’s bathroom which ended up getting her a management deal. Shortly after, she recorded an EP with Bat For Lashes' producer Simone Felice in the Catskill Mountains of New York. Daniel Glass caught wind of the early demos and Jade was signed to Glassnote in March 2017. She released her debut EP Something American, her love letter to Americana, that July.
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She’s currently working on her yetuntitled debut album from which she’s released three tracks; “Lottery” in January, “Furious” in May, and her newest, “Uh Huh,” in July. These newer tracks are very much evidence of her progress into a new style. Jade says that she never limits herself: “you’ve got to constantly progress in what you listen to, to improve what you create. Exposing myself to things that are out of my comfort zone is essential.” She says that for this LP we can expect a wide variety of tunes; “I have piano ballads, and pretty intense alternative tracks (inspired by listening to Hole, Sonic Youth etc.) and moments of stripped back acoustic stuff. It’s all who I am and have been a part of me growing as a young woman.” As for the actual writing part, Jade loves going away and writing by herself and getting lost in it. “There’s always bits of time that you are in a head rush of ideas. Where every book has a title and every train has an advert that you want to put in a song.” An example is from a song of hers called “Side Effects,” where she was inspired by a book of the same name.
When she gets inspired she always jots down the concept and ideas as a spider diagram. “There are some phrases that can link that wouldn’t usually.” Her writing style from EP to LP hasn’t changed, the foundation is just her and her guitar/piano, but now after writing she workshops it with the band, “who are my best friends,” and that’s helped her to define her sound a lot more. If you’ve seen any of Jade’s music videos or press images you’ll know that she really cares about the accompanying visuals and what they represent. The artist Kate Moross has collaborated with Jade on all of the artwork and videos since Lottery and Bird credits her for always taking her thoughts and ideas to another level.” Jade does feel that there has to be a conversation between the visuals and music, but it doesn’t always have to be specific to the song, as long as it’s specific to her. “You have to see the artist in the work or it doesn’t make any sense.”
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Adio Marchant grew up in Manchester between Moss Side and Chorlton as a kid with a “crazy imagination.” He has fond memories of being a child and escaping to his “own lil world like most kids do,” although making music didn’t come into his life until later. Adio’s dad was a drummer and his mom, who he calls his rock, raised him and his brothers while also training to be a teacher. She taught him about The Carpenters, Prince, Michael Jackson and many lovers rock artists like Garnet Silk. Adio’s family is Jamaican, which is another reason that reggae music played a big role in his life. Photography and Interview by Heather Hawke. At the age of 12, Adio wrote his first song while on holiday in Jamaica, hiding inside from a tropical storm. He describes it as “more like a poem with melody to it.” “My mum came in the room and said ‘What are you writing about?’ and I replied, ‘Oh it’s about a girl I haven’t met yet,’” he says. Years later, after an unrewarding two-year stint studying media at university, Adio seized upon his passion for music and started writing and collaborating with his good friends in a few groups. One of these groups was the six-member Manchester band Kid British, of which he was the co-founder and co-vocalist/rapper. When Kid British fell apart, Adio embarked on a solo career as Bipolar Sunshine. In 2013, after signing with Polydor/Aesthetic Recordings, he released his first EP, Aesthetics, followed by another EP, Drowning in Butterflies, later that year. Adio departed from Polydor after the label implied that they didn’t know where to place him as a black artist making pop music. A part of his confidence was shaken at first, but he knew he was going to make music with or without a label backing him.
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While in a studio in London, Adio was unknowingly chatting with DJ Snake’s manager; he thought a track of Adio’s was sick, and mentioned that they might want to use it. The track “Middle” (2016) became the first single off DJ Snake’s album, and when released, earned Bipolar Sunshine global recognition when it climbed the charts to the Top 20 in France and the U.S., as well as the Top 10 and Top 5 in the U.K. and Australia, eventually earning double-platinum status. Adio has since gone on to collaborate with other notable artists including Goldlink, Lil Yachty, Petit Biscuit, Gaika, and Gryffin, and has also toured internationally alongside Haim, Bastille, and Rudimental. His newest EP, Imaginarium, was released in May and with those five tracks he reflects upon both his personal and sonic evolution. Adio moved from Manchester to Los Angeles, had a child, and wanted to let the world know that he had something to say. “I had a situation that left for me dead musically. To put myself back on the map, I had to fight through it and take every opportunity to deliver.” Adio adds that he was afraid because you never know how people will receive your work. “I put my faith in my ability to create, and as soon as I did that I felt free.” He says the EP is about “allowing your imagination to take you to your highest heights and to break all structures that hold people in.”
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“Downfalls, victories, love, finding love to only fall out of love,” are just some events Adio has experienced that have influenced his writing. He says that writing is often a cathartic pain he enjoys, “knowing that those feelings are coming out.” The title of the album Imaginarium was, as Adio says, inspired from a film he watched called the “Adventures of Doctor Parnassus”. “I felt like it was an ever changing and non-conforming world regarding structure where anything could happen. In one minute you feel euphoria, the next anxiety.” The film perfectly captured the feelings he was going through at the time. Wanting to be represented through his music’s artwork as someone who tries to push the culture forward in a “left of center way”, Adio aims to show the creative skills of the people he works with to challenge order and to create something fresh. For his Imaginarium artwork, he credits the amazing work to the team of Ibrahim Kamara, OG studio, and Kazim.
Since moving to LA, Adio says his eyes have been opened to what he can become and it’s helped him connect in ways that take him out of his comfort zone. Even before LA, traveling has helped him understand other cultures and people: “[it] makes you ask questions about yourself in good and bad ways.” Adio has also started to build his own label, Grey, which he’s always thought about creating. He says that he wants to release art that means something to him and also helps bring some acts he really likes to the forefront. Adio, who has struggled with depression, takes walks, spends time with family, and just steps away from what he’s doing to get better peace of mind when he needs to balance the extremes of the highs and lows of being a musician. “I remind myself that I’m not the only person ever to have these feelings so I know there is a way to overcome.”
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Interview with Rakel Mjöll The British-Icelandic punk trio Dream Wife started almost as unconventionally as a band can; as a performance art project at university. Rakel Mjöll studied performance art with an emphasis on sound and visual art, Bella Podpadec studied fine art painting, and Alice Go studied fine art sculpture at Brighton University. Photography by Sophia Ragomo. Interview by Heather Hawke. Alice and Bella grew up in Somerset, England, while Rakel spent the first decade of her life in the bay area suburbs of California while her dad worked in tech. It was when Rakel’s older sister was nearing her teenage years that their parents realized there wouldn’t be a better time to join their big creative family in Reykjavik. You can imagine how drastic the change was, and Rakel remembers that “it was cold, dark, and kids on the street didn’t have car washes and go to Disneyland together,” which came as a shock. She says that her father’s side “is all theatre people, writers, musicians, artists, directors, dancers, a very fun and loud group.” Rakel’s first jobs as a pre-teen were working for them; acting, assisting in the theatre, selling merch at shows, and working in performance art pieces. She soon realized that her dad had rebelled by going into software engineering. “He often jokes that he was the black sheep of the family; his parents were so disappointed that he didn’t become an actor.” However, she says that her family, “opened up a world of possibilities for me, a creative playground to play in and also an understanding that creative jobs are jobs worth pursuing.”
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It was at the age of 13 that Rakel, with the help of her uncle, snuck into her first show (Damien Rice). After buying his CD as a piece of memorabilia after the show, she fell asleep to it every night until it got too scratched. “That night was a really sincere show and left you wanting more,” she says. It must have been a mutual feeling, as Damien Rice ended up buying a house in Reykjavik and became part of the local scene. Her music taste was generally on par with peers her age as, she says, the album of her formative years was Is this it? by The Strokes, and the track that had the most impact on her during that time was the infectious “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. When Rakel was younger, living in California, she became a big admirer of Dolly Parton and her songwriting, so when she started writing herself, Dolly was a main influence… Dolly and Avril Lavigne. “Deep stuff,” she jokes. Rakel’s music education was more formal than that of Alice and Bella’s, who are both self-taught musicians. Rakel studied piano and guitar for a few years, and then went to a music institute after high school and studied jazz vocals and a bit of opera. She adds that she has played in different styles of bands since her teens, which is another education in itself. Dream Wife, the band name, is the result of the trio tackling the outdated idea of the “dream wife” of the 1950s and 1960s: as if a woman became an object in the packaged deal of the dream house, the dream car, and the dream job. They picked the name of the band before ever having played music together and when they were ready to perform to the public they did so for a gallery opening.
All three have a deep passion for creating things, and having been surrounded by other very talented women based in Brighton, the ladies of Dream Wife were already immersed in an environment overflowing with creative energy. The decision to pursue the band outside the confines of school made them feel even more like a contributing part of the community. The early days of Dream Wife were very DIY and featured a drum machine as a stand in for the real thing. They toured Canada this way as well as Europe (which was done via Megabuses). They’ve now graduated university and moved to London, added on an official drummer, signed to a label (Lucky Number), and done extensive tours in a van around Europe and the U.K. Now, Rakel says, most of their visual collaborators are from university or part of friend groups that were made after they all moved up to London. Mentioning that Polyester zine’s founder Ione Gamble played an instrumental part with introductions, Rakel says “that’s what makes London an exciting place to live, the music scene is raw, welcoming and incredible along with all these different unique artist, photographers, designers that are just collaborating with each other and making things work. It’s like we never left art school.” In 2016, the ladies put out their first EP (EP01) and followed it up with several singles, plus one called "Fire" in 2017, the latter being a fitting title as the trio of ladies are all fire signs.
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Rakel writes the lyrics, but she writes from the perspective of all of them, influenced by “what’s happening in our lives and our friend’s lives.” They write what they know, which, as women in their 20s, means gender roles and different phases of womanhood are unabashedly front and center in their lyrics. Rakel says she’s just “trying to keep it honest, like Dolly.” The trio enjoys songwriting, building a sound, and being able to keep the rehearsal space positive. A key ingredient is that they fully trust and respect each other’s musical direction. After signing to Lucky Number, Dream Wife officially began working on their debut album. They spent an entire summer writing in a windowless room in Packham, followed by a week of recording and a few months of mixing. Rakel says that although they’re not a studio band, they’re a live band, they would like to spend more time in the studio for the next release. A lot of the songs written for their debut self-titled LP (January 2018), Rakel says, were “tried out when they were in the writing stage, during live shows.” She adds that one of them usually has an idea that collides with another’s, and then they “jam it out til it changes and becomes a Dream Wife song.” They then test the tracks out on the road. “We didn’t tell the crowd that it was new, we just played and then we got to feel the vibe of the song and how the audience reacts to them.” She says that’s when the songs became fully realized versions of themselves: “by playing and thriving off the crowd’s energy is where we really clicked as a unit and our sound evolves.”
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Bianca Quiñones, known as Quiñ, grew up in Altadena, California, just north of Pasadena. Her parents’ first child, she had an unobstructed view into the jam sessions her parents and their friends would often have. Quiñ’s dad was an amateur musician from the Bronx who always played the trumpet and congas and made jam sessions a regular part of life at home. “I think subconsciously, it planted a few seeds that exposed themselves later but I was so present in those moments I was just soaking it all up,” she says. “I didn’t catch up to the thought of making a career out of music until I was 19.” Photography and Interview by Heather Hawke. At the age of 4 she started singing in a choir at an Episcopal church her parents went to called All Saints in Pasadena. The first documented song she wrote was shortly after her sister Bailey was born. “I was 6 and my mom told me I wrote this sad country song about ‘gettin’ in trouble for doing nothin’ at all.’” Quiñ says she grew up knowing that music and being creative was in her family DNA. She and her best friends wrote songs together at school and she did arts and crafts with her family at home. The fact that her mom was a teacher and librarian got her into reading at a young age, which she feels helped a lot with her writing development. After church choir, where she learned how to exercise her falsetto, she went to Blair High school and began Gospel choir which started her diaphragm training. She grew to love it, but was too shy to participate at first. “Other than harmonizing with others and learning how to push through being uncomfortable with sharing my voice, I just spent a lot of time at home listening to music and mastering every run I ever heard.” She says her high school teacher, Mr. Douglas, was the force that pushed her to recognize how special her voice was. He always gave her some duet to do every show they had, which helped her get past her fear. “I just needed someone to make me do it; especially when it ended up being a part of my grade.”
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She took a break from college when she was 19 and living in the bay area, away from everything that used to stop her from concentrating on music and writing; friends, a boyfriend, and school. During this time, she realized that she always loved to write and sing and that she should start actually start sharing it with people. She wasn’t stuck writing ten-page papers anymore, so she instead started writing about herself and came to learn that she had a skill when it came to writing and rhyming. Once she realized her one challenge was to overcome her shyness, she knew she could beat it. She started taking on any opportunity that was normally out of her comfort zone and eventually the fear subsided. Quiñ was featured on G-Eazy’s track “Think About You” off of his 2015 album When It’s Dark Out and the two collaborated again for her song “Over Again” off of her October 2016 debut album Galactica. There are a few different ways she gets ideas for writing. She says the most common is when a melody comes out, and that melody matches a feeling, and those feelings create syllables and a rhythm of words, and out comes a story in English. Another way is when something floats into her mind; “with those I just use my voice notes on my phone, forget about it, and go to the studio and remember there’s a gem in my phone I need to listen to, and make something out of that.”
There are times where her writing is just writing, like poems that she uses like a word/idea bank. “Some of my things were never meant to be sung, while others I’ve written and saved and opened later to realize it always was a song.” Writing is the easiest thing for Quiñ and when she’s not writing, she’s researching, by just living life. She says that if it ever feels difficult to write she lets herself figure out what she’d rather be doing vs. trying to force something out. “That’s when I know it’s time to experience and download vs trying to upload my feelings into words. They come when they choose, and I follow.” The writing process for her sophomore EP Dreamgirl (September 2017) came very naturally to her. “During that time of my life I think I was on my way to discovering what love was vs what a being in a daze was,” she says. While Quiñ had her heart broken far before her the sophomore EP was made, that heartbreak was the fuel for her to change her environment and make space for herself. Dreamgirl was actually inspired by a collection of love songs she ended up with while making songs with no definite reasoning, where she ended up seeing a pattern of feelings. She originally wanted to put something out on Soundcloud for Valentine’s day, but it turned into something a bit bigger—a relationship story. “First it starts off like a dream, me entering the consciousness that’s my natural state of mind- my heaven.
I get swept away in this dreamy thing that just so happened to happen, and slowly I started to realize this isn’t the real me, but a part of me nonetheless; a part I’m growing to be not so proud of. ‘Sailboat’ is the storm and ‘BB’ is the ending; and so, Dreamgirl was born.” Quiñ says she didn’t feel any limitations when writing the album because she was just expressing herself and her feelings, or her “dream feelings.” “My favorite part was listening to the songs I had made over that year and realizing there’s a story there that I never knew I was subconsciously creating.” Since the release of Dreamgirl, Quiñ’s been learning piano, traveling more than ever, and getting heavily involved in the overseeing and contributing to the sound of her production as of late. As far as releases go, she’s been featured on Miguel’s track “Wolf” off of his 2017 album War & Leisure, and has since released a new single “Remind Me” which came out in August of this year.
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Music was always encouraged in the household when Nik Ewing was growing up in San Diego. Nik’s dad played drums, and his parents brought him home a piano when he was around the age of 7 that a family friend was giving away. He then taught himself everything he could until they decided to get him piano lessons. Photography and Interview by Heather Hawke. Though he can’t remember his first concert experience, he remembers his dad's hair metal band practicing in one of the bandmate's living rooms while Nik drew with his brother. Nik says that the beginning of high school was his rebellious phase against music where he stumbled upon graphic design as another outlet to be creative. “I got really into playing sports, but after a few years I rediscovered music that felt like my own.” He says that he grew up on a steady diet of classic rock, with an emphasis on guitar solo rock. “I was drawn to real mellow, acoustic music and then had my mind blown the first time I heard Outkast.” After high school, he worked as a graphic designer as his main income while playing music in bands for fun.
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For him, his creative outputs bleed together: “it’s much less here is my visual art in one box and music in another, they constantly inform each other: jumping from format to format.” Many of his designs were born out of a kind of defensiveness from the bands he was in, saying that he didn't trust anyone else to make the album artwork or show poster. “[I was] trying to think bigger than just the songs: how to create a visual world around the music too.” Working in a few different artistic formats also helps with any form of writer’s block he says: “I can just jump to another format if I'm hitting a wall in another.” Although graphic design has always moved fast, Nik wonders if the age of the internet with sites like ffffound or Tumblr, has sped it up. “I like that visual art keeps challenging the norm, I'd hate to be making the same work that I thought was rad in 2013.” He doesn’t particularly feel pressured to keep up with trends, but he does like constantly evolving and since trends changing quickly, it helps
one embrace that or really doubledown to stay in a lane. He adds that “obviously, there are the goats like Cy Tyombly, Dieter Roth and Barbara Kruger who are constant inspirations and timeless.” With all that being said, Nik knows that he has a specific visual style which is dark, stoic, and mostly black and white, but he loves how he can make a minimal collage, while also drawing inspiration from working with Brian Roettinger and make the hyper colored “Only Heirs” video. Nik’s “far from a perfectionist” when it comes to design, but he really loves getting into the details of a piece, almost viewing visuals pieces like songs, where they're this living thing that changes constantly over time. “Although I might finish a specific print, I'll definitely make a bunch more variations or come back to it in a year and flip it on its head.” Nik is now about to release a solo album in which he covered Dennis Wilson's only solo album, Pacific Ocean Blue, in its entirety with a lot
of contributions from other artists. The label that’s releasing the album, Turntable Kitchen, approached him a while ago about a series they're doing where artists cover an album in its entirety, which he says sounded both fun and overwhelming. He thought about it for a while as many albums were more important to him than Pacific Ocean Blue, but seemed “off limits,” just because they're timeless or he'd consider it sacrilegious to even attempt recreating them. The first time he listened to the Dennis Wilson album he vividly remembers driving across LA to meet some friends on the west side, which took the time of this entire album. “I was struck with how sad Dennis' voice was, a man seemingly barely holding on, and how honest it felt from a lateera Beach Boy,” he says. “They spent their entire careers selling sunshine and joyful relationships and here was a pretty broken man and pretty sad album, but still sometimes camouflaged in more upbeat production.”
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As someone who’s always loved Cat Power's covers and how she remakes “both classic hits and obscure songs to be completely unrecognizable and completely her own,” he knew he wanted to completely recreate this album. Since it’s not well known, he says there are much less expectations of what these songs are "supposed to" sound like. “I wanted to dig deeper into the darker elements of the album, which kind of became electronic along the way mixed with a lot of piano.” He also wanted the covers to sound like a dark mixtape, with a lot of contributors, but which still sound cohesive. “Dev Hynes does this so well with all his Blood Orange albums, many voices, yet a cohesive sounding album.” Since remaking a Beach Boys album obviously needed a lot of harmonies, Nik had the other members in his band (Local Natives) contribute. This isn’t the first time he’s worked solo though; he has worked with many other artists outside of Local Natives (“people just have to do some digging to find some of those”) and is always creating music or visuals.
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He says this project was more of a very specific goal in putting together and finishing an entire album. “Local Natives is unusual in that we don't have a singular songwriter or singer, we all play many instruments and so the collaboration process is always so different song to song. With my entire band being on this album, making this album really didn't feel that different from working on LN songs, just with a lot more collaborators.” A “ray of sunshine” on this dark album was Cults he says, where they drew on otherworldly pop like A.K. Paul or Blond as an inspiration. Nico Segal played some “very beautiful trumpet” and POP ETC, Evan Voytas, and The Gloomies all sang on the album. Eduardo de la Paz (who mixed a couple songs on Sunlit Youth) mixed the album. Nik wanted to respect the original tracklist, so the flow of the album was basically dictated, but he decided to make "What's Wrong" the last track for the album. “I had trouble figuring out how to bridge the gap between the dark, downbeat vibe of ‘River Song’ with the harmonies of my band into the laid-
back pop vibe of ‘Moonshine’ with Cults.” The title track started as a remix of the Local Natives song “Jellyfish” and he knew he wanted it to be an important motif throughout the album. “My bandmate Ryan [Hahn] and I, kind of approached it like its own song, just taking the original lyrics and creating new melodies entirely. Take the emotion and the lyrics and make something entirely new: the ethos of a Cat Power cover.” All in all, the album was nearly a year and the half in the making and Nik worked on it between Local Natives LP4 sessions and touring. “It was relatively slow, making small changes, adding little details or figuring out what kind of tone and direction a song should take,” he says, adding that a lot of the songs “took big leaps” when other collaborators joined on the tracks. “Like the song 'Time' was pretty much done at the end of 2017 but then Nico Segal played trumpet and it took this beautiful leap forward.” Additionally, Nik says that he almost cried when he heard Chris Chu sing “Thoughts of You.” “I haven't heard his voice that vulnerable and alone since maybe 'Excuses.'”
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Designed by Reginald Colvin
Sudan Archives
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Designed by Cassandra Evanow
Brittney Parks grew up in a very creative household in Cincinnati—her mom was a diversity manager at a firm, but also a talented painter, and her dad was a preacher and car salesman, but went to college for theatre. As a kid, Brittney was fascinated with interior design and fashion, loved to make movies in movie maker and mixed media art in Photoshop, and has more recently messed around in the programs such as Reason and Cubase when she’s in the studio. It was around the age of 17 that she told her mom that her name didn’t fit with how she felt, so her mom renamed her Sudan (as she was always wearing some African-style necklace or seeking out the African shops in Ohio to go thrifting). Photography and Interview by Heather Hawke. Styling by Fatima Mohammed (FATIMØDÄ).
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The first time Sudan felt inspired by music was when she joined the church choir. Since her father was a preacher, she spent three days a week in church: bible study on Wednesdays, church choir on Thursdays, and Sunday Church. She says that in choir she had to play by the drummer because the stage was very small, as the church congregation itself was only about 50 people. “It was difficult hearing myself because the drum set was so loud, but I learned how to play in unison with him. I was inspired to have that kind of energy in my playing and believe drums are a very significant sound in my production today.” Starting in fourth grade, she had a year or two of training to play the violin, but she only really picked it up and learned what the various parts were called, she couldn’t master reading music. Although none of the proceeding four schools she went to had orchestra, in church she kept playing and tried to mimic the violin parts in songs. She never thought she’d go into making a musical career until her uncle Ted from Detroit sent her a Mary Ben Ari CD. It made a huge impact as she was the first hip hop violinist she saw on TV. Her family moved around a lot in Cincinnati, with her and her sister going to five different schools up until junior year of high school when their parents got a divorce. “I eventually got used to moving. I had a cool group of friends, but we had to move to another school after my parents divorced so I drifted through junior to my senior year and didn’t have many friends aside from my twin sister,” Sudan says, adding that she didn’t even go to prom. She graduated high school early since she had enough academic credits and then got a job at McDonald’s where she became a night shift manager, and worked at Forever 21 in the mall during the day to save up money.
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Initially, she wanted to go to college to study African History, but when her mom got remarried to Derrick Ladd, a former executive producer at LaFace Records, he convinced her and her sister to pursue music instead of attending college. “At first my twin sister and I were very focused on our music spending countless days in the studio, but it eventually started to shatter as I wasn’t fully committed to our sound and rebelled by sneaking out to parties late at night which led me to the electronic beat scene in Cincinnati and motivated me to move to Los Angeles to seek independence, pursue my solo career and go to college there.” She remembers going to bars like The Comet in Cincinnati, and seeing musicians “blending their sound” with their own electronic productions by using drum machines or laptops. The very experimental style pushed her to start developing her own sound as well. Her dad sent her an iPad, and she started downloading music apps like GarageBand and iMPC. When she moved to Los Angeles in 2014, she was juggling two jobs in DTLA, taking the bus every day, and living in an artist house in East LA that she found from a musician she met on SoundCloud, CAT 500. She says she didn’t listen to much music at the time, instead she was in her own world, messing around with new apps and gear.
After all of the previous moves, she once again felt ghost-like, saying it’s “like I’m watching myself live in these cities but never feel fully immersed in the mix, which I’ve learned to embrace because I’m on a constant hunt for a home base and feel like others feel the same way and relate when hearing my story.” Sudan doesn’t believe that your current living situation and financial status should limit your creativity though. “Sometimes when you feel the most limited is when you can find that special spark of creative mental freedom.” She started becoming curious about the music of the country of Sudan and realized that most of their traditional music has strings in it. This serendipitous knowledge grew her confidence in her own non-Western style. With only an iPad and a violin at hand, and the new-found confidence and belief that no one should have limitations when creating music, she made do with what she had. It’s been three years now since Sudan mixed the violin with electronic music and various other textures to create her first single, “Come Meh Way,” which ended up being the first song or sound that felt sufficiently hers. “When I made ‘Come Meh Way’ I didn’t feel like I wanted to show anyone, I was just happy I was experimenting and kept the songs make to myself with
an intention of releasing on band camp or SoundCloud.” That is, she says, until Matthew David, an A&R, pushed her to show him. This led to her record deal at Stones Throw Records. Sudan’s always had a sense that traveling would play a big part in her life, with it being the main reason she moved out of her hometown; she felt in order to keep growing she needed to relocate. She has traveled a lot more in the recent years, and has found it highly influential. “When journaling I title certain pieces the city I am in which eventually become songs. Visiting Ghana started my collection in west African instruments which are incorporated in my sound. Visiting Detroit and Chicago in my childhood years influenced my writing and perspectives of living. Traveling to Europe gave me more experiences to write about being in places where no one speaks your language and puts you in situations where you have to communicate without your native tongue, which is a sort of creative exercise in a sense.” Her self-titled debut EP was released in July 2017 via Stones Throw Records and it combines her unique approach to strings and improvisational songwriting with rhythmic elements of Sudanese and West African music. She released her sophomore EP Sink in May of this year.
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Interview with Nathaniel Banks Nathaniel Banks grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, about 35 minutes outside of D.C. He didn’t have too many friends growing up, so he says that creativity was everything for him. Before his creative outlet was music, it was Legos: “I used to sit in the basement for hours and hours designing spaceships and fortresses and hovercrafts and cars and made up these creatures who had families and clans and everything, building these little worlds, making up stories and characters.” Around the age of 12, this creative process with Legos transferred over to composing and producing music. “Same pursuit of vision, same obsessive tweaking and refining, same tendency to get lost in it for hours.” Nate started with two cheap tape recorders that he would use to record something on guitar, play it back while recording the next instrument layer on the other recorder, and so on. “I could overdub and layer parts that way, and I started making little arrangements.” Interview and photography by Heather Hawke. Nate says he always knew music was something that was going to be in his life, before even learning an instrument. Nate’s dad was very encouraging as soon as he realized he had a good ear. “I always could hear these whole compositions in my head and I knew one day I’d figure out how to make them come to life. When I made lead alto sax in all state jazz band as a junior in high school I realized I was actually performing at a high level and started to think about what it would be like to be a professional musician.” “I was really serious about saxophone. My teacher was super intense and honestly quite harsh sometimes, but I think it was good for me.” Nate says this made him focus and understand what it’s like to take an instrument seriously and really practice: “starting painstakingly slow with a metronome, working your way up only as fast as you can play the part perfectly, the subtleties of rhythm tone, attack and air flow etc.” That teacher held Nate to a very high standard and he thinks he’s applied that to everything else he’s done musically as well. However, he also went on to take guitar lessons on the opposite side of the spectrum, from a teacher who was more easy-going, which he also found valuable: 54“He | Decorated taught me Youth how toMagazine make music fun, and that it was ok to learn differently than the established way, and encouraged me to focus on playing the kind of songs I liked rather than just drilling in sight reading.”
arlie
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While in high school, Nate ran track and cross country, did marching band for a couple years because “they wouldn’t let you be in the top school band unless you marched,” went to jazz camp and woodwind camp for a couple years (which he says were really great because “everyone was obsessed with music and free to be a nerdy weirdo”), and also did summer swim team to stay in shape.
When Nate got to college, he started as a saxophone major, but quit because it was timeconsuming and he really just wanted to write and produce his own songs. He got into music theory, and had another great, really passionate teacher: “[music history]’s not for everybody but I just really liked it and wanted to know everything. I was taking all this harmonic analysis from Beethoven and Brahms and Liszt and applying it to pop music.” He took a At that age, he was obsessed songwriting class—twice, with The Red Hot Chili Peppers and pop-punk, which eventually because he liked it so much— because it gave him deadlines spiraled into bands like every two weeks to actually finish Radiohead, Vampire Weekend songs and play them in front of and Arcade Fire. “All my friends people. “That really helped me and I freaked out over that first MGMT record,” which he says is get momentum as a writer. I used college assignments to give still an all-time favorite. “I was myself deadlines for finishing secretly always into pop music songs and tracks as much as I but I felt like I had to hide that could possibly get away with.” In from my friends.” Later on, he fact, he made the song “Heels” says, he became the guy who would always defend the merits (on Arlie’s Soundcloud) as his final project for a German of popular things to his friends fairytales class. “And finally, my who were too cool: “I secretly loved Coldplay, John Mayer and junior year I did an independent Taylor Swift.” Nate also played in study that made me finish 10 demos which became the basis bands all through high school, for Arlie.” He took a jazz theory but he never found one to take course that he really liked as well, seriously until he finally started but says that the music school at Arlie in 2016.
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Vanderbilt as a whole was “really stuck in the past though and pretty limiting,” so he eventually dropped the music major and studied English and Philosophy. “I stopped playing sax as much mainly because it was weirdly having a negative effect on my singing. Something about the tension in my throat.” Before the demo tracks, Nate had begun experimenting with solo, more acoustic-driven pop, until he decided that he’d never want to actually tour in that genre. Finally, in the spring of 2015, Nate started making music up in his room that he’d want to listen to, recorded them on Logic, and what would become Arlie demos started to take shape. His music started drawing the attention of the Nashville community in 2016, but he knew that in order to bring his meticulously-crafted compositions to the stage, he needed to enlist a collective. Therefore, Nate brought in guitarist Carson Lystad (who was in a couple other Vanderbilt bands) and drummer Adam Lochemes (who was producing EDM under the moniker Captain Munch as well as drumming in rock groups).
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Within the course of the next year, the band released two singles, "Big Fat Mouth" (February 2017) and "Didya Think” (November 2017). They went from performing at house parties, to playing a sold-out show at Nashville's The End in late 2017, to releasing their first collaborative track between all of the members ("blackboard.edu") in March 2018. They then did SXSW 2018, support dates with Rostam (Vampire Weekend), and summer appearances at Bonnaroo, Forecastle, and Sloss Festivals. All of this has led to the release of their long-awaited debut EP Wait—released on September 19 via Atlantic Records. There were many inspirations for the lyricism of Wait, one of which was from a dream Nate had about “dying alone in a giant explosion caused by lightning striking an oil field.” Another inspiration came about in the way he idealized the adolescence he never had. Others came about through more deeply felt and realized emotions: “the feeling of having lost something and not being entirely sure what it is or how to get it back, longing for an idealized past and/or future, fading youth, cathartic nostalgia, running away from hurt, existential/interpersonal longing, trying to get back home,
addiction, paralysis, a struggle between the carpe diem ideal & the excitement of being able to change your own life vs. the frustrating reality of mental paralysis, bad habits, and feeling like everything is completely out of your control.”
The idea that artists have to suffer to make good art is a myth that Nate completely opposes: he knows it doesn’t need to be as difficult and painful as we often make it. “In reality, when I write my best songs, I tend to forget about the fact that I’m writing and get into a sort of flow state where I’m lost in the process. I’m Nate wrote everything on his trying to get better at cultivating own except for "Tossing and Turning," where he co-wrote the that state on a daily basis.” He lyrics with a friend. He says that says the reason great artists in when he’s writing it’s almost like the past have suffered a lot is he’s “collaborating with my past because artists are sensitive people: “the same quality makes self... I start an idea and then finish it a year later or combine it us capable of great suffering that makes us capable of great art. with an idea conceived But that doesn’t mean suffering separately.” leads to better art.” It took Nate a lot of beating his head against Nate adds that his writing the wall stuck in writer’s block process has “shifted slightly” since the first collaborative track before he was finally able to as, he says, he’s learned to let go realize this. “I’m still recovering of his pride and the idea of doing from those self-destructive habits everything himself: “I realize it’s and thought patterns,” he adds. more fun and much more efficient to work collaboratively It’s been three years since Nate first started writing those songs, some of the time. Also, it just and so both he and the band, takes time for me to feel who weren’t even formed during comfortable collaborating with most of the songwriting process, people—it takes a deep trust.” have evolved quite a bit. “I’m Nate imagines he and the band writing very different music now will continue to work together more as they grow to understand (which I’m very excited about) and better trust each other. “I’ve but I really love and believe in these songs [off of Wait] and I been writing on my own and forming the basis for this project think they’re a great intro to Arlie and give a glimpse of where for my whole life, so in we’re headed.” comparison the band is still relatively new at this point.”
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