Broken Dreams Club Interview: This is Lorelei

Photo Credit: Eve Alpert

For years, Nate Amos uploaded hundreds of scrappy, fuzzy tunes to the Bandcamp account of his recording moniker, This Is Lorelei. Essentially demo recordings, the songs provided a glimpse of a prolific musician with a profound range, unafraid to explore any genre or sound.

In 2024, Amos finally formalized those recordings, releasing his first “official” album as This is Lorelei. The record—“Box for Buddy, Box For Star,” is the culmination of those intriguing early recordings, showcasing a boundless talent. 

Featuring dust bowl folk songs, heartfelt indie pop tracks, glitchy electronica numbers, club bangers and anthemic love ballads, “Box for Buddy, Box For Star” was one of the best releases of last year and brought welcome new attention to the talents of Amos, who also stars as one-half of the avant garde duo, Water From Your Eyes.

On Thursday, April 3, This is Lorelei—now a three-piece band—will perform songs from “Box For Buddy, Box For Star” at Café du Nord. The show will be presented by local production outfit Throwin’ Bo’s.

Broken Dreams Club spoke with Amos about the background of the record, feeling inspired by Shane MacGowan and Elliott Smith and what’s next for This Is Lorelei and Water From Your Eyes. 

Ok, you’ve got another round of gigs starting up this weekend. How are you prepping for this latest batch of live shows?

Well, with the kind of live form Lorelei is in right now, I basically tour and then kind of come back with a revision. It’s taken a while to figure out exactly what to do with it, because the project is so kind of scatterbrained in terms of instrumentation. It’s been an interesting process to figure that out. But I think it seems like the answer is always simplicity. I have someone playing lead guitar now, so I just play acoustic guitar and sing and don't worry about other stuff. And it's gotten way more fun and interesting for me.

I was looking up videos of our shows from earlier this year. It was just you and an acoustic guitar, right?

That’s what we did in January, yeah. There have been some other setups as well. I did one tour as a power trio last year, where I was playing electric guitar and trying to do double duty vocals and lead guitar. It’s just really fun to have someone else worry about one of those.

Was last year your first kind of “proper” This is Lorelei live shows?

I guess it depends on what you mean by proper. Lorelei has existed for a long time. Back in the day in Chicago, there was a really chaotic live Lorelei band. I think the biggest performance was 10 or 11 people one time. If you kind of knew the songs, I would basically enlist you to join in the band. As long as there was a bass player and a drummer, I would just book a show. And then I would tell everyone else, basically, show up if you want. That yielded a couple of really fun moments and a host of bad performances. And then, for years, I just did karaoke sets. I didn't even have any of the words memorized. It would just look at the computer and stand there and sing. So, It's really been the last year or two that the live band has really developed.

Got it. So, back to the beginning—you’ve been recording songs under the This is Lorelei moniker for years and uploading a ton of those tracks to Bandcamp. What prompted the decision last year to finally release an “official” This is Lorelei album?

It was a combination of things. For a long time, Lorelei was more of a demo idea sandbox. If I had a really good idea from Lorelei, I would just lift it for another project. That still applies to Water From Your Eyes. At least a handful of things from every Water From Your Eyes album are kind of just plucked up from This is Lorelei. It wasn’t really until the last couple of years that it felt like Lorelei developed an actual direction of its own, separate from me personally. It kind of just became more and more of a focus. Before, I would just put a song up on Spotify or Bandcamp whatever, without doing any press or anything. And my manager got really frustrated with me. He was like, ‘dude, let me shop one of these.’ This was honestly the first album where I worked on it hard enough that I didn't want to just put it out without any kind of notice.

And how are you able to differentiate these songs from Water From Your Eyes songs, or My Idea songs? There is something distinct about This is Lorelei, but the musical tastes on “Box for Buddy, Box For Star” run the absolute gamut—I mean so much is covered here. When you have such a wide range like that, how are you able to determine what makes sense for This is Lorelei?

I guess it’s basically a gut reaction. At this point, I kind of have my Lorelei brain and Water brain. This is obviously a question that comes up a lot. The answer that I tend to give is it's kind of like playing two different sports. There is the basic idea and scope of things you could possibly do that are similar, but there are different objectives and different muscle groups being used. And the way it's kind of naturally evolved is that Water From Your Eyes is a kind of exercise in rejecting tradition. Whereas Lorelei has kind of turned into a thing where it really is more about embracing existing songwriting archetypes. If I didn't have separate outlets for those two things, I don't know if anything would work. It would probably just be a mess. 

I know you’ve discussed this topic ad nauseam, so apologies for bringing it back up again, but you’ve talked about making this music while sober, which must have been incredibly daunting at first. Did that process get easier as you kept going? Were you able to really convince yourself that you could do this thing?

It was an odd period of time for me and getting sober was a big part of it. There are a lot of things you have to do in the aftermath of long term substance abuse, in terms of just mental health. Once you kick your thing, you have to learn how to be a person without it. And at that point, I still hadn't really done that. The only thing that I could do was obsessively get into my music. Ultimately, the reason this album got so much time poured into it, is because I was desperately looking for anything to do that wasn't working on my actual self. I wouldn't say it was easy, but I was very focused, at least.

So, in its own way, was this process therapeutic?

I try not to rely on that too much, because I spent too many years being like, ‘I don't need to do therapy, because I can express myself through my art’. I mean, that's kind of the ultimate cliche. There/s weight to that, but it can also be such a cop out. I know I've used it as a cop out.

I think everyone was just amazed at the wild diversity of songs on “Box for Buddy, Box For Star,” and I love that you start the album off with a real curveball track—this lonesome cowboy, tears-in-my-beer country tune, “Angel’s Eye.” That’s such an amazing tune, but clearly not indicative of the entire album. What made you want to kick off the record with that song?

I'm a sucker for a good red herring. That’s something I tend to do, but not to be deceiving. There’s a balance to it—I wouldn’t want to use really stylistically different songs at the start of an album in a way where it's just like, ‘check out how different I can sound!’ That wasn't the intention with this album at all. One of the things I was thinking about at the time was how a lot of albums tend to start in this very focused place, and then kind of drift off towards the end in different directions. I wanted to harness that same dynamic curve, but invert it. In a lot of ways, stylistically, this album is way more cohesive in the second half. It kind of begins as this ball bouncing back and forth—an up and down thing. And then the ball stops bouncing as high and kind of settles into this very comfortable place where that album lands. For me, the final resting place of the album was always [album closer] “An Extra Beat For You And Me”—that was kind of the point of the whole process. That’s the song that I feel like I wrote this whole album to get to. And “Angel’s Eye” and “Perfect Hand” were the two songs that were most different stylistically, so I think they worked best in the beginning of the album. I didn’t want to cut those songs because there wasn’t a good place for them, so I put them one-two in the sequencing.

And I’m going to spare you from going over this whole album, track-by-track, because I really could, but I wanted to touch base on a few of them. “Dancing in the Club” was one of my favorite songs of last year and it has this immortal line in there—“But a loser never wins/ And I'm a loser, always been.” I love it because it claims ownership over that. Indie music is supposed to be for losers and this song really feels like it belongs to indie fans. Did you have it in mind for this song to be a kind of defiant mantra?

Yeah—that’s the joke. It’s a club song by a person who would never get into the club. That song is funny because it ended up being produced in such a hyper specific style, even though it came from a place of simplicity. I was trying to write melodies that would function on their own without the assistance of any chord progression or things. I wrote about 90% of the melody and lyrics to that song walking around outside with nothing else going on. I like the idea of melody that sounds just natural when you’re humming it, walking through the woods. When you go that route, the lyrics that tend to fall into place have a certain melancholy. I was listening to a ton of Shane MacGowan at the time. Someone had sent me “Fairytale of New York,” which I had somehow never heard before—because a song on a Lorelei album reminded them of it. And then I went down this Shane MacGowan rabbit hole and thought to myself, ‘fuck, I have not written a real song in my life.” I've written joke songs, essentially, and he was someone who's tapping into the essence of the human condition that's relevant in rock music but also feels ancient. Basically, I listened to Shane MacGowan, had a panic attack, and realized I needed to write a good song.

I saw MJ Lenderman perform a cover of that song a few weeks ago. I know you two are friends. He has an interesting downtempo take, which I thought was great. What were your initial reactions to his version?

I heard him do it before he was playing it live and thought it was really cool. He’s got that voice—that very specific vocal delivery that can just communicate emotion. There are lots of really good singers who don't have that. There are lots of really bad singers who are great at singing, because they do have that. And he’s a great singer. I’d never really written a song with the idea of someone else covering so fundamentally in mind, before writing “Dancing in the Club.”

So, you wrote that song with the idea that it could specifically be covered by MJ Lenderman?

Not specifically by him, but I did have the idea that it could be covered. You want to write a song that other people want to sing—artistically, that's the dream. To have one of your songs leak through into the canon of songs that people play when they think of songs to play. That’s one half of the dream. The other half of it is like—it’d be really nice to have a cash cow.

Next stop, Sabrina Carpenter is covering that one.

Exactly. Or some country dude. And that's why it was really cool hearing Jake [MJ Lenderman] play it, because he showed it could be transposed into that country sound. For me, the main mark of a certain kind of song that is really good, is how it translates into being done in different styles. 

My favorite song of last year was “Where’s Your Love Now.” It reminds me of a modern day Beach Boys song and it feels to me equally about finding power in sobriety and emotional independence, outside of a relationship. Was that a ripped-from-the-headlines experience? Is that song autobiographical?

Yeah, I would say that song, at least more than anything else, was an autobiographical one. Most of the songs on the album are, it's just a question of how many layers removed they are. Sometimes it works better to push it a little further away, like “Angel’s Eye”, which kind of has its own narrative, or “Perfect Hand”, which just devolves into wordplay. But “Where’s Your Love Now” was definitely one that I wanted to remove as many of those layers as possible. I wasn't trying to write any particular kind of thing, but that’s just what happens sometimes. A lot of these songs went from not existing to being fully recorded and largely mixed in two or three hours. Nothing good ever comes from sitting down and trying to write a song. In my experience, it just has to happen organically, and then you have to latch on to that moment.

Again—you have such a wide range of sounds and approaches and genres on the album and there seem to be countless influences. One of the few songs that I view as having a direct forebear is “Two Legs,” which has this very Elliott Smith, “XO” feel to it. Were you listening to him at the time of making this album? Did he have an impact on the sound of that particular song at least?

He's someone who’s deeply ingrained in my songwriting. When I was about 15, someone gave me a copy of “Figure 8” on CD, and that blew my mind. His sense of arrangements on the “XO” and “Figure 8” period is something that has always stuck with me. I mean, with Elliott Smith, you can't be a guy who double tracks your softly sung vocals without that being the first thing that everyone thinks about. I knew what I was doing, but it actually started off as more of a Ram/Wings thing really, which sort of overlaps with Elliott Smith. In terms of production style, I was definitely thinking of Paul McCartney primarily, but I doubt I could have made it through that whole thing without at least thinking of Elliott Smith a few times. 

I read that you view This is Lorelei as kind of a low-priority side project. Are you surprised at all that the album has resonated the way that it has?

It’s been a shocker. Because Lorelei predates Water From Your Eyes by five years or so. It’s the oldest running thing of mine, and so I'm very used to it not being something that elicits any sort of response, which I was always fine with, because it was kind of my secret thing. But I do feel like it turned into a more serious project at some point, slowly over the last five years. I'm really glad that it's happening on this album, as opposed to some of the others. 

You’ve always been super prolific—have you been working on follow-up This is Lorelei songs to this album? What about Water From Your Eyes? 

I'm kind of constantly flipping back and forth. I'm working on writing new Lorelei stuff now and the next Water From Your Eyes album is done—it’s in the bag. The idea is to alternate years with those projects, at least as long as I can keep up with it. 

So, Water From Your Eyes will be touring and putting out an album out this year?

Yeah—it’s going to come out later this year—it'll be announced soon. There’s a bunch of stuff planned for this year for Water From Your Eyes and I would love for another Lorelei album to come out next year, in 2026.

Are you excited to be coming back to San Francisco? Water from Your Eyes has played here plenty. But I think this will be the first This is Lorelei appearance?

This is going to be the first time that Lorelei has played any further west than Chicago, unless I'm forgetting something. I'm really excited to be playing in San Francisco. It’s funny how different touring can feel with different bands. I never really realized that until this last Lorelei tour. I'm so used to going on tour as Water From Your Eyes, which has a very specific headspace to be in every night. And it's just different touring with Lorelei. But I think we are all excited to be coming out to California now.

Show Details:
This is Lorelei with Starcleaner Reunion
Where: Café Du Nord
When: 8 p.m., Thursday, April 3
Tickets: $27, available here.

Broken Dreams Club Interview: Stuart Murdoch

Photo Credit: Stuart Murdoch

As the chief songwriter for beloved Glaswegian indie-pop group Belle and Sebastian, Stuart Murdoch has created some of the most memorable musical characters of the past 30 years.

Whether illustrating a teenager’s love for equines, speculating on the sexual orientation of a professional baseball player, documenting a trove of irreverent sinners, lamenting the lost potential of brilliant artists or cataloging despondent loners, Murdoch has long demonstrated a singular capacity for world-building in four-minute time frames.

So, it should come as no surprise that he’s written his first novel. 

Largely autobiographical the novel, “Nobody’s Empire,” captures the protagonist, Stephen, as he battles myalgic encephalomyelitis (commonly referred to as chronic fatigue syndrome), an ailment that Murdoch has contended with for more than 30 years. In the novel–named after a 2019 Belle and Sebastian song–Stephen befriends another isolated teen, Kira, before eventually setting off for a transformative trip to California–events that mirror Murdoch’s life.  

On Monday, February 10 at The Chapel, Murdoch will sit down with Slumberland Records founder Mike Schulman and local artist Nommi Alouf to discuss “Nobody’s Empire.” 

Prior to that, Murdoch spoke with Broken Dreams Club about the challenges of his illness, visiting San Francisco, transitioning into novel writing and what’s next for him and his band. 

For starters—how is this book tour going? How has the experience been so far?

It’s working out great—I'm really enjoying it. I mean that in a practical sense. I'm a bit under the weather at the moment, so that's the kind of downside. But then the upside is everything else. It feels like I’m just travelling around, carrying a suitcase full of stories with And with the format so far, it’s almost like an American football game, with four quarters. I start with doing readings and we play some music clips. Then we do the interview with the host and I then play some songs acoustically. And then we finish with a Q and A. It's a nice variety for an evening—everything moves quite smoothly. 

You’ve spent the last 30 years on tour, for the most part. What’s it like to be travelling now, by yourself? With no band and only a book in hand—as you say just carrying a suitcase full of stories? 

I’ve always been quite reticent since the band started to actually get out my guitar, and do something by myself, because, you know—I fought so hard to get my band, I don’t want to be without them. But I think this has been a perfect situation for me–to kind of combine a few things by playing music and doing the reading. It’s almost like, if you have that tool in your arsenal, then why not use it? If I was just supporting a book, and I was just going to visit book shops, it wouldn't be so much fun, and you also wouldn’t get that many people showing up. It’s been nice to mix things up a bit.

I don’t think anyone is in the least bit surprised that you’ve written a book, given your novelistic approach to your songwriting. From the very beginning, Belle and Sebastian introduced such rich, fully developed characters. You go all the way back to the “State I’m In,” which is probably the first Belle and Sebastian song many people heard, and there is this central character who feels so real and multi-dimensional. Where did that approach come from—was it the result of being an avid reader?

I think there's such a huge difference—it’s almost like a through-the-looking-glass thing. There are two sides of this endeavor—one of being a consumer of artistic things, and the other to be a producer. They’re so separate and different. Because I can remember trying to write songs in this era when I was consuming a lot of music and reading books all the time, and I just couldn't do it. It wasn’t until I went through this illness and disaster, and years of being in this kind of vacuum that I actually found my own voice. And there’s not many things I set out to do. It just kind of comes out that way, and that's genuine. We were talking about this last night in Toronto, and I think it all comes back to the illness. It all comes back to my life stopping when I was 20. I had these four, five, six years of very little happening. And instead of being part of the world, I had to just be the observer. And at that point, I started to romanticize about the people that I was observing. I could be sitting in a laundry, and somebody would come in, put their wash in, and leave, and I would write a song about them. There was so much that I extrapolated. I wondered what their life was like, because I was standing still. So, I put those thoughts and movements into my songs.

Back to “Nobody’s Empire.” You started writing this book in 2019, right? What prompted the decision to write a novel?

Yeah, it was a kind of lazy decision. I wanted to do something creative that wasn't out of the realm of the band. I thought I might do a comic novel, and it actually started like that. I was supplying pages to a friend of mine, Graham, who was illustrating them, but once I got going, it sort of quickly outstripped the pace that he could write. And I thought, I'm ‘I'm just going to keep going with this and see where it goes.’

How daunting was this task? You’ve been writing almost mini-novels your whole life in the forms of your songs—did they prepare you at all for this endeavor?

I think I was probably just naturally building up to this. I remember Stuart [David] from the band in the early days, he used to write novels, and I thought that was amazing. It was like the moon to me that somebody could just sit down and fill page upon page of thoughts and observations. But again, I'm quite lazy. I don't try too hard. It’s great if you're going to start somewhere, to do what I’m doing. Like “This Side of Paradise,” or “A Portrait of an Artist As a Young Man,” just this side-step from what actually happened. It wasn't this huge amount of invention.

And the novel shares the same title as the 2019 Belle and Sebastian song that opened “Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance,” which captures the struggles you’ve had with chronic fatigue syndrome. When you wrote that song, did you have any idea that you could expand it into a novel?

Not at all, actually. Even that song surprised me at the time, because although I've been writing inadvertently about ME for years, that was the first time that I'd really sort of captured it in the era and the time when it happened. It was actually years later when I did actually write about those initial experiences. I was doing some live readings of some of the passages before the book was fully written, and somebody afterwards on Facebook commented, ‘oh, you should call your book “Nobody’s Empire.”’ I immediately realized that that would be the obvious title.

You’ve been very candid about your struggles with chronic fatigue syndrome. When you were first diagnosed, what were those early periods like? I can imagine that must have been incredibly frustrating, since so little was known about the disease at the time.

It was a psychological nightmare. It's like the rug is pulled right out from under you and your life is stopped completely. And nobody can tell you what's going on. There is no road map to recovery–not even a road map to being ill. I remember going to see a specialist, and he was very nice and said, ‘look, we don't know much about this. You know more about this than we do.’ And then he sent me home, and that was it.

The main character in the book, Stephen, obviously shares so many similarities with you. Was there ever any thought of writing a memoir instead of a novel?

Again, I really didn’t think too much about it. The moment that I wrote the first page, it set the tone. I gave Stephen a name, and everything just felt natural to me. It wasn't really until I finished the book and my agent was like, ‘what is this? Is this autofiction?’ I didn't even know what that was. He said, ‘well, it's not a straight memoir,’ and I said, well, it can be whatever you want it to be. But in the end, I'm happy that they called it fiction.

In the book, Stephen meets Carrie, who is also dealing with health issues. I think people can make all sorts of assumptions about who Carrie might represent—is she based in real life? Or was that character completely made up?

She is very much based on my best friend, Kira. Kira is on the cover of “If You’re Feeling Sinister,” and she's my best friend to this day. The friendship is the absolute core of the book—I meet her on page two and that’s where the magic is. Everything just flows from there—that friendship. And there is a little bit of, ‘well, If they're so close, why aren’t they a couple?’ It’s definitely the central relationship in the book.

With a subject matter that hewed so closely to your life, did it feel liberating to write “Nobody’s Empire?” Or was it scary to be that open?

I don't find anything scary. When you've been through something like ME and you're still going through it, and you've had really bad depression and all that stuff, creativity and being open is actually almost a relief—it’s like the counterpoint. It's a consolation to be so open about this. It's almost like an excuse to be completely, well—not necessarily brave, but just out there. Kira is the same way—where it's sort of bred in us—this inborn sort of stubbornness and openness, because we know what life is. Life is too short, and we've wasted so much time being ill—so we’re just going to tell it how it is. Since the start of Belle and Sebastian, that's always been my driving thing. I have no qualms about it. I will never turn away from getting up on a stage because the alternative is darkness and that is no fun at all.

A central part of the novel and a central part of your life story is this journey to California. You’ve talked in the past about how transformative that experience was for you, and I know that you lived in San Francisco for a short while. Why was that moment in your life so important for you?

Well, it was an accidental thing to be honest. It could have been Melbourne, or it could have been Nice. In the book—and what happened in the book did kind of happen to us—the boys just picked a place to get away for the winter and be warm in a Mediterranean climate. In real life, we actually picked San Diego because we heard it had the best weather all around. But the thing is— the plane landed in San Francisco first. We were there for a few days before we continued our journey. San Francisco was really the first city outside of Glasgow I spent any time in. It got its hooks into me really quickly. And so we went down to San Diego, and that's written about in the book, but I was always getting pulled back to the Bay. San Francisco was such a contrast to Glasgow and there was an obvious liberation happening there. We started to literally feel better because of the weather and there was a lot of baggage that was lifted there. I know it’s a cliché, but when you come to a new city, especially one California, you can be whoever the hell you want to be. In Glasgow, there were a lot of people that still wanted you to stay in your place. They would look down their nose at you if you wanted to try and be a songwriter. It really did all happen in California for us.

And, like every novelist, you have to determine when the story ends. How did that process work for you? 

I remember the advice that a friend of mine, Barry Mendel, gave me. He was the producer in a movie I made called “God Help The Girl.” When I was writing that movie, he said, ‘whatever you do, before you start writing, just decide where it starts and where it stops.’ And so, I used that for the book. I did at least know that much when I set out to write it. I knew it started when I met with Kira, and I knew it was going to finish two years later, just when I came back from the trip. That at least was set in stone. But actually, it's funny, because the American part originally was only meant to be about the last 20 percent of the book. It contrasts nicely with the first half—where we really don't go out of our postcode area. Suddenly, the two of us are in California and more starts to happen. And I ended up writing much more than I thought I would about that trip.

Going back to San Francisco—you’ll be returning here on Monday, to speak at the Chapel. Are your experiences coming back to San Francisco always special moments for you? Anything you’re particularly looking forward to seeing here?

I just let it happen. Sometimes, when you're on tour, you don't get a chance to do all the things you want to do, but in San Francisco it tends to be different. There’s a character called Jeannie in the book, and I get to hang with the real Jeannie in San Francisco, which is great. She's remained a firm friend for years. Actually, the last time I was there, in May, we rolled up to Oakland, and I was, as usual, really sick. I got off the bus and I went for acupuncture, and it was like a Saturday morning, and the center said they could take me, but I would have to be in a class where I was part of a demonstration. I went into this kind of lecture theater, and they put me on a table. And there were like, 50 Chinese students learning acupuncture, and I was the subject. There was this very good healing vibe about, and they were all smiling and happy to be there. I was ‘like, San Francisco, you've done it again.’ I got out of the acupuncture and I thought I should really go back to the bus and rest, but then I just said ‘fuck it, I'm getting on the BART’, and I ended up in Mission Dolores Park. I made it there and met my friend Heather, and we just caught up and it was such an amazing day.

You’ll be speaking with Mike Schulman from Slumberland Records and Nommi Alouf. You mentioned these book talks as almost “American football games with four quarters.” What can we expect on Monday?

The fun thing about every talk so far—and I've done this in the UK as well—is that every night, it's a different host. Every day goes in a different direction. We don't know where it's going to go, and I'm really happy about that. This will be the first time that there's two hosts and Nommi is kind of in the book–she’s represented by this character called Sharon, who is a DJ that Stephen runs into. But I think it will be that kind of slightly misty thing, where it’s kind of hard to tell what will happen.

Looking ahead—any other novels in your future? Or was this a one-time endeavor?

I love storytelling and I guess music is what I'm best at. But I'm always just waiting for the next thing. My radar is on all the time. I think on the whole, I'll probably do less Belle and Sebastian stuff in the next 10 or so years, and try to do slightly different creative endeavors. I'm not sure if I'll end up writing another book, but I always feel very creative, and I know that time is short.

Belle and Sebastian played a bunch of shows last year, but nothing is scheduled for 2025. Do you all have any live dates in the offing? 

We’re going to wait until 2026 and we're going to some bigger shows. Usually, we start recording music right after we're done touring, but I wanted a little break. I wanted a chance to maybe think about doing something else. Those guys are all doing their own thing, I mean, Stevie [Jackson] is recording just now, Chris [Geddes] and David [McGowan] are writing together, Sarah [Martin] is writing. Everybody's doing their own thing.

What about new music? You all have been incredibly prolific over your career. “Late Developers” came out in 2023—can we expect new music soon?

Yeah--there won't be an album, which is what I was kind of hinting at. I personally want to put my creativity into a different project. I've been writing different music. I'm interested in writing for choirs, actually—more like a kind of spiritual music, this kind of gospel, churchy type music. This is just early days, and I really don't know which choir I'm going to do it for, but sometimes you just gotta swing the bat the other way and see what happens.

Show Details:
Stuart Murdoch “Nobody’s Empire Book Tour”
Where: The Chapel
When: 7:30 p.m., Monday, February 10
Tickets: $30, available here. 

Broken Dreams Club Interview: Tim Heidecker

Photo Credit: Chantal Anderson

As the creator of programs like “Tom Goes to the Mayor” and “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” Tim Heidecker—more so than any other artist—helped establish the absurdist, surrealist comedy stylings that are ubiquitous today. His influences can be found in everything from television commercials to programs like “The Eric Andre Show” to the work of comics like Nathan Fielder, Julio Torres, John Early and Kate Berlant.

For the past decade, however, Heidecker has also cultivated a second career as a plainspoken and earnest musician, embracing the sounds of 70s’ Laurel Canyon singer-songwriters as well as troubadours like Randy Newman and Elvis Costello. Last October, Heidecker released “Slipping Away,” his latest collection of folk-inflected rock songs. 

On February 22, Heidecker and his Very Good Band will perform at Bimbo’s 365 Club. Prior to that show, Broken Dreams Club spoke with Heidecker about the inspirations for his new album, among other topics.

Your latest tour kicks off next week here at Bimbos’ here in San Francisco. How are you all preparing for this latest batch of shows?

We’re going to rehearse this week, but the San Francisco show is going to be interesting, because we’re not doing a warm-up show first in Los Angeles, like we normally do. We’re just jumping into the deep end. It’s a whole new set, and we’re going to try some new things that I haven't done before on the road, so it's going to be a scary first show for me. I'm sure we'll learn some things. It'll be interesting to get audience feedback from the Bay Area. I mean, it will probably make for a really fun, unique show. We might make some mistakes, but I always kind of like seeing that as an audience member—that human element of the performance.

You’ve been pretty prolific touring these past few years. You’re never taking more than a few months off between shows. How important is it for you to maintain this live music schedule, and how are you able to fit this in with all your endeavors?

Once I jumped in and put this band together it started this cycle, where my first tour led to a record with the band, and then some opportunities to play some more behind that. America is so big and there's so many places to play. You can do one route one year, and then a totally different route the next year. You get to go away and not always play the same places. So, we were able to do that for a couple years and then we were able to go to Europe. You have to plan these tours so far in advance—that’s sort of the scary thing. I think we started planning this tour a year ago, and so it's just been sitting on my calendar. It’s like this slow moving train coming my way. But I'm excited to play with this band, and to get out there and check in with the people of this country, and play these songs from the record. Maybe play some songs that I haven't played live before, and do some new stand-up comedy I’m excited about.

Obviously, you first made your name for yourself through your comedy, but you’ve been playing music for most of your life as well, right? What was your introduction to music, and have you been playing pretty much consistently since you first started? I mean, music was always an integral part of Tim and Eric…

I mean, in high school, I was a big classic rock fan, big music fan. My cousin played guitar, and some of his friends played in, like, hardcore bands and punk bands. And it was just the thing to do. I wasn't a sports guy. I was kind of into theater and music, before comedy. Really, I loved comedy too, but music was something you could actually do with your friends. You could make videos and stuff with a camcorder, but you really couldn't do much more than that with comedy. But you could put a band together, and you could rent a four track tape machine, and you could play shows. So that's what I did, and that's what most of my friends  did. And so, I kind of always maintained that part of my life. And I think in the past 10 years, it's been something I’ve taken a little more seriously. I find a lot of satisfaction in songwriting and trying to make the best records possible. 

“Slipping Away” is your latest collection of slice-of-life California folk that is composed of really pretty songs, and even more, it’s just a disarmingly earnest album. Tim and Eric basically set the template for the absurdist, ironic comedy that is absolutely ubiquitous everywhere now, but you’ve said in recent interviews how it took you a while to kind of emerge from that cocoon of irony. What did it take for you to arrive as this songwriter who is really devoid of that irony—whose songs are candid and honest and plainspoken?

I think it has a little bit to do with boredom with where I was at creatively. I'm very antsy and always looking for the next thing to do, and never really satisfied with where I am. And those kinds of tendencies have always been with me. I think I sensed that I was stuck in a creative place. So, it seemed kind of natural to me that, after 10 years of sort of very deep irony and disassociation with feelings, that the most interesting or most severe turn I could make would be to be very open and honest. And it's also just better for the music. My thing is to try to hold all these things together, or hold all these things at once, and it's sort of project based. If I want to make a record, I want that record to feel as well conceived and earnest and moving as possible. And if I'm making a season of On Cinema, I want it to be the funniest, craziest, sickest, stupidest thing you've ever seen. I just want the thing that I'm making to be the as pure a version of that thing as possible.

One of the things that makes “Slipping Away” so enjoyable is that your fears and insecurities are so damn relatable. For someone who has been so insanely prolific over the years, to hear a song like “Well’s Running Dry” is almost shocking in its plaintiveness. I would never imagine that someone like you struggles with creative blocks, but it also is a reminder that you’re a human like the rest of us. Is that something you confront a lot—finding moments where inspiration just doesn’t arrive? 

I go through periods of dry spells and this mix of maybe feeling uninspired or not very creative. And I also go through periods, where there are things that I want to do, but nobody else wants me to, or that there's no market for. You know—shows don't get picked up or movies don't happen or whatever. I have plenty of that—there is plenty of rejection in my life—me and all the people I work with. And then I have feelings of procrastination, or feeling not motivated to finish something that I started—just like everyone else. I do have nice periods of productivity where things happen. But in between all those, I wallow in that kind misery of not being always clear about what to do next. 

In that same vein, you’re very humble and grounded on this album. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that you’re a titanic figure to so many people like me—the absolute pinnacle figure of creativity and comedy—yet on “Dad of the Year,” you seem to be coming to terms that your original dreams and aspirations might not ever come true. That seems almost a little unduly harsh, but also a reminder that we all face self-doubt. How do you cope with those feelings and are there moments when you can kind of indulgently reflect and realize that you have had a profound impact on a lot of people?

I appreciate that. The record came out really good, and I'm really happy with it and the feedback I get is always nice. People seem to really like it—but it's not like it was on any best-of list, you know what I mean? That’s sort of my career. I think that there is real appreciation. I hear a lot of nice stuff, but I think from the beginning, even with Tim and Eric stuff, there was always this sort of feeling of not being treated the way some other people are treated. We don’t maybe get the recognition that I think we deserve. And that that might not be your perspective, but it is mine. So, when I'm playing “Dad of the Year,” I do feel that way sometimes. 

The New York Times did a really nice story about you recently!

For sure. And not to get into the weeds of the media, but there is the kind of media where it’s like a profile or an interview or conversation, and those are always really nice. But then there's this other editorial side, that is maybe a little snobby or a little dismissive of me. And that’s probably because of the insecurity of them asking, ‘is this a joke?’ ‘Is he being sincere?’ I think there is a feeling of not really knowing. Like—where am I coming from, even though I'm very explicit about my intent.

One of the joys of your album is the commonplace things that make you happy. “Bottom of the 8th” is just a sweet song about enjoying a baseball game with your daughter. When you were in that moment, were you thinking, ‘man this would make for a good song?”

That one definitely was written on the road. It was a combination of things. My daughter is getting to the age where we can go and do things together, and it's really fun. And she loves baseball. I love baseball. We go to the games, and we can hang out like a couple of pals. You know, it's really a beautiful thing. I was literally in North Carolina in the summertime, down the street from where the Durham Bulls play. It was all swirling in my head. I sat at the piano and just started playing a song about taking my daughter to a baseball game. And it's probably because I was missing my family on the road. But yeah, it just felt like one of those songs where I was surprised it hadn't been written yet.

And then there is “Trippin (Slippin)” which is about as close as you get to the hedonistic rock n roll lifestyle. What was that experience like—eating some mushroom in a random hotel, right?

I had dabbled in that stuff years and years ago in high school, like probably a lot of suburban Gen Xers, and really hadn't returned to it in a long time. I felt very paranoid. I'm not a drug guy, and I don't do that kind of stuff very much. And I was nervous. But there is this sort of a mushroom renaissance happening the past few years and we had finished most of the tour. We had like two more shows left. We had a day off. We were in the desert, and I really had grown very close to the band and really enjoyed them, and we just got along so well. And we had a bag of mushrooms from a good, trusted source, and I thought, ‘I'll take a little bit’, you know, and that was the key. The dosage is so important. When I was 17 years old, I’d probably take, like, a whole bag of the stuff and then feel like the world was coming to an end. You find that little dose that makes you feel like things are cool and you can sit by the pool and just relax. So, I wrote that song coming from that earnest place of like, an embarrassingly honest drug song.

You have so many great contemporary musicians on Office Hours, and you’ve toured with indie rock heroes like Snail Mail and Waxahatchee. And your pals with Weyes Blood and the Lemon Twigs and Jonathan Rado. Still, a lot of your music seems drawn from that Laurel Canyon rock and Randy Newman kind of singer-songwriter era—are there any newer musicians who inspired or influenced this album?

I mean, first of all, all those people you mentioned seem to also draw from that era and that's probably why we all get along pretty well. We have the same musical language or whatever. But yeah, we had this guy, Christian Lee Hutson, on the show recently and he talked about This Is Lorelei. Do you know that guy?

Yeah—that album is one of my absolute favorites of 2024. 

Yeah. I don't listen to a lot of new music, but when I find something like that, I just listen to it all the time. I listen to it every day. And so that hopefully will turn me on to some other things. I've been listening to my own music trying to get ready for this tour. And I've been going back to early Dylan because I ended up really liking “A Complete Unknown,”—

which I was very surprised about. I thought it was going to be, you know, not good, but I ended up really liking it. I'm such a big Dylan fan. Yeah, so I started going back and listening to those early records that I hadn't listened to in a while, and kind of marveling at what just unbelievable well of creativity that was happening when he was so young.

Looking ahead to this show at Bimbo’s—are you excited to be coming back to San Francisco? Are you familiar with the venue at all?

Yeah—I'm excited. I've never been there. The past few times I've been to San Francisco, we played at the Palace of Fine Arts, which is not like my favorite room. Just kind of felt a little more like you'd see an opera there or something. But we’re happy to be playing in San Francisco. Ellie [Athayde], our bass player, is excited because her parents are from the Bay Area. She said her parents used to go to Bimbo’s when they were teenagers. 

And you’ve got Kyle Mooney opening! That’s amazing! What can we expect there? Will you be joining him at all? I know you mentioned to expect a little comedy alongside your music…

Yeah—Kyle's opening, and then I've been doing this routine. It's not my stand up character, but I've been doing this routine in LA that's really fun a little bit more for me. I haven't really talked about it very much, but I've been collecting YouTube comments and Instagram comments and Facebook comments and I've curated some conversations that I think are interesting to discuss. I've done that with a little slide show. I want to dedicate a good 20 minutes of the show to me goofing around to break up some of the music. A side of me that you probably see more on Office Hours. I'm still putting that together, but I'm excited—it will be a multimedia thing.

Is Kyle going to join for that? Or is he going to be doing his own thing?

We’ll probably overlap a little bit. It will be a new thing for this tour—picking up different, different openers along the way. We’ll have Neil Hamburger and DJ Douggpound. I’ve got this great community—not only of the audience, but of people like Neil and Doug. I’d rather just try to keep it in my little clique, and I think the audience is gonna love it.

And to transition just for a moment to some of your other endeavors. The latest season of On Cinema debuted on Christmas and it’s as epic as ever. Newman Heidecker seems to have a nice new sheen to his face.  When you and Gregg first started this, did you have any inkling at all that it would still be going 15 years later and not only that, but it would also evolve into this all-encompassing cinematic universe?

We had no idea. I mean, we started small, but it did occur to us early on that they're always going to put out movies, so we could always do this—there's always something to talk about. And once we got season four or five, we realized that you could tell some pretty interesting stories without spending a lot of money, because you can just talk about things. You don't have to really see them happen. It’s more like radio play or something. And so, it’s kind of compounded on itself, and the stories got more complicated and more involved. But at the core, there was always this grounding foundation of two guys, who hate each other, talking about movies. And every year, I think ‘does this still work?’ ‘Is this still funny?’ Even when we're shooting it, there's this uncertainty about it, but then the cuts start coming in, and we're like, ‘yep, there it is.’ I feel as happy about it as I've ever felt. And there isn't really any reason to stop, now that we're doing this paid model, the subscription model, which has been working. I'm always looking for it to expand, and we're working on getting an app and getting it so you can watch it on your TV and stuff like that. It's like running this small business that is not always fun, but it's great that we can keep doing it. Gregg still makes me laugh. I still make myself laugh.

Yeah, the last few episodes were as funny as any On Cinema episode ever. One of the things I think must be enjoyable for you is the evolution of the Tim Heidecker character. There’s a new look every season. I can imagine it’s fun to just embrace that ridiculous nature of the character. 

Sometimes the story drives that, and sometimes it’s just where I am at in my life. And yeah, We have a text thread that throws looks and ideas back and forth. I don’t think we thought this new look was going to be that great at first. And then when we started doing the hair, we all just started laughing. And everyone's running around, like, ‘you gotta come in and look at this’. Eric [Notarnicola], our director, when he first saw me, came by and was just like, ‘Oh my god. Wow.’ I mean, we still crack ourselves up like that.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask if you have any future creative projects planned with Eric. Anything in the works there?

Yeah, we are writing something that we've been planning to write for a while. We’re going to start before I go on tour, and then hopefully be writing when I get back. And it's a movie idea that is still in the early stages. But hopefully that will find its way into your lives sometime this year or next year.

Anything I missed here? Any other upcoming projects you’re working on at the moment? I’m finally catching up on What We Do in The Shadows and you’re great in that…

At this point, my life is just touring, and then Office Hours and On Cinema—and a little acting. So that's it, right now. I'm not looking to do more than that.

Show Details: 
Tim Heidecker and the Very Good Band with Kyle Mooney, DJ Douggpound and a special command performance from Tim “no more bullshit” Heidecker
Where: Bimbo’s 365 Club 
When: 8 p.m., Wednesday, January 22 
Tickets: $48.88, available here.

Broken Dreams Club Interview: Christopher Owens

Photo Credit: Sandy Kim

As the lead singer and founding member of Girls, Christopher Owens left a lasting, indelible impact on San Francisco, the place he called home for more than 15 years. 

Following the dissolution of Girls, the untimely death of bandmate Chet “JR” White, and a series of other personal tragedies, Owens relocated from San Francisco to New York. Today, Owens releases his first solo album in nine years, the gorgeously emotive “I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair.”  A stunning achievement, the new collection of songs draw upon all the candor and self-reflection that made Girls so great, while also charting an intriguing new path forward for Owens.

Broken Dreams Club spoke with Owens–whose EP with Girls provides the name for this website–about leaving San Francisco, overcoming countless setbacks, finding new love and being continually inspired by the joy of making music.

“I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair,” your first solo album in nine years, and your first music of any kind in seven years, comes out today. What’s going through your mind right now?

It's been very exciting. I've been waiting for so long to be able to release this music. Seeing the positive reactions so far has been really nice. I'm just glad it's finally here. 

I’m so excited to talk about that new album, but first I want to go over all the huge life changes that have happened since we last talked. First and foremost, you moved from San Francisco to New York City. As much as I would have liked you to stay here, it seemed like the move really rejuvenated you. What’s it been like living in NYC?

I've been to New York a lot over the years, but I've never lived here. It’s a nice new experience. I'm definitely still kind of isolated from my friend group or whatever, but if you're going to do that, I guess New York's a good place, because there's so much to do and check out. It's never really boring. I don't know if I'll stay forever, but it's a good experience to try out. I’m experiencing actual seasons, which is a whole different thing for me. Time passes in a different way, which makes you feel differently about life.

You’ve talked a lot about how the San Francisco that you knew and loved had changed so much over the years. Was it still hard to say goodbye, even after all the difficulties you experienced in the last few years here?

It will always be sad to me that I even had to leave. I wish I didn't have to, but I knew it was the best thing for me to do at that point. I probably spent several years there just trying to make it happen, when I probably should have made a move. I gave it a good shot. I'll probably always miss it. It was the longest place I've ever lived in my life. 

One of your biggest life developments is that you’re now happily married. From what I understand it was quite the whirlwind romance. You all met at one of your shows in LA, right?

Yeah, it was a pretty big surprise the way it went down. It was definitely not something I was thinking was going to happen, but it felt right, and I didn't see any reason why I shouldn't do it. I kind of thought to myself, ‘maybe this is how it is for everybody.’ I always thought there'd be something more planned out, but it kind of makes sense that it didn't work out that way for me. But it’s been really cool. She's from LA, so we go back there a lot, which has been interesting. I never really had a connection to LA before. But now that I do, I realize that a lot of my friends are there, and it’s one of the last places where it seems like everybody still goes out together. It feels like the old days in San Francisco. 

You’ve experienced so much hardship in the past several years—homelessness, a very serious motorcycle accident, the dissolution of your relationship and the death of your closest friend. Not to go all inspirational movie on you, but what allowed you to persevere through that?

I honestly don’t know. When I think about it, all together in hindsight, it's obviously been a lot. And I do have moments where I don't know how I really even got through that. If somebody would have told me, it’s gonna take seven years for you to be able to put out another record. I would have been like, ‘what?’ I would not have known how to accept that. But all you can really do is put one foot in front of the other and keep going. There were definitely moments where I had to sort of ask myself if I was going to try to do something else, but, fortunately I never really got to that point. I always wanted to be playing music and have friends in my life and just keep living how I want to live. I never wanted to be a scenester or anything, but it’s really as simple as that. And, when you do go through that much, you can maybe question how you’re living your life or spending your time. I think it’s maybe a necessary thing for people to experience once in a while—to be tested like that. Hopefully, it's not super extreme, like what I went through, but I think you need to be pushed, so you ask yourself, ‘is this what I really want?’ And then you can take stock of everything, and for me, it was reassuring to see what was important to me. All that I went through, makes everything feel so meaningful now.

Today actually marks the four-year anniversary of JR’s death. How often is he in your thoughts? What are your fondest memories of him? 

He’s been in my mind every day since he passed. Most of my memories are of all the things that we managed to do together. Just the way we sort of stumbled through all these experiences and had to rely on each other so much to get through it all. When big decisions would come up, we were really all we had. When it came to signing big contracts or making huge decisions or touring for the first time—we never thought we'd be actually able to do that stuff. He was a great person to experience all that with. Maybe there were moments where touring was harder for him and maybe sometimes it would be harder for me to let go of ideas on how I wanted songs to be done, but at the end of the day, we never really had any disagreements that lasted longer than a day. 

He was a lot funnier than people realized because he kind of came across as serious. People always thought he was older than me, but in many ways, he was more of a kind than I was—he just had that hilarious sense of humor. He loved cooking. He loved to make food on the road. His family was fun to be around. He was a special person.

When you’re making music now, do you often think of him? How he might approach or contribute to the songs you’re creating?

Yeah—that’s always gonna happen. All my experiences of doing music for those first four years involved him. So, I’ll always be wondering what he would do differently, or if he would like my choices or whatever.

Speaking of these new songs. They’re amazing. When we talked, you mentioned that you had a ton of unreleased material from your time with Curls. Were these songs from those sessions? Or were these all written and recorded more recently?

Yeah–most of these songs are from those sessions. I redid some things, but that's mainly what it was. I took a few songs out and switched them with other things. And then there was a lot of stuff we just didn't record, but most of the songs from this album are from that time period.

The first single you released, “Think About Heaven,” this really gorgeous, breezy, airy song. Of course, it seems like every time you write anything remotely related to religion, people bring up your background growing up in Children of God. You’ve been very candid about your experiences there, and you said that your connection with religion continues to evolve. What’s your current relationship like?

As far as organized religion, I still don't really have any relationship with it. You know, I'm aware of it. I find it interesting, as a human phenomenon, just because I know so much about it. But it really isn't anything I'm into. For me religion has always been more interesting at a personal level. My relationship with the Bible was unplanned for the most part—it was kind of unchosen from the beginning. But recently, I can't help but think about it and read it and it’s probably always going to be a big part of my life. I don’t think the point of the whole thing was to be an organized religion, anyway. Jesus was actually about disrupting that. He was telling people that that their relationship to God was inside of themselves and not inside of some temple. So that's really more the way that I view it. I think there's a reason that it has persisted. No matter how logical and no matter how much our understanding of the world grows, there is always will be that personal relationship.

Shifting gears a little bit--“This is My Guitar” is another great song. I remember when we were speaking a few years ago, and you told me that busking outside in San Francisco—in the wind and the cold—helped make you a much better guitar player. This song reminds me of that—when everything else goes away, you’ll always have your music. How important has music been as this grounding force for you?

It's very important. At a time when there was no real reason to hang on to this and it was probably more logical for me to focus on something else, music became even more important to me. When I had to choose what to do with myself during the pandemic–when I was living in my car and when I really didn't have anyone familiar around me anymore, my reaction was just to play more music and turn to it more. I didn't think about it as a choice—it was this subconscious thing and I only realized afterwards that that's what I was doing. I was really glad, ultimately, because it was reassuring to know that I was doing something valuable with myself. It’s also an amazing feeling when you can actually get better at something. When you're 40 years old and having this same rewarding experience you felt as a teenager of getting better at the guitar. And I've been getting way more into playing keyboards lately and exploring new instruments. I'm just so grateful that I have something like this in my life that I can do.

“No Good” feels like it could absolutely be a Girls outtake, sonically. Whereas “I Think About Heaven” has this upbeat, positive outlook on life, “No Good” takes the opposite tack. What’s the backstory with that song? Is it about anything specific?

It was the first song that I wrote after the break up of my last relationship. It took a while to actually write something like that. I really was only writing instrumental guitar music for a long time. I think it was all too much to address for a while. It took a year until I finally wrote that song and a few other ones. That was kind of me waving the white flag on that relationship. It was about reflecting on the crazy experience that was really jolting. It wasn’t just a disappointing breakup—it was one of those things that really fucked my life up. Something like that shakes your whole idea of yourself and makes you question everything. It definitely made me feel pretty lousy. It’s funny because people say they’ve never heard me write like that. Even though it might sound like a Girls song, what I’m saying on that song is very different.

So, “Album” recently celebrated 15 years since its release. What does that anniversary mean to you? What are your memories of making that record? 

It's always shocking when one of those anniversaries happens. Time seems to pass in a funny way. That record was such a crazy experience. We spent, maybe two years, making it, which is the only record I've ever spent that much time working on. In the beginning, it was just JR and I recording in the bedroom, and the goal was just to get another song done to put on our Myspace page. And then to watch that reaction over those first six months– to see how much people responded to those songs was pretty amazing. It wasn’t until late 2008, after a year of working on those songs and playing those first shows, that we finally started talking to labels about actually making a record. When we knew there was actually going to be an album made, we spent the next year recording the rest of the songs and mixing them up in Seattle at a studio there. It was a huge learning experience. I’d never done any kind of band recording or singing. I played guitar in Holy Shit for a few years, but that was a totally different experience. That first record is sort of the birth of me finding out what I was going to do with myself.

I hope that you appreciate how much you mean to music fans in San Francisco. I think there is a generation of folks like me, whose experience living in the city is so closely tied with the music of Girls. Are you able to reflect on that at all?

I think I’m aware of that, and it means so much to me. To be able to have any sort of impact, especially in a city like San Francisco, is just an amazing feeling. It’s not like doing it in Dallas—San Francisco is this special, sophisticated city and people have taste there. When I left Amarillo, Texas, San Francisco was to me, the most European and beautiful city, and my number one place to go to in America. Coming there as a young adult and being able to have an experience like that and to maybe leave that kind of impression is priceless for me. It gives me a little bit of pride in myself—hopefully not too much—but it makes me feel good. And I couldn't think of anywhere else I would have liked to have made that impression. 

Last question: do you have plans to come back to San Francisco on tour?

Yeah—the first round of shows isn't really a tour, per se, but I’ll definitely be in San Francisco as part of that.[Note, after this interview, Owens announced a set of shows that includes a performance at The Chapel on December 16.]  I’m definitely coming there first, and then I'm sure I’ll be there again when we have an actual tour. I can’t wait to play in San Francisco, actually.

“I Wanna Run Barefoot Through Your Hair” is out now on True Panther Records. Buy the album here.

Broken Dreams Club Interview: Cindy

No band has done more to draw attention to San Francisco’s nascent “fog pop” scene than Cindy, the brainchild of singer-songwriter Karina Gill. Characterized by hushed vocals, unhurried, ambling tempos and proudly lo-fi recording techniques, Cindy’s songs evoke that vivid, dusky moment when one first wakes up, still half-immersed in a dream. 

After receiving critical acclaim for the band’s previous two full-length albums, Cindy is set to release a new EP, “Swan Lake,” through Tough Love Records on October 4. The band will also embark on a major UK/European tour later this year.

Broken Dreams Club recently caught up with Gill to discuss the upcoming tour, Cindy’s new EP and some endearing moments that helped inspire that record. 

So…it’s been another memorable year for the band. You toured the US with Horsegirl, are putting out this new EP and have another big UK/EU jaunt lined up later this year. What’s been your impression so far of the year? Must be exciting times?

The Horsegirl tour was really fun. I feel really lucky that Ground Control Touring invited us for that. I had never really toured the US, other than some small tours in Southern California. To be able to go to the East Coast and the Midwest and cities like Toronto was not something that I would have ever imagined doing. We were presented with a great opportunity to be brought along on a really nice tour that was already set up. All we had to do was basically show up and play. Horsegirl are such lovely people, and I really loved seeing them play every night. I got a sneak preview of music they're working on, so it was really this great experience. And my current bandmates are just a dream to travel with, so it was great. Other than it being crazy hot. I mean, I'm from the East Coast, so I understand. But, you know, my California bandmates were a little shocked. 

That must have been a pretty fascinating bill with Horsegirl—they’re kind of known for their outsized noise, and well, that’s not exactly Cindy’s forte.

Cindy usually plays with bands that are quite different from us, and I generally prefer that. The shows I've played where there was an effort to book us with somebody who is like us end up feeling confusing to me. But for the Horsegirl shows, the crowds were really receptive. There were some people who were there to see us, which is, you know, wonderful and amazing, and I think Horsegirl fans are known for being open minded. Everyone was extremely receptive and warm and friendly. It was really nice. 

You’ve discussed before how you started this musical endeavor a little later in life, watching closely while others pursued this field. When you decided to go into this thing, did you anticipate you’d be where you are today, as this really admired, respected and established musical act?

Definitely not. A lot of opportunities have sort of come to me, and I feel very lucky for that, honestly. I definitely never had ambitions around music, aside from, maybe the ambition to record a song as well as I can or whatever. I think that's pretty common around here with Bay Area bands. There are some exceptions, definitely, but most of the bands I know are mainly interested in developing aesthetically and creatively within our community. There's less of an outward looking feeling. And I certainly felt right at home with that. As you said, I haven't been playing music all my life—this is a relatively recent thing for me. It wasn't like I was, 14 years old, dreaming of touring. But now that it’s happened, I feel super lucky and grateful that I get to do this.

So, the new album—“Swan Lake”—obviously has a very famous title, but this has nothing to do with Russian Ballet, correct? What’s the significance of this name to you?

The song Swan Lake on the EP is referring to man-made lake in a park in Birmingham, England. Last time Cindy was over there, we all went for this walk, and it was full of conversations, and it was just this kind of magical hour or so. We ended up at this lake, and there were all these swan paddle boats in the lake, and they almost all seemed oversized. It was kind of bizarre looking. So the title refers to that place and that experience. But it is also meant to ring bells of that ballet. Even if you don't know that the title is a ballet,  it conjures something from the past—it sounds familiar. I think in my songs, I do that a lot--add these kinds of ringing bells that maybe are not entirely transparent, but have associations that add dimensions to the things we say, the things we hear. 

Now were these songs culled from the “Why Not Now” sessions, or were these written with an EP in mind?

They were all written after “Why Not Now.” I started recording them with just the idea of doing a 7”, because I like them—I think they're cool. But, apparently, record labels do not like 7” records. So I was thinking of doing a 7”, or maybe two, but then once the idea of doing a tour started evolving, it made more sense to record more songs that were new, so we could put together something that was a little bit more substantial of an offering. It went from being maybe I'll do a 7”just for fun, to ‘okay, well, I have, you know, like eight songs and I can find six of them are ready to be recorded.’ They all ended up being recorded in different ways. Oli [Lipton], my bandmate, has a great recording setup in his home. So, we did some there. We recorded a little with Robby Joseph, who helped us in the past. So yeah, they were all kind of put together in different manners. The “Swan Lake” song I recorded at home on a four -track, as you can probably hear.

You mentioned how there's not a whole lot of love for 7” records, but EPS are kind of a lost art as well. There is such a great history of bands with amazing EPs, though. What’s your relationship with EPs? And why was it important for you to release these songs in this format?

I don't know that I have a specific relationship with EPs, per se, but I definitely tend toward less is more. I don't need to hear a set that’s an hour and 20 minutes long or anything. And Cindy's MO has always been about what is happening now—about what is available. That’s not because I have any principled stand on this, it’s simply because it's how it works for me. I’ve never put together an album with this agenda in mind that I have to have 10 songs. That’s never been the case. It's always been—I have songs, they work together, here's a record., I think it's kind of just a reflection of what was real for us. I had a pool of songs that I could then bring to my bandmates and at the time. I had made demos of a lot of them, and they were just kind of ready to go somewhere. I tend to record things and release them pretty swiftly. That has its drawbacks and sometimes I wish I weren't like that, but that's how I am. I just want to do what's happening now and then do the next thing. 

Yeah, and you talked about workshopping these demos. I know there is deep love for demo recordings for certain San Francisco bands (Sad Eyed Beatniks and April Magazine, for example.) There is an appreciation for embracing the imperfections of recordings and in many ways, I associate EPs with some of those demo recordings. Do you share that same kind of appreciation for demos?

Well, I think for me, it's just kind of what I do. I suppose I could adopt another way, but it has no appeal for me at all. I wish I were somebody who could make things more perfect. I wish I was somebody who could, you know, work on something until it has a less vulnerable form. But I'm just not that person. I also think people would be surprised by some of the recordings that you think are effortless. Those other Bay Area albums you mentioned that are similar to us—they are certainly not effortless and nor is Cindy. There is a lot of labor that goes into our work. It may be a different kind of labor—one that is not about the polish, but more about the source. And it’s not this decided-upon route. It's just an expression of what works for me, and I think likewise for the other bands you mentioned. There's this desire to keep moving and not kind of be outward facing and product oriented. We want something that is kind of invulnerable. Something that’s so shiny and bright you can't look at it straight. 

You said that six of you took part in the recording sessions. The Cindy band lineup has gone through some evolutions over the years, but you seemed to have settled on a pretty steady core at this moment, right?

Well, the lineup right now is definitely amazing—I feel so lucky. The live lineup is made up of folks who are able to tour. So there Oli Lipton and Will Smith, both from Now and then Staizsh Rodrigues from Children Maybe Later, who is also doing another project now called Peace Frog. So the four of us have become a band in the sense that we tour, and you know, we've made a set that works for us. But the Cindy sound that’s on the recording also has Stanley Martinez, and Mike Ramos. Again, I’m so lucky that I live in this place where they're all these amazing musicians. And even if someone can't be a touring member because they have other obligations or whatever, you know, they are still willing to contribute to a recording. “Why Not Now?” was full of people from the community who contributed. 

Some of these songs on “Swan Lake” have pretty interesting origin stories. The opening track, “All Weekend” for instance, traces back to an inspiring elevator ride, right? What was the exact genesis and inspiration for that song?

Yeah, a couple years ago now, I was on an elevator in the Main Branch Public Library here in San Francisco, and there was another person on the elevator. It was just the two of us and they were having some non-consensus reality experience. I found myself kind of enraptured by how totally enraptured they were. They were having some experience that was totally immersive, and I was just there to get a book. There was something about that person, and that experience that stuck with me over years.

Every Cindy album seems to contain a stirring instrumental track and this EP is no different. “The Birds in Birmingham Park” is this gorgeous, ambling stroll of the song. What attracts you to these songs with no words?

Most of my songs are really lyric-driven and part of me wishes that I could get away from that, but it is kind of what I have to offer, largely. But I do love instrumental music. That song is very much a mood. I think all my songs strive to capture something like a mood that has its own sort of logic, its own emotional logic. And that song is also about walking through that park in Birmingham. I mean, it's not about anything specific, but that song kind of comes, in some sense, from that experience. I did actually write lyrics for it originally, but they seemed extraneous, so I shifted away from that, and just had this kind of feeling and progression and structure. And then Oli was able to elaborate it so beautifully on guitar. It just became something where the music was able to communicate the mood far better than the words could. 

The title track is a nice wrinkle for the album, with its spoken word delivery. How did you arrive at that kind of arrangement?

That was a really spontaneous demo. I’ve done similar things. There's a song on “Free Advice” that's basically spoken. It feels kind of funny, I suppose, and makes me slightly squeamish, but sometimes that's just what it is. And for that particular song, I was thinking about different kinds of associative thinking. And it just felt like there was no place for a melody. I just had that structure and tone and I recorded it really fast. Usually, I think through songs a bit more before I record them, but that was just kind of spontaneous. 

You have this really big tour coming up in Europe and the UK coming up. This will be your first trip to Europe, but your second trip to the UK. Are you all pretty excited for that?

The UK tour was a year and a half ago, and that was my first international tour. I feel really privileged to get to go back to the UK, and, you know, and play at venues where they want to have us. We get to return to London and Glasgow and Manchester, so that's cool. And then Europe—I mean, I'm really looking forward to it. I'm going to places I've never been. I’ve never been to Berlin or Amsterdam or Rotterdam, Geneva, all these places. So, it's exciting. And Ruben [Myles Tyghe], who runs Outsider Artists, just does a great job of making the tour make sense—making it financially viable and practical and doable for a band at our level where we're not obviously playing massive venues. I'm really looking forward to it. I mean, I'm slightly terrified, but that's normal. 

And are there plans for a possible headlining Cindy tour domestically? 

Nothing planned. We get back mid-November, so probably for this year, that's going to be it. But we’ve gotten invited to different parts of the US. And I think once I recover from this upcoming tour, I might have the bandwidth to think about maybe an East Coast tour. We’ve also had some really lovely invitations from the South. I don't know that I could book a tour in the US on my own and keep my sanity, but I could definitely try. 

I know the EP is coming out in a couple of weeks, but do you have plans on writing a full length album as well? 

I mean, these songs keep showing up. And I do like recording, especially when it can be at someone's home or a really comfortable place, like Robby’s studio. So yeah, I would totally embark on another collection if I had the songs that made sense to do that. But no immediate plans at the moment. 

Other updates worth highlighting? Album news, announcements? Anything happening with Flowertown?

Nothing concrete. Mike and I are good friends and Flowertown is always sort of there in the background. He just went to Japan as Tony J and both of us are in Sad-Eyed Beatniks, which has been really fun. I don't know that Flowertown has any concrete plans, but when those songs are being written, they tend to be like a faucet. So, if we start again, we’ll probably get some songs recorded quickly. I’ll keep you posted on that. 

“Swan Lake” is out Friday on Tough Love Records.

Broken Dreams Club Interview: Built to Spill

Photo credit: Alex Hecht

Legendary indie rockers Built to Spill will be playing two shows at the Fillmore on Friday, September 27 and Saturday, 28. To mark the 30th anniversary of their beloved sophomore release, “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love,” the Boise band will play that album in its entirety each night.

Broken Dreams Club caught up with Built to Spill founder and sole permanent member Doug Martsch prior to the band’s shows to talk about his love-hate relationship with “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love,” performing in San Francisco and what’s next for the group:

You’ve been playing these “There’s Nothing Wrong with Love” shows for more than a month now. What’s that been like—have fans been pretty excited to hear this album live in its entirety?

It’s been really fun. It took a little while to get rolling with it. I don't know if we had as much rehearsal time as I wanted, but it’s starting to feel pretty good after a few weeks. It’s been cool having a cello player out here for this run. 

So, you have a cello player on this tour? What is the tour lineup right now? Is it Melanie [Radford] and Teresa [Esguerra ] and the cello player? 

Yeah, exactly. Mel and T and John McMahon on cello. It’s been awesome.

You’ve been approaching these shows with an interesting setlist—starting with a song not off “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love” before launching into the full album. Any particular reason for that approach?

Yeah—that’s another example of where I wish that we had had a little more rehearsal time to figure out things. We played maybe a couple weeks of shows starting with “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love,” and then decided to mix it up a bit. I really like that it’s a way to warm up the show a little bit, and then you jump into the record. It’s a little more exciting. I wish we had done that from the beginning. 

You’ve been so consistent with touring. I think you've played more than 250 shows over the past two years. How important is it to maintain that steady, live presence? 

I think for me, it's just my job and what I do. That’s how I think of it. There’s something to playing a lot so that you're comfortable and playing at your best. We took eight months off and I feel like it took a little bit for us to get going again. I’m not sure how bands do it that take long hiatuses or just drop out of music, and then come back a few years later. I guess everyone has their own way of performing and their own relationship to live music, but for me, it would be really hard to pick it all up again after not doing it for a long time. I don't know—it just seems the more I play, the more comfortable I am. 

Even after all these years, huh?

For sure, definitely. I'm not a real natural music person. It takes a lot of time for me to get into the zone. 

Ok—let’s talk about “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love.” Last time I interviewed you, you weren’t exactly praiseworthy of this album. Have you softened a bit on it, since you’ve started playing it live in full every night?

I like the songs, for the most part. I just really don't like the recording. The guitars don't sound very good. I didn't play very well back then. I could just only play guitar enough to be serviceable. With my singing, it’s the same thing. There are a lot of things about it that I just feel like they are not very well done. I've improved a lot—at least in my own mind—over the years. But the songs are fun to play now. We do them our own way. The guitar sounds different now, and I sing differently, and I prefer it this way. I understand, too, how it's just a record of that time period. I'm not ashamed of it, but I'm not very psyched about it, either.

What was it like revisiting these songs? Some you’ve been playing live for years, but others you haven’t played much at all.

Well, I guess my thing is that the words and the chords and the melodies are all there, but the way that they're performed is different. I have a different way of singing, a different way of playing guitar, than I did back then. I changed a lot from doing it live over the years as a result of finding my voice and getting more comfortable with the guitar. I try and strip away parts of the songs that I don’t think are essential, but I’m not trying to be extreme like a Bob Dylan thing or something. Sometimes bands make a really cool improvement on their songs and their live shows, and I hope that's what we're doing when we do our old songs. Hopefully we're making them better, and not worse. 

Not only did you record this album 30 years ago, but it certainly feels like the most earnest, almost whimsical Built to Spill album. Was it particularly nostalgic going back to these songs?

Well, there's really not much nostalgia. I don't think about how I felt at the time or what was going on in my brain, really. It’s more about figuring out how I can make it sound good today. And I don't really think about whether or not it transports anyone back. That's not important to me. What matters is making music that sounds good for me right now. 

It also feels like the most autobiographical Built to Spill album. Songs like “Twin Falls,” and “Car” and “Distopian Dream Girl” seem to offer this glimpse into your life that we don’t often get to see. Do you consider this your most personal Built to Spill album?

I mean, it's not too autobiographical. I don't even have a stepfather, that was someone else. “Twin Falls” is not about anyone real, either. So, it’s not necessarily autobiographical, but maybe personal, maybe a little more earnest. I don’t remember the feeling that I had when we made the record too much, but I remember thinking that it was nice to make just a really sweet pop record, with lots of melodies and without any distortion. There's no reverb or anything. It sounds like a home recording at a time when everything was all about grunge and this loud rock stuff. I definitely felt like we were just doing something totally weird. 

So, you didn't really have a stepdad who looked like David Bowie? 

Nope. And “Car” is just a bunch of random words. Not much of it is really about me or anyone. I think there's a few songs that are about my wife Karena. “Reasons” is this pretty love song about her, and “Cleo” is about our kid being in the womb. “Israel’s Song” is a song that Karena wrote all the lyrics to, and it's about a kid with autism that she worked with a little bit. So it's kind of all over the place. “Stab” is not really about anything. I think it's just kind of nonsense words that sound serious.

And so, you mentioned, “Stab,” which is one of the jammier songs on the album, but  “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love” is generally known as the Built to Spill “pop” album. After writing this album, did you feel kind of freed up to explore the more vast, exploratory song structures you specialize in with “Perfect From Now On?”

Yeah, I don't know if it was that specifically. I feel like each record is a little bit of a reaction to what was before. There seems to be a little bit of that pattern. The first record, “Ultimate Alternative Wavers”, was more kind of jammed out, with a lot of improvising and experimental music and song structures. And so, “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love” was really concise. And then “Perfect From Now On” is more of a reaction to that conciseness. “Perfect From Now On” was also about a bit of a fear of a record label trying to do something commercial with us, trying to sort of throw a monkey wrench into the things a little bit. My fear was being over-promoted. I mean, now I wish, I wish we'd done it, but I just did not want that at the time. The whole radio version of music didn't ever make much sense to me. The stuff that got played on the radio, it didn't really sound good to me. 

I love “Hidden Track ” from “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love.” I’m sad I never got to the hear the full version of that song that starts “a man needs loving…” Where did that idea come from, to do that, like, fake preview of the next album?

I don't even remember. It was just this silly idea, and we were able to spend enough time to pull it off all right. Maybe I'll have AI do a full album from that one track. 

“There’s Nothing Wrong With Love” obviously resonates with so many people. There are a ton of Built to Spill fans who consider this their favorite album. Why do you think it’s still special to so many people after all these years?

I have no idea. I remember when we made it, I was really proud of it and really happy with it. It was the first time that I'd spent that much time in the studio—that I finished a record and didn’t really feel like I had to go back and work on it some more. I felt so satisfied with the whole process and working with Phil [Ek] and the band and the collection of songs and the way it all fit together—it just felt like a big accomplishment, But listening back to it now, I wish I still felt that way. I really can't stress enough how disappointed I was to go back and listen to it over and over to prepare for this tour. I just, I don't really like it very much. “Perfect From Now On” or “Keep It Like A Secret”— those records have some similar things that I don’t like, but they’ve grown on me a little bit more. “There’s Nothing Wrong With Love,” for some reason—I just don’t connect. I know I’m not promoting this very much! I mean, I do remember when the record came out and people in Boise were hearing about it and stuff. It was kind of the first record that I made that had any kind of audience beyond my friends and family. Not many people listened to that first Built to Spill record—maybe a handful of people knew about it. So, all of a sudden, this one came out, and we were on the cover of The Rocket, which was really big in the Northwest, so that was super exciting. There was this one guy who worked at The Record Exchange—this older guy who was really cool—and I remember he didn't like the album. I couldn’t understand why at the time. But I definitely can see now how someone could be annoyed by the album.

You’re playing two shows at the Fillmore. Over the years, you’ve played in plenty of San Francisco venues. Where does the Fillmore rank among those sites? It’s a pretty special place.

Yeah, it might be my favorite place, anywhere. I love it so much. I loved playing at Slim’s, but no Fillmore is the best.

And you’ve never gone too long without visiting San Francisco. Do you feel like you always get a nice reaction when you come here?

For sure. It’s one of a handful of most important places to us. 

You released “When the Wind Forgets Your Name” in 2022 on Sub Pop, which is just the perfect label for Built to Spill. Are you all working on material for a new album? Any updates on when we could expect that release?

No, nothing at all. I haven't really written a song in a long time, and even with “When The Wind Forgets Your Name”—a lot of that stuff was mostly pretty old. I don't know. I haven't been pushing myself or anything. I assume I'll write some more songs one day, but maybe that phase is over for me. But getting back to AI actually, I just downloaded an AI app and made a birthday song for my brother, and it was so incredible and weird. So, maybe it’s over for me. 

Final question: what’s your favorite song from “There’s Nothing Wrong with Love?”

If I had to choose, I mean, my favorite one to play, at least, is probably “Some.” Just to noodle around with that chord progression that I think is so pretty. It’s kind of become my favorite one on this tour to play. It's a little too low to sing, but over the course of these few weeks, I feel like I have I settled into where I'm supposed to sing it where my voice feels right. “Big Dipper” is also a nice one. “Reasons” is one of my favorites. “Car,” is an interesting song, but I also kind of hate it.

Show Details:
Built to Spill with Quasi
When: 8 p.m., Friday, September 27 and Saturday, September 28
Where: The Fillmore
Tickets: $53, available here.

Broken Dreams Club Interview: Google Earth

Photo Credit: Maria Vanderslice

For decades, John Vanderslice was the impish cult hero of the San Francisco music scene. A prolific singer-songwriter, Vanderslice also operated Tiny Telephone Recording, a beloved studio in the Mission District.

Feeling pressure from the increasingly untenable cost-of-living in San Francisco, Vanderslice closed Tiny Telephone in 2020 and decamped to Los Angeles, although the satellite Tiny Telephone studio in Oakland stayed open. Vanderslice will soon be on the move again, as he and his wife Maria are set to relocate to the Netherlands next May. 

Before he leaves, Vanderslice will continue work on his latest project, Google Earth, an electronica-infused outfit he’s formed with longtime collaborator James Riotto (a highly accomplished producer and musician in his own right.) The duo’s debut album, “Street View,” will be coming out on August 9, and on Tuesday, the group released their second single from that record, “JJolts.”

Broken Dreams Club spoke with Vanderslice and Riotto about their longtime partnership, recording “Street View,” MDMA, and the importance of chair placement in studios.

So…take me back to the beginning. You two met in 2009 in San Francisco at Tiny Telephone, right? What was that first meeting like? Kind of instant chemistry?

John Vanderslice (JV): Yeah, it was just instant chemistry. I thought, ‘oh, this guy is such a baller.’ I just knew it. He was kind of intimidating, for some reason. I remember he kind  of spoke to me really self-assured. And he's confident and I'm nervous. And I talk too much. He just seemed really comfortable in his own skin. He did an arrangement of "They Won't Let Me Run" from “Cellar Door,” and it was almost violent and overwhelming. So, we became friends. Then he started working at the studio. He started interning at the studio, or working at the studio and then immediately I was like, ‘let’s go on tour, let's work together.’ And we started making a bunch of records together. Now we just keep collaborating.

James— I think shortly after that initial meeting, John told you that one of your albums was recorded “terribly”—but that actually inspired you to explore production more? Is that true, and how did that kind of brutal honesty encourage you to explore the field more?

James Riotto (JR):I was touring with John in his band, and I was working on this album with my band and I was really excited about it. And I gave it to John, and I said, ‘hey, tell me what you think of this,’ and he was kind of radio silent. And then after a while, I pressed the issue. And he said, ‘I didn't say anything at first because honestly, I think it sounds terrible.’ And it really hurt. You know, when he said it, it was hard. But then I walked away from it, and I was, I know that John really respects me a lot. Because you know, he's hired me to be in his band. I had just arranged some of his music for this orchestra. And I know he's very effusive. I knew John thought a lot about me and thought highly of me. So, then it was the only reason he would have said that, is if it was true. And I kind of know this sounds insane, but at that point, I'd never really thought about music in the way it was recorded. I only really thought about it as, you set up some microphones and you play music. That's a very jazz way of thinking. And I kind of remember putting on one of his records and thinking, it really does sound so much better. I had no idea what he was doing, but it just sounded way better. And I wanted to know how to do that.

You’ve been friends for 15 years now. What prompted this latest collaboration?

JR: Well, we've made, I don't know, three records together before. And that was always John's music, but it was very collaborative. I mean, I think the last couple we sort of just wrote together.

JV: They were very collaborative, equally collaborative.

JR: And I think we were pushing each other into weirder territory with electronic music. And honestly, we were getting into these MDMA hangs, where we would listen to this weird electronic abstract music, and it just sounded so new and exciting to us. We both got into making that sort of experimental music. We just got together to jam and experiment with these particular boxes that we had made by this company Elektron. And I don't think we really were intending on making an album, that just sort of happened really organically out of these hangs, where we would get together and jam and experiment with these very particular idiosyncratic instruments.

And you chose the moniker Google Earth for the band name. That might be the least searchable name possible. Was that part of the appeal? Kind of a commentary on the digital nomadic life we all live now? The idea that if something can’t be Googled, it might as well not exist?

JV: I think that we basically just boofed coming up with a bad name, especially me and then my poor wife had given us a list of like, 100 names, and she's still irritated that we picked Google Earth. And Jamie and I were kind of poring over these names and it's so hard to come up with a name. As an adult man, I can't believe I've been doing this for like 20 years, and I still can’t come up with a stupid band name.

JR: I remember that I was working with this band at my studio, and I had this list that Maria [John's wife] had made, and we were having lunch. And I started talking about how it's hard to come up with a band name and they were just said, ‘okay, let's do this. You say a band name. And on the count of three, we all just rate it from one to 10.’ And I would say a band name and just everyone would give it a one. So, then we started talking about how you have to have a weird misspelling to make it searchable. Then we talked about how there's this counter movement to basically make it impossible to search, so I said Google Earth, and I told John about this discussion, and he was like, ‘that’s actually good,’ and it took me to this place, where I really liked it too. It’s an anti-band name.

Again, Street View as the album title is much in that same vein. Are you almost like fucking with people at this point?

JV: Well, that was my wife, Maria. She is always kind of filling in the gaps with Jamie and me. She was just, you know, the ‘record really should be called the “Street View”’. We were both kind of like, ‘god damn, she’s right.’

JR: We also had this photo from when we were at the studio, mixing it in Oakland. Our friend Danielle took this photo of us that was outside the studio, and so it felt like “Street View” really worked with us. 

John—you’ve been steering into this electronica musical direction for years now. We’ve talked in the past how you could never picture yourself returning to that singer-songwriter milieu you once inhabited. It just feels so stale. Do you ever see yourself growing tired in that same way of this digital world?

Well, it's a good question. You know, it's funny making two records right now. Jamie and I are making another Google Earth record right now. And then I've been trying for the past year and a half to finish this new solo record and, you know, I have to finish it because we're packing up all of the music gear for honestly, about nine months. Once the container gets here, everything's packed up and it's gone, and the container takes six months to get to the Netherlands. So, I can't imagine not finishing this record, but I’m really struggling to make a solo record that’s a blended version of normal songs and electronic stuff and it's really not very good. Honestly, it's not very good. I'm not being funny. I'm not being coy—I listened to it this morning. I felt I was making some headway. And I listened to every song I have in this folder and it’s really not believable music except for two songs I think are really cool. And so now I'm in this weird panic mode of like, "I’ve got to figure out how to do this. I do think it is a little bit hard for me to go back to writing songs on acoustic guitar. I think it's hard just simply because it's really tough. I don't think that's in invalid. I mean, I was listening to the Flying Burrito Brothers yesterday and T. Rex. I like those songs. I think that I’m just burned out personally and I become very impatient writing lyrics and that's just 100 percent laziness. I just think that electronic music is this endless kind of maze that you can go into. And Jamie and I talk about this all the time. Because it can be endless, it’s a lot of fun to find the reason why you're doing it—and that's often the hardest part. That's why Jamie and me collaborating was so easy because we could find that path forward together. If you're alone, you're simply like, ‘why in the fuck am I making these bleeps and bloops, you know?’

Jamie—you come from a jazz background. You talked about it a little bit in the beginning, but how did you kind of start to embrace these more electronica sounds? 

JV: Drugs!

JR: I mean, honestly, that was a big part of it, but also, some of my favorite music that I started with, they're entry points into it. It's funny, when you get into jazz, there is sort of a trajectory. You're not all of a sudden listening to the Art Ensemble of Chicago. It would sound cacophonous and fucking nuts. So, you start with, Duke Ellington and Oscar Peterson and then Sonny Rollins and it sounds cool and then you listen to Miles Davis and, you know, there's a progression that gets you into the more abstract stuff. And I think the same sort of thing happens with electronic music where you listen to Radiohead, and then you realize that Thom Yorke is always listening to Overmono and you know, Squarepusher and stuff like that. And then you listen to that, and you realize that those guys are into Autechre. And suddenly, you are listening to music that would have been unimaginable to you a couple of years ago. And I guess another thing is that working in a recording studio. Now, the actual sonics of something are really important to me and electronic music pushes that in a way that very few things do. It’s also kind of—I know this sounds silly—but I've thought about a porn star and what kind of sex they'd be into. They can't just have vanilla sex. You know? And I just listen to music all the time, so at a certain point, the things that get me really excited are kind of a little weirder than they are with most people. Electronic music felt like it tapped into that, you know, weird thing.

Let’s talk about this new album. You’re both accomplished producers and mixers and engineers. What was it like working together as a duo on an album? How did you kind of split up those managerial duties for Street View?

JR: Well, I think we’ve worked on about 50 records together. I worked at John’s studio for about 12 years and basically learned everything I know from working at Tiny Telephone. So, it felt pretty normal.

JV: There’s one funny thing—Jamie is a much better engineer than I am, and he's a much better producer than I am. But because of the studio setup, where I’m basically blocking his access, I ended up engineering. It’s literally because my chair faces all the equipment. And it definitely doesn't sound as good as it would if Jamie were sitting in the chair. It's just that it’s my studio.

JR: Yeah—it’s set up for John for the way he works and he's the only one that needs it. So, I sit in the chair, and I'm like, ‘where the hell is everything’. So, it’s just easier for him to do it.

The first single is ‘something complicated.’ I know there isn’t an elaborate product roll out for this album, but was there a particular reason you all chose to release that song first? John—your voice sounds gorgeous and haunting, and the sonic textures are so rich and strange. Did it just feel like the right song to lead with?

JV: Well, Jamie did all the song structures and he also played everything, so he played the acoustic guitar and all the real stuff. I think that we just felt that that song had this very unusual unfolding structure that just keeps developing. I love how unbelievably long it is and the vocals are just one thing repeating with effects. You know, I think I only did whatever one line and then just affected it through, you know, plugins and other junk.

John—we’ve talked about this topic for some of your most recent work and James, as a jazz musician, I’m sure you’re familiar with this concept, but for music that feels formless and boundless like the tunes on “Street View”, how do you determine when one song ends and the other begins?

JR: As I said—and I truly know this sounds like a trope—but we were not trying to make a record at all. And the way that this happened feels kind of like magic. ‘something complicated’ as an example—we made that when we were hanging out, we made it in one day in about two hours. The basic part of that song was made because we had this idea to try a vocoder. We had never really worked with a vocoder and we're like, let's download this vocoder and see if it's cool. So, we made that song. And I'm not exaggerating that I never listened to it. We never talked about it again for maybe six or seven months. Yeah, it was just in a Google Drive folder. And, then it was only when I basically went on a hike and I got stoned and I downloaded some of the stuff in the Google Drive folder and I listened and I remember calling John and said ‘dude, there's actually really good stuff in here.’ And then we started working on stuff. And at that point, John took ‘something complicated’ and did all the vocal stuff and kind of did an arrangement of it because at the time it felt like almost an etude—just a means to practice. And then he did that and sent it to me and I was thinking, ‘holy shit, this is awesome, you know?’ And so, the whole process of finding songs and knowing where they started and ended just felt incredibly organic. I think that's very unique. 

For a lot of songs, you can see how your loves of jazz and electronica intersect. “JJolts”, for instance, has these huge blaring noises that sound like alien brass instruments. Was that the idea? To create digital sounds that recall analog instruments?

JR: I think that song was those nine Elektron boxes, and John and I both had a mono machine and a machine drum. And that was actually one of the last songs that we made for this record. It came together in about an hour. And John did this really interesting thing. The mono machine is split into six instruments within itself. And he externally played all of the instruments together with another keyboard which, I just didn't even know was possible. And so that weird melody thing in the middle was just John, playing the whole mono machine and it turned into this sort of quasi instrument that you've never heard before. 

But there are some real horns on the album, right? “Deep Sea Leaks”, for instance? 

JR: Yeah—our friend Nicole McCabe played some sax, alto sax and flute on a couple songs. 

JV: It's really amazing when a real instrument pops in, because this is a very claustrophobic, highly, digital landscape that has its own pleasures. But sometimes it's amazing just to get a little bit of air in there.

“Afterlife” really feels like such an appropriate coda for the album. It’s a departure from most of the album and feels like the most traditional “pop song,” although most don’t start with “I cut my wrists.” Was it important to end on that note? Did you always feel like that was the album closer?

JV: It felt like a good, sad funny closer. Those lyrics, which Maria wrote, I think are hilarious. I mean, they're so fun and weird.

The album comes out August 9. Any plans to tour? John you’ve really embraced—I guess unconventional touring approaches—living room shows, venues that aren’t traditional clubs—could that be something that works for Google Earth?

JV: I'm also cutting out the ticket buyers because no one is buying tickets. No, I mean, I don’t think the house shows could work. I think that probably every artist now out there, feels that everything has just shrunk down. It’s just not feasible for me to leave LA County. Jamie and I have been playing shows in LA and it's a total blast. We’re going to play at the end of the month, but other than that, we don’t have a ton of plans.

So that show at the end of the month—will that be a Google Earth show?

JV: Yeah—it’s at a really cool place called Healing Forces in Pasadena.

And will that be the first “Google Earth” show?

JR: We had one a few weeks ago at Permanent Records in LA. You know, what's interesting is that we set these rehearsals and we thought, ‘yeah, let's play music off this record.’ And then we got to John's house to rehearse and both of us agreed that there's no fucking way we're playing these songs.

Yeah—I was going to ask. How would a live show translate? There are so many moving parts on these songs—how would you approach recreating that sound in a live setting?

JV: We couldn’t play one song live.

JR: I mean, it would take us two months, working every day to figure out how to play these songs. And that’s sort of a goal. I think it would be amazing, and really impressive. But we just made a set of electronic music to improvise. And I think we're going to do a similar thing in a couple of weeks.

John—how are things at Tiny Telephone in Oakland? Are you still making frequent visits?

JV: I think that all that stuff is okay, but I think I'm definitely worried. We’re only half booked for August, and I just don't have the financial wiggle room for this. I just got super depressed this morning thinking about it. I've already removed myself from the studio and I don't live in the Bay Area. So, I'm definitely worried that it stays busy. And I'm not doing myself favors by leaving the country.

Yeah, I mean, does it survive the move to the Netherlands? 

JV: I hope so. I’m pretty far removed now. No one really knows that I even live in LA. But I think that in time, the position of the studio has just weakened. The Bay Area has weakened art-wise, and it hasn't had that replenishment yet, you know? I mean, I'm nervous, you know, but we'll see what happens. But Jamie's studio is very, very successful. 

Jamie—what projects are you working on at your studio?

JR: Well, in the last year I've worked with Jamie XX. Dave from Dirty Projectors was in here and we are starting a record on Monday with Local Natives. It’s fun, but I love the stuff I do with John. I’m excited about this project.

“Street View” comes out on August 9.