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Even In Dark Times, Bully's Alicia Bognanno Is Embracing The Light On 'SUGAREGG'

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The gravel-voiced singer, songwriter and guitarist opens up about heading home to Minnesota, leaning into a more positive mindset on her third album, writing music for Elisabeth Moss and more
Will Schube
GRAMMYs
Aug 22, 2020 - 4:00 am

Since Bully's inception, founder and sole full-time member Alicia Bognanno has felt expectations caving in around her. From critics and fans, Bognanno began to second-guess herself for fear of having to talk about a certain topic with the press or moving too far from the gnarled post-punk cliff she hurled herself off of on the band’s first two LPs, Feels Like and Losing. But after a mutual friend introduced Bognanno to director Alex Ross Perry, the Minnesota-born, Nashville-based songwriter earned the opportunity to write songs that Elisabeth Moss would sing in Perry's 2018 feature, Her Smell. At first, the prospect terrified her. She would think of audiences reacting to the film by saying, "the songs were the worst part of the movie," but the experience was ultimately cathartic and a way for Bognanno to relieve some of the pressure she had previously been so used to putting on herself.

The forced removal―a sort of ego death―of writing songs for someone else to sing influenced the way Bognanno approached her third Bully album, the brilliant, inimitable SUGAREGG. Normally the one to handle the recording and mixing of her records, Bognnano ceded control to John Congleton, who has worked with St. Vincent and The War on Drugs, among others. Bognanno also refused to let her vision of Bully's live show interfere with the writing and recording of the album. If she wanted three guitar parts on a song, f**k it, the live arrangement will be addressed when the tour begins. On the chorus of "Hours and Hours," Bognanno layers guitars higher than a Marshall stack.

Bognanno also worked hard to reframe her mindset, approaching typical Bully themes from a new perspective. Where she once would dwell on dysfunctional relationships and existential dread, she's instead infusing these topics with humor and a "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" approach. Bognanno attributes this shift to a better mindstate and a desire to bring positivity to a world so desperately needing it. SUGAREGG is Bognanno's attempt at giving her fans a much-needed respite from the onslaught of tragedies, injustices and miscarraige of responsibility from those meant to protect us. "It's our duty to stay alert and it’s really a privilege to fully ignore the news," she explains, before adding, "but it’s also worth stepping away, because everybody deserves a healthy break."

When did you begin plotting SUGAREGG?

I really started writing it three years ago towards the end of Losing’s touring cycle. The only songs that ended up staying that long or throughout that process were "Prism" and "Come Down," which changed quite a bit in the time that they stuck around. After I ended that tour cycle I started writing for Her Smell, the movie. When I completed that I really dove into pivoting my focus to solely the third record.

Did working on that film inform the way you’d go about making the new Bully album or was that simply just a good dividing point between the end of the tour and working on the new album?

It was a nice way to get back into the writing process and really just get going again. It was a great exercise and opportunity to just focus on writing in general, whether or not it was for Bully. I wouldn’t say that it influenced the record but it definitely helped me pick things up.

What's it like not writing entirely for yourself? That must be a radical shift from music that you make purely for the goal of expressing what you want to be expressing.

Honestly, I enjoyed it so much. I loved the process. I hadn't really done anything like that before and I just really loved it. It was the first opportunity I got to do anything like that for someone else. It was cool to get out of my comfort zone and read the script, trying to figure out what was going on with the scene and the character. It was great to have a more specific scenario outside of Bully that I was catering to while writing. I hope to do more of it.

Obviously giving the control of mixing and mastering to someone else is different, but with this new album, you relinquished that. What went into that decision to be more hands-off in that way with SUGAREGG?

I was in a much better spot mentally and I had a little more responsibility to take on with this record as far as playing goes because I wasn't playing with some of the guys that I had played on the last two records with. I wanted to focus on the music and not be sacrificing anything. On previous records, I was sacrificing a little bit of my engineering skills to focus on the music and a little bit of the music side to focus on engineering.

I was ready to focus 110 percent on the record and try and be open-minded about it and creative throughout the process. I have to map out the sessions to the T. I map out what microphones I’m going to use, what pre-amps I’m going to use, everything, before I go in. Not having to do any of that preparation took so much off my plate.

I wasn't in a place anymore where I felt like I had to prove myself to everybody else. I recorded my first album because I wanted to prove it to myself. With the second one, I was doing it to stay consistent with the story of Bully or whatever you want to call it.

With this one, I said to myself, "You know what? I know I can make a record. I don't need to show anybody else that I can do that, now I'm going to do something for me as a writer and as a musician and let go of the responsibility." I think it was the best decision I've ever made for a record. It was by far my most enjoyable experience.

Was taking a step back and removing some of the pressure from yourself intentional or was that something you had to work towards? How did that come about in terms of loosening your grip on the entire process?

It came from just knowing that I was going to have to do all the guitars and everything. Doing it on tape is a whole different beast. There's just so much running around involved that it’s hard to stay present. It involves all of this direction that can be really frustrating because you can’t really just press record and go, you have to constantly be on point or you’ll erase over something. The thought of having to do all that just seemed like a little bit of a nightmare. Nothing ever comes of me staying in my comfort zone. It has never really worked that way in my life. It was time to change it up.

Lyrically, some of the themes do mirror that approach as well because there’s an optimism, whereas on earlier Bully records similar themes would be presented from a less positive POV. Do you feel more optimistic in general?

I’m in a better place and I was able to have more fun with things and write about what seemed like unhealthy, dramatic relationships in a playful way. It was like I was able to detach a little more into a storytelling side that I hadn’t been in before I think since "Trying" came out. I was put in this box of being so literal and so direct and just so cut and dry. I feel like I can have more fun with things now and I can paint some scenarios in my head of things that would happen or maybe have a piece of it be off of something that did happen and kind of write the rest of that story that wasn't finished. That really comes across for me on songs like "Let You," "Where to Start," and "You" where it’s as if I were to put together the ups and downs in my life through the lens of a relationship.

How do you balance that with the state of the world as this record is coming out? It's easy to fall back into negativity now.

We pushed the release of this record back as far as we could because it just felt insensitive. It got to the point where we just couldn’t push it back anymore for a lot of reasons. There’s so much that goes into releasing a record. I was just so thankful that I wasn’t releasing something dark. I mean there are dark parts to everything I write but in an upbeat way. I was just so happy. "Where to Start" is a really fun song and it’s upbeat and I just remember thinking when I had to release it, "Thank f**king god I’m not releasing 'Trash' or something." I love that song but I’m just digging for outlets to look for a little light right now. Everything I'm consuming is negative. I’m really big on podcasts and there was a month where I couldn’t even listen to podcasts because everything is about f**king COVID. I'm glad that those singles have the potential for somebody to have a little light.

Your music has been coined as extremely personal in the past, so it’s nice to look at it from an angle of how it could benefit other people as well. Is that something that you’ve always prioritized, or is that a development with this record in particular in the way that the audience will receive the music?

There's nothing I love more than the connection that people who listen to Bully have with the songs. That’s the best thing to me, that’s what music is supposed to do for you: It’s supposed to make you feel a little bit less alone or give you the feeling that someone understands you. Going into the second record, though, I was really paranoid about how it would be perceived or being cool.

With this record, I wrote it for myself. I found myself kind of censoring my lyrics for what I did and didn’t want to talk about in the press after the fact. Like, "I’m really not writing what I want to write because I know I’m gonna be asked about that?" That’s awful, that’s the antithesis of how you should be creative. It’s a terrible idea. I sat down with this one and I didn't write it for anybody except myself. But I wrote it with the hope that people connect with it. At the end of the day, though, it’s for me.

What was it like returning to your home state for this record, going back to Minnesota? What was the prevailing feeling going back home to record it?

You’re actually the first person who’s asked me about that, which is surprising. It was so crazy. When Ryan, my manager, brought up the idea, I loved the idea of going back home to write because I don’t have any family anymore in Minnesota. I have no immediate family there. I have a few relatives there, and I have always wanted to go back but I never really had much of a reason to go back.

The idea of tracking a record there was just kind of a trip. The studio was perfect, it was outside, I could bring my dog, it was in the woods. It seemed very appropriate for the record. I thought I was hours away from Rosemount, Minnesota, where I grew up and I got to the studio and the studio manager was like, "You’re 20 minutes way from where you grew up." It was such a trip. It felt good. It was comforting in a way.

Were there any explicit differences you wanted to accomplish in making this album as opposed to any other Bully albums? Was there anything you wanted to do that you’d never done before?

I just really didn’t want to be concerned at all about what people think. When I first started writing, before anything really happened with Bully, I was 100 percent doing what I thought was cool, whether or not people were going to shit on it.

This was definitely the first time I felt like I was back in this place. On songs like "Hours and Hours" where there are so many noises and I have little voicemail clips here and there, it feels like it’s mine. I don’t want to say it was taken away from me but I did let go because I was just insecure because that the Bully stuff was public and people were actually listening.

With this one, I just wanted to make sure that I was really experimenting with what I wanted to for myself. I can definitely hear that in some of the songs. I don’t know if anyone else would be able to tell by listening to it, but when I listen back to it, I can hear a little bit of growth, which is always the goal...I think.

Indie-Pop Breakout Brye Opens Up About Her Hit "LEMONS" & Overcoming Anxiety & Disordered Eating

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PJ Harvey and John Parish perform at Primavera Sound Festival in 2016

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PJ Harvey's Lost Album: John Parish Discusses 1996 Gem 'Dance Hall At Louse Point'

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On the occasion of its recent reissue, we tracked down John Parish to talk about 'Dance Hall At Louse Point' and his earliest memories of meeting PJ Harvey as an ambitious teenager
Zach Schonfeld
GRAMMYs
Nov 10, 2020 - 10:19 am

PJ Harvey rarely looks back. The songwriter’s career has been defined by a restless sense of reinvention, each album cycle accompanied by a fresh persona—the blues roar of To Bring You My Love, or the glossy alt-rock romance of Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea—ready to be discarded at the next creative whim.

But 2020 has been an exception. Harvey has spent much of the year rolling out a vinyl reissue series of her back catalog, along with some accompanying demo albums. The latest vinyl reissue is something of an outlier: Dance Hall At Louse Point, Harvey’s abrasive 1996 collaboration with ex-bandmate John Parish. Harvey and Parish had first met in the late 1980s, when she joined his band Automatic Dlamini. In 1996, they combined Parish’s musical demos and Harvey’s lyrics on an album that would plunge the singer-songwriter into an avant-garde realm of disturbing monologues and banshee-wail vocals.

Credited to John Parish & Polly Jean Harvey, Dance Hall was largely overshadowed at the time by the immense success of To Bring You My Love. In retrospect, it’s an underrated gem and something of a lost album in Harvey’s catalog; as Harvey herself later acknowledged, "People don't even count that, yet that's the record I'm really proud of."

On the occasion of the album’s recent reissue, I tracked down John Parish to talk about the album’s unusual backstory and his earliest memories of meeting Harvey as an ambitious teenager. Since then, Parish has co-produced most of the singer’s solo albums, and in 2009, the pair reunited for a second collaborative record. This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.

At the time you made Dance Hall At Louse Point, you had already known Polly for a number of years. What was your first impression when you first met her in the '80s?

She was like 17 when I first met her. She was coming to see my band, Automatic Dlamini, whenever we played in her local area. We all got to chatting after a gig. A mutual friend introduced us, and then she gave me a couple of cassettes of some of her early songs she’d been writing. They were kind of like folk songs at that time, really. But her voice—it was already there. It was fully formed at that age.

I just thought, "That girl’s got a really good voice, I’m gonna see if she wants to join the band." So I just asked her. When she finished school, she came and joined the band and she played with us for the next three years, before she formed the first PJ Harvey trio.

Was there a moment when you first realized, "This person is extraordinarily talented, oh my God."

I mean, I obviously saw something that was really good there; otherwise I wouldn’t have asked her to join the band. You can’t possibly predict how somebody’s going to develop as an artist. I could see that she had the potential to be great. If I said, "Oh, I knew she was going to be a star"—obviously nobody can know those kinds of things.

Do you have any favorite memories of working with Polly in Automatic Dlamini?

She came in at a point when the original lineup was kind of falling apart. I was rebuilding a lineup, and she was an absolutely fundamental part of that. She’s always had an old head on young shoulders. She was somebody that you could talk to and discuss pretty serious issues. As a teenager, she was very serious. And was quite capable of being able to offer good advice. We started relying on each other.

Was she nervous performing onstage with the band when she first joined?

The first couple of shows, yeah, really nervous. As you would be. But no, she got used to it pretty fast.

Tell me about the origin story for Dance Hall At Louse Point. My understanding is that you wrote those songs while on tour with Polly for To Bring You My Love?

That’s semi-right. It was Polly’s idea. It was after Rid Of Me, before she had started To Bring You My Love. I was teaching a performing arts course at a local college. I’d written some music for a theater production, and Polly came along to see it. She absolutely loved the music, and said afterwards, "Would you write me some music in that kind of vein? That I could try writing words to?" I said, "OK, that would be great."

That’s how we had the idea for the album. I was writing the music for Dance Hall At Louse Point at the same time she was writing the music for To Bring You My Love. I then became involved with [To Bring You My Love], which was obviously a big record. And it involved a big tour as well. Took 18 months of our time. While we were on tour for To Bring You My Love, that’s when Polly wrote all the words. She already had a cassette of the music for the Dance Hall record, which she carried around with her on the tour and then wrote lyrics in different cities. Which is why those cities are referenced on the album sleeve.

Were you hearing her lyrics while she was writing them? Or were you both working in your own separate worlds?

She would sort of drop a cassette into my hotel room and say, "I've got some lyrics for this song." I'd hear them as they were coming in. It was always kind of, "Here you go, here's the lyrics." And it would always be completely done. It was very exciting.

I was reading some old interviews with Polly. There’s one where she describes that record as being a huge turning point for her. What do you think she meant by that?

It’s always difficult to talk about how that is for somebody else. My take on that is—and I know this from myself when I’m writing in collaboration with somebody else—it’s a certain freedom you have that you don’t give yourself if you're writing entirely individually, because you have the weight of the whole thing. When you can share the weight, it eases you up to do things you might be nervous about doing yourself, because you’re not sure whether you’ve gone off a stupid tangent and you’re not seeing it.

You can try those things that might seem kind of wayward. And you have another person that you rely on say, "Oh yeah, that’s great. Push it a bit further." Like I said before, she approaches most things very seriously. Writing particularly so. So I think it probably enabled her to be a bit more wayward than she might have been. When I first heard her vocal idea for "Taut," I mean—the entire delivery of the song was kind of extreme.

Which song are you referring to?

I’m referring to "Taut." Which is quite an extreme performance. A lot of the songs, I would give her a title. So I gave her the title "Taut." She didn’t have to use it if she didn’t want to. Some of the titles she used; some she didn’t. But I think it was also quite freeing to suddenly have a word or a line and say, "What are you gonna come up with for that?"

I’m assuming Polly thinks the same. She might have a totally different reason for saying that was a turning point. It could also be that, up until that point, the lyrics she had been writing—you know, Rid Of Me and Dry—were very personal lyrics. Or they could be read in a personal way, couldn’t they? Louse Point was very much stories and scenarios. You weren’t imagining that Polly was talking about herself in the bulk of those songs.

The vocal performance on "City Of No Sun" is also quite extreme and very jarring. Were you taken aback by her approach to singing this material?

I was a bit surprised. In a good way. I thought it was really exciting. I remember the performance of "City Of No Sun" when we were in the studio. She said, "OK, I’ll record the quiet bits first, then I’ll do the loud bits." So she had the engineer set the levels, doing the quiet bits. It’s quite strange timing in that song, to get everything to line up. She hit the chorus; she had two or three go’s and she kept getting it wrong.

At one point, she got it wrong again and she was so annoyed that she just went straight into the loud bit anyway. We had the mic set to be recording this really quiet vocal, so all the needles shot way into the red. It was on tape, which can really compress those kinds of things.

Is that the performance that is actually on the record? You can hear how it sounds a bit distorted.

Yeah. Because it’s absolutely pushing everything. She didn't mean to record it like that, but it just sounded so great. Of course we kept it.

Whose idea was it to cover "Is That All There Is?" by Peggy Lee?

It was initially done because they needed it for this film [Basquiat]. We really liked the way it came out, so we thought, "Oh, it kind of fits on the record." The recording that’s on the album is actually the first time we’d ever played that song. There were no rehearsals. We didn’t really know what we were going to do. Mick Harvey played the organ, I played drums, and Polly sang.

Obviously, most of her albums are credited to PJ Harvey. On this album, she's Polly Jean Harvey. What do you think is the significance of her changing her billing?

That was absolutely her call. I think she was quite protective of me. She very much said, "I want it to be called John Parish and Polly Jean Harvey, not the other way around." It’s difficult, isn’t it, if you’re an established artist and you suddenly work with someone who’s unknown, or de facto unknown. It’s like, "Oh, PJ Harvey and some bloke" kind of thing. I think she was trying to find the best way of making people realize that it wasn’t another PJ Harvey album. I know that later on, when we did the second collaboration, it was PJ Harvey and John Parish. It in some ways made more sense, but you’re never quite sure how you should go about those things when you’re doing them.

Some articles I’ve read state that the record label, Island, was uncomfortable with the album and believed it to be "commercial suicide." Is there any truth to that?

I’m sure there were people at Island who were a little bit unnerved by it. And by the fact that it was coming out not as a PJ Harvey record, but under a different name, when To Bring You My Love had just been such a relatively commercial success for PJ Harvey. Probably somebody said it was commercial suicide. If they really thought that, I doubt they would have put it out. I think they didn’t really know what it was.

I have to give quite a lot of credit to Polly’s manager, Paul McGuinness. I think if he hadn’t been behind it, perhaps Island Records wouldn’t have gone for it. But Paul heard it and he was like, "This is a really good record." Obviously he had a lot of clout and a lot of credibility with Island.

During this period, Polly was also becoming successful very quickly. Perhaps she was overwhelmed by the expectations from the record label or the degree of media scrutiny. Do you think those factors contributed to her desire to separate herself from the PJ Harvey that people knew?

You’d probably have to ask her. My take would be that it’s not quite as thought-through as that. She doesn’t like to repeat herself. The last thing she would have wanted to do at that time would have been To Bring You My Love 2. Her gut reaction is to try and do something different each time. Which is why I think she’s had such a long, successful career. I think there was a lot of pressure after the first album, Dry—the record company didn’t like Rid Of Me. They didn’t want to have this Steve Albini-recorded, very hard-hitting album. They were hoping for something more commercial, like I would have said Dry was.

If you are able to reinvent yourself each time—which, obviously a lot of artists just don’t have that facility—if you can, it sets you up for a much longer, more interesting career.

The album title refers to a painting. How did the title present itself to you or to Polly?

I was, and I still am, a very big fan of the painting Rosy-Fingered Dawn At Louse Point by [William] de Kooning. I told you I was giving Polly some of the songs I gave her with titles. One of them, which she ended up not writing any lyrics to—the title track from the album—is an instrumental. That was just a title I gave it. There was something about a place called "Louse Point" that sounded sort of desolate and rather unappealing, and I just thought a dance hall—I just liked the atmosphere that the title [suggested].

How would you describe this album’s long-term legacy in Polly’s career? Do you think it’s overdue for more attention?

I mean, I know it’s seemed like there’s a hardcore group of fans that like it very much. In the U.K. and Europe, there were a lot of people [who] liked it pretty much straight away. Perhaps in America it took a little bit longer to find its home. Obviously we never came over, played any shows, did anything in the U.S. at the time of its release. A lot of people talk to me about it 23, 24 years after its release and say they love it very much. I guess it has its fans for sure.

Once this reissue campaign is over, do you think we can expect a new album from Polly next year?

Umm… I don’t know. I can’t really answer that.

Are there any more previously unreleased demos, like the Dry demos, that fans can look forward to as part of this reissue campaign?

Nearly all the albums will come with accompanying demos. Probably the only ones that won’t are our two collaborative albums—the demos would all be instrumental versions of the album, because that’s how we went about it.

What can you tell me about the demos for Is This Desire?

Well, there’s a demo version of "The Garden," which I really, really love. Had it been down to me, I would have said "Put the demo version on the album" when the record came out. Because I just think it’s one of Polly’s greatest demos. Generally, I like the demos for Is This Desire? a lot.

And the b-sides from that record as well—"Sweeter Than Anything," "Nina in Ecstasy." I think there are some really extraordinary songs that didn’t make it onto the proper album.

You and me both. I think "Nina In Ecstasy" should have been on the record. That was my favorite track of the whole set of demos. So I was very disappointed that that didn't make it onto the album.

I’m glad I’m not the only one who thought that track should have been on there. Will those b-sides be included with the reissue package?

Not the initial reissue package, because it’s literally the album plus demos of the album. I might be wrong, but I think there might be some kind of b-sides and rarities thing to come out as another package at some point down the line.

Will you also be reissuing the more recent albums, like Let England Shake and The Hope Six Demolition Project?

I think Hope Six is still available anyway. So I don’t think there’s any point in reissuing that. But I think everything that was unavailable is being made available.

Has Polly herself been very involved in preparing these reissues and overseeing everything?

No, I think she’s delegated to people like me or Head. And she’s delegated the artwork; it’s all the people that did it originally who are working on it again. She’s very good at [delegating].

I’ve always gotten the sense she doesn’t like to dwell on her past work. She’s more interested in doing something new.

As all creative artists should be, I think.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg, The Honorable Music Lover

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Slow Pulp

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Slow Pulp Find Serenity

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The Madison-born, Chicago-based shoegazey quartet open up about the trying events that led up to recording their tranquil debut album, 'Moveys'
Danielle Chelosky
GRAMMYs
Oct 7, 2020 - 11:31 am

Slow Pulp aren’t sure how to sonically categorize themselves, so they jokingly offer: "cow rock," "slowcore" and "not emo, but emotional." They’ve been labeled as shoegaze before, but they think the reason for that is: "We’ve put out such a little amount of music that people don’t know what to call it yet."

The group is based in Chicago, but the four of them are from Wisconsin. Three of the members—Alexander Leeds (bass), Theodore Mathews (drums) and Henry Stoehr (guitar)—have been playing together since sixth grade, and Emily Massey (vocals/guitar) joined in 2017. Moveys is their debut album, arriving via Winspear on Oct. 9.

Moveys follows a crazy series of events involving a depressive episode, a diagnosis and a car crash, but the record glows with an aura of serenity and weightlessness. It’s different from their past material; it’s more focused and cohesive. It’s naturally packed with inside jokes, eccentric sound effects, infectious indie rock riffs and sprawling folk ballads. Read our chat with the band about the making of Moveys.

While all of you were working on this album, Emily, you got diagnosed with Lyme Disease and Chronic Mono and then your parents were involved in a crash. Could you take me through this timeline?

Massey: Where do we begin?! Last year we all lived together and we were touring a lot and trying to write music. I was experiencing a lot of fatigue. I was sleeping most days and feeling really depressed and confused about my health. My motivation level was really low and my [self-esteem] was really low. I was in a big time period of questioning whether or not I was capable of being in a band and writing. When we started writing a lot of the songs on this record, I started feeling a little bit better in terms of my mental health and desire to get better. I went to the doctor in the fall of 2019 right before we were going on some other tours. I got my diagnosis. It was really validating in a lot of ways because it was another piece of my health that was causing my fatigue and my anxiety and getting sick a lot. That’s kind of when we really started writing the record—after that diagnosis.

I started getting a lot of tools to take care of myself and then my parents got into a car accident on March 1 of 2020. My mom broke her neck and my dad fractured his neck, so they both had pretty serious injuries and were in the hospital for a while. I came back to Madison, Wisconsin, to take care of them. Then, a couple weeks later, COVID hit. I remember I came back to visit Chicago for a day and that’s when it really dawned on me how serious it was. I asked the boys—Henry, Teddy and Alex—if they wanted to hang out and they were all like, Um… I don’t think we should do that. That’s a bad idea because of coronavirus. And I was like, Oh, yeah, that’s a real thing. The next day my mom was in the rehab hospital terminal and I couldn’t even see her for three weeks because they wouldn’t let anybody in. That was really crazy and I ended up getting stuck in Madison partly because of COVID and my parents needed a full-time care taker. There was no one else to do it, except for me and my sister. Because of coronavirus, we couldn’t have family friends coming over or anything like that. It was a really strange time to be dealing with all of these things in what felt like an isolated and lonely way. There’s just a lot going on—drama with family friends. It was a very difficult time. We finished a lot of the record during that time [laughs]. It was kind of a whirlwind.

But my dad is a musician and he engineered my vocals on the album. In a way, working on the record was a nice reprieve from being a care taker and dealing with grief. Weird juxtaposition finishing a record and writing about being emotional and sad and dealing with a lot of difficult things but also using it as a thing to help me through it.

Was it nostalgic to be back in Madison, Wisconsin?

Massey: It was a nice time to be there, I think. I hadn’t been there in a while, and I think after this time I have a new appreciation for it—for the city. I grew up there and before I moved to Chicago I lived there my whole life. My parents actually are moving away from there this fall, so it was my last time being in Madison as a home base. My mom put it in an interesting way—since my sister and I moved out of the house, it’s was the last time that we would really spend time as a family like this, unless the pandemic gets worse and everything fails and I don’t have any money and I have to go back [laughs]. Which is highly likely, but it is an interesting time to reflect. I’ve been in Madison during tough times and I’ve found it to be a very healing place. There’s a lot of lakes and it’s really beautiful to walk around. That helped me a lot.

How does mental health tie into the record?

Massey: When we started writing this record, I was at a low point within my own mental health. I was having a really difficult time explaining it or communicating about it especially to my bandmates. I was—for a while—unable to write. I was really self-conscious about writing and was very self-deprecating all of the time. That’s difficult when you’re a musician because you have to believe in what you’re making, and I wasn’t in a space to do that.

Mental health isn’t something where you wake up and you’re like, "I’m better and good!" It’s something that comes and goes, at least from my own experience. Throughout this record, I was learning a lot about myself, about my body with my diagnosis, about myself as an artist, about myself as a human who was growing. It was at the forefront of my mind, and lyrically it came out. For me, it was a way to understand it. I was having trouble understanding how it manifested in myself. It’s a weird position to be in when you’re a performing or touring musician and you feel so against yourself. I felt like I hated myself and was being [disingenuous] to people watching me, like I was pretending and putting on a facade of being confident and like I knew what I was doing. I needed to step back, and I’m still figuring it out. I don’t have the answers at all. I feel lucky to have gotten out of the place that I was in, but the pandemic and all of the other stuff doesn’t make it easy to continue on the right track [laughs]. It’s a process of figuring out how to care for yourself in the best way. I think this record helped me do that, or at least move forward in doing that.

The press release says the title Moveys is an inside joke. What’s it about?

Massey: [Laughs.] It’s kind of funny that they called it an inside joke. Henry had written the last song on the record, "Movey," and I thought it was funny. I liked the word a lot. A lot of the songs also started with names that were related to movie titles. Like, "Whispers (In The Outfield)"—Henry, correct me if I’m wrong—but that’s related to Field of Dreams.

Stoehr: It was actually Rookie of the Year. [Laughs.]

Massey: And we had another song that started out with the title "Evan Almighty." Just random things. For "Track," at one point, we had talked about The Wild Thornberrys Movie as an inspiration. And the way that we communicate about music is very visual. Sometimes Henry will try to be talking about a song and he’ll set up an entire scene to describe it rather than I want it to sound like this. So, I think in that way it’s an interesting tie-in to the title. I also have a history with dance; I used to be a ballet dancer, and I’m a ballet teacher outside of being a musician. That plays into it. We’re just connected to the word in many ways. Movement in terms of health and mental health. I think Alex said something earlier about motion and movement within yourself and your growth being transient and that changing.

There’s a bunch of weird noises and bits throughout the record. Where did these come from?

Stoehr: The sound in "Idaho" is from Teddy and I recording at the same time. I had done this delay effect with guitar pedals, and it was just in the scratch take and I left it in there. For most of the other sounds, we branched out and did some different textures and song environments. I found this keyboard in an alley when we started recording it and it has a lot of cool sounds on it.

Where did the piano instrumental on "Whispers (In The Outfield)" come from?

Stoehr: I had just been playing more piano in between working on the other songs and recording. I had this chord progression going and I’d been fine-tuning it over the course of writing and recording the album. It was one of the last ones that we figured out. I was thinking about this one song that I recently found from this baseball movie used to watch when I was a kid, and I didn’t realize I was thinking about it necessarily at the time. I think I was trying to capture this big baseball energy but in a nice piano song. [Laughs.] I couldn’t play it exactly how I was imagining it, because I don’t play all that much piano. And Emily’s dad is a professional piano player so I sent him a video of me just playing the chords and then we talked and he sent back a couple versions of him playing it. He shredded it.

Massey: He knocked it out of the ballpark.

Shamir Talks New Self-Titled Album, DMing With Mandy Moore & Being The Change He Wants To See

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Nostalgic For A Different Future: Arcade Fire's Will Butler On How His New Solo Album Finds Healing In Community

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Butler talks to GRAMMY.com about his sophomore effort 'Generations,' how it fits in with an upcoming Arcade Fire album and the healing power of community
Lior Phillips
GRAMMYs
Sep 29, 2020 - 9:17 am

When Arcade Fire released their very first single, it came with a B-side that hit very close to home to brothers Win and Will Butler: a recording of a song called "My Buddy," credited to their grandfather, Alvino Rey. In fact, several generations of musicians line their family tree. While those historic echoes provide joy and solace for younger brother Will, the world tipping into pandemic and protests over racial injustice reinforced life’s darker cycles. On Butler’s second solo album, Generations (due Sept. 25 via Merge), he explores the ways in which we come together in community both because of and in spite of those ripples.

The video for early single "Surrender" represents that duality perfectly. The clip opens with studio footage of Butler’s band recording the jangly anthem, complete with call-and-response vocals and gospel falsetto. But much like 2020, things devolve quickly, with closed captioning-style subtitles mourning the deaths of Black men and women killed by police, calling for sweeping political change, and insisting on prison reform. Though written long ago, the album holds a special ability to tap into something boundless and timeless while simultaneously feeling entrenched in the tragic pain of the present.

Butler spoke with GRAMMY.com about the album’s similarities to Fyodor Dostoevsky, the ways in which songs take on new meaning over time, how Generations fits in with an upcoming Arcade Fire album and the healing power of community.

Did you have any hesitation about releasing the album in the midst of the pandemic?

I'm sad to not tour it. If I could wait four weeks and then tour the record... but that's not going to happen. It's actually kind of a good time to put out music. It feels morally good! People want music, so let's put out music. I've experienced that, where people put things out and it feels generous.

It truly does. You've compared this album to a novel and your debut before this to a collection of short stories. Is there a particular novelist that you feel would be in tune with your work? Do you take inspiration from fiction in that way?

It's not Dostoevsky. [Laughs.] But it is weirdly more inspired by Dostoevsky than it ought to be. It's the tumult of the 19th century, the next stage of the industrial revolution and the gearing up of socialism and anarchism. It feels related to the pre-revolutionary thing happening in Russia. [Laughs.] It's not a one-to-one comparison by any means, but it’s just the deeply human things happening in a context of the whirlwind.

Was there an experience that led you to the feeling that it was the right time to deliver such a politically driven album?

Partly, I went to grad school for public policy. I explicitly went as an artist wanting to know what's happening and why it's happening. I started the fall of 2016, which was a very bizarre time to be at a policy school. But I had a course with a professor named Leah Wright Rigueur, a young-ish professor, a Black woman, a historian. The course was essentially about race and riot in America. And since it was a policy school, the second-to-last week on the syllabus was talking about Hillary Clinton and the last week was talking about Donald Trump. It was a history class, but in an applied technical school, so it's like, "What are we doing with this history?"

We read the post-riot reports of Chicago in 1919 and the post-riot reports of the '60s, the Kerner Commission and after the Watts riots, and we read the DOJ reports after Ferguson and after Baltimore and Freddie Gray. And then Donald Trump got elected at the end of the semester. This course really trained my eyes at this moment of time, just being in that state of thinking about what's going on and why it's happening.

Right, and the album's title feels like it encapsulates not only the history that you were learning at the time but also your personal and familial ancestry.

Yes, very much so. My mom's a musician, and her parents were musicians. My grandmother grew up in a family band driving across the American West with her parents before there were even roads in the desert. Her dad got arrested a bunch of times for vagrancy or for not paying off loans. There's something very beautiful about being in the tradition of generations of musicians. That's a positive thing in this world. It's no coincidence that I'm a musician. There are, however, many more poisonous things that are also not coincidental that are rooted in both personal and political history. All of political history in America has been geared towards making each generation of my family's life better insofar as they're white men. It's been very good to my family, but that is as much of an undeniable generational heritage as music, which is this beautiful and faultless and glorious thing.

Do you see that musical tradition in your family as storytelling?

It's never been explicitly storytelling, though that is part of it. It's more about building community or building a society through entertainment. Entertainment is almost too light a word. My grandfather and grandmother did all these broadcasts during World War II, and some of it's jingoistic, some of it's incredibly moving, some of it's just dance music for people who don't want to think about the war for a minute. It's all these emotions, but still with this aim of trying to get us all in it together–which in a war context is fraught. But there's that element of always trying to make a family, make a community, learning how to bind us all together.

That reminds me of the call and response vocals you've got throughout the record. It has an especially gospel-y feeling on "Close My Eyes," which is such a clever way to paint a song about surrendering to something bigger than yourself, that communal feeling. What was the impetus for that narrative voice?

Part of it is just rooted in Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. [Laughs.] Years ago, someone mailed us the complete Motown singles on CD, just every single starting from day one. Even though there’s some garbage mixed in there, it just feels so human with those gang vocals and great singers that sometimes they just pulled off the street. You get the sense of humanity. Having backing vocals be so integral instead of just having my voice layered feels like having a community and feels very natural. It's hard for me to not just rely on that every third or fourth song. [Laughs.] It just feels like that's how it should be.

Those multi-part harmonies must be especially potent live in a room. Do you write in a way where you’re already picturing these songs live?

We played almost every one of these songs live before we recorded them. My solo band played "Surrender" live on the Policy tour for years. But even before we went into the studio last summer, I booked a weekend of shows. We did the Merge 30th Anniversary festival just to have us feel it live and have that communication. And then we went down to the basement to try to iron it out.

Speaking of "Surrender," that song took on an entire new life in the video. It starts out with videos of your band in the studio, but then quickly and powerfully gets replaced with messages mourning the deaths of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor and emphasizing the need for prison reform. You never know what life a song will have when you’re writing it.

That song is very nostalgic in a certain way. It’s looking towards the past, but not wishing to be in the past. It's wishing that we were in a different present because we had already chosen a different past. So when I was editing the video, I started it as a "making of" video. But the footage is from January of this year—five, six months old. There's this feeling of nostalgia, but also 2019 was not good enough to look back at. [Laughs.] 2019 was also horrible.

It's not like I want to go back to 2019. I want to play music with people. I want to be having fun with my friends. I want to be making a record. But I don't want it to be 2019. I'm nostalgic for a different future. And as I'm editing the video, there have been six weeks of protests of people trying to build something, and it just felt crazy to not acknowledge that. It was what people were focused on, at least the people around me.

Do you feel like you'll be infusing more overt social and political commentary into your music going ahead?

I think so. It's important that it's organic. It's part of the world I live in, part of my family and my friendships. Before the coronavirus hit, I was very much looking forward to touring and had vague plans to do town hall meetings and discussions. It felt like a rich time to do that around America, and around the world. I'm sad to not get to do that, but I think it will happen someday.

You produced the album yourself in your basement, so were you writing with the production choices already in mind or were you writing while in the studio?

I had the band come down and record for a week. And at the end of that first week, we had seven or eight songs that could be real. Some of them were clear. Some of them are simpler, like "Surrender." Others were trying to figure out where they would go. "I Don't Know What I Don’t Know" was more trial and error, trying something crazy. We'd turn everything off for two days and then come back to it and try something else. You try to be surprised by it.

I love revision. Well, I don't love it. I hate it. [Laughs.] I love the process of editing, of making a version of something and then finding something that's either better or worse. It's fun when you work with an editor that you trust, but when you're just doing it yourself, you drive yourself batty after some time. But I still love versioning it until it makes sense.

It feels like you're not too precious. You just want to service the song at the end of the day.

Yeah. I try to not be precious. I feel like the songs mostly came out with a fresh spirit. I didn't massage any of them too much. I'm very conversational in how I think of the world. Nothing is the final statement. You say something and then someone says something else and then you say something. And you have to finish what you're saying in order to hear what the other person says. So if that means putting it out into the world without rounding everything off, to me that feels right.

The record begins and ends on the same burning synth tone, like history ready to go around the loop again. What does that synth tone represent for you?

Not to get too mystical, but there's something about the bass that is so embodied. There's something about a really powerful bass that is fundamental, something that just gets to the core. I wanted that core to feel a little uneasy. It's not like the hit at the end of "A Day in the Life" where it’s this clear conclusion. It's a little bit gnarly. It's a little bit not in the right key for the song. It’s something disturbing at the very core of everything.

What has writing and producing this record taught you about yourself?

I found that while I still prize quickness and thoughtfulness and conversational life, this record took longer and took more effort than Policy. It was way less casual. It was not casual in a very good way. I realized this shouldn't be a casual undertaking—even though it can have lightness and humor and breezy elements. Even then, the whole undertaking can still be serious and grounded. It can even be quick without being casual. In the past, I've fallen into thinking, "Just do something first before you think about it too hard." But this was a reminder that you can do something more thoroughly.

Were you writing these songs while working on the next Arcade Fire album? Speaking about intention, how do you compartmentalize those two sides of your creativity?

Yeah, Arcade Fire is always very cyclical. We record for a year and a half, we tour for a year and a half, and then we're off for a year and a half. I was very conscious to do this in a moment when I wasn't distracted by something else. I wanted to focus on this.

I'm still figuring it all out. Right now I'm making a video for the song "Close My Eyes." I have children, two-year-old twins and an eight-year-old, so the spring was just complete family time—net positive, but total chaos. [Laughs.]

On 'Transmissions,' Beverly Glenn-Copeland Looks Back On A Long And Varied Musical Life

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Sad13 Details The Ghosts And Gear Behind 'Haunted Painting'

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Ahead of her second solo album, the Speedy Ortiz frontwoman talks to GRAMMY.com about her "most maximal" work to date, drawing influence from David Berman—and sampling Elliott Smith's broken microwave
Zack Ruskin
GRAMMYs
Sep 27, 2020 - 4:00 am

For Sadie Dupuis, Franz von Stuck’s portrait of the dancer Saharet was a face that launched a thousand plans.

While the painting, which Dupuis saw one evening at Seattle's Frye Art Gallery, immediately gave the artist the name for her second solo album, the rest of the work would fall to her. Fortunately, as the creative center behind the Boston indie rock outfit Speedy Ortiz, Dupuis is well-versed in the D.I.Y. musician’s life.

While 2016’s Slugger contrasted with Speedy’s sound as a more pop-forward vehicle for Dupuis, Haunted Painting (out Sept. 25) takes the project to another level entirely. As Sad13, Dupuis has already proven it’s possible to write a feel-good bop about consent in "Get A Yes," so perhaps it shouldn’t come as a shock that "WTD?" manages to blend shimmering synths with a message decrying eco-fascism.

Yet it isn’t one standout but the quality of the album as a whole that solidifies Haunted Painting as one of Dupuis’ most significant releases to date.

From the mischievous and prescient "Ghost (Of A Good Time)" to the sweeping, contemplative "Take Care," this record finds Dupuis working towards what she’s previously described as her "most maximal" work yet. In part, Dupuis credits her mode of songwriting to the late David Berman, whom she noted was a master of walking the line between bouncy and bleak.

"I think that with both Silver Jews and Purple Mountains," Dupuis said, "as well as in his poetry; David Berman rode that line really, really well. Some of his saddest work is also his absolute funniest. As a guiding figure for me in my writing, I'm always trying to be conscious of that line. If a song feels like heavy subject matter, I'm trying to bring levity where it's possible, because I think the art that I admire most tries to strike that balance."

Striking a balance is nothing new for the 32-year-old, who in addition to touring relentlessly prior to onset of COVID, also runs her own music label, Wax Nine, as well as a poetry journal of the same name.

Though she may have a lot more time on her hands these days, last summer, Dupuis found herself booking local studio time during off-days from touring with Speedy to get her next solo project done. Never one to arrive unprepared, she also wrote every song on her new album specifically for each studio's gear list.

Prior to a session at San Francisco's Tiny Telephone, for instance, Dupuis wanted to be sure she could make full use of the studio’s legendary synthesizer collection.

"They have one of the more insane vintage synth collections of any studio I've worked in," she said. "My first instinct is piano, but I'm not good at it and I haven't reliably played it since I was a little kid. I knew there were all of these expensive synths at Tiny Telephone that I wanted to get on the record, so in the time leading up to being there, it was me just sitting at home with a little tiny practice keyboard, trying to be able to play those parts correctly."

Commitment to vision is another thing Dupuis takes quite seriously.

After hosting a panel for Sonos focused on women in audio engineering, Dupuis went through her own album credits and realized that she was the only woman credited as a producer on her work.

"I had this awareness of all these awesome engineers," she explained, "but I hadn't worked with any of them, so that was part of the reason for me wanting to hire strictly women on this project."

As a result, Dupuis worked with only female audio engineers on Haunted Painting—eight in total—including Emily Lazar, Sarah Tudzin and Lily Wen. The latter of the three was actually once under the care of Dupuis when the artist worked as a summer camp counselor. Last year, the two joined forces at Figure 8 in Brooklyn to work on new Sad13 tracks featuring woodwinds and strings.

At Elliott Smith’s New Monkey studio, Dupuis teamed with Tudzin—who records and releases music as illuminati hotties—to figure out a way to sample Smith's microwave as means of incorporating his spirit into the recordings.

"When we were at New Monkey tracking ‘Oops...!’ and ‘Good Grief,’” Tudzin recalled, "we were perpetually in search of any instrument or sound that was unmistakably Elliott. There are a lot of beautiful instruments and pieces of gear there that belonged to him, and after pestering the staff about the story of the studio, we learned that even the furniture and decorations were his, including an essentially non-functioning microwave that no one wanted to get rid of."

Read More: He's Gonna Make It All OK: An Oral History Of Elliott Smith's Darkly Beautiful Self-Titled Album

The two joked about sampling the decrepit appliance before actually deciding to give it a shot. The final result, pitched as a synth, can be heard in the melody that ends "Good Grief."

The ways in which the experience of creating Haunted Painting are reflected in the finished product don’t end there.

Upon arriving at La La Land (an analog-only studio in Louisville) following a gig in Chicago, Dupuis discovered a block party borrowing power from the building had caused a fire to start. As a result, she altered some of her lyrics for her sessions there to refer to smoke. At Tiny Telephone, a broken harpsichord required Dupuis and engineer Maryam Qudus to "layer chains and ping pong balls on piano strings" to create a worthy substitute.

In one key area, however, Dupuis opted to cede control. Though she has done her own artwork for all her releases to date, she tasked the design of Haunted Painting’s cover to her mother.

"My mom, for most of my life, was a portrait painter," Dupuis explained, "but she stopped doing it as her main work after her car was hit by another car maybe a decade ago. She has chronic pain from that, so it's difficult for her to do portraiture, which is so detailed and time-intensive. She does plenty of other kinds of art, but she hadn't done a portrait in like a decade. The fact that she was even able to do this one, let alone that it looks so incredible, after 10 years away, is amazing. I think the world of my mom. She's a really cool artist and I probably wouldn't be doing any of this stuff if I hadn't had her as an example of someone doing creative work, so it's really nice to have her involved."

From sampling Elliott Smith’s microwave to teaching herself how to compose for strings and woodwinds (again), Dupuis’ emphasis on Sad13 as a project solely of her own creation is undercut only by a seemingly inextinguishable desire to give back.

Be it writing artist bios for projects from Tudzin and Qudus as they worked with her in the studio or also finding the time to put together a heartfelt compilation honoring the late Adam Schlesinger earlier this year, Dupuis has often used any focus on herself as an opportunity to refract attention onto those she cherishes.

This time, however, the spotlight shines solely on her, and with good reason. In trying to summarizing all the countless elements that came together to create Haunted Painting, Dupuis once more turns to von Stuck, the painter who started on her on this project.

"One of the cool things about him," she recalled, "is that he would build the frames himself and that he considered the frame as part of the artwork. As someone who likes to play all of the instruments and use production as part of the song itself, I can relate to a perspective of wanting the whole thing to be one product."

Molly Tuttle & Producer Tony Berg Discuss the Cross-Country Making Of Her New Covers Album

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