06.14.22
To start off I wanted to ask you: how did you get into songwriting? What's your origin story?

Yeah, I mean, it starts when I was 6 years old. There was this kid in my class who I wasn't too fond of for some reason – I'm not really a spiteful person ever, but I just didn't like this guy for whatever reason. He got a guitar in first grade, and I was just jealous. I went home, and I remember standing on the little step stool that you need to go wash your hands and I was like, ‘hey, mom, I want a guitar for my birthday.’ So I picked up guitar, and guitar for the first part of my life up until really high school was almost like something that I felt like I had to do. It wasn't something that I really enjoyed that much. I enjoyed the process of learning to play a technically difficult song that I wouldn’t have been able to play previously, and I'd have a lot of recitals for my studio and stuff like that, and that was really fun. But I despised practicing. I hated it, and I would always just make all these logical excuses for not practicing with my babysitter. I'd be like ‘I wanna spend time with the things that I want to spend time on. Just let me do my thing!’ She's like ‘honestly, I can’t argue with that’ so I didn't really practice a ton.

Smart Kid!

But yeah, then junior year of high school came around and two of my friends approached me. They're talking about how they had been jamming, and how fun it was, and how awesome of an experience like playing live music with other people was and they said ‘we need another guitarist would you be interested?’ ‘Absolutely.’ So yeah, we started practicing, and that was the start of the band Dream Regime.

We were horrible. We were awful. I still have videos from this era. We’d play covers. We did “Crazy” by Gnarls Barkley, we did “A Certain Romance” by Arctic Monkeys. We didn't think we were good or anything but it didn't really matter! It was fun to hang out with my friends and play my music. So that persisted for a while and then we played a couple of house shows, which were really fun. We’d invite all of our friends – pre-covid obviously – and jam everyone in a basement. And we’d make a whole spectacle of it, and our pre show routines were pretty fun as well.

Songwriting at this point never really crossed my mind. I'd spent my whole childhood just playing other people's songs, and it was like there was this barrier that existed. It’s not like I didn’t want to write music. I just didn't think it was possible. I thought you had to have training, that you had to know about theory and stuff. So it was this black box of experience that I just didn't have – or I didn't think I had – at that point. And then the first time that I sat down and wrote something, it actually turned into the song that was our single on the EP that we put out called Incidents that next summer.

There's something about it that I still find myself looking back to. I almost wish I could look away from every songwriting related thing that I've learned because I think not having any basis is really important when you're trying to develop creatively. And so this first thing I did was really cool, and I would be happy to write something like that again. It was pretty solid, and it was just fun like bringing something into the guys, and we all added parts that were integral to the whole song. And obviously my voice was awful during that time. So it didn't sound perfect on the recording, but the parts were there and it was really satisfying, seeing that all come together.

So take me back to the first song you wrote. What inspired that? What was the momentum that caused you to sit down with a guitar and make something new?

I'm trying to remember. I can't pinpoint it exactly. Usually what it is is I'll often sit down to write a song when I'm just feeling off in some way. Like I need to center and get out of my own head.

What does that first step look like? Do you have a lyrical idea? Do you just pick up like a guitar and play some chords?

I love chord progressions that are unique and have really nice voice leading and nice tension. But also resolutions. I like when I write a chord progression that I hear, and immediately I think: I haven't heard anything like this before. If it associates with some feeling like some emotion, whatever it is –– I don't know what it is at that point – that I can riff off of for the rest of the song, that's when I'm happy. So I spend a ton of time – probably too much time – perfecting progressions. And it's not just about the progression for me. I really enjoy finding new rhythmic patterns. And so sometimes I'll have these cool chords, but I don't know how they fit together. I don't know what the underlying rhythm sounds like, so sometimes like there's some drastic changes.

When I sit down and when I'm writing my best stuff, I have the whole song figured out in like a minute or so. I can hear exactly what I want to happen but the trouble is trying to find a way to get down what you're hearing in your head but being okay with it not sounding exactly like what you what you hear in your head, and not being disappointed at like taking a turn a stylistic turn at some point, if it presents itself. Recording ideas is a really amorphous stage of the process where so many things can be changed, like the dynamics that you play a progression with the tones that you use. The individual drum samples you're using if you’re laying that down. Everything has such an impact on that first tangible listen. For better or for worse, that leaves an indelible mark in your head of where the song is. It's like this balance between capturing what I hear in my head and not getting it down too quickly and ruining the creative flow. I've found the first couple hours of working on a new song are so crucial because it definitely changes how I perceive the song in my head, until it's down.

Do you mostly write by yourself, or do you also write with your band together?

It depends on when. With the band during quarantine, we would practice every day for hours. I had a job during that summer, so it would usually be after work from 5:30 to maybe 9:30 or so, and on the weekends we would just play all day. Obviously COVID was horrible and affected a ton of people, but I had a great time because I was just doing what I love. I played so much music and got really close with my friends. We decked out my friends' lower garage where they stored their deck equipment and stuff. And we completely gutted it. We had carpet, we had, we had this magnetic door that would block out the cold, and heaters. We had the lights everywhere. We had all the gear you could imagine. So we locked in that winter break, and then we spent a week and a half in the studio recording our album that we put out last fall.

Is that Figures in the Clouds?

Yeah! I highly recommend it as a bucket list thing, if you can find a week just walk in in a studio with some material. I'm glad I got to experience that once. I'm not sure if i'll do it again or have the opportunity. I hope I do.

What was different about being in the studio?

It was strange. The biggest thing was being okay with relinquishing a lot of control. I'm a huge control freak and it's the thing that I fight when I'm with the band. They're like they're my best friends. I irritate them. They irritate me, and we work it out. But honestly, I learned so much about small conflict resolution. There's so many ideas that people bring to the table and it's really important to hold all of them as important. The principles that we operated off of during that time were: you can't just say you don't like something – if no one has a better idea, then it's staying. You don't a verse, you don’t like how this post-chorus transitions into whatever next part there is, you have to go home and work on it and bring it in.

But yeah being in the studio is awesome. We had an engineer there, just handling all the consoles, you know, setting up the mixing and stuff, and that was really cool to see. The studio we recorded at was called ARC studios in Omaha. It's operated by Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes. Phoebe Bridgers recorded Punisher in the A room for example. We weren’t in A room, we're not we're not A room guys, but we were in the B room, and it was cool just being in the same space, We got to walk in there and see everything. You're just fully immersed in the music. When we were in there we didn't know what time it was. We didn't know what the fuck time was, we would walk out, and it's 2am, and we'd be up at 8 or 9 the next morning. It was a lot of work. Hard work, stressful, but it was so so fun and so rewarding.

And now you're mostly working by yourself.

I just got my guitar shipped in from Omaha. So I've been working on stuff. I have a solo project. It's called Panorama Dades. I'm hoping to actually have stuff out by the fall. End of summer, maybe, but probably fall but where it's fully ready.

There’s one aspect of songwriting I wanted to touch on, which is – Where do you get your lyrics from?

I'm horrible at lyric writing, that's what I'm working on the most. If someone had a gun to my head and told me to just write some lyrics – not that anyone could do that – but if I'm under pressure, if I I had to write some good lyrics I'm not going to be able to. It's very momentum based. Something will be rolling, I'll be feeling it, I’ll have this emotion in my head and I might be able to tap into it and get some cool lines, but I'm not a great lyricist by any stretch of imagination. I think I've had one song with lyrics I'm proud of on the album, it's called 'Calypso', My lyrics stem from the emotions, and the themes that I extract from the production and the chords. That song to me sounded very ethereal. It sounded like a dreamscape. There are a lot of light, airy, whirly piano notes that conflict with the other notes. So it's just kind of like toeing the line like breaking apart, being dissonant in a sense. And so I wrote about kind of a fantasy. My lyrics definitely toe the line of the production and the music itself rather than the other way around.

How would you characterize your sound, whether as a band or an individual artist?

I've been really inspired by the Greeting Committee, lately, especially their album, This Is It. I feel like It's really loose, and like that a lot of like jangly high leads and stuff, and some cool rhythms. It's a very live feel but they still somehow pack it full with really interesting lines and lead stuff. So I've really been vibing with that. This stuff I'm doing right now is definitely more live sounding and traditional than a lot of stuff I've done in the past.

I’ll ask you to wrap up by giving me one piece of advice as a total beginner to songwriting. Do you have a cool hack? Guiding philosophy?

When I was starting out I found myself getting locked into writing progressions that I had heard before. A lot of just 3 and 4 for chord progressions. And this is awesome, but it's really important to make sure you're never comfortable when you're writing a song. I try my best to treat each song as its own landscape. Each song has its own tools that you draw from, just like the experiences that you draw from. For example, if you're writing something, and you have the feeling of, ‘I don't want this to be like a fully produced thing, I just want to have this bass synth that's like just driving underneath. And then I want some weird rhythm.’ Just go with the cool ideas that you have. Just go with some idea that you have spur the moment and see where it takes you. A lot of times it'll lead nowhere, but that's part of it. You have to write a lot of shit in order to get something good. My best advice is never get comfortable with a certain way of doing things. Never get comfortable with a certain interval, or a certain picking pattern, or a rhythm. And it's fine if, at the end of the day, you have 40 songs, and 3 of them are pretty similar. That's fine. Just like just make sure that for each song you're diving in and making a whole world out of it. To me the most fun part of writing is that every single project or song has infinite possibilities.