New Bums Interview: Married Couple Vibe
Unlike the mathematical approach of Six Organs of Admittance or the wound jangly pop of Skygreen Leopards, Ben Chasny and Donovan Quinn’s New Bums is like its name: contemporary slacker vibes, loose playing, easy, gorgeous tunes. The band’s first record, Voices in a Rented Room, came out in 2014, and almost immediately afterwards, they started recording its follow-up. It wouldn’t be released until this March, as the more layered but just as lackadaisical Last Time I Saw Grace (Drag City). Both Chasny and Quinn write songs, and each plays off the other one’s style as much as presenting their own. For instance, on the energetic “Oblieration Time”, which juxtaposes soloing and acoustic strumming, Chasny attempted to write lyrics like Quinn. As for Quinn’s lyrics, more generally, Chasny’s instrumentation shifts them. “One of the great things about songwriting [is] the way the lyrics come across versus what they actually mean,” Quinn said on a Zoom call earlier this year with me and Chasny. “The same words can be funny, sad, [or] ironic depending on the instrumentation behind [them]. It’s really fun to see what Ben does.” Chasny agrees that instrumentation matters, not citing a general philosophy but rather a YouTube video with almost 10 million views that overlays a scene of Darth Vader visiting the Death Star with a snippet of Spandau Ballet’s “True”.
Indeed, the buddy quality of New Bums shines through when they’re in the same room--even a virtual one. They laugh and play with each other and finish each other’s sentences, having been friends for a long time. But such a laid-back feeling wouldn’t be possible without each member’s distinct personalities. Chasny, knowing I was set to interview Chris Corsano later that day about his and Bill Orcutt’s excellent Made Out Of Sound, had me communicate an inside joke to Corsano, with whom he shares a band, Rangda. (The joke? Telling Corsano that he should make a pack of beats called “Chris Corsano’s Breakbeats,” to which Corsano cackled and replied, “You’ve been talking to Chasny.”) Chasny’s also self-deprecating: “I’m not a very good violin player, but the last song has me on the violin,” he shrugs about Last Time’s “Follow Them Up the Slope”. And he forgets the titles of the songs, facetiously chalking it up to the album’s lyrical themes of decay. Quinn, simply, is humble and go-with-the-flow.
Underneath it all are some serious aesthetic and instrumental chops from the both of them, a mix of guitars, harmonium (the circular “So Long, Kus”), violin, and keyboards. Opener “Billy, God Damn” is twangy and layered. “Onward to Devastation” features tasty riffing following the lilting folk of “Marlene Left California”. “Wild Dogs” shimmers, while “Hermitage Song” stuns with deep string textures. All in all, Chasny and Quinn talk about these songs with the same exuberance they do their other projects, or music by Corsano and Orcutt, or even legendary records by 90′s German drone artists. Music fans make music makers, and music bums never fade.
Read my conversation with them below, edited for length and clarity.
Since I Left You: What’s unique about Last Time I Saw Grace as compared to Voices in a Rented Room?
Donovan Quinn: I think both of the records come from the same place. A buddy record is the way I would put it, where it grew out of me and Ben in a room, playing two guitars, talking about ideas and records we admired. This one, we built the songs up a little bit more, added some layers to the songs with overdubs, and really added some depth to a lot of the compositions with vocal and guitar work and different synths, whereas the first one we tried to keep it as barebones as possible.
Ben Chasny: Yeah. I would say the first one was more slopdog, like a mutt running wild, and this one isn’t showdog level, but trimming up the dog a little bit, teaching it a couple tricks.
SILY: Maybe album 3 will be showdog.
BC: Yeah. I think it’ll probably take a poop right in front of everybody, but it will still be up there.
SILY: Those layers are what I noticed from the get-go, on [opener] “Billy. God Damn”. Is that why you decided to have it first on the record and release it ahead of time?
BC: We ran through a number of sequences on the record. It just felt like a good one to start out with. There are definitely more vocal layers on this than the other record we did for sure.
DQ: Yeah, I don’t have a clear memory of recording a lot of these songs because we did it over a long period of time, and “Billy God Damn” is one of those songs. I think we put it first because it set a good tone for the rest of the record.
SILY: The sequencing definitely struck me. It goes back and forth between more up-tempo tracks like “Obliteration Time Two” and more lilting tracks like “Marlene Left California”. Is that something you had in mind when ultimately deciding on the order of the tracks?
BC: I think so, yeah, trying to balance it out without having one of the sides of the records being too much one direction.
SILY: I love records like this where the palate is mostly vocals and guitars but you throw in a wildcard like the harmonium, or the cello on “Street of Spies”. It makes those songs stand out.
DQ: “Street of Spies” has our buddy Jason Quever on cello who has a band called Papercuts. I work a lot with Jason and he was kind enough to put some cello on that one.
BC: He did the drums and some of the strings on the first record, too.
SILY: You could say the whole album has a loose quality, but on that song especially, you kept the false start and the countdown from the live recording.
DQ: We do like that kind of sketchbook vibe with our records.
BC: [laughs] I have a feeling I know what you’re gonna say, Donovan.
DQ: I’m not gonna say what you think I’m gonna say...Me and Ben have known each other for so long, it’s a married couple vibe where we know what the other person is gonna say or is thinking...With the way you can record records now, it’s pretty easy to really get things lined up and cleaned up. We thought with New Bums, it would be kind of a nice contrast to not do that, to keep things a little bit frayed.
SILY: It goes with the aesthetic suggested by the band name, too.
SILY: Did anything inspire the lyrics specifically?
DQ: Not anything specifically, but over time, both me and Ben writing, we kind of developed a sense of a type of record lyrically, and it seemed to be a lot of songs about decay and certain kinds of desperation. We built from that, not totally consciously, but everything seemed to gravitate towards it.
BC: I will say, when I wrote some of the lyrics to the song “Obliteration Time”, I was actually trying to write songs like Donovan’s band Skygreen Leopards, and I was hoping he would pick up on it. I was like, “Did you pick up on it?” He was like, “No, I didn’t at all.” That was what I was trying to do.
SILY: In some ways, you still have a ways to go in your marriage, then.
SILY: What were you going for on the first line of “Street of Spies”, “Who gives a fuck about clemency?”
DQ: You know, I don’t remember. And when we were listening back to different vocal takes, there was one that was so unusually angry for me that Ben was saying I sounded like Rage Against the Machine or something, so we changed it. I don’t know. It’s just meant to have the language contrast the mellow vibe of the song. I like that style when if you have a mellow song with lyrics that contradict that feel.
SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the album title?
BC: It’s a line [on the album]. When you listen to [the] song, you realize it’s the name of a woman, Grace, but in context on the front of the record, it has a different meaning, which we thought would be kind of fun. You listen to the record, and you realize, “Ah, I see what they’re talking about.”
DQ: That was kind of a last-minute title. I think we got lucky with it. It fits really well with the kind of themes developed in the record: decay, desperation, etc.
SILY: Is Grace a real person or just a character?
SILY: What’s the inspiration behind the cover art?
BC: Donovan had the concept behind the art.
DQ: We were gonna see if anyone noticed this, but if you look at the first cover and the second cover, it’s basically the same elements, but we took things away. The first one has the two triangles, and it’s pictures of me and Ben, and this one doesn’t have any pictures. The idea is for every album to have the same basic design that takes elements away to eventually have nothing at all.
SILY: What are you gonna lose on the next one? One of the triangles?
BC: Possibly. That’s when I get kicked out of the band.
SILY: Or it’s self-titled, and you can use New Bums as the band and the title.
DQ: The other day, something cool happened that reminded me of the cover and the two triangles. It doesn’t totally work, but I did this video that heavily references ZZ Top. For the video, we bought a couple of ZZ Top magical keychains, and I was trying to open a box with it, but the fucking thing broke! But the two extreme points of the keys broke off, and what’s left looks a lot like the two triangles.
BC: The original record cover from the first record was based on one of my favorite records, pretty much a tribute to it, a band called The Black Vial. He did a record called Frozen Morning in maybe the mid-90s. He did 300 of them, this German guy, Liebried Loch. They were wrapped in black electric tape, and that’s what held the photograph on. This really gorgeous looking record, one of the most dark, depressing records I’ve ever heard in my life. It’s just droning on electric guitar on a practice amp, really distorted, singing songs like, “Black crows, flying no more!” We based the original artwork off that record and then modified it.
SILY: Have you thought about doing a live stream or socially distant show?
BC: We should try to figure out how to do it together. We still have to figure out Zoom. We may not do Zoom a lot. We’re more Google. We know technology.
SILY: You’re not Luddites?
BC: We have most of our meetings on Google Hangouts.
DQ: New Bums has a lot of meetings, and we spend a lot of time together, so it’s surprising it’s taken us 5 years to do two albums and two tours.
BC: We do have some great video footage from that tour a couple years back filmed at a bookstore in San Francisco called Adobe Books, and I think we’re gonna put that out for people to check out.
SILY: Were some of the songs from this record performed there?
BC: Yeah, we [did] “Cover Band”.
SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading lately that’s caught your attention?
DQ: I’ve been watching a lot of movies more than anything else. I have the Criterion Channel service, so I’ve been finding a lot of inspiration in that. I was just recommending the movie Close-up to Ben, if you want to feel that doing any kind of artistic endeavor might have some meaning, it’s worth it.
BC: I’ve been watching a lot of Poirot. That guy’s great. His relationship with Hastings is quite similar to Donovan and me, though I won’t say who is Poirot and who’s Hastings.
Last Time I Saw Grace by New Bums
