In 2015, Beauty Pill released Describes Things as They Are to much critical praise. How do you make another record when you've made something that has had such an impact on people?
First of all, it's still not a very well-known record. It got a lot of praise, and that's very nice, but if you ask your friend if they've heard of Beauty Pill, it's very unlikely that your friend will say, Yeah, I know that band." In that respect, there's a lot of room to grow. But artistically, I didn't understand. I was so focused on keeping my band together and navigating that weird project of recording in public. It hadn't occurred to me when we were done with it. It was my bandmates who first started telling me, "This might be one of the greatest records ever." My bandmates started getting very, very excited about the record when it was done. I don't see Describes Things… as a masterpiece. I do appreciate that people say that, because I'm not a rich person or a wealthy person or a famous person, so it's very nice. This [new] record was something I wanted to do in the midst of all of that; to assemble slowly. It's more fragmented and damaged in a certain way. I'm happy with it, but the title is Please Advise, which I feel has the right amount of humility to it. It's a document of a fragmented time. I'm happy with it, but I understand that it's coming in the shadow of this [previous] record. Everything we do now, probably everything I do for the rest of my life, is going to be post-Describes music. Every motivation I ever have is that I want to make something. I didn't go into it like, "How can I follow up this amazing record?" I was, "Let me make some music."
It was at the right time, and it hit at the right moment. It resonated with people, for whatever reason.
Yeah, it's nothing to obsess over, I guess.
Can you talk about making Describes Things as They Are? It was not a standard run of the mill process.
There was an art museum in Arlington, Virginia, called Artisphere. It was an almost Smithsonian-scale gallery. A jaw-dropping, beautiful, large palatial place right on the Potomac River. The curators asked me to create a sound installation. I would have done that, but I felt everyone has seen or heard sound installations before, and it's not anything new. I was like, "What could we do that would be new to use this amazing space? Couldn't we do something more unexpected or creative?" As I was touring the facility with Ryan Holladay – the main curator who brought us in – we took a look at what was called the black box theater; a very large theater space within Artisphere. There was a window that looked down into it, and it reminded me of the [control room] window that looks into Abbey Road's Studio Two. Anytime you see a picture of The Beatles recording, you see that studio. I started thinking, "What if my band made a record here and we allowed people to watch us from the window?" A lot of my friends imagine that records take as long to make as they take to listen to. When Radiohead or whomever disappears for a year, people are like, "What are they doing?" They don't even understand. I thought, "Let's let people see the process of a band making a record, including overdubbing." Not a live record, where a band is playing to an audience and it's, "1, 2, 3, 4" and then you go, but rather a band constructing an album in the way bands do in the studio and making it visible to the public. Those watching would see all the boredom, all the ordering of pizza, all the band arguments, and the non-glamorous sides of making music. They would also see the moments of magic. I thought it could make a cool art exhibit to let people see the band at work. We set up a two-week session, where the band came into the room every day. We recorded one song per day. In the morning we would listen on a boom box to one of my home demos, and we would decide what song to record based on whether the band liked it or thought they were in the mood to do it. Largely, the band was being introduced to the song in the morning and having to figure it out all day, which I knew would at least make for an interesting process to witness; watching people scramble to learn parts and figure out how they were going to arrange a song. I knew that would be interesting at a basic human level for people to observe. That's how the album was made.
Were people invited to come view, or was it something that people came across and were able to see if they were visiting the museum as if it were a painting?
We tried to let people know for two weeks plus that "you can watch Beauty Pill make a record." Our band has a little bit of a mystery around it. I also disappeared when I had my heart surgery [in 2008]. It had been a long time, and I think that people had this idea that I was reclusive and hard to reach. I dunno. I try to be transparent and accessible. Back then I was sort of regarded as this person who was shrouded in mystery. People came by and watched from the window. It was interesting. I knew that it would affect the recording, and I didn't know what the outcome would be. We could have become so self-conscious that we froze, or something terrible could have happened, in terms of the interaction between the band and the viewers. Some of my friends warned me against this project. Like, "This is not a good way to go about making art." There are a lot of different theories: The whole idea of a record is that it's an intimate personal process. Making it into something that's public has many perils. I specifically did not want to have it filmed. We have some Japanese fans, and fans in Brazil and other places in the world. They were frustrated that they couldn't see it, so there was some pressure for us to make it a live YouTube streaming thing. I understood the desire for that. My feeling is that YouTube invites a nasty part of human nature that you see in the comments on any video. If there's a cat video, someone in the comments is going to say something about Nazis. I wanted to limit the scope of the project in certain ways to make it survivable. People could come to the window and hear us, as well as hear us arguing. They could witness the amazing moments of our performance, as well as the euphoria of doing something that works. They could also witness us being terrible and sounding like the worst local band ever. That was all visible.
You've done all sorts of interesting projects. You did the Immersive Ideals series, like the Cherry Blossom Boombox Walk.
Ryan Holladay is an artist and curator. He's younger than I am, but I look up to him in a way. He was here in the DC music scene, and he and his brother Hays had a band called Bluebrain. They were only here for a short while, but they were doing interesting art happenings. They wanted to shift the paradigm of how people receive music and how they interrelate with music. For example, they have an app where you can walk around the Washington Mall, around the Washington Monument and the beautiful grounds of Washington, DC, and the app changes music as you move into different areas; your experience is scored by Bluebrain. I found them very inspiring. In the age of streaming, people are encouraged to receive music passively and not think about engaging with it, not think about paying for it, not think about its value, and not remunerating the creators. One creative response [to those limitations] is to try new ideas. Why not mess around with the form? I want to always do that. I always want to mess with what people expect. I had a performance series here, a collaboration with the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland, which is this great literature institution. We did a performance series where we blended poets or novelists reading from their work with a band or musical artist playing right afterwards. It was called Story/Stereo. Our idea was that there's maybe a literature audience that's not aware of how great the DC music scene is, and there are probably people who are into music who aren't as aware of what's happening in the world of poetry and literature. I like to do projects like that. I know I move slower than people would like, but I don't want to pollute. If I put something out, I want it to be worth peoples' time. Just because you can put up anything on Bandcamp or SoundCloud, it's still worth considering that if you're going to take three minutes of someone's time, that's three minutes of life. That's a very precious thing. Make sure that what you're releasing is worth that person's engagement and time. If more people did that there would probably be less music, but better music.
But I love that creative people can put out music without the blessing of gatekeepers or tastemakers.
I agree, too. I'm a DC punk. I love that ethos of "not asking for permission."
On the other hand, the bar gets lowered a little bit when you have access to so much technology. That is not to say that there are not amazing and brilliantly recorded and produced records coming out today.
I agree with you. It's an interesting paradox. It's easy to dismiss expertise, particularly in technical things like recording, but it's dangerous and bad for culture.
