memory and sound
when pop music worms its way into your self-serious indie songs
This is one of those ideas that’s a bit abstract to modern listeners (whatever the fuck that means) but if you’re an independent musician (like me) who grew up worshipping independent artists and the DIY-ethic that kept them going it was sort of your unspoken duty to loathe popular mainstream music. The idea being if it was worshipped by too many people there must be something pandering or inauthentic about it that therefore couldn’t possibly hold much integrity or meaning. This is, of course, preposterous. Most music listeners these days pull from indie music and mainstream music- the two became intertwined at some point in the last decade or so. I am no exception- I find myself listening to mainstream pop music far more often than I’d expect with my pedigree. When boygenius is setting off on a sold-out stadium tour you start to realize you’re already listening to popular music whether you like it or not. Then your friend (who’s also in an indie band) recommends you listen to ‘Brat’ and you notice that it’s an amazing pop album basically built over underground style dance beats, introspective lyrics and also has effects and flourishes present in indie music.
Initially the fact that I listened to and enjoyed so much pop music became a bit of a dirty secret, which was actually nothing new. I remembered being in college and secretly liking the Spice Girls’ music. My best friend and I went to see ‘Spice World’ “as a joke,” which, as it turned out, a lot of people with a similar bent did. All you had to do was say that you enjoyed it because it was so bad that it was good. If you asked me about it now I would tell you that I honestly enjoyed the movie. That time was a weird transitional time where the alt-rock boom started to die down and people began to listen to trashy pop music again. The appearance of Creed and Nickelback made you realize that the dream of so-called grunge music was dead. Dark, brooding music could never be the mainstream for long as a majority of people also crave fun and lightness from the music that they listen to. This is a reasonable expectation. These days indie bands going on sold out tours of massive venues isn’t that out of the ordinary, which makes the indie or pop designation seem a bit hollow. A lot of wildly popular songs have some very introspective lyrics lurking under those fast, driving beats and bright melodies.
While I was working on the songs for ‘out of the white’ I got a familiar feeling that I often get while working on a set of songs that embrace the ‘shoegaze’ designation that’s followed me around my entire musical existence. It starts to feel like I’m chasing my own tail and relying on paint-by-numbers type of tricks. It’s usually best to try and approach that sound from a fresh perspective, which can be ironically tough considering it’s supposed to be a type of music that rejects a lot of common preconceptions about recorded music- i.e. buried drums, quiet vocals with murky lyrics, widescreen and enveloping fuzzy guitars. I wasn’t aware of how much the pop music I’d been listening to was seeping in when I’d feel stuck. I discovered ‘Casual’ by Chappell Roan via a TikTok filter that told me which one of her songs I was. This method for discovering a song would normally elicit an eye roll from someone like me. I ended up liking the song so much that it made me see that how we find a song isn’t always of such great consequence. I was so fascinated by the song that I recorded my own cover version of it during a period when I was feeling drained of inspiration. The cover became a bit of a template for several of the songs. This is often why I record covers when I get stuck, there’s almost always something that I try to approximate that makes me think of things from a different angle.
There came a point when ‘memory and sound’ (see the video above) arrived and it seemed like a more, urgent, dancey beat would be appropriate. When I’m recording, the drums are always the biggest challenge as I’m a terrible drummer. There aren’t any drum fills because I am simply incapable of doing them (although I do kind of find them a bit unneccesarry at times). Often times what I dream up is beyond my abilities, which is why I tend to stick with a pretty similar approach from song to song. I can see why Lawrence Tolhurst always played the same beat for nearly every song when he was drumming for the Cure. Surprisingly, this was less noticeable while I was only working with a floor tom and snare as opposed to more of a full set. I was thinking along the lines of ‘Screamadelica’-era Primal Scream, early Stone Roses or The Charlatans. In order to get a drum-machine-like sound I tried just recording each piece separately and then building the whole thing into a loop or a breakbeat. When I used to make percussive loops from sampled drums I used to try to visualize it from more of a hip hop type of perspective- lots of limiting that cuts through a mix. Once the beat was finished I really liked it, but found it sounded like something you would hear under a modern day pop song more than a dancey, baggy, Madchester type of sound. It was really driving and effervescent and unlike anything I’d incorporated in my own music before- I don’t have a lot of lively, upbeat songs that drift past the 100 bpm realm. I was a little horrified when I first heard it all together- I’d accidentally created something the me of about 10 years ago would have claimed to loathe.
As I added the other parts and fleshed the song out I found that it worked beautifully and it took a lot of pressure off of the lyrics and vocals. Those ended up taking on a bit of a melody via wordiness that is also in a lot of pop music. Having a prominent, strong beat also made the song stand out easily and (hopefully) would excuse the considerable length of the song. In another song called ‘overthrown and overwhelmed’ I had multiple drum parts, all of them recorded different ways and mixed for different effects. I had built the main beat for that in a similar way (i.e. recording each drum piece separately), made a loop from it and then recorded another beat over a different part that also ended up being looped. There’s even a bassy, club music type of beat on a song called ‘like chasing the sun’ that got in subliminally from listening to ‘Brat.’ I didn’t even notice it had happened until I was listening to ‘Brat’ with Stefanie and, again, was a little horrified at first.
On ‘to never wonder why’ I’d had trouble with the actual drum sound I’d gotten at first. I was waiting on a part to fix my snare drum while I was recording the song. When Noah was in the band he had brought a bunch of extraneous drum pieces that he used to supplement my Franken-kit and he left them in my basement when he wasn’t there. The only reason there are high-hats on the record are because he had left one and I used it occasionally (I still don’t own one). On this particular day I wound up recording a drum part using his snare that he subbed out for mine sometimes. It had a very different sound to mine and since the guitars are so swirling and washed-out on the song it cut through the mix differently. I had trouble getting a consistent level out of it, again due to my limited abilities. I’d recorded a full take, but the audibility and cut of the snare would change from second to second and was distracting. When my own snare was fixed I redid it, but found that the sound didn’t cut through the same way and stood out like a sore thumb in the ocean of droney guitars. After finishing the other songs where I’d looped the drum parts it seemed like an obvious thing to try- just find the section of the performance where the original snare sounded the way I liked and loop that section through the whole song. Again, it gave it a bit of a dancier sound since it was a faster, more driving beat. It was also the result of a time when inspiration calls for an unforeseen necessity. Something you toss off in the moment thinking you’ll redo it later that ends up working better than anything else you try later.
Whenever I’ve worked on the albums and songs of mine that really lean into the gazey aspects of my music I’ve found that it’s always something rhythmic or just smaller, subtler sounds that bring the whole thing together. The noisy, enveloping guitars are more of a constant than what defines the sound of those songs. I think people forget that the point of a lot of shoegazey and dreamy music is to cause a listener to change and challenge the way they absorb a listening experience. It also always reminds me of an interview I read with Kevin Shields where he basically said he considered what he was doing in My Bloody Valentine to be pop music at its core.