The Pinx’s “Other Side” pairs infectious choruses with introspective lyrics. At times the band suggests early Foo Fighters, and at others they are a 70s throwback to the vanguards of hard rock. “Other Side” has a bit of it all—fuzzed out guitars, thick snares, and fist-pumping choruses—all tied along with Adam McIntyre’s devil-may-care-croon. McIntyre sings of the dissolution of a relationship as something that frees him “I’m running / after something / I’m missing / and I’ll find it on the other side”. Adam joined me for a brief chat about influence, destruction, and the necessity of joy.
Buy Freedom by The Pinx here. SC: “Other Side” has a fascinating tension between its celebratory music and it’s lyrical content. Can you tell me a little about that choice? AM: The song IS totally joyous— but about a fiery, chaotic, volcanic time in my life. My best plans were awful and led to pain—for myself, and others—repeatedly. As a result I was finally starting to work on myself as a person but the more I worked, the more there was to work on. I got divorced, finished producing three albums at once, played a show with The Pinx, bade goodbye to that lineup (Joe moved to LA, Jim stopped playing) and got on a plane to Hawaii. I didn’t exactly know why I was going except I needed to go meditate on the beach of a distant planet. Hawaii was the closest I could get to that. When I tried to capture that moment of giving up and starting over and learning about myself, I went to a place in my heart that Matthew Sweet captured on his Brendan O’Brien-produced albums in the 90s. The chords and drums were chunky and sunny, while the lyrics held some pain and confusion. SC: Can you tell me about these lyrics “I want to be an island / in the middle of your sea / I’m in the eye of a hurricane / looking for a moment of peace”? AM: Everything in my life felt like it had been destroyed so I was going to this island in the middle of the Pacific to get that moment of peace and introspection before rebuilding. SC: Tell me about your writing process. Do you wait for inspiration? Or do you write on a schedule? AM: It comes in waves depending on where we are in the album cycle and if we “need” songs but when I need to work, I go and I sit down and I work. If I don’t have anything in my head already, I’ll have dozens of voice notes of me beatboxing and humming into my phone, loads of notes for lyric ideas that have maybe occurred to me over the last several months. I’m always writing but not always sitting down and paying attention to it. I am always receptive to any inspiration that drifts past my attention because songwriting is like any skill; you have to do it a lot. If I’m going to be messing around on my phone, I could at least be using that device to get ideas down. SC: How does your community of songwriters inspire you? AM:Not a ton on the front end. My peers are far from my mind when I’m starting a song. I’m amusing myself, getting my own personality out, baring my weirdness as much as I can and trying to make sure I’ve said what I need to say.When I’m finishing arrangements it will sometimes occur to me “oh, so and so from that band will LOVE this.” When it comes to fine tuning things, it’s an opportunity to look at your stuff through the eyes of your peers and see if it checks out, see if it makes the cut.
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Ali Enlow's songs are pop song operettas told at a whispered pace. “Hush” off her debut EP Rough Drafts places her powerful vocal up-front-and-center alongside the intermittent coos of Rhodes keyboard suggesting a kinetic combination of Ingrid Michaelson and Regina Spector. The song’s power comes a restrained accompaniment that allows for Enlow’s clear-eyed lyricism to dazzle the listener. Enlow joined me for a brief chat about her inspiration, repetition and the importance of flow.
Listen to “Hush” here. SC: I love the different ways you use the word “breathe” in this song. Can you tell me a little bit about the repetition? AE: Using the word so many times, I like to think of it as me telling myself to do it. I needed to take a step back and just breathe and think things through. SC: There’s a tension in this song between keeping a secret and not being able to breathe. Can you talk about that tension? AE: I've only ever told two people about who this song is about. At the time I was falling for a friend of mine who wasn't the best person. I knew it, our friends knew it, and I knew that it wouldn't work. We were very different people and I had to tell myself no. SC: Tell me a little about writing “Hush” AE: A lot of the time when I write something extremely personal, the process is really simple. The words just kind of flow and I don't think too hard about them; they just fit. Writing “Hush” was a big relief on how I was feeling since I couldn't really tell anyone about the situation. SC: What’s your writing process like? Do you write daily? Or do you wait for inspiration? AE: I typically try to write as often as I can, but there are times when I can't write anything. I start with my instruments, because I'm not a big fan of writing lyrics first. I'm not the most technically skilled on any one instrument. I'm self-taught in pretty much everything and learning new chords and how to use them in my music is probably my biggest struggle. But even though I get frustrated about it, I try to improve at least a little on each song I write. Whether that be a new strumming pattern, plucking, learning how to flick my hand a certain way, etc. SC: How does your community of songwriters inspire you? AE: I'm not actually that involved with the songwriting community around Columbia. I'm one of those people that sits alone in their bedroom and writes and writes. I used to go to a bunch of open mics, but they would be with the same people and I'd play the same songs and I wasn't learning anything. After a while I just stopped going. Total Babe is a songwriting duo from Atlanta, GA. Their song “Prayer” off their forthcoming self-titled EP is an earnest and unflinching portrait of family. The song is driven by Emily Backus’ yearning banjo and plainspoken lyrics with Meg Brooks’ warm harmonies. At its heart “Prayer” is a confession of doubt rendered into celebration. Backus’ narrative captivates as it castigates, and ends with a final declaration that: “beauty lies not up above / but in these roads we pave”. Backus and Brooks joined me for a brief chat about co-writing, family, and the importance of punnery.
You can listen to “Prayer” here. SC: I love how this song begins with a rumination on family dynamics and ends with a self-assessment of faith. How do you view these two themes working together in the song? EB: My family went to church together every week for the first 15 years of my life. One of the first symptoms I noticed of my parents’ failing marriage was that my father started staying home on Sundays. When my dad got remarried, he tried to get his union to my mother annulled in the Catholic Church, which, naturally did not go over particularly well with the protestant daughters who were the product of that thirty-year marriage. The whole mess of hurt and grief from losing my conception of earthly and heavenly fathers has been swirled together in every song since. MB: I am always pleasantly stunned by Emily’s writing for many reasons, not the least of which is that she has an uncanny tendency to take the words right out of my brain. My parents split up a few years ago, and the first time I heard “Prayer” it felt like the song I needed but hadn’t figured out how to write yet. One of my favorite things about the writing is the juxtaposition of the chaos and confusion of a family being dissolved, that feeling of the familiar becoming unrecognizable, with this refrain of naming the things that will not change, that are still identifiable: “blood is blood / kin is kin,” “man is man / lies are lies,” etc. It’s a thread of subtle reassurance in what is ultimately, I think, a pretty hopeful song. SC: Can you tell me about these lyrics “I will worship open skies / But not your holy son”—and how they relate to the title “Prayer”? EB: I loved church camp as a kid and have held onto that peaceful reverence in nature even as I’ve left the fold. I miss feeling right and centered in the way I did as a religious person. I carried this song around with me during a really tough year and it filled up the space that scripture and prayer left empty. (That second line may be subconscious nod to the weird pain of seeing my dad connect more with his stepson than he ever did with his daughters. No shade to my step-brother, who is a very cool and nice person!) MB: I’m just a sucker for a well-constructed pun. SC: You are both strong songwriters. What’s your writing process like? Do you write together? Do you bring songs to each other? And individually; do you write on a schedule? Or do you wait for inspiration? EB: I don’t co-write but I lean on my bandmates as editors and arrangers. Meg has given new life to tunes that I could never quite figure out. My writing process is mostly in my head. By the time I sit down and make something proper, it’s been brewing in my brain for a bit. MB: The words always happen first for me, but they come from all kinds of places. I’m working on a song now that was inspired by a Rita Dove poem about a Greek myth, but more often I’ll just get a phrase stuck in my head and let it roll around for awhile. I have a little notebook full of bits and pieces and I sort of wait and see if they assemble themselves into something cohesive. Playing with Emily has really expanded my conception of melody and tonality, and made me want to challenge myself to take more risks with my writing. SC: How does your community of songwriters inspire you? MB: The process of making the EP has made me hyper-aware and endlessly grateful for the amazing group of artists I am lucky enough to call friends. Some of those people are musicians and songwriters who helped us arrange and record and produce, some are photographers and visual artists who helped make it (and us) look good. All of them are people who put their time and love and tenacity into contributing beautiful things to a world sorely in need of beauty, and boy howdy if that doesn’t make me want to sing! “Fifteen Steps and Draw” is a laid back lo-fi gem that depicts the complicated context of Northern St. Louis—and beyond that—contemporary America. Rather than an endorsement or condemnation of 2nd amendment rights, Lolito’s sharp eye focuses in on what’s left unresolved by easy gun rights narratives. The song ends with a rhetorical question “who is afraid of you?” Musically “Fifteen Steps and Draw” utilizes a tight-four-piece arrangement that undulates with organ swells, guitar stabs, and snare shots to create a sound like Ray Lamontange dropping acid on Beale St.
You can listen to “Fifteen Steps and Draw” here. SC: This uses a lot of repetition in the verse, e.g., “I still, I still / ain’t let my blood spill”. Can you tell me about that choice? Does it reflect a conflicted narrator? Can you tell me about the shift in tension between the verse and the bridge? AL: The repetition is there mostly because that’s what the cadence of the verse calls for. The lyrics themselves, however, are about guns. I wrote the song when I was living in St. Louis. I moved to St. Louis in 2014 to teach High School on the north side. Up there, like a lot of places down here, gun violence is a complex, tragic issue. I’ve always found myself dismissive of pro-second amendment arguments. Something about old, white, good old boy senators, who I imagine live in nice neighborhoods, talking about how they need to protect themselves always rubbed me the wrong way. In St. Louis, I was working with a lot of people, kids and adults, who claimed to own guns and felt the need to protect themselves. I heard firsthand accounts of gun violence and knew people who were shot while I was living there. There’s a certain lawlessness in some parts of America where the state has failed and where on a personal level it is hard to argue with someone who thinks they’re safer with a gun. I tried to write the song about how guns can make us feel safe, but never really resolve the underlying insecurities that exist in the first place. SC: What is your writing process like? Do you write every day? Do you hold off for inspiration? AL: I’m definitely more of a hold off for inspiration type of writer. I can’t approach songwriting like a full-time job. I can’t sit at a desk and whip something up on command. Melodies come to me sometimes when I’m washing dishes or waking up or using the bathroom. Really, anywhere. I try to capture the melody, recreate it on the guitar, and I go from there. With “Fifteen Steps and Draw”, I think I was cleaning my room when the melody came. It was real simple so I wrote it down. We ended up recording that song live in one evening. My friend, who is an incredibly talented producer, Thomas Avery, invited me over to help guinea pig some new equipment for a session he was doing with another band. I was floating through Atlanta at the time and threw together a little band the day of—Matt Pendrick played bass, Paul Stevens played keys, Zack Falls played drums. Those guys are good friends and great musicians, so I was fortunate to have that opportunity. SC: How does your community of songwriters influence you? AL: I moved back to Atlanta about three months ago after two years in St. Louis and a year living in Sicily. In both of those places, I was pretty isolated. I knew musicians, but never had a “community of songwriters” the way I do in Atlanta. As a result, I was writing a lot of songs alone. I brought those songs back to Atlanta with me and I’m currently developing a new project tentatively called “The Titos”. We’ve built up a nice set list with the songs I wrote while I was living away. It’s been great playing with old friends-- Zack Falls and Ian Mastrogiocamo who I used to play with in the Space Time Travelers. Daniel Kirslis, who is a good friend with a great ear is also playing some keys with us. Paul Stevens has been helping out, too. We’re starting to really collaborate on the song writing process now, which is how I prefer to write in the first place. It really feels like the creative chakras are open in a way they haven’t been for years. Chris Compton’s latest offering—“Sunshine In The Mine”—off his forthcoming LP Furtherville is a bluesy stomp that rocks with harmonica, fiddle, and a tight rhythm section. Throughout “Sunshine in the Mine” Compton braids a fantastic shifting cadence that mimics Southern speech patterns with a highlighted spike of musicality. It’s a smart song because it doesn’t sacrifice musical ingenuity for mass appeal. Instead what comes off is American as eating popcorn in the nosebleeds of a baseball game. Hang out for the Prog outro with pick ax flashes of chromatic shimmer as the song is lowered deeper down the mineshaft.
You can listen to "Sunshine In The Mine" here. SC: I really love how you build this song with your meter. Each line of the verse building onto your internal rhythm, “I came / to carry on the family name. / Picked up a shovel and I stepped into the front line”—later in the verse you switch the meter again. Can you tell me about how you chose this building rhythm? CC: The singer in the song is a young coal miner trying to make something of himself after the death of his father. "I came to carry on the family name" tells you it's up to him to maintain the family line. He is driven to work all day in the mines, despite the cold and wet conditions, so he can afford to buy his lover a wedding ring and start a family of his own. The cadence of the vocal line echoes his determined outlook on the future. There is a swagger to his voice when he sings "I'm telling you why." He's telling you like it is-- what kind of man he's going to make of himself. SC: What was your writing process like for “Sunshine in the Mine”? CC: I spent the weekend in a cabin up in Cashiers, North Carolina with some friends of mine in a country band. The lead singer was also a songwriter from Columbia and being in the Appalachian Mountains, we got the idea of writing a song about a coal miner. I've never really co-written with anybody but the closest I've come was with this song. We tossed around a few different ideas but the one that stuck for me was the idea of never seeing the sun because you're always underground working dawn to dusk in the mine. We each ended up writing our "coal miner" songs separately but I still liked the story I saw taking shape so I let the lyric get a little richer. I pushed it toward a narrative that reflected my own experience after loosing my father just a few years earlier. SC: What is your writing process like? Do you write every day? Do you hold off for inspiration? CC: Songwriting is really the only thing I remotely know how to do. I can't change my oil or install a ceiling fan but I can write a song. I'm pretty lucky in that I get a lot of time for reflection while I'm at work. I spend my days driving through remote parts of the countryside and this provides a lot of the inspiration for my songs. I carry a little toy guitar for banging out melodies and a notebook for lyric ideas. I try to work on something every week but I find that real creativity comes in waves and is even seasonal. Spring and fall seem to be the most productive times for me. SC: How does your community of songwriters influence you? CC: The south has deep roots in traditional music and songs with stories. While my tastes go beyond these genres, I find myself more frequently in the folk, country and bluegrass circles around town. I joined a few songwriter groups and met local artist who gave me some insight into playing in those styles. But I guess ultimately I am a loner or at least a control freak and tend to work better by myself. |
The Sound Connector is an online magazine for songwriters. We feature songwriting challenges, monthly interviews, and the opportunity to discover new songwriters. We are interested in all things related to the craft of songwriting. Do you want to be featured on The Sound Connector? Send us your songs!
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