You recorded and produced NOPLACE with P. David Hazel, who you also worked with on your 2020 album Too Prickly For This World. How did your creative partnership begin?

Greg: David is someone who’s been in bands for a while here in Indianapolis. I knew of him for a longer time than I knew him. I thought of him as kind of a hotshot but then we began playing bills together and playing in similar circles and we got to know him. I found out he recorded a lot at home and he’s a really good guy, which is half the battle for recording with someone. [laughs] He was fun to work with. That sealed the deal. He’s really good at recording Natasha’s drums.

Nicole: He’s in a band called Bullet Points and early on we played a lot of shows together and got to know each other really well. It’s nice to have somebody who not only knows us and knows our music but can also step back and be objective. He was never pushing us one way or the other. He was already familiar with our sound, appreciated our style and what we were going for, and really just wanted to work with us to bring the best of us out in recording. He was also very flexible on schedule which was great. [laughs]

Greg: Yeah! Since we’re recording with him here at home, we did this over a long period of time because we wanted to have everything the way we wanted to have it. A lot of our friends are able to go into very nice studios for a very brief amount of time and you’ve got to really do it quickly that way. We’ve done it that way before but we wanted something a little more fussed over. We do lots of fussing, so we need that fuss over time.

Nicole: We’re just very selective.

Did you have a song that had the most fuss over time?

Greg: It didn’t make the album!

[laughter]

Natasha: It’s still being fussed over. It’s called “Triumphant Return”.

Greg: Ironically.

Natasha: Ironically but sincerely. We fussed over it and ultimately it turned out to be an outlier for this set of songs; it is a little bit outside of the theme of NOPLACE. So even though we all love the song and we love to play it, the hiccups we had with capturing it in a recorded format turned out for the better because I think that song belongs as part of another set of songs, TBD. [laughs] It was a happy accident of sorts that all the pieces didn’t fall into place and worked out for the better for the album that is NOPLACE.

Greg: That song was written at a very different time. [laughs] As we were nearing completion of the album and the release we were like, “That’s kinda a saving grace that we didn’t put out a song called ‘Triumphant Return’ when we’re all feeling ambivalent to say the least” because the album’s so concerned with the way we’re absorbing and reacting to the world as it is. It didn’t feel right anymore.

Natasha: Of what made it on the record, I don’t know that any one was more fussed over than the other, but I would say “Ruthless” ultimately had a lot of positive shaping during the recording process. It wound up different than how we’d been playing it live as a band for some time. Everything from the lead vocalist changed; the overall arrangement of the song, the total length of the song was truncated, and the horns were not originally there. That was a part that Nicole wrote as we were going through the recording process.

It used to be a co-lead vocal with Greg and Nicole and now it’s a lead vocal by Nicole. It used to have a coda at the end that no longer exists and we filled out the instrumentation. Some of the things happened by happy accident or were not necessarily the intent at the outset but by subtraction in the studio, we became happier with the song as a whole.

You’ve said that you feel like this album shows your growth as musicians and this year also marks the 10-year anniversary of Wife Patrol. How do you feel you’ve grown as a band and as people during this time?

Greg: That’s almost impossible to quantify! It’s been such a consequential 10 years in our lives.

Nicole: I’ve lived in Indianapolis for 10 years. I moved here in July of 2014 and met you guys at the end of that year. We started the band in the fall of 2015 and just rode out the tide since then. I’d definitely say we’ve all grown as songwriters, we’ve all grown as collaborators, and we’ve grown in developing different skills in our instruments whether it’s the way we play or pedals being added to the mix, or knowing what kinds of things we need so we can hear ourselves well when we’re on stage. We’ve really come together in terms of what helps us function as a band.

When we first started playing together, a lot of the songs were written by Greg and Natasha. I didn’t sing when we first started. I had stopped playing bass for a while and I got a new bass which was the precursor for us getting together. I was like, “Maybe we should start playing!” The joke was, “Family band?” because we all have the same last name. Then we got together and played and had a really great time. So we got together again and they were like, “We have some songs we’ve been working on!” so we started working on those together. It was a few months in before I was like, “I think I have some ideas to sing on this” and threw in some vocals which I think are probably on “Starlight Sun”, one of our early songs. They were like, “WHAT?”

Greg: It was almost disappointing how good her voice was because that meant we had not been using this tool for the earlier bits we’d been playing. [laughs] That aspect of it, the vocal weaving, has evolved over that entire time. Bands that I’ve been in have mainly been loud rock bands where the vocal intentionality was not the primary thing whereas here, it’s now becoming the most significant thing in the band and, God forbid, I’m turning the guitar down and the vocals are coming to the forefront. Sometimes you want people to hear what you say and you have to be audible for that to happen, the vocals need to be heard. That started with Nicole singing and being so good that we’re like, “Oh, we should take this a lot more seriously!” [laughs] For me, being less guitar-centric is a big evolution. I still fuss and think about the guitar and riffs and everything but now I’m like, “How does this work rhythmically with the way Natasha and Nicole play? How do I pull back?”

You can’t help but grow as a person in a decade. Also in such a cataclysmic time, this band has been sort of a safe haven for me, to have a place where art and thinking creatively and being generous and getting to know new people is the only obligation. That has been crucial in the last 10 years for me and is increasingly so.

Nicole: I think it’s been really great to see how our songwriting as instrumentalists has grown as well. When we play live a lot of people say that they’re surprised at how much sound we have for three people. We also write in a way where everybody is doing something. When we’re writing maybe Greg will come up with a riff to start with, Natasha will start working on some drums for it, and then I will hear the rough demo and try to write basslines that go around what’s happening with the guitar and compliment what’s happening in the drums. Sometimes people think bass is meant to just hold down those root notes and be in unison with the guitar and I think there’s so much space for creativity in that.

Similarly, being a three-person band, I wanna make sure we’re appropriately filling space when we’re playing. A lot of times Greg will have something going on and I’ll write something that weaves around what he’s doing but still meets the melody in the middle. That’s been a really fun way to make our songs more creative and explore where they can go instead of just the verse, chorus, verse format. It gives us a lot of room to play.

Greg: I think “We Who Are About To” sort of exemplifies how far we’ve gotten. Not just because it’s a six and a half minute song - thinking of our very first practice and screwing around it seems like that would’ve been a very strange idea for us [laughs] - but that it is such a complete idea. The title comes from a Joanna Russ novel, We Who Are About To…. It started with a riff I had then the verses come slowly and we kind of wrote them together. I was like, “We have these two verses” and Nicole was like, “I feel like we need to complete this idea”. That song ended up that way to a degree that we hadn’t really done; lyrically, musically, all of it.

What drew you to that novel in particular?

Greg: I like Joanna Russ a lot. She reminded me a lot of Kurt Vonnegut, not just being sci-fi but being a little bit more thoughtful and challenging. When the pandemic hit I was reading that novel. The book is about a group of people on a random flight in space and they get shipwrecked on this planet. They are out in the cosmos, there is no reasonable hope that they’ll be rescued. So the thrust of the book becomes, “How are you going to spend this time? Are you going to delude yourself into thinking, ‘We can repopulate this abandoned planet'?” Of course, that is the idea of the men who are there. It was basically a book about confronting hopelessness with however much grace and bravery you can bring to a hopeless situation and that sparked with me. It was kind of a stupid book to be reading at the time because it was so bleak. [laughs] Just the title alone kept pointing to this feeling of, “We are so obviously in a moment of change and we don’t know what the change will lead to”. I liked the ellipsis at the end and it seemed like an easy thing to steal.

Nicole: Take inspiration from! For legal purposes.

[laughter]

Nicole: I remember when I got the rough demo I wanted there to be a nice sound so I recorded my vocals in my bathroom. I was trying to learn how to record at home at that time.

Natasha: I love how dovetailed that co-lead vocal is. It’s amazing. Other than in my own basement, I don’t hear a lot of music where the co-lead is so essential and integral. What starts out as harmony part writing becomes a co-lead and is solidified as a co-lead and I love that about that song.

Greg: There’s moments of bleakness and stuff on the album but it’s really nice to have two vocals going at the same time and have them blend well. That’s just a nice sound anyway, but it takes on more meaning because so much of the album is about how important togetherness is. Even if everything sucks, even if everything won’t get better, it is really important to recognize how valuable togetherness is on its own no matter the circumstances, and co-lead vocals feel appropriate for that.

What’s helped you keep your friendship within the band strong?

Natasha: Just being friends, number one. [laughs] I would say folks who we spend time with who are in more of a band-first-friends-second situation - which is a fine setup - talk to us about the pitfalls that there can be when a band is not completely everyone’s and it’s not rooted in friendship first. I would say for us, being friendship-first-band-second is just a throughline.

We’ve talked about how being democratic as a band sometimes means things take a little longer or we have to come to a consensus more slowly before moving on to the next thing. That’s a good way for friends who are in a band to operate because it’s all about mutual understanding and ultimately doing things that we’re all excited about and want to do and are happy about. That’s the root. Nicole, you wrote something that we’ve been using in our bio that touches on that, like, “Wife Patrol is a band of friends who play music together”.

Nicole: I like to tell people that Wife Patrol is a band of three friends who make music together. What we have in there now is, “It started as a joke and I guess the joke’s on us because it’s 10 years later and we’re still doing it”. I really enjoy that we get to do this as people who are friends and that’s really pivotal to what we do.

There are times when we take a break for a while because we have things going on in our lives like, “We need to focus on these things for a while but maybe in a month we’ll get back together”. There’s transitions in life and not having that pressure to have to perform both in terms of the stage and in terms of trying to be creative is nice. It’s nice to be able to do those things because when we come back we have a bigger appreciation and things are fresh and some different perspectives come out of it. I just love how in general we hang out a lot. Sometimes we’ll be out around town and go to an event and people will be like, “Oh, Wife Patrol’s here! Do you just do things as a unit?”

[laughter]

Greg: We walk around like a gang! [laughs]

Nicole: We’ll just all be out together because even offstage we are friends and we’ll do things together. We have a lot in common so it’s not uncommon to see all three of us somewhere. It throws people off sometimes and sometimes someone will ask us, “Do you always do everything together as a band?” And we’re like, “We do things together because we’re friends!”

Greg: Part of the ease of staying friends over 10 years depends on what you’re in a band for and what you want out of your band. If you want to make money, why would you join a band?

[laughter]

Greg: But if you want to make money in your band, friendship will be secondary. If you want to be popularly successful, you will replace your guitarist if they're not great so you can have better odds at success. But for me, and really in the punk circles that I’ve always swam in, it’s like a bowling league more than trying to make money or be successful. It’s a shared interest and companionship and a like-minded group. Going to basement shows, you know you have something in common with everyone there and that’s you like this kind of music and these kinds of shows.

That's the thing for the band. I love music. We all get along in part because we like music so much, not even playing it, just thinking about it or talking about it, and considering it from every angle. So that just bolsters friendship. We’re not paying rent with our band, we’re not trying to be as popular as possible. Some of that looks like a bummer and we should be so misfortunate to be so hugely successful. That comes with its own challenges that would be potentially jeopardizing the friendship which I wouldn’t want.

Nicole: We’ve often said if it stops being fun, we just won’t do it anymore. It hasn’t stopped being fun yet!

Natasha: As we all develop new skills, it’s organic and it takes time but it’s so fun when all of a sudden someone in the band has a new thing to share and contribute where before maybe it was someone else who typically took the baton at that stage of the writing process. It stays fun too because there’s always something new and interesting going on with all of us developing and growing in new ways. It’s great to have all these different muscles that we’re flexing together.

Two of the songs that go so well together on the record and have that musical expansiveness are “NOPLACE I” and “NOPLACE II”. How did those songs come about?

Nicole: “NOPLACE II” came before “NOPLACE I” which is funny. [laughs] They were definitely written very far apart from each other.

Natasha: I don’t know if I’ve voiced this a lot with the group, but I think “NOPLACE I” gives the feeling of being in-between and stuck and desolate, and “NOPLACE II” is starting to deal with that. The two different vocal lines are like depression and anxiety colliding. That lower line is that feeling of malaise and that feeling of being in a tunnel and the light seems very far away whereas that upper line is very much the anxiety that can come through in those moments too. There’s tension between that nervous energy and that malaise. I like that progression in those songs. It is interesting that “II” came first. [laughs]

Nicole: As we were in the process of working through what the lyrics were going to be for “II” I remember talking about how this pandemic started with us thinking that we would just be home for a couple weeks and we ended up being home for two years. I live alone, besides my dog, but I didn’t have her at the time. Living on my own and not being in the social space of the workplace, I actually found a lot of freedom. Offices can be full of types of environments, spaces, people, characters, and personalities. I felt kind of a freedom from that in being able to go to my computer and do my work and not have to think about all those other things that can sometimes come with being in an office environment.

It was freeing in a way but it was also like, “I’m here every day. I’m in these same walls every day”. [laughs] I feel like the push and anxiety of “NOPLACE II” is accepting it like, “Ok, we’re doing this. I’m at home. I’m kind of enjoying this, I have everything I need. I have Netflix. I can order my groceries now. I’m surviving!” but at the same time you’re like, “I’m waking up with this sense of despair because the news keeps shifting and we don’t know what’s gonna happen next”.

Natasha: I think the series of songs is definitely very informed by the time when we were doing a lot of work on them but also just the place. “Noplace” is a term used to deride the city that we all live in - Indianoplace. [laughs] It doesn’t matter where you live; people feel that sense of in-between or purgatory in different cities all over the place, but I do feel there’s something particularly interesting about the stuckness that people describe feeling in Indianapolis. It’s a city, but it’s not a massive city. It’s a city that has a good size population but it sprawls, we don’t have a lot of density. It’s known as the Circle City and sometimes it just feels like you just go around and around and you don’t get anywhere. [laughs] Especially for people who commute on the loop around the city. I don’t have to do that, thankfully, but I can’t imagine that every day. That could be its own special sort of Groundhog Day.

Greg: The song was about limbo in several different senses; one being the pandemic and feeling almost literally on pause, and also living in Indianapolis where you feel like you’re in a cultural blindspot sometimes in some ways.

Natasha: You’re somewhere and you’re not.

Nicole: I think all three of us went through job changes at some point in that period as well. So much of that feeling of, “What’s around the corner?” but also that feeling of pause when one thing ends and another thing has to begin. A lot of that went into that song for sure.

Is there a reason why Indianapolis has the circle or is that just how the city was planned?

Greg: So there was a massive roundabout at the city center. The circle was copied off of one portion of Washington, DC. This guy was on the run from Congress and he went to the Western Territories and basically took the plan for a section of DC and said, “Let’s make this what Indianapolis is” because Indiana was making its capital at the time. It’s such an unsavoury and kind of dumb history. So there’s that. Then there’s the race, the Indianapolis 500. Then there’s this massive interstate loop surrounding our perfectly square city and that is a circle. It’s circles within circles, a wheel within a wheel. It’s something circular and eternal. [laughs]

The Hoosier-ness, the Indianapolis-ness is kind of a part of the band for better or worse. The photo for the cover of the album was taken in front of this building that we thought was just this decrepit, abandoned warehouse that said “Hoosier something” on the front of it and one of the “O”s had fallen off. We were like, “This would make a good picture for the album!” The more I look at it, the more it feels right. People have a picture of this place like the movie Hoosiers, this idyllic, rural, pastoral landscape when it’s more just fulfillment warehouses and wind farms and poor health outcomes. I’m being too cynical about this. [laughs] It feels like a place in decline and it’s kind of speaking to a larger sense of decline that’s happening.

Nicole: At the same time, we all still live here and it’s home.

Greg: My friends are here, my associations are here, my family’s here. I don’t want to be somewhere else but I also demand the right to observe the imperfections and the chosen imperfections about the home.

Nicole: It’s hilarious because Greg is the only one of us who has lived here his whole life.

[laughter]

Natasha: I would say it’s part of the essence of so many Indiana artists to have a contentious yet loving relationship with the place. You think of Robert Indiana, the visual artist; you think of Kurt Vonnegut, the novelist.

Greg: Mari Evans, the poet and Etheridge Knight, the poet. They were people who keenly observed the imperfections, but nobody wrote more loving or beautiful prose or poetry about the place than those people. It’s weird! I think a lot of people feel that way about wherever they come from.

Natasha: The city is a very interesting muse. It’s fascinating that generation after generation of people show their love for the place through a bit of sharpness. [laughs] The sharpness comes out when we’re expressing our admiration. It’s from a place of: we love it and we always want it to continue being better.

Greg: But everyone here is like that, it’s not just artists. No one complains more about Indiana than Hoosiers. The second someone else says a sideways word about Indiana, it’s like, “You don’t fucking know Indiana, don’t tell me about Indiana! You barely even know the city! What do you know, the airport?”

[laughter]

Natasha: Number one airport - Conde Nast Traveller!

Greg: We’ve got so many meaningless stats!

Nicole: We’ve got Wes Montgomery, we’ve got Babyface! I would like to throw in that there is an amazing music scene in Indianapolis.

Natasha: Yes!

How would you describe the music scene in Indianapolis?

Nicole: Always changing, there’s a little something of everything.

Natasha: I’m obsessed!

Nicole: For all the talk about feeling like you’re standing still, one of the things that I really liked about Indy when I got here was I kept meeting a lot of artists and people who had this sense of wanting to do something or build something. So many of the artists and musicians in this community want to create and want to create here.

There’s a collective called Musical Family Tree that started an archive of Indiana music and I remember writing a blog for them early on when I moved here about the experience of being a Black woman interested in rock music and how sometimes scenes can be a little less open to that. I remember seeing comments from people outside of the city or outside of Indiana who were like, “Well, it’s Indiana, what do you expect? You should move”. I was like, “Well, that doesn’t change anything. That doesn’t make change happen. Also, this isn’t something that only exists in Indiana”. Racism and sexism exist all over the place. Many people face these sorts of things.

I kinda had that sense of pride that you get when someone says something about the place you live where even though you have also made a critique - because nothing is without critique - to hear that outside sense of attacking that thing is like, “But there’s still so much opportunity. This is where I live, this is my home. This is where my friends are. Why not stay and make things great and make it a place that you want it to be?” I see that energy in a lot of the musicians here in Indianapolis, many who we’ve gotten to play with and who are also friends and people we meet at local record stores. There’s just a real community of people who love to create art and share that. There’s a real camaraderie between a lot of us, we’ll run into each other when we’re at each other’s shows or at events like, “Oh man, I loved your set!” or “I loved your show!” or “That album just came out and we can’t stop listening to it!” There are so many positive vibes between all of us because we all know we’re fighting a fight of some sort as we do what we do and create.

Natasha: This scene has been open to putting bills together that span genres or ideas of what might fit together. Over the years we’ve had a chance to play with acts that are more rooted in hip-hop or those that are primarily ambient or experimental. The cross-pollination across the different micro-scenes has been really fantastic, especially because we have such a great hip-hop scene, hardcore scene, ambient/experimental scene, jazz scene, and so on.

Also I would like to shout out the folks behind Punk Rock Night, which is a Saturday night punk event. They do other events too but it’s been running for 25 years straight. We played earlier this year and we’ve played their shows over the years a number of times. It’s typically hosted at a venue called The Melody Inn which is also like 100 years old. [laughs] A lot of people who come out to Punk Rock Night, that it the place that I see them so it’s really cool that they’ve got their regulars and they’ve got their community that they’ve invested a lot of time building up over the years.

Greg: It’s an escape too. There’s not a ton of money for the arts in Indianapolis, relatively speaking. There’s a sense of “We don’t do this for money” that sort of pervades the scene. Less so now, I think that’s improving somewhat. People are trying to pay folks for what they do and there’s more encouragement that way, but that’s kind of the legacy. Historically, musicians from here were told, “If you want to make a living you’re going to have to move”. I think for the musicians that are here, it becomes more about a reaction to your life here because the politics of the state are so retrograde and it becomes a way to shelter. Going to Punk Rock Night feels like you’re going to a place that is going to be cool for the night and you don’t have to worry about some of the things that are uncool. I think a lot of music is built around that concept in Indianapolis.

Nicole: We’ve seen a lot of people try to make a massive, sustaining music festival in Indianapolis. Chreece, which is a hip-hop festival that was originally put together by Oreo Jones - who is a rapper and musician here in town - and Jay Brookens, is in its 10th year now. That continues to be a thriving event and culture that attracts artists from all over the country. That started as a response to, “There’s a few of us and we’re playing shows but we know there’s more because we’re going on tour and connecting with people. How do we bring that energy here? How do we connect people so they know there’s a scene here in Indianapolis?” There’s a huge, amazing rap scene in Indianapolis. Chreece got started and now it’s exploded. It’s so big and something to look forward to.

We’ve had a lot of people be like, “We’re going to bring a big, national, annual cultural event in!” and many of them have fallen apart. Then we have people who started something here locally and it’s only grown. Post. Fest is another example of a festival like that and it’s a bit more hardcore. Those festivals are things by local artists and musicians that have been growing and standing the test of time whereas large, national people trying to come in and build something here have kind of struggled and faltered trying to make that happen.

Greg: These are things that galvanize a scene that can sometimes feel scattered. Chreece, Punk Rock Night, and Post Fest are things that are like, “I get to see all these great bands! I want them all to be together. I’m someone who’s in the scene already”. Everything that’s great about Indianapolis music happens when people can get together.

Nicole: We’ve had many times where people have incorporated the things that they want to see here in town. I would be remiss not to mention that I’ve done that in the past as well. In 2018, before everything changed rapidly, myself and two other Black women artists in the community started a festival that year called Woo Grl Fest. I kept finding that for a lot of shows we played Natasha and I would be the only women on stage. Maybe there’d be one other band that had women, but that was even smaller when you think of non-binary and trans artists as well. I had people say to me, “Do you know any girl bands?” and I was like, “First of all, I’m a woman. Secondly, there are so many bands that are not solely filled with men in this city, in this country, in this world”.

There are a lot of people making music and there seemed to be a lack of awareness among the people who were producing things at the time. We were like, “Well, let’s do something where we show them”. We had over 20 artists that played across several different venues on April 20, 2019. It was packed and it was great! People supported it so it was another opportunity to build something local from the artists themselves saying, “We are missing this but we know that it’s there. We just need to build some solidarity around this and create something to show people what we have”. I just see that happening so much within this music community.

I also co-chaired I Made Rock ’N’ Roll last year which is another festival that was focussing on Black representation in rock ’n’ roll music and that conversation. I was invited by GANGGANG, who put it on, to be co-chair of that festival and help talk about another space where people are not seeing the diverse diaspora of people who are involved in lots of different types of music. Black people invented rock ’n’ roll music and I still to this day get people who are like, “It’s so weird that you play rock! You’re in a rock band?” That festival was an opportunity to work together with folks to bring awareness to that.

“323” talks about the reindeer that were killed by lightning in Norway in 2016. Why did you incorporate that event in particular?

Natasha: I think I was the first person who heard about this news story. It was very striking to me just how the story unfolded after this natural disaster occurred and 323 reindeer were struck down by lightning. I think the scientific community and the community at large decided that what they wanted to do was leave everything as is and see how the ecosystem responded. Over time, what scientists were able to see is this incredible regeneration of other life as a result. It’s stranger than fiction but true to life. It’s interesting thinking about the different poetic layers that are within that real-world event.

It had me thinking a lot about the wisdom of nature. I shared that with the band and we worked on putting together a song that reflected on how sometimes the wisdom of nature doesn’t always extend to the wisdom of people. Sometimes we choose to hear it, sometimes we choose not to and just thinking about those choices. I think it was a bit of a tough song to get through just because it’s pretty vivid so it wasn’t necessarily an easy road writing or recording because I think all of us have pretty strong empathy for the animals that were gone after that lightning strike.

Greg: There’s little allusions to America’s political destruction or impossible functionality in its lyrics too and through very obvious numerology talks about Congress and its representative structure.

Nicole: The first time I heard the song I was shocked because I was just feeling very sad. There’s a bridge part in the song that I started to add really because I just felt so sad for these reindeer that I felt like they needed to have a voice. Obviously, no one can plan or expect a lightning strike but as we continue to see the climate shift, the “storm of a lifetime” is happening multiple times a year. A lot of that, as we know from science, is caused by human interaction in this world so there’s the line, “Did you see it coming?” It’s written kind of from the perspective of the reindeer who are out in this field asking the humans, “Was there something you could have done? Did you know this was going to happen? Could you have protected us?” I just really wanted them to have some sort of space to speak. Obviously, I cannot speak for anybody else but myself, but I was imagining what would I have asked if I was one of those souls.

Which part of NOPLACE are you proudest of?

Nicole: Finishing it.

Natasha: I think that’s it!

Greg: It was a long labour of love.

Nicole: It was a long process. I’m really proud of how much we all grew as collaborators and songwriters as we were making this album. There are songs that spring from different people at different times. Even just the fact that a lot of these songs started during the pandemic. There were songs that we were demoing and sending things across to each other. When things got a bit safer, we had to learn how to play them because it was like, “I did this when I was doing one thing at a time and now that I’m trying to sing and play this song, we might have to shift it”.

A lot of things took on new life once we finally got together to play those songs because it’s different when you’re like, “I’m going to sit and play this in front of my computer. I’m going to record the bass part. I’m going to record the vocal part. OH, we have to meet and play these and it was a lot easier when I did one thing!” I think we all really got creative in a time when we needed to and I think it awakened some new talents in us.