You recorded Curtsy When You Land with Pedro Aida at Audio Verite in Richmond, Virginia. How did you decide where to record?

I recorded a single for a compilation that Say-10 Records released in 2022 called Never Erased which benefited a transgender non-profit. We recorded that song a year before we started recording the full-length. Adam from Say-10 asked me if I wanted to do a song for the compilation and I was like, “Yeah, sounds great!” Then Adam was like, “Go to Pedro. I’ll pay for the day of recording.” I did and it was such a good experience. Pedro is just so good. Everything sounded so well produced. When I knew that I was going to record a full-length I was like, “Let’s go back to Pedro.” It was a great experience.

I’ve had a lot of good studio experiences before. Recording my 2018 record, A Comprehensive Guide To Burning Out, was also an excellent experience and it was very different. For that one, it was with my friend Tyler Bisson who lived in Tallahassee at the time and had a home studio called Audio Geography Studios. We recorded it in about two weeks and I slept on his floor. A day was like, wake up, record, go eat dinner, and then go to sleep. That’s how that one was done.

Cursty When You Land was very different in that Pedro lives 5-10 minutes from where I live. His studio is in his house. It’s a really cool studio setup where there’s sort of a separate guest house. This one took about a year to record with finding the time and going in for a week. Sometimes it would just be going in and trying to overproduce it as much as possible and then going back later.

What was it like having that extra time? How do you feel the songs evolved?

I felt like I could really put as much as I wanted into them. I felt that there wasn’t that cut-off where I know that it has to be done at this time and once I’m gone, I’m gone. For the last one, I was able to send notes over a longer course of time for mixing. For this one, I could go home, listen to what we had, and be like, “You know what? This could use some random percussion in this spot for like 5 seconds just to add some flourish and make it seem more full.” Then I was able to go back and we were able to play around and keep creating.

There was still a time crunch though, definitely. There were still things like, “This is the time we allotted for drums” or “This is the time we allotted for keyboard” or “I have the saxophone player for this day.” There was still planning and making sure that everything was solid going in so we could get what we needed. Then we’d be like, “What can we play with after that?”

Pedro has a spoken intro on the album. How did that come about?

I feel like the album intro and the intro to that song in general took a while for me to figure out exactly what I wanted. That came later, kind of once I kinda hammered it all down. As far as the spoken intro for Pedro, I feel like one of the themes of the album is escapism through entertainment in a way so it was about setting it up as a movie. It starts with that and it sort of wraps around to “Diegetic”, which is also very narrative-themed. It was a nice album open and close for me.

The album cover with the film reel speaks to that too.

Yeah, that was fun to do too. I found actual 35mm film on eBay so I bought some. I’m assuming it’s from a movie that was shown in theatres sometime in the ‘80s or '90s and then they just put this film somewhere when the movie was out of theatres. I took that film to Mx. Bex, who’s credited on the album, and they did the album art shoot with what I think is called a lightbox? I’m not as visually artistic. We did that shoot together and that was a lot of fun. We got a million photographs of the film on that white background.

Do you know what the movie that’s on the film is?

I know but I don’t know if I’m going to tell everyone else what it is. [laughs] It is a real studio movie! I looked at it and was like, “I recognize all of these actors” and was able to narrow it down and figure it out with IMDb. [laughs] When we shot it I was like, “You can clearly see on the film what it is.” I kinda wanted to shoot around it so there’s no specific moment of, “Oh, that’s what this is!” I just want it to be this general movie, like a make-up-your-own-mind sort of thing. I don’t think you can see what it is in any of those images, but it is possible. If anyone sees it and can figure it out, that’d be fun too.

The album takes its name from a line in “Diegetic”. Why did you decide to name the album after this lyric in particular?

I always like deriving from somewhere within the songs and I felt like “Diegetic” kind of wrapped up what I was going for with the overarching theme of the album. Narrowing in on “Don’t forget to take a curtsy when you’ve landed” specifically just felt like the bow or curtsy at the end of the show so I just went with that general closing line. It’s more about the positive feeling of the closing and I went with that for the album title.

You mentioned escapism through entertainment. Do you have a certain thing or things that are your go-tos when you feel like everything is too much and you need that escape?

Definitely! I feel like entertainment in general is a big part of my life and I see it as art whether it’s music, movies, television, or video games. Those are my biggest areas of, “Ok, time to do something for me.” I just see it as consuming art. It’s a good way to sort of escape whatever’s happening out there and see what somebody else is making.

It’s like looking into someone else’s mind.

Yeah, exactly. Then you can either be like, “I could totally relate to that” or “I totally understand that” or “Hey, that’s a new perspective I haven’t fully thought about” or “That’s something to digest.” You can just get so much from all of these mediums. Sometimes it is just, “Everything is so hard. I just need to not be in that for a while so I’m just going to put this movie on or I’m just going to listen to this album.” Then that’s what’s consuming you instead of how you’re going to make rent or whatever it is.

There’s something that can be said too for feeling like everything is crushing or tough and then consuming media about that. It can somehow feel good in a relatable sense or it makes you think. It doesn’t have to be escapism into cotton candy, it can still be into rough subjects but you’re still just taking in the art of it.

How would you describe your songwriting process?

For the most part, I start with just an acoustic guitar and usually, I’ll have an idea of either the theme of the song I want to explore or something that I’ve been thinking about a lot, or maybe it’s something I’ve recently heard and I’m like, “It would be cool to write something within the constraints of this genre” or “How do I merge these two different genres? How do I come up with something that’s all that?” Then I’m gonna put in filler words and just sing whatever and come up with the melodies. It’s going to build from there and I’m going to write lyrics that make sense and fit. At that point, I’ll bring it to the band and be like, “Hey, here’s what I’ve got so far.” Maybe I’ll have a bassline or maybe I’ll do that obnoxious guitarist-singer thing to the drummer where I go, “It goes like ba-dum-badum-bababa. Figure that out.” You know, the thing that every drummer loves. [laughs]

There have also been occasions where the songwriting style is a little bit different, like with “Had Enough”. We were at a band practice and everyone was taking a 10-minute break. I don’t usually take the break, I usually just stay in the room and keep playing. I just started playing that riff and when everyone came back I was like, “I think this is a song.” We just jammed that one out until that became a song.

On this album, there’s a song called “No Good” which I think of as if Powerman 5000 played funk. That’s kinda how I see that one. [laughs] I think the bassline that carries the song makes no sense. I was driving around for about a month and for some reason, it was just in my head. I transcribed the thing that was happening in my head and was like, “Let’s just make it a song! It’s gonna be weird.” We definitely polished it a ton and figured out what it was. It’s almost like shower thoughts where you don’t know why you thought about it but you’re just going to go with it. I tried to make something out of it. In my opinion, I do think it’s maybe the weirdest one on the album but I like it. I usually like the weird stuff. [laughs]

You’ve gotta dig into the weird stuff! If you’re not then what are you doing?

Exactly! Then it just sounds like all of the other things that are out and there’s not necessarily anything wrong with that. It’s that thing where you see something or you hear something or you read something and you’re like, “I know exactly what this is!” That could still be comforting and I’m sure it’s easier to market. [laughs] I’ve never been able to do that. I’ve always been like, “Ok, how do I take this thing that’s maybe pretty average or normal and just make it strange? How do I change the timing a little bit or do something that tweaks it enough that it catches somebody off guard?”

Do you have any other weird flourishes or anything like that on this album that you’re proud of?

Definitely! That saxophone solo by Michael Bradley on “No Good” is a ton of fun. I think that’s a super weird way to go about it; just put a freeform jazz solo right over the nu-metal guitar riff.

I think there’s a lot going on on this album that’s fun. The thing with the album that I really tried to hit - and I try to hit this when I make albums in general - is that I want it where all of the songs sound unique and different from each other but they all make sense somehow as a cohesive album. There are albums that I kind of go back to for that inspiration. I really like ‘90s alt-rock and Recovering the Satellites by Counting Crows and All The Pain Money Can Buy by Fastball specifically are two great albums where if you really listen to the songs, they’re all so different from each other. With that Counting Crows album, the first few songs are like: mid-tempo alt-rock song, pop-punk song, country song, and then back to an alt-rock almost emo song. All the songs on that album are so different from each other but they all make so much sense back to back. I usually go for that and try to be like, “Ok, how am I going to mix it up on this next thing?” I think about track order a ton just to keep it super unique and keep it engaging but have it all still make sense.

I think within a lot of those songs there’s a lot of things that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to be there. The solo section on “Fake it til I die” is really fun. Liz [Fackelman] from The Best of the Worst is playing trombone with some multitracking with a really sloppy, loud guitar. It’s hard to even call it a solo; it’s just a guitar lead that’s going over it. I wanted it to be chaotic and messy. “Fake it” is maybe the most sarcastic song on the album. It was a lot of fun trying to marry what I wanted the intent of the song lyrically to ideas like, “How do I make the music sound sarcastic at the same time? How do I make this sound like a high but unearned ego? How do I convey that with music?” That was fun.

“Where’s the Passion?” was a lot of fun because I feel like on some levels it sounds like what I used to do a long time ago. We just messed with the timing for the silent gaps in the horn section on that song and we tried to make it a little bit of a guessing game for when it’s coming back. I was in a band for some years where it was hardcore and ska and dance-pop all mixed in. I was like, “Let’s do some hardcore and put some horns in there, it’ll be a good time.”

I think this album is full of little moments here and there that are just a little off or a little weird for what I think is the most accessible and catchiest album I’ve made.

What was it like revisiting that sound in particular?

It was a lot of fun to go back and do that, which is something I really haven’t explored in quite a while at this point. It’s been between 10-15 years since I’ve done that, the great 2010 skacore era. [laughs] It was a ton of fun to do. We just played all those songs live at the album release and it was also a lot of fun to get to revisit that.

Did you have a song that was the most fun to bring to life in a live setting?

I do really like all the songs on this album and I do really, really like all of the “more normal” songs. I think they are fun and catchy like “Had Enough”, “& the days go by”, “What Are We Gonna Do”, and stuff like that. They’re just a ton of fun to play but we’ve also played those a lot at this point. We’ve been practicing those a ton for years on our side whereas as a band, we’ve played songs like “No Good” and “Where’s the Passion?” a whole lot less. It was really fun to get to do those, especially with our friends in Corporate Fandango from North Carolina on horns. I think that was the first time at the show that we’ve played those songs in a live setting with the horns and I don’t think we’d ever practiced with horns before either. It was a ton of fun to do. All that said, I think “Diegetic” was my favourite to do. I think that’s just such a fun song. I’ve never written anything quite like that. Getting to do that song and getting to do the “Oh”s live in felt really good. It was a good release.

Would you say that’s the most cathartic song on the album for you?

I think it is for me. It’s longer than most songs I write and it’s got a lot of different moving parts that are a lot of fun. When I wrote “Diegetic” I had just watched the movie Tick, Tick… Boom! with Andrew Garfield about Jonathan Larson, the guy who made Rent. I’ve never been into musicals, but watching that movie I was like, “Oh, this is cool! I really like the song style.” I came out of it being like, “I want to write a musical but not a whole one. I just want to write a song that’s like a musical.” That’s kind of where “Diegetic” came from. When I approached writing it, I wrote it as if it would be on stage as a musical and then just expanded it from there. I think it has this unique sound than the rest of the album and anything I’ve ever written, but in the same way, I think it fits.

It’s also interesting to think about how in this day and age with how people listen to music and with it being the last track like, “This is the one that people are going to hear the least!” [laughs] But I’m really proud of it. I really like it. I feel like I’m just old and I listen to albums so I’m like, “I hope people decide to listen to this album multiple times and really soak it in.” We’ll see. [laughs]

So much time and effort goes into the tracklist, you have to listen to it all the way through.

I worked for a long time at the Richmond SPCA, which is an animal shelter, and a big part of the job that I had was driving around the state of Virginia. There was somebody else who was younger than me, early 20s maybe, and she introduced me - I already knew them a little bit but she liked them a lot - to the band Fidlar. They’re a really great band. The way that she listened to them was that she would go to Spotify and click the top songs and it would play all of the songs in order. At some point I was like, “What album is this? I want to listen to the album” and she was like, “It’s not an album. I just clicked their top songs.” But she knew it like it was an album. It’s the thing that really illuminated how different it is for people who are not quite my age, I’m in my late 30s. It was just so different. I don’t think there was another person that I worked with, regardless of age, who actually listened to albums. It would usually just be a playlist of singles or whatever the algorithm was going to play for them. Not a single other person was like, “I’m going to put on an album.” [laughs]

As somebody who is so invested in artists’ intent and tracklisting it’s bizarre to me. Sometimes that really meshes with you and sometimes you go, “This could have ended at track 11” when there’s still a few good songs to go but they don’t feel as cohesive but you still soak it all in. I feel like that gets a little bit lost. I prefer to make things that I would enjoy consuming. I just go with what I feel like I would like and think, “If I like it maybe other people do the same thing too.” [laughs]

On “OHHH!, or what it’s like to be disappointed by the monotony of everyday life” you reference “Here Comes The Sun” by The Beatles and “Pike St./Park Slope” by Harvey Danger. You also reference Sean Nelson on “Fake it til I die”. What do these songs and Harvey Danger mean to you?

Honestly, the Beatles don’t mean a whole lot to me. [laughs] They’re not a band that I’ve really listened to much. I went with a song that I felt was pretty familiar to a lot of people and something where in the end everything could be positive, it’s optimistic. I wanted to juxtapose that with the pessimistic reality, like the cynical take I tend to have, with “Pike St./Park Slope” where it’s like, “It doesn’t matter where you go, everything’s the same. You’re not going to outrun those problems.” At least, that’s how I see that song.

Harvey Danger is one of my favourite bands, I love Harvey Danger. Those three albums that are their main full-lengths are just so good from start to end. They have a lot of sarcastic-sounding music but at the same time, they can get really earnest which is fun. I’m such a fan of the amount of thought you put into the words you’re gonna say and how clever you want them to sound. I think they’re just top-notch at all of that and then Sean Nelson gives it the delivery that it deserves in the vocal performance. Just such a fantastic band.

That’s name-dropping in that I don’t know them and likely will never know them. I don’t typically name-drop in music, I try to keep other people out of it. [laughs] On this record I was like, “You know what? I’m just going to drop references and names and stuff. Harvey Danger would’ve dropped references and names. I’m just gonna throw it out there.” There are a few Harvey Danger and Sean Nelson references on there. I just went with it because it means a lot and I feel like it fits with what I like to do lyrically.

With the name drops, you also have a line mentioning Jeff Rosenstock. What’s the story behind that?

I’ve met Jeff Rosenstock a bunch of times, I would say once every couple years for a stretch of time when I was younger. I can be pretty awkward and not always know the right thing to say. I met him for the first time when I booked in Florida. I had seen his ska band, ASOB, like a year or so before that in Florida and I was blown away. I was like, “This is the best band in the world!” Then a year or so later, he was going on tour with Rick Johnson of Mustard Plug. I booked them a show and I actually booked a venue that was way too big because I had no idea what I was doing. I was 17 or 18 and was like, “Oh ASOB and the guy from Mustard Plug? Everyone’s gonna wanna go to that!” I didn’t realize that’s not necessarily how shows worked at that time. [laughs] So I booked an 800 or 1000 cap venue and like 50 people showed up. Later in life, I was like, “That would’ve been a great house show!” It was just the wrong thing. In any case, that’s the first time I met him. I was a kid and didn’t really know what to say at that point, so it was just awkward and weird.

Then I felt like every couple years a band I was in would play with Bomb The Music Industry!. There was a show in Atlanta when I was couch surfing with a friend and that friend was playing a show with the Jeff Rosenstock band. I showed up with the friend and Jeff was like, “Hey, I’m Jeff! Nice to meet you” and I shook his hand and was like, “Actually, we’ve met four times before. You meet so many people I don’t blame you at all for not knowing me.” I think this was also the first time I met him after transitioning. He was like, “Oh cool! Nice to re-meet you.” I was like, “Yeah!” and was just quiet. I’m just a weirdo sometimes trying to be like a regular person but making things awkward.

That line was about how I keep meeting this person who I think writes absolutely fantastic music, some of my favourite stuff, and excellent lyrics and I respect that a lot. Then I happen to meet them a bunch of times and I’m just weird. [laughs] That’s what that is. I get to flip it the next time his name would come around in the song where I say “insert name drop” because at that point I’m just saying names of people who are kind of well-known who I’ve met. It comes off as maybe bragging even though it’s not because I was just being weird. [laughs]

It’s hard not to be awkward sometimes.

Yeah, I know that very well. [laughs] I used to have a really hard time when I was younger with talking with people and stuff. I think part of that was being trans and not being able to tell anybody and all of the internalized hate and stuff but some of that was also because I was very nerdy - not that I’m not nerdy now. [laughs] I mingled with everyone at school; I talked with the punks and all the nerdy kids and the music kids, all the different cliques. But at the same time, I would just go home and play video games for like six hours then I’d go to sleep. Rinse and repeat, that was kinda me as a kid. Especially when video games were not seen as cool or not everyone was into them. It’s very different now.

In new situations and with new people I still feel this to an extent. There was a band that was really cool and they booked me a show in a town in Arkansas - I think it was in Little Rock - that I toured through a few times when I was in my late teens. The show was at a bar and I remember driving 8-10 hours through terrible weather to get there from the last show I did in Texas. I got there and they were all at this round table and the band was super inviting and nice. They’re like, “Hey Madison, come over! Hang out with us!” I remember sitting there and saying absolutely nothing because I wasn’t sure what to say or how to interact with people. I just remember doing that and from there being like, “How do I not be so quiet and weird and awkward? How do I talk with people?” and then having to figure it out and get to a place where I could just be an average person in the world. [laughs] That specific interaction sticks with me where I was just there and afraid to talk to people who were both so extremely nice but also literally booked this show for me. I didn’t know what to say because I thought they were all so nice and cool that I was like, “Clearly, I shouldn’t say any words.”

I think mostly I’m pretty good, but at a recent show there was a thing where I was like, “Oh, I think I know who that is but I’m not 100% sure and I’m not going to be awkward” but in that maybe I was more awkward because I just buried myself in my phone and didn’t say anything. [laughs] I usually try to put myself as out there as I can until something in me says, “I just can’t right now.” Probably the right thing to do is be nice and outgoing but I have to retreat inwards for a little bit.

You have to recharge, it’s not an endless well.

I totally agree, especially when you have to work at it. I think there are people who are naturally super extroverted and love meeting every new person and that’s really awesome. I try to be that. I do really like meeting people. A lot of times I really want to introduce myself to everyone so they introduce themselves to me and get to know people on that level. But then I have a lot of anxiety about, “Oh god, now I know too many people. There’s no way I’m going to recognize this person the next time and I’m gonna feel terrible about not immediately knowing who they are.” Then I just start to spiral inwardly. [laughs] Too much anxiety.

What’s helped you deal with that?

Oh god, I don’t know if anything helps me. [laughs] I just try to push through. A lot of times I think, “If I don’t make this thing happen, it’ll never happen” so I just talk myself into doing the thing whether that’s creating art or putting myself out there in a way that might feel uncomfortable.

You shot your video for “& the days go by” at DawnStar Video Games and Arcade. What does this place mean to you?

I love DawnStar! Shoutout to DawnStar Video Games and Arcade in Richmond, Virginia! Dakotah, Meaghan, and Andrew who own DawnStar are great owners and great people. They also own Wax Moon Records which is right next door. It’s the punk rock version of running an arcade and running a record shop. It’s people who are like, “This is the thing that I know I should be doing. This is the thing that I deeply care about and I’m just gonna go figure out how to make my life that” which is so awesome. I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to work events with them. Since 2021 I have run Super Smash Bros. Ultimate Tournaments and I’ve played Super Smash Bros. competitively since maybe 2008, whenever Brawl came out on the Wii. Again, going back to how I am a nerd. [laughs] I just love the game and I love the feeling of playing competitively.

The place in Richmond that used to run tournaments, The Forge, closed their doors during COVID. Once vaccinations came out and I felt safe to run events again, I was like, “Running Smash tournaments can’t be much different than booking DIY music.” So I started running Smash tournaments at a place called Castleburg Brewery and Taproom in Richmond for quite a while, then they ended up closing. DawnStar was running their own Smash tournaments and I hit them up like, “Why don’t we combine?” Now I run a weekly Smash tournament at DawnStar.

I know the owners pretty well and was like, “Hey, can we shoot a video at your place?” They were like, “Yeah, that’d be great!” I wanted that aesthetic of all the arcades and everything. I believe there’s a CRT TV with Super Smash Bros. Melee on the stage as well while we’re playing. I was like, “I’ll get some Smash in there in some way!” [laughs]

Plus I just love music videos. I remember being a kid and sitting down and watching all of the music videos in a row on MTV or VH1 after school and getting to know them all intimately. A band I really like is Superdrag, they’re a great ‘90s alt-rock band. They have a lot of great albums but I still remember the video for the single from Regretfully Yours. It’s hard to find now. It was them in a diner playing in slow-motion shots and they’re playing on tables. I was like, “This is so cool!” Those things just resonated with me.

I’ve always been like, “I just wanna shoot videos” and for this album, we got to do three so far which is a lot of fun. I like to do videos. They’re much more accessible to do in this day and age, like a lot of art, because cameras are easier to come by, the technology is there, and you can just upload it yourself to YouTube instead of having to convince a national television station to play it. But at the same time, because there’s so much out there it’s so much harder to get in front of people. I’m not gonna give Meta my money to do that. I’m sorry Mark Zuckerberg, but I’m not paying you to sponsor my ad. [laughs] You just put the thing out there and you hope people who are interested in that thing will watch it and if they’re not, that’s fine.

You shot your video for “Arsonist & All Alone” on a Hi-8 tape and converted it to VHS to get all these analog effects. What went into your decision to film that way? What was that experience like?

I would say I have way more music video ideas than I’ll ever be able to make. That was one of the various ideas that I had specifically for that song. I thought it’d be really cool to get that nostalgic aesthetic but I really don’t like modern filters, especially for stuff like that because in my opinion, you can just tell it doesn’t look like what it should look like; it’s just an approximation. I thought it would be fun to figure it out. The initial idea was to find a camera that recorded straight to VHS and we found a couple - by “we” I mean Jake Morley, our bass player. The problem with them is the technology is at that point where it just barely works anymore. It’s unlikely to have a video camera that records to VHS that still works and the parts that don’t work are very, very difficult to find to replace because they’re no longer in production. It’s like a tool that has aged out, unfortunately. That’s not something that I knew about until trying to do this because I just assumed, “Oh, somebody will have one in their closet.” [laughs] None of them will work anymore.

The VHS players that we used - also supplied by Jake, who is really good at acquiring these things - also sort of didn’t work like they should and that made it better because when we recorded from the camcorder to the VHS tape, it automatically added all of that fuzz, all of that static, and that great tracking that I wanted to put in manually. It was doing that because the tape heads were already degraded and could’ve used cleaning. We used multiple VHS players and recorders to get different aesthetics on the tape. I was actually able to record in real-time from the Hi-8 tape to one VHS player which had a darker colour to it because it had a cycling tracking issue. Every time the head would spin around it would just create more and more tracking and go blank for a moment and then come back.

Then I recorded it in real-time to a different VCR that had some tracking but not nearly as much as the first one and the colours were a little bit brighter like they were supposed to be. Then I recorded both of those VHS tapes separately to the computer using a composite cable capture card through OBS - which is a program I usually use to livestream the Smash tournaments. I had a lot of footage to play with when I edited it together. As far as the editing digitally, all I did was cut and move around all the pieces. We had a ton of footage, it was hours worth to make this 4-minute video. I did no effects or colour correction or anything other than reshuffling footage digitally. Everything else was done analog through VHS tapes and the Hi-8 which I thought was really cool. It’s super authentic as far as how it looks and how it was made.

I also figure the worse resolution helped with the masking of band members disappearing and reappearing. It made it seem a little bit more natural than if it was in 4K glossy. It’s the same way that movies look so good because they don’t look real, they’re masked a bit by that film grain. When you have everything blown up to such a nice-looking thing, especially with the interpolation of extra frames and motion smoothing, it starts to look so much more real that you’re taken out of it. It’s supposed to have that 35mm grainy kinda thing going on because it feels more real instead of looking more real. You need it to look a little bit worse so that it looks better.

Which part of Curtsy When You Land are you proudest of?

That’s such a hard question. I’m proud of the whole thing as an album because I look at it that way. I look at it like, “How does this work? How does this flow? How does this sound from start to finish?” I think we really nailed it. I’m definitely proud of the whole thing. I’m proud of how catchy it is and fulfilling the goal of having hooks. The mentality that I had for a while was like, “You only need to do the chorus once because if somebody likes that chorus, they can just listen to the song again. It’s there, it’s recorded. Just go back and listen to it again if you like it so much”. I think you can hear it when you listen to my 2013 album life for instance, or to my previous band Paranoia Dance Party!’s 2011 album surroundings. I had the mentality of, “Keep moving, keep changing, keep doing more things.”

I feel like Comprehensive Guide was the first album where I was like, “You know what? We can do some choruses and stuff, it’ll be fine.” But I think this was really the album where I was like, “Ok, let’s put hooks in there! Let’s have the thing where the chorus happens multiple times but it evolves throughout the song so there’s a little bit of spicing it up each time it happens. Let’s really dig into these hooks and make it something where somebody can latch on immediately and go, ‘OH I know this song now!’ even if they’re hearing it for the first time.” I’m proud of that and I think that was successful. Other people will have to tell me as they listen to it. Especially in a day and age where - and I can be guilty of this as well - sometimes you listen to something for ten seconds and you judge it immediately like, “This might not be my thing” or “This is great.”

Maybe someone can latch on to this song within one listen to it. It doesn’t have the benefit of radio play or anything. I mean, people don’t really listen to that anymore regardless, but I feel like that was a thing for a while where if your song was on the radio it’s gonna play once every thirty minutes or whatever so regardless of how you feel about it, you’re gonna know this song. You’re really gonna soak it in and that’s gonna dictate your final opinion on it. Now there’s just so much music from so many different sources and so many different niches that it’s like, “How can I get it so someone resonates with this immediately when they listen to it?” That should be the goal of music in general, to be accessible. I feel like in my past I’d be like, “How do I make this not accessible so you have to really listen to it to get into it?” That can be fun too.

Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you’d like to add?

I’m super proud of this record and I hope people give it a chance. I hope people listen to it a few times and really soak it in. When you went to a record store - in my case, I bought mostly CDs - you paid for that CD and you had that thing. If you wanted another one you’d have to go back to the store so you listened to the CD you had a bunch. I feel like that is something that is sort of missing from how music is consumed today. A lot of people will listen to something once and move on. I hope people go, “This is cool! This is worthwhile, I’m gonna listen to it a few times and really start to make up my mind about how I feel.” I’m always chasing that perfect record that stands the test of time; maybe this is it, maybe it’s not. I hope people like it.