No. 15 - All By Myself Edition AKA a Conversation with Jake Ewald of Slaughter Beach, Dog & Modern Baseball 🗡️🩸🏖️,🐕
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Like pretty much everybody, Jake Ewald had big plans for 2020 that were quickly felled by the pandemic. Instead, the former singer and guitarist of the much-loved Philadelphia quartet Modern Baseball recorded his fourth record as Slaughter Beach, Dog without bandmates Ian Farmer (who also played in MoBo), Nick Harris and Zach Robbins, a return to the project’s roots as a solo outlet for Ewald’s songwriting.
At the Moonbase is easily his most idiosyncratic record; though it fits neatly into the continuum of Ewald’s songwriting - classic singer-songwriter mixed with 90s emo - the songs venture into new sonic and aesthetic territory as the four months Ewald spent alone gave him the space to experiment with new sounds and vocal cadences.
Speaking to Ewald over phone at his home in the Poconos, I was struck by how oddly well-adapted he was for a moment where he was stuck at home with nothing but time to write and record music. “I'm glad that this happened now, he says, “and not five years ago when it definitely would have crushed me completely.”
Slaughter Beach, Dog are playing shows in the Northeast in September. Have you started rehearsals for those yet?
September we're just doing two shows. First two shows back. We haven't really talked about what we're actually going to do for those yet, performance-wise. But we're definitely really excited to be in the same room and working on stuff again. That's something to look forward to for sure.
It must be strange to release an album and then not perform it at all.
There was a really strange lack of closure. It was very unsettling in some ways and didn't really hit me until it was happening. I'm hoping that once we finally get to play these shows, it'll be a little bit of a confirmation that we did actually put out this album and it wasn't just a dream.
Has it been difficult to promote it from your home?
It's been surprisingly uneventful. Just doing interviews, the same as I normally would, and, you know, posting online - all the usual stuff. Because there aren't live shows happening, people are staying a little more tuned in online to what's going on. So it was nice to have that happen. We did actually get to have some response, even though we weren't going on tour, which was a pleasant surprise. It was weird to not get the closure personally, of going out and doing a tour. But it was kind of pleasant to still have people actually listen to the record and kind of share their thoughts about it even though we didn't get to get out there and play it.
When you say closure, do you mean like that like physically seeing the response from fans?
Just the personal feeling with this record, in particular, taking longer than normal - I spent like four months on it. There's something that's just so gratifying and almost tangible about finishing a record and then going on tour and playing it. It's the last piece in the puzzle: you wrote the songs, you made the album, and now you're performing the songs. The cycle is complete. So, it was a weird psychological thing for me where I didn't have that last piece of the puzzle. I was like, “What do I do? Do I start thinking about something else? Do I find a different way to kind of satisfy this feeling?”
Did you find a new way?
I just talked myself down. It was helpful to have the space to answer those questions for the first time and figure out what I'm comfortable with as far as finishing a project and giving myself some space and not dive into the next thing. Just sit with what I've done and appreciate it. It ends up being helpful. It was mostly a psychological event. But it was something that I would have never had to think about, had we not been in a pandemic.
My understanding of At the Moonbase is that you had pretty detailed demos, and you were going to go into the studio with the rest of the band and record it. That obviously didn't happen. Are you the type of person that handles that kind of transition, an abrupt change of plans, well?
These days, I'm a lot better at it. But historically, those kinds of events have been my greatest weaknesses. I can be pretty, not just controlling, but also if a plan doesn't go the way that I have planned it all out to a tee, then I'll get pretty flustered and [think that] everything is ruined. But in the last few years I've gotten a lot more into meditation and ever since the late Modern Baseball days, I started going to therapy. That's become a really big part of my life. Those two things, in particular, it's kind of been a very pleasant, slow transition into learning how to roll with surprises. Because really, nothing is within my control at all except for what I ate for lunch. Whenever I can sit back and accept that and just kind of appreciate the unpredictability of the universe, I end up enjoying everything a lot more. I don't get stressed. I'm glad that this happened now and not five years ago when it definitely would have crushed me completely.
Making the record on your own over four months, were you able to find some joy in that process?
Definitely. Especially since I did end up making it by myself - that was kind of something I haven't done in a few years. It was really fulfilling to go back and do that again with the skills that I've picked up in the meantime. When I first got into recording music and writing songs, I was doing it by myself in the basement and layering things on top of each other. It's always kind of gone in and out of different versions of that as different people come in and out of the scenario. Obviously, as the world stopped and everything kind of turned upside down I had to retreat back into this comfort zone for myself and really explore it in a way that I hadn't before. I would call it joyful, for sure.
You know how you do something for a really long time and you can be very late in actually recognizing like, “Oh, this is my job.?” So this was definitely the first time that I had to make a record by myself where I really had fully accepted that this is my job and this is the thing that I do. Every day for like six to 10 hours I just do my job and try to do the best job that I can do which I know isn't a very artistic way to look at it. But as far as the practice of it, and the joy that I get from the practice of it, that was really a special experience.
It sounds like you’re starting to look at songwriting less like a means to an end and more as a craft that you can hone.
The more that I work at it, and the more that I study, and the more that I'm accepting this as the thing that I do… I’m settling into this view of songwriting that feels really good, that I can actively work at, and push myself at, and chase down different ideas and try things that end up being terrible ideas. With Modern baseball, everything that happened - we were so young - the whole operation was just like 90% adrenaline. It was the excitement of being young and having all these opportunities. It's been interesting to have so much more space now. Literally space in the day where I'm essentially just a songwriter and my job is to write songs. There isn’t adrenaline pumping through me every day that I'm writing songs and that’s allowed me to take a step back and really study the ways that other people write songs from a career perspective. The ways that they push themselves and experiment with things. I had a really pleasant discovery where I thought it's one thing to be in a band when you're 22 and everything's exciting and moving at 100 miles an hour. But there's also this other kind of songwriting where you quietly chip away at it. You don't have to be 22 to do it - you can do it until you're 80. So that's been really gratifying to kind of slow down and look at it that way more recently.
Working that way, with that mindset, are you able to write more songs? Or are you working on the same batch of songs longer?
I am writing a lot more songs, which is really cool. It feels like a part of me opened up. I used to wait for songs to come and then eventually a song would come and I'd be like, “Great. Thanks. There’s a song.” But now, I wake up in the morning and sit down and be like, “I'm gonna try to write a song today and maybe I'll get one or maybe I won't, or maybe I'll write a poem or maybe I'll just journal.” Now that I have the space without the adrenaline, everything becomes so much more deliberate and I get into these actual routines that I love and I end up writing more songs. It's been a really pleasant surprise.
To me, At the Moonbase is the most idiosyncratic record you’ve made. I don’t know if you agree with that, but if you do, do you think that was baked into the songs as you wrote them? Or did it come from tinkering with them for four months?
I think it was more from working on them. Especially coming after Safe and Also No Fear, which was the first time that we did a record where we wrote and recorded it as a band and tried to limit ourselves to the physical capabilities of four people in a room. The recordings are really cohesive in that way. Whenever we finish an album, I find myself thinking, “That was fun, but I kind of want to do the opposite thing.” That was kind of what happened. Even when we were planning to record At the Moonbase as a band, we were saying we didn't want to treat it as just three or four people in a room playing music together. We wanted to treat it more from, like you said, idiosyncratic production from song to song and just follow these threads. So that got totally exaggerated. I ended up in the basement for four months with no deadline. Not only was there no deadline, I didn't have to explain myself to anybody, which I'm not really good at doing. As I was building each song up from the bottom if I had kind of a crazy idea I could take as much time as I wanted to try that idea, follow it and see if it worked. I was really pleased with it at the end because I did feel like every song kind of turned into its own little world. I just tried to spend way more time on every individual song than I ever have before. It was definitely a new thing and I was really happy with the way that it turned out.
Are you the type of person who fiddles with something just for the sake of fiddling with it? Or are you able to say to yourself, “This is done,” and move on?
I am historically an anti-fiddler. I'm the person in the studio who says we need to go to the next thing, let's keep the momentum going. So it was a really new thing for me to be by myself. Also when I used to make records by myself I would do a couple of takes and then I'd be like, “Okay, next thing I'm bored.” But this time, I guess just because of how the whole music industry was just floating and we really didn't have to do anything and also because I was by myself and I didn't have to deal with like… I'm just not very good at confrontation or like expressing myself. And I don't even mean confrontation like actually fighting, I just mean communication, like talking about decisions. But because I didn't have to do that, I took a step back and tried to use it as an opportunity to see what it was like to be a fiddler for once and it was really cool. I wouldn't say I'm a total convert now, but I’m definitely really excited to work on some songs with Zach and Ian and again and not be the guy who's constantly saying, “Let's move on to the next thing.” There were so many things that ended up coming out on this record that I really love that I never, ever would have discovered if I hadn't worked on certain songs for like three or four months.
Kool Kids Blatant Self-promotion club
More in the New Faves section of Exclaim! This time it’s Toronto duo Babygirl, who dropped their new EP Losers Weepers last month. Check out “Million Dollar Bed” for a taste of their minimal brilliance.
Kool Kids Music Recommendation Club
90s emo really was, to paraphrase Jessica Hopper, where the girls weren’t. The main exception to that were Madison, WI’s Rainer Maria. The trio split in 2006, but in the interim singer-bass player Caithlin De Marrais forged a quiet solo career. Following Rainer Maria’s reunion, she returned to making music for herself, dropping What Will You Do Then? back in February. I am a bit obsessed with its opener “Good Luck Come Back” though the whole thing is pretty great.
Kicksie’s full-length debut, All My Friends, came out last year, but I’m only cluing into the Toronto artist’s (real name: Giuliana Mormile) pop-tinged emo now. “Banana Pop!” is an easy standout on an all-around great album, that masks some serious pop chops with American Football style guitar noodling. Mormile excels at creating sunny tracks that still manage to convey complex emotions. All My Friends is an ode to companionship in all its forms. Despite the complications that can come with any relationship Mormile still manages to maintain an optimistic disposition that personally, I could stand to learn from.
Montreal producer and electronic musician CFCF is many things to many people, depending on which sounds and aesthetics he’s currently working with. His Night Bus mixes remain amongst my favourite and his new album Memoryland shares many of the themes (if not the overall sound and vibe) with those recordings. For a deep dive into its sound and influences, I suggest checking out fellow musician Cadence Weapon’s thoughts on the record at his own Substack.
When I reviewed Get Bleak, the debut EP from jangle-pop duo Ducks Unlimited back in 2019, I noted that the Toronto band “effectively convey the lost-in-the-world miasma in which too many of us find ourselves floating.” Now working under the name Duck Ltd., the band have signed to Carpark Records and are expanding the original four-song record with an additional three tracks. “As Big as All Outside” is the first taste and it doesn’t disappoint.
On the surface, Halifax’s Century Egg are just another (very good) garage rock band from a region that tends to produce far more of them per capita than is really fair. But dig a little deeper, like maybe half-an-inch, and you start to see that the quartet are so, so much more. Blending elements of mandopop - Mandarin pop - with a DIY attitude, Century Egg’s new EP Little Piece of Hair gives a global update to their hometown’s 90s pop explosion sound. You can’t find a better place to dive in than the opening blitz “Do You Want to Dance?”
Faye Webster just announced her fourth album, I Know I’m Funny haha, out June 25th on Secretly Canadian. “Cheers” the album’s first single is a pulsing kiss-off to breakup platitudes and pretending everything is okay when it really isn’t. The gritty track is a real departure for the Atlanta artist, whose last album, Atlanta Millionaires Club, sounded like something out of the Spacebomb Records stable: a little bit soul, a little bit Americana. That might turn off some of the fans she’s gained, but I’m definitely feeling this new vibe.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
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