Don't Really Mind These Miles: An Interview with Marble Teeth

/

For most of my life, I’ve been chasing the high of listening to The Replacements for the first time. It happened back in seventh grade. I was a performative hater of anything modern, and I had a problem: I couldn’t deny that I was starting to enjoy Green Day. Fearing that I might be on the verge of betraying my “born in the wrong generation” aesthetic, I Googled “Old bands that sound like Green Day,” hoping to find a group from before I existed that could scratch the same itch. Through this search, I found “Bastards of Young,” which led me to Tim, which led me to Let it Be, which led me to everything else, and before I knew it, I had developed a burning love for the band that outlived (and helped guide me out of) the pretentious phase which had led me to them in the first place. It totally changed the way I consumed and thought about music. I just had never been into a band like that. I didn’t know there could be a band like that. 

Though I’ve never had that exact feeling again (and likely never will), there are a few bands that have gotten me pretty close. Cloud Nothings come to mind as one example, a band that grabbed me at first listen and totally changed my understanding of the ways melody and fuzz can coexist. Prefab Sprout, who pushed pop songwriting in directions I had never considered, is another. Most recently, I’ve become obsessed with Marble Teeth, the solo project of Decatur, Illinois-based singer-songwriter Caleb Jefson.

I came across Marble Teeth last August when they opened for Retirement Party at Beat Kitchen. Prior to the show I’d never heard of them, but they very quickly had me hooked. Most of what they played that night came from their most recent release, top 10 times i’ve cried, a record that at different points finds itself living in the worlds of alt-country, indie folk, and straight-up Americana. It wasn’t necessarily a sound that I expected to hear at an emo show, but I couldn’t deny that it worked.

Beyond the music, I was fascinated by Caleb as an artist. His merch spread was like nothing I’d ever seen; sitting next to a table with CDs and zines was a portable clothing rack with about 20 Marble Teeth shirts, no two of which were exactly alike. Each one that I flipped through had a new design or was pressed into a different brand/color of shirt, meaning that they had each been individually crafted rather than ordered in bulk from a distributor, truly DIY. 

When I got home and looked more into Marble Teeth, I discovered that this is just how Caleb does things. He handles everything on his records: the playing, the recording, the mixing, the album covers. Beyond the unique shirts, he seems to be constantly learning new crafts and applying these skills to his merch; at different times over the past few months, he’s offered both custom embroidered hats and Marble Teeth branded gloves, all homemade. When he worked with Klepto Phase to put out a vinyl pressing of top 10 times i’ve cried last fall, each record was accompanied by an exquisitely designed lyric zine. He’s an artist in the truest sense of the word. 

As I dug into Marble Teeth’s back catalog, two records I found myself coming back to a lot were Cars and Park, released in 2018 and 2020, respectively. Where top 10 times is clearly influenced by older folk and country music, Cars and Park take their approach more from contemporary bedroom pop/singer-songwriter-tinged emo artists like Slaughter Beach, Dog and Trace Mountains. They’re raw and emotional records with a sound that’s incredibly in my wheelhouse. It was the most I’d been obsessed with an artist since finding Tim; there were whole weeks where those two records were all that I listened to.

A few months after first hearing Marble Teeth at Beat Kitchen, I was lucky enough to meet Caleb at a house show in Chicago where he mentioned that a vinyl pressing of Cars and Park was in the works: one record that would have Cars on one side and Park on the other. This was right around when I was playing both non-stop, so I was ecstatic. That vinyl is now pressed, ready to ship, and up for sale directly through Marble Teeth’s own website. I sat down with Caleb to discuss his creative process, finally getting these records out on vinyl, and how he feels about them five to seven years after their release. Here is that conversation.   

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

SWIM: To get started, I was curious how you guys came to this decision to put Cars and Park out on vinyl at this point, with their release having been quite a few years in the past.

CALEB: I got the opportunity through a program at the local college here where they were doing a small pressing of something, like only a hundred of them. Honestly, these have been a long time in the making. So, top 10 times i’ve cried was being recorded but not even planned to be put out yet. Neither of those albums [Cars or Park] really had much of a physical release. I did some tapes that were split albums where I had Cars on one side and Park on the other, but it’s been a couple of years. I just thought, given only a hundred, those are old enough that I'm not gonna be pushing them so hard. The people who want them will definitely want them because Cars and Park have their fan base. And then the new stuff has picked up people, but yeah, the day-one fans love those, I think, I hope.

SWIM: So I know you just said you put out some tapes of those two, but in general, with your stuff for physical releases, are you doing just like CDs when you go on a run? Is that more your normal thing? 

CALEB: I've done that in the past where, yeah, I'll just hand-burn CDs. Physical copies are definitely something I've not put a ton of money into. When it comes to band operations and stuff, it really is just me. I have a live band that I play with, but I play all the instruments on the records and do all the recording and writing. So when it comes to financial backing for things, it's literally just me paying for it out of pocket. In the past, I've done the cheapest way possible, generally homemade stuff. I splurged for a couple of runs of tapes before a big tour or something just to have something else that looks nice.

SWIM: Nice. When it comes to vinyl, are you personally a collector or fan?

CALEB: Yeah, yeah, I like vinyl.

SWIM: Do you have any particular records in your collection that are your favorites or mean something to you?

CALEB: My buddy Jacob gave me a copy of Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan a couple of years ago, and that kind of started it. He was like, ‘This is for your Bob Dylan collection,’ and I only had two of his before that. Honestly, I was a big fan, but I only had a couple that I had found, and then I was like, huh, I didn't even realize I had a collection. After that, I kind of started buying a ton. So that one's special because it kind of sparked that, “All right, I'm just going to buy all these up,” I guess. I'm a huge Dylan head, and he just has so many albums. It's fun to try out the ones I've never listened to before. Just put it on the record rather than trying to get through it on streaming. Sometimes it's way easier to skip around and stuff.

SWIM: Right, yeah. I know I saw you posted your Bob Dylan spread. It was the size of a quilt.

CALEB: Yeah, I was inspired by some other dude who had me beat by a couple, I think, but just like had them all laid out on the floor of the rug.

SWIM: That's sick. So, back to Cars and Park and putting them out again in your live show. Do you still play many of the songs from these records? Or do you mostly play stuff from top 10?

CALEB: Up until very recently, there were still Cars and Park on the set list. Probably “Funk Track” off Cars was really the only one getting played, and then some Park songs, like “The Park” and “The Neighbor.” Actually, “Quick Stop” off Park, we still do play. If I'm playing a solo set, I have a lot more (from them) I can pull from than the band. With the band, it's kind of just the couple that we've practiced because I record all the parts, and then I’m teaching them to other people and letting them kind of put their flair on it. I've had a couple different lineups of the band. The second to most recent lineup we've had was still playing Cars and Park stuff, but now I think we're just doing “Quick Stop.”

SWIM: As part of this process, when you had to listen back to Cars and Park, was there anything that surprised you about either release? I don't know how often you were thinking about them beyond playing the songs before this, but going back and listening to the recording, is there anything that stood out to you where you were like, ‘I didn't think much of this at the time, but this is something?’

CALEB: Before getting them back, actually, not really, because I just kind of sent all the stuff off. But once I got the test pressings and listened to those, it made the mix really pop. It definitely sounds way better than just listening on a streamer because it was mastered by somebody as well. I didn't originally—Cars was mastered, but Park was exported straight from GarageBand onto the internet, essentially…it's quieter than most stuff on Spotify, so hearing it on the record just makes it sound nice and big. I still have a soft spot for those songs, for sure. It just maybe took me back in time a little bit.

SWIM: I know both records have very similar cover aesthetics, and you said in the past you put them out with the tape, like one on one side, one on the other. When you made Cars, did you have the idea, like, ‘I'm going to make Park, and it's going to be kind of a sister record?’ Or were these songs you had left over, or did it come together over time as being a shared existence?

CALEB: I definitely had the album cover for Cars even before there was much of an album written. There was just this sign by my house that I drove by every day, and I was like, ‘I want to make that an album cover.’ And then the Park sign is just right down the street, and I had already put out Cars before I noticed how good the other one was. I was like, oh my gosh, perfect follow-up–four letters on literally the same road in my town. Sadly, the Cars sign has since been torn down. But the Park one is still standing. I definitely didn't plan to make a follow-up, but thematically, I think it kind of is a follow-up or almost a part two. A before and after.

SWIM: Yeah, because even across the two, I know you have “Runners World” (on Cars) and then “Runners World 2” (on Park), which is a different take on a similar riff. Did you write two versions of that song, or did you get to one later?

CALEB: The original “Runners World” on Cars was just the song, that was the only song I had. Then one time, I was practicing up a live band when I really only had Cars and a couple of Park songs written. We were just trying to figure out what we could do because I had 13 songs back then, essentially. So (we were) figuring out which ones we could do, and I was playing the “Runners World” riff, and Paul, the drummer, started drumming. I had this poem that I had just written up, and I was like, whoa, this kind of sets over it. So that just kind of turned into the sequel. Definitely wasn't planned originally to do that, but that might have been the first example of it… But, well, even on some original Bandcamp stuff—I have two different versions of a song called “High School Football Championship,” that's also on Cars. But that's something I really like in other artists that I enjoy: finding a song that they've done different versions of or different live takes of it.

SWIM: Because I think I saw on one of the Extra Volumes (on Bandcamp), you have one of the songs that ended up making it on top 10 as well. I'm forgetting which one it is now.

CALEB: Oh, yeah, yeah, “the gun.”

SWIM: Yeah yeah yeah.

CALEB: It's an extended version of an Extras song. It's just verse one on Extras, and I think I honestly had had a few verses, it just wasn't— I probably had tweaked the lyrics since then and didn't have the full band vision of it in my head, so I didn't want to milk it. With the Extras I was trying to do short stuff, and it was just recording in a couple of days’ time.

SWIM: Do you try to do much interpolation of other people's stuff? I was listening to Marble Teeth, the self-titled one, and you have that song, “John Jackson.” Is that like a Jack Johnson riff, kind of off “Banana Pancakes?”

CALEB: Yeah, yeah, just playing those chords, they remind me of “Banana Pancakes” and “Upside Down,” but there's definitely the major seven or whatever chord that is…the way the chord sounded made me think about Jack Johnson, for sure. So then, yeah, I just switched it around.

SWIM: Sick. And then there’s one thing I've been thinking about, too, because I listened to Cars and Park a lot before this, and before that, I'd been listening to a lot of top 10 times, and it's very different. The approach on top 10 times feels a lot more rootsy, and I know there are many years in between the records, but I was curious about the change in sound between Cars and Park to top 10 times. Is it that you always wanted to make something that sounds like top 10 times, but you didn't have the equipment, or you were getting around to that songwriting? Is it just your taste has changed over time and this is reflective of what you're listening to now?

CALEB: Yeah, probably a little bit of all of those. I had been in pop-punk-type bands before, so I made louder rock songs. Definitely with Cars or Self-titled at least, because those were the first things I recorded at home. I was definitely going for more of a bedroom pop, softer sound, and since then, I've gotten way more into country and roots and folk. Maybe not folk, but country was something I would actively say that I disliked in high school and younger, but I've definitely come around on it in my 20s just listening to Dylan and Neil Young. Honestly, the American Anthology of Folk Music, this compilation by this dude, Harry Smith, that the Smithsonian put out, just lots of good old-timey tunes on there. That's what I was, post-COVID, listening to a lot more, stuff like that, so I don't know if I would have tried to make something that sounded like that back then, but I definitely was going for quieter at the beginning.

SWIM: For sure, it reminds me a little, the Cars and Parks stuff, of Slaughter Beach Dog.

CALEB: That's definitely 100% what I was listening to. I mean, Motorcycle.jpg and Birdie coming out pretty quickly, one after another, changed my music taste completely. I speak for a lot of people in the scene, probably when I say that, but I think those were a shift for people my age getting into a lot more Americana-type sounds and slide guitar.

SWIM: I was always curious about it because I found out about you over the last year. I first saw you when you opened for Retirement Party with OK Cool, and it seems like whenever I'm on Instagram and I click on an emo or pop-punky band, I see that you often follow them, but then when I see you post music you're listening to, I feel like it's more recently folk stuff or like, Poco-style rock. 

CALEB: Yeah, I'm definitely not listening to much emo these days, to be honest. I mean, there's definitely stuff from my youth that has a nostalgia factor, but I'm not, like, seeking out new stuff in that vein—although the new Hotline TNT album kind of threw me back into the rock and roll world a bit. Yeah, like I was saying, I've been going back in time, just further back, trying to… just the story songs and the banjo and mandolin, those instruments have been really fascinating to me recently. They just sound good. Less abrasive to my ears, too, honestly. I was just getting headaches from listening to a lot of music in the car all the time.

SWIM: So, did you record Cars, Park, and top 10 all at home kind of on the same type of setup, or did you also have an equipment change or upgrade to a different system? 

CALEB: Probably the closest (in recording method) would have been Park and top 10. Cars I actually recorded on an iPad on GarageBand.

SWIM: That's wild.

CALEB: Yeah, oh man. Yeah. I'm just thinking back on it as a mess of cables and converters and stuff. I have recorded a couple of projects that way through the iPad, Self-titled, and then some other projects for other friends. I felt like I was kind of getting good at that, and I liked GarageBand a lot, so then I bought a Macbook, and Park was the first thing I recorded on it, so I was figuring things out. That's why I feel like those two sound kind of different, the vocal and the guitar sounds, at least, just because I was plugging directly in through an interface instead of through an iPad.

SWIM: I know Cars has way more keys and synth than Park, definitely (more) than top 10. Is that just because when you're recording into an iPad directly using some of those direct MIDI software instruments?

CALEB: Honestly, all of those are a... I don't think I have any... there's a drum and a...sorry, I'm so spacey. No, all of those are real keyboards, a little Casio I've got. I've only used a GarageBand drum machine one time on “Lonerisnt” the single. But it was also the last thing I... that was truly the last thing I recorded on the iPad right after Cars. I recorded a single, got the MacBook, and started doing stuff on there. So there's Park, and then Extra was kind of a little more experimenting with the laptop. 8 More was, like, I'm kind of locking it, have to make it sound a little more hi-fi on the laptop, and then top 10 was like, alright, let's EQ this shit.

SWIM: Yeah, because on top 10 you have way more filtering and stuff on the vocals, and it feels like more an artistic choice in the mix than just making it legible.

CALEB: I definitely just spent a lot more time on this one, that's for sure. I mean, when you're doing it yourself especially, it's like every project you do is pretty much a huge learning experience. It's like you work on it, and then you put it out, and then you listen to it, and you're like, ‘I like this, I don't like this, let's try again, use all these new tricks that I just figured out.’ Every song you finish, you're like, wow, I wish I could have done that thing I figured out on every other song I've ever made, but let's keep it going.

SWIM: For sure. So you put out the vinyl of top 10, and now you’ve got the Cars and Park one, does it make you think your next album, you might want to do vinyl at release? Or is it the sort of thing where if the opportunity comes again like this, you would, but otherwise it's not really top of mind?

CALEB: Yeah, I'm so bad at planning ahead.

SWIM: Sure.

CALEB: If I could find somewhere that was really interested in doing that…because I haven't even really started on anything post-top 10. I have songs, but recording-wise, there’s nothing finished. So maybe I should start planning ahead and getting everything together. My problem is once it's done, I'm not waiting on anybody to mix it or anything, so I'm just ‘I want to get this out ASAP,’ and I'd rather promote something that's already out than try and sell people a record (that will) come out in three months.

SWIM: Definitely. On the top 10 release, you did those drawings for the tracklist on the back. Do you like that part of this kind of (physical) production where you get new places where you can do some sort of artistic output related to the old project?

CALEB: Oh, yeah, I mean, it being kind of a one-man operation in that way, I really just get to throw every hobby and craft I encounter at this and try and incorporate it in some way. There's been a couple of pieces I've commissioned out, but pretty much from the beginning, everything I've put out I've made to some extent, and I really like figuring stuff out and getting my own style. It's pretty amateurish, you could say, from recording to drawing or the production side of things, but I think there's a charm that's kind of realistic when you're not trying to curate something to the point where you’re getting the best of the best. This is just my life's work, essentially. I don't have it packaged up underneath.

SWIM: Yeah, no, I get that. So that was the main stuff I had to ask you. I have two really specific questions about lyrics from Park that I've just been curious about, if that's cool.

CALEB: Sure.

SWIM: So I always thought about this line on “The Monkeys” where you say, “We're dancing in the dark, just like that singer you like,” which I think is a sick line. I was always curious if there was someone in your life who liked Bruce Springsteen and you didn't. I mean, it's just a cool way to say that because I feel like a lot of people have dropped Springsteen's name in a song on purpose, and you kind of, whether intentionally or not, avoided it in that way. I always thought it was kind of sick.

CALEB: That's funny. I've gotten that a couple of times, but it is not about Bruce Springsteen.

SWIM: Oh, really?

CALEB: It's about dancing in the literal darkness, like a different singer. I'll just keep it unnamed, but I do like that. I know that's just one of those things about writing lyrics where they totally take on a life of their own, and also, maybe I'm just dumb for not realizing that that's exactly like Bruce Springsteen. So many things where it's like, yeah, I almost don't want to say it because I don't want to change everyone's perception of it. It's whoever you think it is, but it's cool because, yeah, you are not the first person to say that.

SWIM: That's fascinating. And then the other one I was always curious about was in part of the song “The Park,” you talk about not being “allowed to watch this program as a kid” and not getting someone's references. I was curious if there's any specific instance behind that or if it's just something you've run up against when it comes to media.

CALEB: That one I can specify. It was definitely Spongebob. That was my inspiration behind that one. Spongebob or Friends, maybe those are the two that I really imagine in my head when I'm thinking of that. But that one I definitely leave up to interpretation as well. I'd be interested to hear what shows other people were not allowed to watch.

SWIM: Sure. It reminds me of when I was in kindergarten. For some reason, some kids in my kindergarten class were allowed to watch Boy Meets World, but I wasn't. And they would have long debates about Boy Meets World stuff, and I just had to sit there.

CALEB: Yeah, everyone's talking about it, and you're like, hmm. Or just…you're telling them a story, and they're like, oh, that’s like the episode of this thing, and you're like, yeah, I understand. Can I finish my story, please?

SWIM: Yeah, for sure. Sick, that was all I had to ask. Is there anything you would want to add about the vinyl release or the process around it?

CALEB: I don't know. I'm excited to do it. This was supposed to be the first vinyl that I got, but it's kind of just been a long process for various reasons. I'm bad at sending emails and stuff. And I got lucky with Klepto Phase reaching out about top 10. Like I said, these were slated to get produced when top 10 wasn't really finalized or anything yet. I had most of those songs written and somewhat recorded. I'm just excited to get them. It's sweet that people—I mean, it's sweet that you listened to them a ton and were thinking about this, and you were interested enough to want to write about it. Because they definitely sound—I mean, listening back to them, they sound young, but that's just because it's me. It's, like, I love that guy, but he's also me four years ago. So I kind of hate him a little bit, but... 

Yeah, it's sweet that people like those albums, and (those were) the basis of this project. It’s what I was touring on for the majority of when I was getting out there. So it's kind of cool that people still like them, and I appreciate them sticking with me on the new stuff. I mean, I look at the streams, and every album kind of has more than the last, so it feels good as an artist to feel like you're picking up steam and not like, “Oh, you guys only like this old one, now I have to try and recreate that magic or just, like, move on and lose you all.”

The combined vinyl pressing of Cars and Park is available now directly through Marble Teeth’s website.

Josh Ejnes is a writer and musician living in Chicago. You can keep up with his writing on music and sports on Twitter and listen to his band Cutaway Car here.

Big Girl Are Ready to Be Your DIY God

/

Self-Released

Big Girl’s performance was the crux of a protest show held during last year’s South By Southwest, where a slew of punk-adjacent acts gathered to play a thrashing, beer-soaked free set under a highway. On stage, frontperson Kaitlin Pelkey is flanked by two backup singers, Christina Schwedler and Melody Stolpp, whose sharply coordinated moves set a ferociously campy scene. Their show is quite the production, with multiple guitars, choreography, and Pelkey’s powerhouse vocals wrangling the chaos. The singers’ frenzied dance lights up the band’s layered rock sound, miraculously weaving a biting punk aesthetic out of melody and perfectly timed movements. How the hell did Big Girl come up with this strange concoction of a live show? “Be truthful and be stupid,” frontperson Kaitlin Pelkey says. 

At the dyed-red heart of Big Girl’s songs, Pelkey’s voice contorts and swirls, never missing a note, yet not quite content to settle on one for too long either. The band’s new single, “DIY GOD,” finds expressive electric guitars chugging, sparkling, and wailing in Pelkey’s wake, trailing her like the briefcase chained to her wrist in the music video. There’s something a little unsettling about the tone of her voice: although pretty, her melodies are a little loopy, a little queasy, channeling ghosts of glam rock past in a way that counterbalances the songs’ scuzzy instruments. Turns out, a touch of theatrics is the perfect canvas for the NYC band’s very real experiences and emotions.

"DIY GOD" is just the first taste of a forthcoming EP called DYE which is coming later this year. Pelkey wrote most of these songs in 2020 in the midst of her mother’s dire health crisis, which she eventually succumbed to, passing away in 2021. “A lot of the stuff I write about is pretty heavy, pretty dark,” admits Pelkey. Paradoxically, the depth of her painful moments fuels the panache that sets Big Girl apart. “Just remembering that you have to keep the joy in your story - it actually elevates it,” she says about the maximalist aesthetic of their live performances and forthcoming EP. Pelkey’s songs strike a remarkable balance between maudlin and cathartic, both extremes fueled by the same deep well of emotion. 

Red keeps showing up in Big Girl’s new era, whether seeping out of Pelkey’s freshly colored hair in a sink or lighting up her energy in an angry swath. “It’s bloody,” she says about the motif. Dyed-red hair isn’t just a stylistic choice, she elaborates: it’s “transformation on your own terms…bringing color to a place that once had none.”

Photo by Tess Fulkerson

Big Girl’s guitarist Crispin Swank produced DYE with help from Justin Pizzoferrato (Speedy Ortiz, Dinosaur Jr., Pixies), who had also helped them bring their debut album, Big Girl vs. God, to life. They knocked the EP’s five songs out in just three studio days, tightening up their sound from the manic sprawl of older songs like “Big Car Full of Mistakes.” In contrast, “DIY GOD” sticks with just one time signature throughout—although don’t expect a clean-cut indie rock track, with Pelkey’s voice maintaining a dash of drama a la Puberty 2-era Mitski. The single is a lurching, groovy confessional, culminating in Swank’s guitar shredding Weezer-style behind exasperated choruses. “No one can fuck it up like I do,” Pelkey sneers, summing up the EP’s flamboyant existential crisis in a single line. 

Disassembling—hitting a wall and starting over—succumbing to weirdness and chaos. It’s all a part of Big Girl’s journey through DYE. Quitting a job on a sunny day, dyeing one’s hair just to feel something. Despite the band’s larger-than-life sound, their struggles are the same as everybody else trying to find meaning in an uncertain era. Big Girl’s snark is just one stripe in a swirl of deep experience: grief, joy, and rage at the horrors of our modern world. But what better vessel for angst than sharp, relentless rock songs?

“So watch me burn it all ‘cause I’m so bored that I told you the truth,” Pelkey howls on “DIY GOD,” wrestling with the apparent futility of… well, everything. The final scene of the music video shows Pelkey thrashing in the waves on the Miami shore, melodramatically raging against the impossibility of art, of joy, of any hope at all. The song answers its own question in a flash of graffiti in the middle of the music video: “Red Hot Salvation.” With their newest songs, Big Girl’s underlying belief shines through that creating DIY art is, in and of itself, the salvation that they seek.

Katie Hayes is a music writer and karaoke superstar in Austin, Texas. She is from there, but between 2010 and now, also lived in Lubbock, TX, Portland, OR, and a camper. Her life is a movie in which her bearded dragon Pancake is the star. You can check out her Substack here and some of her other writing here. She’s writing a book about growing up alongside her favorite band, Paramore.

Tonight I Will Be Your Entertainment: The Ascendancy of saturdays at your place

/

Photo by Ty Benson

“If [saturdays at your place] is what the future of emo looks like, we’re in safe hands.” That’s what Taylor Grimes concluded when he crowned always cloudy as one of the best releases of last year. The trio dropped their star-making EP at the onset of 2023 and have spent the following two years touring relentlessly, building a grassroots fandom on the back of a very small but promising body of work. From “tarot cards” hitting streaming highs to retrieving stolen gear from evidence lockers and selling out their first headlining tour, 2024 has been a banner year for saturdays at your place, and 2025 is looking even better as anticipation builds for their next move. We sat down with a few of the band’s recent tourmates to hear in their own words what makes saturdays special, but before that, a bit of a history lesson. 

The genre’s newest superstars are from Kalamazoo, Michigan, making them, yes, true Midwest Emo. The trio is comprised of Esden Stafne on bass, Gabe Wood on drums, and Mitch Gulish on guitar, with Stafne and Wood sharing vocals duties across their discography, lending the band a nice range as they bounce from one perspective to another. Their debut album, something worth celebrating, came out in 2021, and the group has seemingly been working nonstop ever since, touring everything from basement shows to Hot Mulligan concerts. Sonically, they lean more into the traditional side of second- and fourth-wave emo (if you believe in that sort of thing), taking cues from twinkly progenitors like Pictures of Vernon, Their/They’re/There, and Camping in Alaska while putting their own distinctly gaze-y tinge on the sound. Like all new emo bands at this point, they’ve received plenty of comparisons to groups like Modern Baseball and Remo Drive, but that just scratches the surface of s@ypdom. 


We're Getting Off to a Rough Start

saturdays at your place first hit my radar on some random winter weekday in 2023 the same way a lot of people found them—a joke about their pronunciation of the word “tarot.” The band’s breakthrough song is incredibly catchy, with an immediately recognizable intro, a thumping bassline, and play-by-play lyrics about a Classically Emo Scenario: having a weird time at a house party—great stuff with a very strong start. Around the one-minute mark, the gang vocals kick in and shout, “They’re pulling out the tarot cards!” like an announcement (or a warning) (or a threat) yelled over the music at the aforementioned party. 

The joke comes from the way “tarot” is said. While lots of people seem to say the word as if it rhymes with “arrow,” saturdays at your place hit the "ro" hard, kinda like how you would pronounce “throw.” My understanding is that it’s a regional accent, but emo music listeners are very online, so the song made pretty much immediate waves on TikTok, Discord, and Twitter (to this day) because that line stuck out in such a charming and memorable way. 

Author’s note: This is the part where I admit that there is nothing I hate more than when I’m at a party and everyone decides to start playing a game or doing a secondary activity. I like chatting with strangers over music and generally hanging out. I think starting a secondary thing usually kills the vibe. If any of my friends are reading this, I am not talking about you. I loved it when you pulled out a board game at your party and had a lot of fun learning the rules of Catan at 11 pm.

Two years and eight million Spotify streams later, it's easy to see “tarot cards” success in real-time at any show the band puts on. Even listening to the studio recording, you can almost feel the finger-pointing reaction of the crowd when Stafne reasons, “Well, your friends don’t like me / I don’t like me too.” It’s obvious that someone is going to crowdsurf over the bridge’s “and when the lights go down / I don’t want to leave this house.” In fact, former tourmates Riley! said it’s their favorite song to see saturdays perform live because it's a fan favorite, and the band can command the room with it. I really like the song, too; I think it’s perfectly shy and maybe even cute. I especially like the line at the end, “Well, will you stick around if I do? / I think I found a part of me beside you.” 

Okay, so it only makes sense here to try and describe why people care so much about always cloudy. I mean, the EP has only six songs, how much could the band realistically tear through in 18 minutes? I had the same question. Turns out the answer is it’s just really loud and cohesive and earnest.

Photo by Ty Benson

What’s good about “tarot cards” being a launchpad of sorts is that it's a song that really introduces the band. Even the notion of talking to some unnamed person makes the band name make more sense—is this stumbling partygoer the person whose place you’re at on Saturdays? It makes you double back to start the whole thing from the beginning. The rest of always cloudy follows this kind of crowded hallway feeling. It's sweaty, buzzing, frustrating, overwhelming, and a little overheated from trying to wear winter clothes in a packed house while half-buzzed off three warm Miller Lites.

“future” kicks the EP off on the miserable final thoughts of their first album (discussed later), with frustrated lyrics burying themselves under a particularly dancy beat that gives each member of the trio a chance to shine. The groove of “future” extends into “fetch,” which leads into “tarot cards.” To me, the following track, “hospital bed,” is the spiritual sequel of “tarot cards”—kind of like the next morning after a wrought party experience, all mixed with a vibe I can only describe as Carpoolian. After is “it’s always cloudy in kalamazoo,” a song that needs a crowd as much as the crowd needs it.

The EP ends with “eat me alive,” a four-minute closer that's constantly colliding into itself with two distinct halves: one slow and laced with self-inflicted cruelty and another that’s fast and turns the blame outwards. It’s also my favorite. The song starts with the fuzzy dirge before Wood’s drums come in, loud and miserable. The first two minutes feel almost like the waves in the album art are washing over you as Wood lets the more complicated parts of himself crash ashore. The song builds and builds before breaking entirely. Wood speeds up his drumming and spits out one of my favorite lyrics on the EP, a strangled accusation, “You prepare me for a meal / ‘cause your friends / eat me alive.” saturdays at your place is not a band about mending relationships or even necessarily apologizing, they look at a scene from all angles, and, as much as they critique themselves, they aren’t afraid to level blame at others as well. Amidst a pummeling build, Wood flips the cards and reveals, “Saturdays are the worst for me too / I'll do anything to get you out of my room.” Actually, this one contributor on Genius can probably explain it better than me:

 
 

The album concludes with the assurance that “In time, memories will fade / I promise everything in the future” before looping back into the first track and starting again. It is a perfect six-song collection about feeling bad, feeling good, going back to feeling evil, just hanging out, and trying to figure out what you mean to someone.


Well, Will You Stick Around If I Do?

It’s genuinely refreshing to see people so excited about something new again. It should be news to no one that emo has a real nostalgia problem. Whether it's as blatant as When We Were Young Fest or as underhanded as people insisting that whatever Foxing album they heard first is their best one, it’s an irritating bias. I think saturdays at your place managed to unintentionally fulfill a nostalgic niche and satisfy a craving the scene had for ultra-catchy Midwest Emo. I think about how when I first listened to always cloudy–the house show atmosphere of the songs immediately dragged me back to the days of Modern Baseball and their music videos for songs like “The Weekend” and “Your Graduation.” It was instantly familiar in a way that other contemporary emo songs can’t quite achieve. In other words, it’s clear that the members of saturdays came into their own during that particular era of music, but they aren’t stuck in nostalgia. In fact, they seem to be actively combating it by working with other new emo bands as they collaboratively construct a cohesive scene.

saturdays at your place just wrapped their third tour of the year, each outing sharing the stage with other rapidly growing emo acts. They started the year on the Wax Bodega Tour with a stacked lineup of Ben Quad, who is taking over the world; Carly Cosgrove, who is maybe one of the best live acts you can catch (I reviewed their latest album); and Arm’s Length, who is clearing a path for these upcoming legends. When we asked Ben Quad about this, they said, “That tour felt like we were doing something important for the genre.” We agree. A couple of months later, saturdays at your place headed back out on the road as support for Prince Daddy and the Hyena’s summer tour with tapping superstars Riley! and Carpool (I also reviewed their latest album). This fall, they toured with Carpool again, with the midwest emo-revivalists TRSH and Dudes Rock connoisseur Harrison Gordon in tow. It doesn’t even end there because Origami Angel announced they’re taking saturdays on tour with them to the UK in Winter 2025. Phew. That felt like constant name-dropping, but it’s their actual reality.

Photo by Emily Harrington


But If You Get to Know Me, I'll Get to Know You

Beyond their EP, saturdays at your place has released one album, something worth celebrating, and a three-way split with SHOPLIFTER and Summerbruise called That’s What Friends Are For. 

Author’s note: While you may know that Mitch Gulish joined Summerbruise last year, did you know he’s in the music video for “With Friends Like These, Who Needs Empathy?” Thank you Mike for bringing this to our attention.

I guess this is the part where I speak very frankly. For a very long time, I didn’t care about saturdays at your place very much. I don’t know if y’all remember the state of DIY emo during the pandemic and directly after when touring started again, but it was really rough. I love a lot of the projects that came out during the time, but they were standouts in a total cesspool. Many previously exciting artists had serious accusations leveled against them, there were tensions between bands and band members, and several musicians just gave up and left music entirely during the nightmarish era. I found it hard to truly get excited about anything new, so I didn’t. As a result, when saturdays at your place released their first album in late 2021, I just ignored it. 

It wasn’t until I saw that random “tarot cards” joke a couple of years later that I gave them any time of day. This was after some of the misery of 2020-22 diy emo spaces had subsided, and notably, for one of the first times in a minute, I had seen people thoroughly geeked about something new. 

Photo by Ty Benson

One thing made very clear moments into “first of all” is that Gulish is a very good guitarist. In fact, a lot of the band’s debut album seems to be built on how good of a guitarist he is, with a couple of songs being guitar-led instrumental tracks or featuring extended guitar solos with his constant, complex, twinkly riffing. Elsewhere, songs like “existential shred” pad the release with lyric-less riffing, and I find it genuinely cool that they added these to their debut album. (Author’s note: as I was writing this, the band posted this Tweet encouraging listeners to “just skip all of the instrumentals,” so they seem to disagree, but I like ‘em.) At the time, especially after the popularity of particularly wordy emo artists like Origami Angel, many emo bands felt the need to fill in that same space with lots of lyrics. They don't. This album is proof.

Two years later, saturdays’ first contribution to That’s What Friends Are For is “pourover,” which has legitimately gotten stuck in my head at least once every week since its release in late 2023 (and you should check out their acoustic version with Counter Intuitive Records). Then there’s “forever,” which is easily one of the band’s most experimental songs as they break away from the fairly rigid rules of Midwest Emo and deploy a robotic vocal distortion on Wood’s voice. It makes the song more melancholy and distant. I consider saturdays at your place a fairly upbeat band, but this is the lowest they’ve ever dived in their discography. It acts as the symbolic ending of the split, the emotional endpoint. I look forward to hearing more of this grim experimentation on future projects. 


Can We Change the Conversation?
Can We Make It About Me?

Obviously, with only 19-ish songs to their name, this is a relatively small discography, but that means it’s more accessible to new fans. saturdays seem to have gamified the streaming algorithms that be; their songs have wound up on major editorial playlists on services like Spotify, spreading their music even further than imagined. This is at least partially responsible for their about 200,000 monthly listeners on Spotify (for reference: heavy hitters in the scene like Prince Daddy and the Hyena or Oso Oso are tens of thousands of listeners under that). 

To get a sense of this whirlwind rise to emo fame saturdays is experiencing, we reached out to Ben Quad, an up-and-coming band from another niche music scene who blew up at a similar time and also sold out national tours. In one word, Ben Quad described the experience as “wild.” They referred to tangible things like busier inboxes and new management but focused specifically on the fandom side. “Our audience is definitely a lot broader now, too. There’s also a lot more die-hard fans at our shows, which is something foreign to us. We have multiple people a show flying across the country to see us, and that absolutely blows my mind.” This experience, going from small house gigs with friends to sold-out club shows with fans in just a couple of releases, seems to mirror the trajectory of saturdays at your place and leaves the future of emo music open and sprawling.

While I can’t speak from personal experience, from observation, gaining such a quick notoriety can either drive your project into super-popularity or doom your reputation, kind of like a false start. In the case of saturdays at your place, it seems to have done the first thing. From my perspective, the minuscule mispronunciation in a great song seems to have launched the band into emo stardom and resulted in an instant classic. The enthusiasm for this band is tangible. Don’t believe me? Let’s talk about their live shows.

Photo by Ty Benson

2024 started, as mentioned, with the Wax Bodega tour. My tour date was in a cramped new club, and for the first time ever in the venue, I was struggling to catch a glimpse of the stage – it was just so packed and rowdy. When we asked Ben Quad about that tour, they said, “There wasn’t ever really a sleepy show because saturdays were there to get the crowd riled up from the start.” While I had seen saturdays before, that was the first time I really experienced that frenetic energy in action, and all for the opener.

Over the summer, saturdays shared a stage with Riley! who has a similar rowdy fanbase. When we asked about that crowd, Riley! said, “If you could boil it down into one word, energetic doesn’t even begin to explain it.” Carpool was on that same tour, and Stoph Colasanto described the crowd as “ravenous” and detailed how the audience was climbing over itself to get closer and closer to the band, a sight I experienced myself.

Carpool just wrapped up the always cloudy tour with saturdays and witnessed firsthand the band’s shift from a support slot to a headliner. Colasanto said that as the headliner, saturdays went all out. “They brought out all the bells and whistles, and it was genuinely fun to watch every night.” Ultimately, the experience “was a literal party but the type of party that’s all-inclusive and for everyone. It was cathartic.”

Outside of the performances, the fervor around the band had started to change, which can be summed up in one of Colasanto’s observations – that every single day of the tour, fans were lined up outside the venues early to get front spots for the gig. As someone who has stuck around DIY emo corners for several years, I find it hard to picture this happening in such a small and, at times, insular genre, but it absolutely is. 

We interviewed a lot of bands for this article, and one thing became abundantly clear very quickly: this is all just so much fun. Mike Newman of Summerbruise recalled, “Their excitement about every single crunchy-ass aspect of touring really renewed my appreciation for what we get to do.” Riley! added to that sentiment and said that touring with saturdays this summer was a blast – “we truly could not have asked for better tourmates on that run.” Ben Quad continued that train of thought and said saturdays were “one of those bands we instantly connected with as soon as we met them.” From Colasanto’s perspective, “It’s really special to see something so real and organic continue to grow and to get bigger, and for it to happen to saturdays just makes my heart so happy because they deserve everything in this world and more.”

Photo by Ty Benson

So, it’s all gas, no brakes for saturdays at your place, both physically after this year spent as road dogs and emotionally as they connect with a bigger audience than ever before. When it comes to what’s next, saturdays at your place talked about working on their next album during their latest tour. This record will be one of the most highly anticipated releases of the year and the first since their split with SHOPLIFTER and Summerbruise in 2023. Coming up even sooner is their holiday show with Ben Quad, Worry Club, Summerbruise, and Palette Knife. We asked Summerbruise about the show, and Newman’s excitement was tangible: “My favorite shit as a kid was watching the bands I loved who were legit friends goofing off together on stage, and this lineup is stacked with some of my all-time favorite goofers.” 

Like I said earlier, emo has a nostalgia problem, and I pity people who sit out just because they assume the stuff they grew up on is superior for whatever reason. I am so excited, genuinely, that this generation of listeners have a band like saturdays to be a fan of, a buzzing genre to enjoy, and an exciting scene to be part of.

The larger impact of saturdays will be reverberating around the Emo World for years. People will pick up the guitar because they want to play like Mitch, or they’ll start singing in a garage band because of Esden and Gabe, and when asked about their inspirations, saturdays will be first on their lists. I also think about Kalamazoo and how exciting it is for a band from a small scene to get this big. I think about how their attention will translate into people discovering new bands and how Kalamazoo will be intrinsically tied to the emo music of this era. Stoph Colasanto put it best:

“They’re a true testament to what it means to be DIY and care about your scene, community, and hometown. That’s something that really resonates with me — talk to Esden about Kalamazoo, he fucking loves it. It's his favorite city in the world. That shit gets me so hyped up. To see a DIY band from a smaller city or town get national attention and to use that to lift up their hometown and their community means a lot. Even as an outsider, I just get so stoked for Kalamazoo and for what saturdays is doing for it.”

“Anyone who has ever been in the proximity of that band knows that they are the future.” That’s what Ben Quad said while replying to our first question about saturdays at your place, and I think they’re absolutely right. Since 2023, I have seen saturdays at your place four times, and while this essay is not a concert review, I can’t emphasize enough how good they are live and how fun their performances are. Whether saturdays is headlining or supporting, the whole crowd knows the words to every song, thrashes around to every guitar solo, and the crowd surfs through their entire set. People are excited, and I am too. So, like we said, if saturdays at your place is what the future of emo looks like, we’re in safe hands.

Caro Alt (she/her) is from New Orleans, Louisiana, and if she could be anyone in The Simpsons, she would be Milhouse.

Bottom Bracket – I’m So Afraid of Where | Track-by-Track Review

/

Count Your Lucky Stars

To be in the realm of music and bands is a tumultuous one. It is a space where every person is pining to create something that might reach beyond the confines of a singular human experience and resonate with a complete stranger. At the same time, it is an exhausting and unforgiving space in what it asks of its participants. Every week is another announcement of a band throwing in the towel due to the strains and pressures of running this gauntlet; every week, another band decides to weather on despite it all.

I'm So Afraid of Where, the second LP from Chicago, IL’s Bottom Bracket, is an unflinching exploration of personal fallout, strained friendships, and the search for belonging in unfamiliar surroundings. Across its ten tracks, Mario Cannamela (guitar, lead vocals), Tim Recio (bass, vocals), and Rob Diaz (drums, percussion, vocals) channel three years of labor and love into a record unafraid to hold a mirror up to the most difficult parts of what it means to grow as a person and as a band.

As we dive into each track on this immensely special record, I had the privilege of getting Cannamela’s perspective to inform us on some of the nuances in the lyrics and stories that helped craft these songs. Grab your water bottles and strap on your bike helmets. This is I'm So Afraid of Where.

1. A Condemnation

“A Condemnation” opens the album with the beautiful guitar work that comes standard in any Bottom Bracket song. Once the track is in full swing, Cannamela delivers the haunting line, “I’m so afraid of where / We’ll end up after this,” introducing the album’s title and central theme of drifting apart from friends and bandmates, as well as struggling with a sense of belonging. “I always do this to myself / Leaving friendships to collect dust on the shelf,” laments Cannamela at the end of the track. This song wrestles with the pain of unresolved tension, regret, and the weight of holding others accountable. The urgency in the guitars mirrors the emotional tumult, setting a gripping precedent for what's to come. 

“Courtney and I moved from Springfield, Illinois, to Chicago three years ago,” says Cannamela about the track. “It was a hard move to make, but I wanted more than what I was getting out of the Springfield scene, and Courtney, for a long time, struggled to find fulfillment there as well, despite both of us having grown up there.”

2. Great Lake Jumper

A dream of escape drives “Great Lake Jumper” and its anthemic hope and yearning. Inspired by Cannamela’s move to Chicago, the track opens with sprinting guitars that mimic the speed of biking through city streets. The tension between staying in the comfort of the known and leaping into the unknown finds itself soaring high as the entire band shouts, “I bet I could jump my bike over the lake / If I went fast enough.” Here is a song about the possibility the big city offers, as well as the anxiety of being swallowed into anonymity underneath the scope of Chicago and Lake Michigan.

“I often would stare at the lake in wonderment when I would come up here to visit before moving here,” says Cannamela. “I still do now that I’m here, to be honest.”

3. Spin Cycle

“Spin Cycle,” the final single released for the album, portrays a fracturing of friendship through the lens of awkward silences and simmering discontent. Growing detachment, fueled by miscommunication and unmet expectations — the metaphor of a relationship stuck in a “spin cycle” feels apt as Cannamela laments the repetitive patterns that erode connection. Punctuated by Diaz’s pinpoint work on the toms and Recio’s hypnotic bass lines, the instrumentation exemplifies how Bottom Bracket masterfully allows each member of the trio to take a central spot in the composition. One of the highest points of this track comes at the 1:30 mark when Cannamela says, “If your life’s a T-shirt,” the entire band emphatically answers with, “Then I must be the stain” before Recio and Diaz enter a couplet that will have everybody in the room grooving.

4. Rainbow in the Rear View

In the second single released for the album, Cannamela recalls his move to Chicago and the urging of his mother to stay behind due to unsavory weather. Sonically, the guitarwork jumps and patters around the fretboard, casting a twinkly rainscape of hammer-ons as Cannamela vacillates between the dream of making it out of his hometown and the laments of leaving home. “To me, this day was always coming,” sings Cannamela in the second verse, further compounding the predetermination of this journey against the anxieties of his mother, who worries of rain and hopes she can delay the inevitable by even just a day more.

To leave home, to be the one that’s left — both are heaving emotional battles to wage. Cannamela finds the perfect center of this axis in the chorus as he sings, “Rainbow in the rear view / I can see you.” And what a beautiful way to celebrate an exit, not by mulling on some rainbow in the future that may come when the clouds finally part, but to see all the colors and hues in the place you’re coming from. Whether it’s a mother, a hometown, or history, this song stands as a monument of how having the right things behind you serves as a means to push forward, even “when lightning cracks the sky.” (And for the record, if you’re not screaming that last line when they play this song live, I have questions for you.)

5. Camouflage

How do you balance the line between someone you count on versus the realization that you don’t see eye to eye with them on much of what they do? An ode to internalized frustration, the third single, “Camouflage,” opens with an uptempo rhythm to anchor us sonically in the tense landscape of bedroom conversation and close proximities. Exploring the discomfort of trying to appease another while sacrificing one’s boundaries, Cannamela reflects on the strain of such close confines in the lines:

But two steps into your bedroom
And I already want to leave
I don’t need another silly scheme
I need the end of this fucking lease

The song’s tight rhythms and layered guitars give way midway through to leave Cannamela and the guitars singularly exposed to deliver the tried and true “I hope you know it’s not you / No, it’s me” before the rest of the band crashes in with some of the heaviest moments ever seen in the Bottom Bracket catalog. For those wondering if Bottom Bracket can still surprise you even after the near perfection they have already delivered in this record, “Camouflage” dares you to take that bet.

6. Swivel

In “Swivel,” we find Cannamela and his guitar alone in the booth. The song, restrained and haunting, finds Cannamela asking, “Oh, how do I do better?” The repetition of the line echoes as a reminder that Cannamela and company are constantly aware of the necessity to grow and, furthermore, how their past has shaped their growth so far. As we move towards the end of the track, a chorus of voices sings, “My bottom bracket won’t stop me / From riding all the way to your house” as the track finds its close, a nod to the band's roots and song “Bottom Bracket” from their debut EP, Dreamland. 

7. Unsavory

“Unsavory” was the record’s first single and the introduction to this new era of Bottom Bracket. Listeners are instantly met with insanely bright guitars and drums and are then pushed right into one of the catchiest riffs in human history. The choice to have “Unsavory” as the lead single is a fitting one, given that it chronicles the inciting incident for many of the themes and lyrics found throughout the rest of the record.

“This song is about the day the final straw was reached,” recounts Cannamela. “I wish I had been more vocal when something seemed off, but the picture wasn’t always clear to me.” “Unsavory” is the perfect word to capture the feeling when someone close to you is revealed to be someone they are not. “How do we find a way past this?” Cannamela asks before lamenting, “All the warning signs, how could I ever have missed this? / How could I ever have missed this?” But the truth is, sometimes we’re so close to the people we love that we DO miss some of the darker moves they make. The question we are then faced with is, what do we do next? For Cannamela, he says, “That was the moment our friendship ended, at least from how things went down from that point on.”

8. IKYKWIM (I Know You Know What I Mean)

“IKYKWIM” leans into Bottom Bracket’s poppier sounds and bouncier chords, with Recio’s infectious bassline as the driving spine of the beat. Tongue-in-cheek, the track’s lighthearted energy serves as the perfect foil for Cannamela to hit the soft implications of “I know you know what I mean.” Filled with the tension of knowing something is wrong but being reassured otherwise, Cannamela calls out the absurdity of it all with levity in saying, “There’s a few holes forming / In your Swiss cheese of a story” to the track's subject. And again, the repeated line of the song’s namesake echoes the frustration of unspoken truths after Cannamela has already begun putting the pieces together. The track, punchy, quick, and packed with urgency, captures the unease of discovering cracks in the façade of a friendship, finding its standout two-thirds of the way through with one of the sauciest solos found on the record. 

9. Cellar Doors

“This whole song is a love letter to the house that we used to live in Springfield; we spent four years in this cruddy house, but we practiced in the basement, even ran a house venue out of it too,” says Cannamela about the penultimate track, “Cellar Door.” This love letter calls back to many moments in Bottom Bracket’s history, with references to “Phantom,” “Failures,” and “Sun Singer.” The line, "I spent so many nights alone," captures the juxtaposition between nostalgia and moving on, a recognition of isolation and growth. Our histories shape us in ways we cannot imagine sometimes and in ways we don’t always get to see while they happen. 

To be able to chronicle these moments is a privilege, but to keep them “delicate, preserved, like a memorial display” also comes at the price of immortalizing the pain that came with those times. “All of I Don’t Care Enough to Stay and A Figure In Armor were written in this house,” says Cannamela, as well as some of the songs on this record here. For a musician, the house they live in is often the epicenter of where so many stories are born. For Cannamela, this is no exception.

10. A Confrontation

Our final track is the result of “a bomb that just keeps ticking down time,” the guitars and drums frantically moving us through the song. As their finale, the trio brings this record to a gallop with “A Confrontation,” the oldest song on the record, according to Cannamela. “I don’t quite relate to the lyrics anymore, but it was [about] a particularly bad fight,” he says. “At the time, it weighed on me heavily… I’m sure I didn’t handle things well then, either.”

While plenty of external exploration occurs throughout this record, the band is unafraid to look internally. Throughout this track and all that came before, Cannamela displays apparent dissatisfaction and frustration with his place in these situations. Regardless, the only option is to lay it all out on paper like Bottom Bracket did throughout this album. With a sonic callback to “A Condemnation” in the form of the lead riff, Bottom Bracket ties the record to a close by saying that where we are is a snapshot of where we’ve been. 

Final Thoughts on I'm So Afraid of Where

I'm So Afraid of Where is Bottom Bracket at their most vulnerable, most raw, and most masterful. This is not just an album: it is a memorial of relationships we must let go of and a celebration of the community that keeps us whole. Recorded by Andrei Milosevic and Tyler Floyd, mixed and edited by Tyler Floyd, and mastered by Adam Cichocki, the love and care put into making this album is apparent. The result of all these efforts is a deeply affecting album that feels both personal and universal. The future, for anyone, is a terrifying unknown — for Bottom Bracket, I am not afraid of where they will be once this gift of an album is out in the world.

Nishat is a writer, Pokémon addict, Fortnite fiend, and lead singer of tenmonthsummer, a lakeshore emo band from Chicago. You can learn more about his writing and work at nishatahmed.com, catch him streaming on twitch.tv/thenishfish, and find him yapping on Twitter and IG for the band at twitter.com/tenmosummerband and instagram.com/tenmonthsummerband respectively.

The Many Shades of Fiji Blue: An Interview with Indie Pop’s Bittersweet Optimist 

/

Photo by David Williams

Trevor Dering wants you to cry while dancing in the club. The Los Angles-via-Phoenix singer-songwriter who performs under the name Fiji Blue has carved out quite the niche for himself with downtrodden lyrics over up-tempo, buttery-smooth production. Imagine if Bon Iver crooned over songs meant for Harry Styles. The mixture of melancholy and jovial emotions creates a moody-yet-pleasant ambiance. It’s the rare type you can listen to if you’re depressed, where you don’t feel like you’re slipping into an abyss.

This year, pop music has been rejuvenated with newer stars shining quicker and brighter than ever before. In a stream-heavy world, artists can be spun up through advantageous avenues online, specifically TikTok or Instagram, where you can go from obscurity to instantaneous fame in a matter of months. Dering experienced this firsthand when Jungkook of the mega global superpower boy band BTS gave him a co-sign on Instagram for the sunkissed synth-laden single “It Takes Two.” From that point, Fiji Blue was suddenly elevated from a bedroom pop artist to a known quantity worldwide. Dering has since been featured on Spotify’s New Music Friday and on the music publication Ones To Watch, amassing millions of streams without even releasing a debut album.

Now, Dering is ready for his debut this winter with Glide, which will be released on December 13th. The different hues coming from Fiji Blue sonically on Glide are a mixture of swirling pop, house, easy-listening, and R&B. Introductory single, the refreshingly warm “Peppermint,” has a familiar sound that is simultaneously both aromatic and subtly sweet. The track is dedicated to his wife; the two got married earlier this year, and now the song stands as a celebration of their love. This is music with a universal appeal for all occasions, whether that’s a car ride down the Malibu Beach freeway, walking around your local grocery store, or even doing chores around the house. The rich vibey production combined with the earwormy hooks from Dering gives off a feeling that it’s only a matter of time before another mainstream jump. 

I chatted with Dering this summer and photographed his Chicago show. Read our conversation below and check out the gallery of photos of Fiji Blue performing. 

SWIM: Who were some of your favorite musicians growing up? Did you try to emulate any of them?

DERING: I grew up listening to a ton of classic rock on long car rides with my dad, but I quickly fell in love with the blues once I heard a Stevie Ray Vaughn song. Soon after, I discovered John Mayer & fell in love with the art of songwriting. John has been a huge, huge inspiration for me since I first picked up the guitar.

SWIM: Is there a specific moment in your life that you can remember that convinced you to pursue music?

DERING: I remember very specifically, at the age of 15, my mother showed me the song “In Your Atmosphere” by John Mayer, and it changed my life. I felt something I couldn’t quite explain that drove me to want to pursue story-telling and music at that instant.

SWIM: You have a sizable following both online and monthly streaming numbers (over 1.2 million monthly on Spotify) without releasing a full-length album. What is it about your music that you think connects with so many people?

DERING: I’m beyond grateful my music has been able to connect with so many people, close and far. I’m not sure if I can pinpoint an exact reason, but I’d like to believe it’s because people can relate to the stories of love and heartbreak I’m trying to tell. Life and love has its ups and downs. I’ve had my share of both, and I find peace in knowing my music has broken through enough to help anyone going through it in life.

Photo by David Williams

SWIM: You announced your debut album will be called Glide. What do you want listeners to take away from your debut?

DERING: I hope listeners fall in love with the story of “Glide.” It’s filled with some of the happiest moments of my life and some of the lowest. I got married during the creation of this album while also going through moments of heartache in creative relationships. This album was written to give life to that moment of “Glide” where you’re moments from landing & there’s nothing you can do but hope everything is going to work out.

SWIM: You chose the song “Peppermint” as the first single from the album. What was your thought process when selecting this song as the first taste of the album?

DERING: To me, “Peppermint” felt like falling in love. I wanted to come back with a song that gave me the biggest smile, and to me, that was this song. It tells the story of the effortless love I feel for my partner, Natasha. The world also needs more happy songs, which I struggle to write, unfortunately!

SWIM: Congratulations on recently getting married! Your lyrics are mostly described as “melancholy yet optimistic.” Can we expect similar themes on the album, or will you include more topics about love and marriage?

DERING: Thank you so much. Marriage has definitely shifted my perspective on life in a very short time, but I feel like I’ve also been married to Natasha since the first day I met her. I feel like my “sad yet happy” viewpoint will always be a part of my writing style, yet I hope to branch deeper into both places individually as I venture further into life’s highs and lows.

SWIM: Any final words before we sign off?

DERING: I’m just really excited and ready for the world to hear about this project.

David is a content mercenary based in Chicago. He's also a freelance writer specializing in music, movies, and culture. His hidden talents are his mid-range jump shot and the ability to always be able to tell when someone is uncomfortable at a party. You can find him scrolling away on Instagram @davidmwill89, Twitter @Cobretti24, or Medium @davidmwms.