Bound Stems

Listen to "Happens To Us All Otherwise" from The Family Afloat

Heavily informed by the quintet’s trial by fire crisscrossing the country in support of their short attention span post-pop debut Appreciation Night, the new album finds frontman Bobby Gallivan ruminating on shitty temp jobs, long distance girlfriends and uncomfortable sleeping quarters – paired with a sound far more direct and poppy than its predecessor. Things get downright Modest Mouse-y on anthemic sing along “Happens To Us All Otherwise” and a previous need to coat nearly every song in a swathe or two of ambient sound or aggressive slice of guitar skronk gives way here to moments of pastoral beauty  as in the darn near naked piano ballad “Clear Water & Concrete.” Wisely, the group still includes just enough sharp right turns – like the ska-copping outro on “Taking Tips from the Galley Gang” - and prickly guitar textures to remind the listener of their masterful knack for quirky song structures.

Reveille talked with Bobby Gallivan about songwriting, teaching, salesmanship and the joy of finding “the song within the song.”

Reveille: There’s a pretty pronounced shift in Bound Stems sound as compared with your debut – it’s a lot more direct. Did your approach to songwriting change with The Family Afloat?

Bobby Gallivan: After touring for months behind our first record we figured out what some of the more fun moments in our songs were to play, I think that made the biggest difference. There are hopefully a lot more sing-along moments on this record, we realized those were the most fun parts of our shows.

Reveille: I would agree with you that there are certainly a lot more direct pop moments on this album than Appreciation Night but there are still quite a few ambient sounds and tricky layers in there. Was it a challenge ensuring all those varied tones made it onto the album?

Gallivan: With Appreciation Night we would go in to the studio with the skeleton of a song but there was always so much post-production work done that the final product would be completely different from where we started. This record captures much more the sounds that we could come up with on our own in rehearsal. There was still a lot of layering done in the studio, but it felt a lot more natural. I like having those different layers in the recordings because it really opens things up for us when we play, we can tool around and stretch out different parts. In the same way that there was that balance between straight forward songs and more layered material we tried to have a balance between different types of songs just in terms of core structure, there’s some pretty simple verse/chorus/verse stuff on there and also songs that don’t fit those kind of traditional patterns.

Reveille: The Family Afloat seems like it’s written from a pretty autobiographical late twenty-something kind of place. There are songs about shitty temp jobs, feeling aimless visiting your hometown. How grounded in your own reality were the lyrics this time around?

Gallivan: This is a much more autobiographical record than our first album. We were in such a weird situation personally after Appreciation Night came out - quitting our jobs and throwing ourselves into this strange world of indie-rock touring – a lot of those experiences ended up informing this record. The record is about coming home, whether that’s where you grew up or where you’re living at the moment. I’m getting married in six weeks and I met my fiancée a few weeks before we went on tour, so one of the songs was about the start of that relationship and having to do the long distance thing. Another of the songs was about going back to my hometown on tour while trying to keep my ahead above water. It’s not all personal though, there’s also a song about Winston Churchill on there. [Laughs.] I would say about 80% of the record is tied to those more personal themes and then the rest is a little more out there and fantastical. I had a song that didn’t make the record that was about the French revolution. I’m a history teacher so that kind of stuff comes pretty easy, taking a lecture and turning it into a song.

Reveille: Do your experiences as a teacher inform your musical life at all? I seem to be encountering more and more musicians who double as teachers in their day jobs.

Gallivan: It does to a certain extent. Both of them are performances. The good thing about teaching is your guaranteed some students will be there very day, whereas sometimes on tour you’ve only got five people in the crowd. [Laughs.] Oddly enough playing on stage did help me develop a comfort level teaching in front of teenagers. The schedule of teaching allows you to do whatever you want for a few months of the year so it’s a profession that lends itself to being in a band. It doesn’t surprise me that there are a lot of musicians who are teachers.

Reveille: Depending on the environment you teach in I would imagine there might also be some similarities in terms of the amount of creative freedom you have. As a teacher you can craft a lesson pretty much however you want which is the same kind of autonomy that comes with songwriting.

Gallivan: Yeah, I’m in a really nice situation where I teach, I don’t have daily meetings about hitting state standards so there’s a certain amount of creative freedom. I definitely bring music into my classroom. I’ve had my students listen to Pavement and Sufjan Stevens songs that tie into my history lessons. They always hate Malkmus’ voice. [Laughs.]

The Family Afloat

Gallivan: When we’re in the studio there are always amazing instruments lying around and it would be a waste to let those sounds go by just because we couldn’t reproduce then live. I used to listen to Built to Spill a lot and one of the things I loved about them was the way they had these soaring recordings with lots of layered vocals and their live show was completely different from that. Only in concert when I heard what parts Doug [Martsch] chose to play and sing did I realize what was actually at the center of the song in his mind when he wrote it. It’s cool when live performance can be about finding the song within the song so to speak, I think of the live show and our records as two totally different documents.

Reveille: The instrumentation on this record branches out considerably, with horn sections in the mix at points and more prominent use of piano. Was that just a matter of throwing everything at the wall and seeing what would stick during the recording process?

Gallivan: Evan [Sult] our drummer helped produce this record along with Manny Sanchez. They were both so patient and thorough about going through every single sound, just grabbing the moments that worked. It was a lot of trial and error. We would record the skeletons of the songs, guitar/drums/vocals, and then sit on those for a couple of weeks, listening to them independently and coming up with additional ideas to put on top of them. Sometimes that would mean twenty new ideas for a song, sometimes three. The whole process took about a year, we would record for a few days, go away for a few weeks, and then record some more. We revisited every song multiple times.

Reveille: I imagine that helped in terms of crafting a cohesive album.

Gallivan: Recording that way definitely shaped the songwriting in the end. “Happens To Us All Otherwise,” which is probably our most straight forward song ever, was written because we had just finished worked on “Palace Flophouse and Grill” which was a skeleton of a tune we all had a really hard time wrapping our head around and writing for. After that song was finally done we went to our practice space and were basically like, “Fuck it, we’re going to write a simple song.” The whole thing took a half hour and we really liked it, the song felt like a nice counterbalance to all the work we had just been doing. That definitely wouldn’t have happened if we hadn’t recorded the album piecemeal like we did.

Reveille: After taking so long in the creation stage the album’s finally reaching the public in a few weeks. Do you worry at all about how it will be received or talk within the band about what would constitute “success” for the album?

Gallivan: Not really, just because it’s so not in our hands. The fact that we made it and it’s something we all like marks it a success for us. The fact we can convince clubs around the country to give us shows is a success. If people write about it and enjoy it that’s wonderful and humbling and great, but if it’s just a lukewarm response or poor that’s ok, it is what it is. When we got home from touring behind Appreciation Night we weren’t even sure what we wanted to do with our band anymore. So the fact that we stuck together, and made something our friends like and our label likes - that feels pretty good. We’d drive ourselves crazy if we depended on everyone liking everything we did. Being a salesman out on tour is weird, we just played ten shows and had our new record with us and you play your show and wonder if people liked it - if it’s good enough for them to buy the record. The weirdest thing for me after we play is always, “How am I supposed to act? Should I go over to the merch table? Is that cool?” I’m definitely still figuring out the business part of it. [Laughs.]

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