Q&A: Stephen Brodsky
Photo by Jeremy North-Lewis
Cave In frontman and Signal favourite Stephen Brodsky recently released his latest solo album, Here’s To The Future, and it’s available on cassette only. The Hydra Head release is a return to the lo-fi, four-track sound the singer championed on early releases like Ole Sunday and Expose Your Overdubs, and the analog format only serves to enhance that aesthetic.
I spoke with Brodsky earlier this week about his affinity for lo-fi recordings, being a prolific songwriter, and playing with old friends Isis at their final gig.
Why did you decide to release Here’s To The Future on cassette?
I recorded the record on cassette, or I should say cassette format. I felt like it would be fitting to duplicate the recording, the finished product, the same way it was originally documented.
What keeps drawing you back to four-track recording? Your last few recordings seem to have used more modern recording techniques.
My ProTools rig broke down, so I continued to record anyway on my four-track, which was kind of nice in a lot of ways because it limited me to the amount of tracks I could add, and the amount of time I could spend on a piece at one time, as opposed to when I first got a ProTools rig and I had a seemingly endless amount of tracks, and proceeded to double and triple every instrument, which is a bit of overload. I ended up mixing all the stuff in ProTools, and I don’t think the record would have come out as sonically expansive as it is, for a four-track recording, had I not done that.
The album seems to follow a trend with your solo projects, as it exists as its own unique thing with its own style, and then you’re already moving on to the next thing by the time it’s out. Pet Genius had its own sound, Octave Museum had its own sound, so how do you get in and out of those mindsets so quickly?
Maybe that’s just the nature of writing music solo. You’re not really involving a lot of people, then there’s less to remind you of your work or whatever time it was that you documented that work. That’s a big part of it. I don’t usually have a problem being prolific. As to what’s worth people’s time to sit down and listen to, that’s a different story [laughs]. I’m not the best editor. That’s one of my weak points when it comes to writing solo music, or music in a solo atmosphere. Maybe it’s just a combination of all that.
Having recently gotten into Guided By Voices, I seemed to draw a lot of comparisons to the way you and Robert Pollard write, put out music, and how you have that affinity for lo-fi recordings. It also reminded me of how much the 90s indie and alternative aesthetic seems to appeal to you. What exactly about that time resonates with you?
I was a teenager growing up in the 90s, so that had a big impact. Music tends to affect people, generally speaking, in a heavy way when you’re in your teens. You start looking outwards from your home lives to create more of your own identity. I just happened to be a byproduct of the alt-rock, grunge explosion. Around the same time was when I discovered hardcore. As far as going to shows and being part of a community, and learning how to function as an artist within a community, I attribute a lot of what I know and a lot of my experiences to being involved in hardcore. I think you combine those two worlds and it makes a good picture for my role in Cave In.
How do you bring that aspect into Cave In?
I definitely keep the other three guys in mind and make it a point to contribute material that I think they would be excited to play. I’m always surprised at stuff they tend to gravitate towards, aside from my preconceptions of what they like to play, which makes it fun and interesting, and is a key element to why we’ve been doing this band for as long as we have, with the spontaneity factor still being alive and well.
It seemed to me that a song like “Air Escapes,” if you took it out of the heavy realm that it exists in, might be a poppy song that could show up in your solo work. Was that how it originally started?
No. “Air Escapes” came out of my love for the Bad Brains, which, admittedly, is a recent discovery. That’s funny to say now because Cave In was featured on a Bad Brains compilation years ago. We had to scramble around to find a copy of the first album. None of us owned it. We weren’t even into the Bad Brains. The feel and the energy of that song really comes from the ROIR cassette.
Is that something that ever happens, that you’ll write a song solo and then realize that it might fit with Cave In?
It’s happened before. There’s moments on Jupiter that are extractions from other bits of music that I have on four-track tapes that maybe have been released. I can’t remember at this point. I think the time between 2001 and 2003 were years that songs that I put in a solo atmosphere came out in Cave In. I don’t look at it being my best work, but it could go either way. A song like “Down The Drain” sounds light years beyond anything I could do on my own.
How do you decide where to use each song? Do you ever feel like you’re going to wear yourself thin?
Again, when you play with a band, you have other people’s opinions and personalities to bounce ideas off. At this point, it’s very quick to realize whether something works or not. We’re adults now, we don’t try to force anything upon one another when it comes to working on music. It’s easier now than it was before.
Has Cave In been writing new songs since the Planets Of Old EP came out?
We have an album’s worth of songs, and they will be mixed at the end of the summer.
For a full-length or another EP?
We have a full-length’s worth of material, but we’re not sure in what form it’s going to be released.
How did you feel about the reaction to Planets Of Old being pretty much uniformly positive after being away from Cave In for so long?
We just never know anymore. I don’t know. We just go into the idea of releasing music nowadays that some people are gonna hate it, some people are gonna love it. That simple notion is a continuation of how the reception, generally speaking, to our music has been ever since we’ve been making it.
At this point in your lives, have you all decided and accepted that music is going to be a part-time thing for you, or would you still want it to be more full-time and career-based?
Two of the guys are fathers now. First and foremost, their families are top priority. Cave In can’t go out and play benefit shows or low-paying gigs anymore. It’s just not in the cards for us. When we do stuff like this, the bill’s gotta make sense. That’s pretty much it.
How does it feel to be playing with Isis at their last show ever? Did you know it was going to be their last show?
We found out probably around the same time as everyone else. It didn’t really change much as far as how we were going to approach things. A lot of pressure got taken off us, because we’re just showing up to play. We don’t even have any merch. We feel like we can just play what we want to play and just please ourselves. At the same time, having grown up with Isis and being very much a part of the same scene for many years as well, we know that some of our fans are gonna be at these shows and it seems like a fitting bill. Cave In doesn’t get to do this very much anymore, so we just like to enjoy it when it’s here.
