Allston-based post-pop band Pretty & Nice have been a dervish in the Boston music scene since they arrived in 2005. Thriving in our perennially underdogging city, co-leaders Jeremy Mendicino and Holden Lewis have bucked area pitfalls by managing to successfully juggle the elusive trifecta that plagues all recording artists: they write amazing songs, put on great live shows everywhere they go, and produce inventive recordings that only get better with age. Behind the boards on those recordings is grown-ass wunderkind engineer/producer Mendicino. For years he operated out of his basement studio, Esthudio (http://esthudio.com/), where he also tackled the work of some of the area’s most exciting independent music with partner Dan Gonzales. In late 2013, however, they endured every studio owner’s fear: having to move.

I spoke with them last year about their most recent release, the concept album Golden Rules for Golden People. In anticipation of Friday’s Spirit Kid album release show—Is Happening was one of the last projects recorded at Esthudio—I caught up with Mendicino via email to see how they’d settled into their new location, Odd Fellows Recording.

– – –

August 2013

How did you guys meet?

Holden: We both grew up in Vermont. I had seen Jeremy play when I was in high school. But we went to different high schools so we didn’t know each other. I left for school and then came back during the summers, so that’s when we actually connected. I was on my first summer break from college and I was living in a punk house up there and we had shows in the house. Jeremy came to one of the shows.

Jeremy: I had heard there was a band that sounded like Brainiac or something and I was like “Are you serious?”

It’s funny that the first band you bring up is Brainiac. I’ve been listening to your new album a ton and just discovered a mix CD I had made with an Enon song on it. I was like, “There it is!”

J: That was the first big tie. XTC was the next one. And we made a record together and have been inside each other’s iPods ever since. That was Pink and Blue. We recorded that in ‘05 or ‘06.

You get a lot of Elvis Costello comparisons as well.

H: That’s definitely where everything started. It’s expanded a lot. That was kind of the idea behind the writing style of Pretty & Nice.

J: Which I just jumped in on. The band has obviously morphed since I’ve been writing as well. But yeah, when the band started it was definitely hard-line, mean, fast pop.

And was Pink & Blue mostly stuff that you [Holden] had written?

H: It was half written by me and half this friend of mine who I’d grown up with, Will Peters, who did, sort of, the more sing-songy songs on that record.

And then after that…

H: It became Jeremy and I.

The first word that comes to mind when I think of the music you make is “diabolical.” It’s poppy, but you guys are writing these parts that turn on a dime and don’t often repeat themselves, and you’re tying in all these hooks and anthemic choruses in a two-minute span. It feels like somuch is accomplished but you don’t think about it having only taken two minutes.

J: We’re big into efficiency.

How do you go about that? Where do you start?

H: We start with a couple of ideas that we think are strong and build off of that, combine or see if things work together if we have separate ideas going in. See where it leads.

J: It’s very organic. The songs write themselves in a way. I don’t believe that you write a song. So that’s a big, esoteric [difference from] the way that a lot of people think about songwriting. So, from the get-go, I don’t feel like I’m responsible for crafting a song so much as I’m responsible for allowing myself to find a song, trying to facilitate between Holden and I. Like, “What goes there? What’s next?” Well, where does it feel like it’s going? Certainly there are times when you hear something and think “That seems contrived. I don’t like the way it feels. That doesn’t have the right smack to it.” But for the most part, it’s just where does the song want to go and you let it go there. And the songs that come to us just happen to have a lot of layers, moments.

Are you writing simultaneously, together, or do you each bring parts from outside of practice?

H: Most of the time, we’re sitting together and working a song through.

J: But it always originates with one of us. I don’t think we’ve ever sat down and said “Okay, let’s write a song.”

And as far as the arrangements…

J: It’s all shared responsibility. I do more of the hands-on making sounds happen because I’m the one who knows how to make shit happen technically, as far as studio stuff is concerned…

H: Jeremy’s got a catalogue of sounds in his head and how you patch it in and how you make it and where it comes from and what instrument makes it. And I’ll just have an idea of something that I can try and describe to him.

J: Twinkly and blue.

H: Yeah, exactly.

J: And I’m like, “Oh, I get it!”

How did you get started recording?

J: Did you see that TEAC A2340 in the living room? That was my first deck, when I was two. It was my Dad’s first deck as well that he purchased when he was 23 or something. And then he moved on. He got one of the Fostex A8s, which was the predecessor to that Fostex A80. And so that was the “Ooh, I can’t touch that one unless he’s around” deck. But I was allowed to play with the 4-track. So I fucked around with the 4-track forever and then eventually my Mom purchased one of the cassette 4-tracks when I was 7 or 8, again a predecessor of that 414 up there, one of the Portastudios, and that made it a lot easier to have everything you needed in one place. So then I started getting into making full productions, whereas with the 4-track it was more noodling, fiddling around. I used to love doing really silly library shit, like cataloguing, respooling tapes onto different reels, making sure that the reel matched the box, making sure that reels were tails out or heads out or whatever I was in the mood for. I would just, like, come home from school, play some drums and then just fuck with reels of tape.

So your parents were really supportive!

J: Yeah, they had to be. They made this happen. They asked for this. When the two artists boinked, they asked to be given the fruit of their boinking.

Are they musicians?

J: My Mom is more the “musician” musician. She’s a piano player. She still actually records with me. My Dad is the writer, the poet. But also a musician. He wrote his first rock opera when he was 18. So I’m the obvious outcome.

How did Esthudio come to be?

J: Esthudio is the name of this specific iteration of the studio, but it’s just a continuation of the work in Vermont. We had a space in Shelburne that I really miss. We moved here [to Boston] in ‘07 and found this space. It was the closest thing to perfect in the two days we looked. We really lucked out. It had the best clap sound! And we’ve been here ever since. Within three days of moving in we had started recording “Blue and Blue.” Maybe two or three weeks later, we heard that this guy Dan G [Dan Gonzales] was looking for a place and met him and instantly loved him. It was like, “You’re one of our new favorite people. Yes, you should move in and we should marry efforts.” We called it Esthudio because it’s silly. It’s this Castilian thing, like (fakes a Castilian Spanish accent): “What is this place? Oh, it is esthudio.”

You’ve written a song about Dan. [“Dan’s Heart”]

J: We are so in love with Dan that the placeholder lyrics just stuck.

H: I had that riff/refrain in my guitar mind for months and I was playing it in the kitchen and Dan walked in and I just sang the first lines of the Dan G part of the song as a joke to him and we just kept it.

J: Here’s a line that never made it: “In Dan’s broth, he’s a man of the cloth.” It’s a good one. I don’t know why we didn’t keep it. We blew it!

On the Esthudio website, you say you can “run the gamut from clinically accurate science guy to total lunatic producer.” I imagine the bands define what they want from you. But with such a range how do you manage their needs?

J: I try to be selfless. As a producer or an engineer you can’t bring ego into the mix because it won’t help anything. It’ll just be a hindrance. You might come to some small gain like “Ooh I won that fight! I got those two seconds of reverb in when they didn’t want it! Hahaha!” But then you injure the relationship and the record as a whole might be a little disjointed. You won’t work with the band again. It’s easier to look at yourself as a technician, as a facilitator, as a member of a service industry. Steve Albini talks about this all the time. I offer a service. You bring your music in. I service it with these gadgets and make it possible for you to carry it around on a piece of plastic. It’s all about the artist’s vision to begin with. But then you get into the watery fluidity of “How am I involved artistically?” and as long as you are leaving the ego at the door, then anything you want to add of yourself, you add or you allow as an option. In a perfect situation, the band has a lot of great ideas, and if you have ideas they want to hear about them, and everybody gets their ideas into the mix, and the mix is fortified with all these extra great ideas. Every piece of gear is its own character, its own voice. So in the same way, I’m just another piece of malleable gear that you can use for my day rate!

In fact, you’ve spoken to me about the gear as if you have “so many friends.” You call them tools, but they’re participants.

J: They all have their own sound, they all have their own resonance, their own range of effectiveness. It’s just a matter of dousing for which one to use and—once you’ve established your signal path—knowing what knob to twist to start the conversation. Let’s see how this attack time changes how you’re going to add to the signal chain. Let’s see how you’re going to react to these ideas. How about if we have two people talking to you at once? How about if I sidechain you as well? What’ll you say then? They’re all little dudes.

Your two most recent releases, the US YOU ALL WE EP and Golden Rules for Golden People, were both recorded here, right?

H: Everything was recorded here.

J: We’ve never recorded anywhere else. But with the exception of “Yonkers,” which was mixed here, we mixed [Golden Rules for Golden People] at Tiny Telephone.

What was it like working there?

H: It was fantastic.

J: We were there a couple of weeks. It was only $200 a day because they had just opened the B Room and they were trying to get people in. And we saw that and were like “What!? Yes! Now!” So we booked two weeks. Within a few weeks I went back out to mix another project—again, because it was so cheap and even with airfare wrapped in it was still cheaper than mixing in New York. And then maybe a couple of months after that I heard back from John [Vanderslice] about another project I was hoping to work on out there and he was like “Sorry, guys, we’re not taking any outside engineers for the B Room. It’s just gotten bananas.” The reason they had opened it in the first place was to have more workspace. But it was great. The Peliccis (Ian and Jay, house engineers) and Vanderslice are some of the absolute greatest people who are also the most technically proficient, well-spoken, communicative, kind, just great people.

H: They’re present. They’re thoughtful. They were all there all the time to help us out. If we had a question or anything, they were like “We’ll come by and help you with that.”

J: Or, serious problems that other studios would have just told us, “Well, tough.” The ½” mix-down deck that was in our room just died on us. We were like “Well, we can’t do anything without the mix-down deck so, uh, can we borrow the one from the A Room because, you know, we need it? We absolutely need it.” And they were like “Ahh, well, here are the days we absolutely don’t need it.” And we worked it out and were able to use the machine while they had someone come in and work on the machine in our room. And everything that needed to happen happened. Because they’re a real collective of people working as one piece of fabric.

Talk about Boston. You’ve been here for years. You make sense here musically. But it’s always seemed like a difficult town to break out of. You guys seem comfortable; you have a network; but you don’t seem stuck.

H: We make a big point to get out a lot and connect with people in other places. And that’s what you need to do because there’s not an industry support system here to get bands out of Boston. We’ve always been confused when people say they’re going on tour and we’re like “Cool, where are you going?” And they’re like “Oh, we’ve got a show in Connecticut and a show in New York and a show in Albany and then we’re gonna come home.” That’s not a tour. That’s a weekend!

J: We were from such an insulated environment in Vermont that to do anything you had to leave. It was always clear to us that it was tantamount to our success in any way at all that we had to be on tour. We had to be going out to play as many places as possible for as many people as possible. With the internet being what it is, you can make a career now without touring. But it fortifies the whole concept of “the band” to go on tour and be supported in real life in places where there’s really no reason that you should be supported. You bring this music and it’s worth people’s time and respect or it’s not.

H: Every seriously good thing that’s ever happened to our band has happened because we were on tour and found the right ears in some totally random place and were proactive about the other aspects of the band and weren’t sitting on our laurels waiting for something to happen to us.

In your new video, you’re in SXSW and playing abandoned parking lots and empty parks! You sound particularly gracious about a process that could be easily interpreted as thankless.

J: It’s an exercise. When you go out for a jog the immediate result is you feel wheezy and less powerful. But do it every day or every week even and you realize it’s an additive process. You create a structure that’s able to support much more ability. But people are so short-sighted and impatient that they go out on that three-day tour and they’re like “Man, we lost money and nobody was at that show in Connecticut and I just don’t know if it’s worth it.” Dude, this is going to take a long time and you’re going to have to put in a lot of effort and it’s going to be the weirdest thing you didn’t even plan on… For us it was this show in Dayton, OH that we booked just because we like bands from Dayton and we thought it would be a cool place. Dayton is not a cool place. It’s a great place because there are great people there, but it just happens that because we made that decision, certain people who we’re big fans of heard us and assisted us. And that kind of happenstantial blessing is what’s born of really breaking your back and taking chances and making little leaps of faith.

It’s no secret that being an indie rock band isn’t the most lucrative career path. The new album’s title, its song titles—there’s lots of gold, lots of commerce, lots of capitalist imagery. Is the album a critique?

J: You can read it that way. There’s definitely an element of that. There’s no way to separate yourself—if you’re living in the constructs of our society—from commerce or capitalism. But the record is, for us, entirely about not wanting to be so subservient to that construct. It doesn’t feel right. So, the songs are really about finding happiness outside of the foolish constructs of gold. The record also aggrandizes gold because gold is beautiful and royal and sparkling and a magnificent element. And money can be really helpful! But the way that I’ve understood it for so long is that money is mean, it’s bad. All those simple, negative terms are baggage that I carry around. And it’s unnecessary. We’ve spent a lot of the last few years trying to gain perspective on our lives and our happiness and the songs are really just about exploring that, finding happiness outside of the “me first” mentality. Because happiness never comes from the “me first” mentality.

H: Jeremy mostly wrote the words for “Money Music” and my reading of those words is that the first half is sort of about a discomfort about the fact that music and money have to be so intertwined because of the construct that we’re in and what we want to do with our music—that it has to get all tied up, that we have to have a conversation about what commercial we would be comfortable having our music in. And so there’s a lot of lyrics about that confusion and that twisty tangled world. And then, in the end, it’s releasing, and it’s all about how we are instruments and that’s a beautiful thing. We’re more than all that confusion. We’re more than all those dirty things we do for money.

J: The duality exists if you want to see it. “Lock it in” vs “Unlock it.” You can see it from either side. But it doesn’t really matter when you look at it from the higher perspective where everything is unified. They exist simultaneously. You can look at it as like “Aww we’re locked in this commercial bullshit, it’s such a drag.” Or you can say, “Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s go for the skrill. Let’s get the bills and we’ll be so comfy.” But you can look at it from above and see that you’re making music either way. As long as you’re making the music that you would be making purely whether or not you would be making money… Is this the music that you’d be making if you were independently wealthy? Yes. We would be doing this anyway. Except we’d be doing it in the new studio! Which, by the way, would be 100% translucent, on the top of a mountain, and fueled entirely off zero-point energy.

You begin the album with that “We are all instruments” line, as a kind of lo-fi prelude. When I first hear it, in the context of the superficial gold/money perspective, I think of how the media’s been talking for years about “derivatives and other financial instruments”…

J: Like we’re all tools of the wealthy.

Exactly. And then when it’s reprised in “Money Music” you extend the thought that wasn’t there initially: “We are all instruments ringing out to live. We are the positivists. We are impervious.” It’s a very triumphant transformation.

J: There are lots of places in the record where I feel like we take the message all the way there. And then there are other moments where the song stays in a weird tangent reality, specific pictures, instead of the songs that are more grand in their apex, like “Okay, here’s everything that we think.” There are other songs like “Critters” and “New Czar” to an extent, where you don’t come all of the way out of the muck of negative imagery. But I still see them as positive songs. Some have interpreted the album as us railing against the rich and it’s not that at all. We’re just dreaming of not needing that anymore. Not wanting to be a part of what makes people unhappy. I think that there are a lot of moments in a lot of songs where we’re talking about getting happy and rising above and transforming these things. “Stallion and Mare” is a very Kabbalistic song but it could mean all sorts of things. It’s all symbolism and symbols are meant to be read. I trust that there’s a unifying string in any of the interpretations. And also it’s been interesting to see how the negative interpretations have brought out meanings that I almost don’t want to explore. Like, “Ooh I guess that did kind of mean this, but I don’t want it to mean this. Eww.” I don’t want the focus to be there. So when we perform it I have to really bring the oomph to the positive. Really let it shine. Make sure I don’t get snooty or affected by it.

H: The songs are all born of a really transcendent, transformative positive. But there was a negative that was the catalyst to get there. But we never want it to stay in that catalytic converter phase.

J: Everyone has shit in their lives but we want to see that shit as assistant and then use that.

Between the album itself and the music and you talking about how you wish you had better gear—you have a lot of toys here and it may not be top-flight but what you’re making is very polished, very inventive, very compelling—the whole picture, especially with the gold emphasis, feels alchemical.

H: It may not seem possible to do it but we do it anyways!

J: You just have to dream it into existence.

So Golden Rules sat for two years before it was released. It’s out now. You’re touring. It’s getting favorable coverage. And meanwhile the studio is coming down. You have to move out of the house.

J: We’re out September 1. The next spot will be a commercial space. It will have higher ceilings. And we will be able to build it out to the specs that we want and it won’t just be arranged by happenstance. I feel like I’ve done a really good job in my life at making lemonade. But it’s time. Obviously there’s a lot of stress that comes with the unknowning element. But I’m a faithful person. I’m a believer that everything will work out if I let it. So I’m trying not to stand in the way of whatever comes around. Who knows what will fall into our laps? But something always falls in your lap!

So the timing doesn’t feel tragically ironic? In keeping with the gold theme: there’s gold at the end of the rainbow?

J: No reason to stop hunting for gold!

H: It’s weird but it’s totally the right time for it to happen. It’s unfortunate because it diverts a little from working on the record. But it’s really just one extra thing. I’m sure there will be some sad moments, some nostalgic moments as we tear it apart but change is such a boon. Change is almost always good.

J: You learn as you grow older that when you have greater perspective on any specific matter you see that these things you thought were just funerals—just the worst thing that could happen—were never the worst thing. They were always really important doorways to the next thing. The more we say “yes” to the weirdest craziest things that come our way the more we’re able to navigate the constant ebb and flow that’s going to be tossing us around anyway. If you’re saying “yes” at least you’re working on the ship. You’re trying to navigate the waves and not die. Otherwise you’re going to be the apathetic jerk that’s going to die at sea because he climbed down into the boat and said “It’s not worth it. I’m so tired.”

H: You’re the man of metaphors today.

J: When have I not been a man of metaphors? It’s the easiest way to speak!

– – –

March 2014

So the album press push and tour have passed. What’s occupying you now?

J: I moved out to Cape Cod by chance. I’ve been hibernating to a great extent—writing, demoing, reading, watching documentaries, hanging out with the kitties. Super duper ready for Spring though!

You’ve partnered into a new space, Odd Fellows Recording. Give us the backstory there. Who’s involved?

J: The short story is that our friend, Jerry MacDonald, got his hands on an old town theatre in his hometown of Weymouth, MA over a couple years of scraping, leveraging, etc. Dan got wind a few months or so before we started looking for a new space to relocate to, and after we’d looked at a few spaces, he suggested we go and see Jerry’s new place for some inspiration and… who knows. Well, we went out to Weymouth and walked around this massive building (which was also an Odd Fellows Hall), and it felt so good that we couldn’t help but offer ourselves up to the cause of turning this crazy joint into the next Abbey Road! And, luckily, Jerry agreed!

Have you already started recording folks in there?

J: Yeah! It’s wonderful. We’re still building it into the Perfected acoustic, electric, aesthetic environment, but it’s already yielding fantastic work! It’s a heck of a lot easier to capture the sonic truth of a moment in a theatre than a living room!

Describe the Odd Fellows space. What’s your elevator pitch for why bands should pick this new space of all the other places in the city?

J: Odd Fellows is like an enormous tree fort / pirate ship of play time, replete with thoughtful structures, benevolent ghosts of yesteryear, bountiful chests upon chests of booty, and a crew of first mates that take turns turning tiny toe taps to tumultuous Terraform. Making records should be an adventure in Now creation, and it should be done in a space with no limits. There are no limits here – just the Golden Rule. Why would you want to record anywhere else? Our studio is the best one yet! 😉 Calling it Abbey Road II unfortunately would get us sued.

Who do you guys have scheduled to come in?

J: I’m finishing up a record with a budding NYC songwriter this weekend, Dan’s finishing up a new Ghost Box Orchestra record next week, and Holden and I will be starting up the next P&N record in the next few weeks!

So we have some new Pretty & Nice recordings to look forward to in the near future?

J: You do indeed! Now that Holden’s back from Europe (he stayed on after our last tour over there in the Fall) we can finally get our pretty little noses to the magnetic grindstone. The demos sound awesome – now we gotta re-make ’em bigger Bigger BIGGER before they hit your ears at your preferred volume.