Allston Pudding: When and where did you start putting together the songs for this album?

Bedbug: I probably started putting together these tracks sometime in 2020 or so. It was a bunch of stuff I was writing before I moved out of Boston, actually. 

AP: And these are the first songs that you wrote as a full band if I remember correctly?

B: Yeah. So we had done a bunch of rereleases, like I don’t want to say remixes, but we redid a bunch of songs and that was really fun. We decided that we wanted to do kind of a big, full band sendoff and do some full tracks, like a full album written as a band in a studio. So that’s how this one came about.

AP: And you did that at Big Nice with Brad, right? 

B: We did have fun with Brad, which was awesome. 

AP: I was going to say, how was that experience for you all as a band?

B: So Big Nice was really, really great. We recorded with Nick, and obviously the studio is gorgeous, but we actually just tracked drums and bass there, as I had already done the guitars and vocals at home. And then we went back also tracked the cello at Big Nice, as well. Nick then helped with all of the mixing and mastering. I did kind of a first pass it all the mixes, and then Nick kind of cleaned everything up for me. So, experience was really fruitful. 

AP: Did you get to play any of these songs when you were still in Boston with the full group, or is this just something you got on tape? 

B: The, last show that I played in Boston before I moved was booked at my basement, which was called Lost Woods, and we played the entire album in full. (I was at this show, by the way –Ed.)

AP: How did the writing process as far as putting these songs together with the whole group differ from your earlier solo stuff? 

B: Honestly, been getting a lot of questions about that. I think that generally I didn’t really change my writing methods very much because I think what I normally do anyways is: I take down lots of  little vocal and little guitar ideas as my basis as voice notes on my phone, and those will those will kind of be like the skeletons or the frameworks for the songs, but I won’t really like move to the next stage of writing, which is like layering other parts to the song until I know those two pieces are set. Too often I’ll have a good vocal melody, and I won’t be able to place it to a good guitar track, or I’ll have a good guitar track, and I won’t be able to get a good vocal melody around it, and that’s kind of the heart of the song to me. It’s the structure, the melody and some of the guitar parts, because I feel like those are the core elements of a song. Those components can sometimes change, like you could sub out for bass or synth or something like that, but it’s a similar principle.

I feel like if I don’t have a strong structure with like a vocal melody that I’m confident in, it’s really hard for me to push it forward into the next stage. For the old records that used to be me writing some songs on my acoustic guitar and then layering synth over it, or putting a drum machine on it and messing around with it a little bit. For this one, it was the same thing where I would just bring those that structure or an acoustic version of the song to everyone else, and we would try to figure out how to make it sound appropriate for the band

AP: Do you feel like your approach to the instruments changed once you started playing and recording with the full band? And if so, how? 

B: Yeah, actually a big change for me was about full band is that I started using the electric guitar a lot more. I still write on the acoustic, so most of my gear  stays in the garage where my recording stuff is, and I pretty much just take it out when I’m playing a show or practicing. I will say though that when I was writing the songs on this record, I was thinking very differently about my guitar playing, and I was thinking about how some of the solo stuff; I don’t want to say stagnant, but they often had a similar structure in that they have verses and guitar parts that were kind of repetitive. I think the thing that drove the older songs were  the lyrics or the vocal melody in place of the instrumentation. And so when we translated those solo stuff to the band they were not the most exciting to play.

So when I started writing these songs, I was very conscious of writing more dynamic parts that could translate well in a band setting. It was a challenge for me as a writer to come up with a lot more ideas per song, it sometimes felt like writing three songs per one, which took a lot of time out of me and then energy, but I think it was worth it. Plus, I think that the music landscape kind of changed in the four years since I’ve last put out a record, you know? That kind of chaos in songwriting isn’t necessarily in vogue right now. Feels like a lot of songs right now are very  “verse, chorus, verse” and there’s a lot more droning going on right now than in the past in indie rock. A lot of the big songs right now seem to keep a pretty similar dynamic range throughout, and I don’t think that these songs don’t really do that. So we’ll see it that works against me a little bit.

AP: Do you find yourself listening to music with that kind of ear in mind?

B: Almost always, I like to stay abreast of what is happening in and around music, so I’ve been following indie rock trends for a  while. I talked about  this in another interview recently about the trends circling while I was writing the record. I want to say it was the fifth wave emo trend. That no longer feels as dominant, but there seemed to be a lot of Y2K era pop punk style recording with the vocals and guitar being really slick. I also think there were more synthesizers in the mix, too. And there were for sure. It seemed to come off a little bit messy and chaotic, which was cool, but I also think that a lot of those recordings were replicating that extremely loud, super-compressed Y2K style feeling where everything kind of hits at once, whereas the wave of emo and indie rock prior to that had a more natural sound.

With that in mind, we really went into Big Nice with the intention of getting away from that style. I was listening to bands like 22° Halo and Skirts who were making really lush and beautiful recordings where everything is gentle, even when it’s loud. So we were shooting for something similar where we didn’t want it to seem flat and compressed. 

AP: Do you find yourself reaching for things that see that, whether they’re trendy or not with your writing?

B: I think that if you really want to do well in music, following trends, but keeping your own sound is the way to do it. Bands that are able to evolve with current trends, but also still have a couple elements that makes them stand alone are always going to remain kind of timeless. When I was releasing a lot of bedroom music it happened to coincide with the trade winds of the era, but that was a very natural voice for me. Once emo rap or hyperpop started, I probably had the capability to do that kind of thing, and I know a lot of people that did shift to that or shifted to the fifth wave style I was talking about before, but it wouldn’t have felt like my voice. I was also really not interested in making that kind of music. I feel similarly about the bedroom stuff in that I kind of outgrew a lot of it after three records. It just doesn’t feel much like me anymore.

Even during the bedroom era, I was listening to a lot of Built To Spill and earlier Modest Mouse stuff that I liked a lot in high school, and I told myself that if I turned this into a band that would be the type of music I’d want to make, so it was something like a natural progression. That said, I hope there’s enough from my older music seeped into the more indie rock style songs we’re making now to keep people interested.

AP: Let’s zoom out a bit, what were you reading, watching, listening to while you’re putting the album together? 

B: When I was writing my first record, I was watching a lot of like mid-2000s TV, like Freaks and Geeks and stuff like that, whereas the second record was centered around reading lots of Marxist history, and then the third was kind of a mixture of both. Life Like Moving Pictures definitely felt like a mixture of the two records in my head since I was still reading a lot of socialist history, and still watching a lot of The Wonder Years. As for this record, well  I wasn’t really doing a lot of either. My studying has slowed down a bit, and I wasn’t really watching a lot of TV. I was playing a lot of old D&D RPGs, but I don’t really know if that translated at all, and I don’t know if it really hit in the same way. I’m sure where this record came from to be honest.

AP: Are there any other places you find inspiration in your writing?

B: Without getting myself in too much trouble, I think that it all comes from a couple different places, and while I try to make some stuff sound autobiographical, because I think it can be easier for people to connect. Also, it’s a fun exercise. However, I think that in my day job as a counselor at a high school, there are a fair amount of stories that I think I tell within the album that take direct inspiration from stuff that I’ve seen with some families I’ve worked with, while excluding the specifics. The feelings and the things I’ve seen and the things that a lot of my students have gone through were definitely bigger inspirations for me this time than any TV show.

AP: That’s pretty powerful.

B: I’m also trying to mix that with a lot of surrealist imagery. A big theme I was working through was this sort of apocalyptic, but not necessarily world ending event occurring. Something about the dissonance between continuing to live your life, all the little things that people have to do and get concerned over, even as the world is ending. So that played a big role, but I was also thinking about the long history of emo and indie rock about moving or leaving home for the first time. That was sort of a backdrop as well while moving out here.

AP: Obviously you’ve since moved to Los Angeles, but can you speak on what Boston meant to this band?

B: I don’t want to pretend to be any sort of expert on the LA scene, and I know that there are people who are super involved that have found a way to connect, but it feels a lot different than Boston and the scene there. I feel as though the energy l resonated with and connected to the most was in Boston. I moved here for work, and not necessarily for music, and while it has definitely been positive in that regard, it did feel in some way like a closing a door on a very important chapter of my life. I just think my relationship to music will never be the same as it was when I was in Boston. So much of my life in Boston revolved around going to, playing, and eventually hosting shows, and its through music that I forged a lot of really deep and close friendships. I hope that something similar will happen here eventually, but I also understand that that kind of thing is such lightning in the bottle. There isn’t part of the same scene culture here that there is in Boston.

AP: Your priorities have shifted a bit too, obviously.

B: Coming here to a new city as an adult and the scene not really working in a way that’s as familiar to me is part of it, too. There’s a lot more bar shows here, and it seems like the locals here play all their shows together with similar types of bands. Makes things feel like there’s 3000 different scenes, but also no scenes. So in a word, no, I haven’t really found my place yet. It all makes me that much more appreciative of Boston because I really do think the Boston music scene, for all of its ebbs and flows, was a community in the truest sense. 

AP: Have you done much writing yet in Los Angeles, and has the move had any effect on what you’re writing now? 

B: It’s really hard for me to consider a new album before the other one is out, and I know that it’s gonna take in a while, so hold tight. I have started picking up my guitar a couple times a week or so and recording little voice memos for myself, and I have some scratchers and some ideas, but it’s the kind of thing where it will feel like I’m doing nothing until it all comes together. My current musical obsession is this new little piece of gear and that is helping me get excited about incorporating synths and stuff into the full band. That will be my inspiration for the next record whenever it comes.

AP: Obviously you have a new lineup in Los Angeles. Do you feel like the songs on this record have changed for you and the band? 

B: The people that I recorded with in Boston were really intimately familiar with the songs, and that went a really long way into the recording process and playing it live. But I will say the people that I play with right now in L.A. are extremely talented and are able to push the songs in directions that I didn’t expect them to be just because they come from different musical backgrounds. So I’m pretty fortunate, and I’m really, really happy with where the band is at now in LA. Like, I don’t even need to play shows, I enjoy practicing with them because they’re so fun to play with, so that’s a nice thing. 

AP: How has the response been thus far in LA?

B: Complicated in that I don’t really have a good read on the listeners, which is not true to the fault of the listeners. It’s more been about living here and being busy with other more adult things, and not prioritizing the band quite as much as I did in Boston. When I was in college, I was going out 2 or 3 nights a week, and now I’ve been to like one show in the last month. That said, the shows that I have played have been wildly different. We’ve had mixed reception in terms of turn out in LA itself, but shows outside of L.A. in other parts of Southern California, like Long Beach and Pomona have gone really well. A lot of really young people turned out who were pretty big fans, which was awesome because I wasn’t expecting it. And I haven’t really found that in LA proper in the same way just yet. There’s definitely a lot of people who are listening to what we’re doing, I’m just not really sure how to get to them just yet.

AP: Do you find that these audiences are receptive to the indie rock or were they expecting more of a bedroom thing? 

B: I think everybody’s been a pretty big fan of the indie rock stuff, honestly. While I do think my reputation precedes me in some ways, most people are not really sure what to expect anyways when they come to see us live. And I think that the few that are actively seeking me out don’t really care what I’m doing with the songs as long as I’m playing ones they know. I have been surprised by the reception in general, though.

AP: All right, last one. Which city, in your opinion, has better food? Don’t hold back.

B: That’s a really mean question. I think that L.A. has better food overall. Obviously, I am a big fan of Mexican food. Because I’m Mexican. And I think it’s just it’s just there’s just no comparison in that regard. But Boston often gets a bad rap because I think that what Boston does have is really good. Also everyone gripes about Boston closing early, but other cities really aren’t open that much later than Boston. Like all the restaurants on weekdays are closing at eight here. Ultimately there’s no food cities quite like LA, but I’m surprised at how close it feels to me right now as someone who just moved here. Last time I was back in Boston, I went to a tiny little skewers restaurant in Coolidge Corner that kind of blew my mind. It was insane, and I haven’t found anything like that yet here so…

pack your bags the sun is growing is out March 15th on Disposable America, and you can preorder a copy right here.