Photo Credit: Brian Libby

Beauty Pill is a band that simply refuses to go quietly into the dark. Led by frontman Chad Clark, the D.C. outfit is making a huge comeback from a seven year hiatus marked by Clark’s contraction of a serious heart illness that brought him near death on several occasions.

This year alone, the band has released an album, scored a local production of Hamlet, reissued their first EP, and are now embarking on a brief East Coast tour.

Their new album, Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are, continues where they left off. It’s a poignant statement about, well, most everything. There are songs about social equality, drowning in a car with your lover, and there’s even a tribute to Clark’s late, beloved dog Lucy.

The band’s signature experimental DIY pop sound is set to maximum, and is as confident as it is innovative. It’s an immense soundscape, one that fires information at you around every corner. Yet it still manages to be hooky and just downright fun. Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are has a grace that only comes from veterans like themselves.

The album was recorded and released as a three-part experiment called Beauty Pill’s Immersive Ideal at the Artisphere in Arlington, Virginia. The Immersive Ideal was an experiment on dissolving the distance between audience and band. It sought to break down the sort of alienation between fans and artists.

We caught up with Clark on the phone before the band departs on their tour. They’ll be at O’Brien’s this Thursday with Dirty Dishes, Soft Fangs, and Rachel Hael.

AP: 2015 has been a busy year for Beauty Pill—How are you feeling about it all? What’s it like to be back at full speed?

Clark: You know, I feel like the work we’ve been doing is more visible. But I feel like I’m always active with Beauty Pill music. It’s just not always visible to people. But I’ve been very encouraged by the response to the record. I honestly didn’t expect it.

I thought people would receive this music as difficult or challenging. I didn’t expect people to get into it immediately, as they seem to have gotten into it. Maybe I overestimated how complex it is, or whatever, but it’s been really positive and encouraging.

Were you trying to make the record a little more heady than usual?

No, it’s one of those things where when we were done with it, I was like wow, this is a lot for people to take in. I would never deliberately craft music to be more difficult for people, or more challenging on purpose. I’m always interested in being understood. I’m always interested in reaching people.

But sometimes, you know, you end up in a zone where the music leads you to a place that may not be as acceptable to everyone else, and then you’re kind of just like “Well, that’s what happens!”

And so I misgauged this record. It’s a more popular record than I expected. I just thought people would see it as weird or something. I don’t know. But people are really into it. There are seven minute long songs on this record, and there are Japanese instruments and all this stuff and people were just like “thumbs up!”

Yeah, I would’ve been a weirdo if I had made this record and thought, “Oh yeah, this is a fucking hit.”

There’s definitely a lot happening in it.

It’s very dense.

It is. I really enjoyed the transparency you had going with the whole Immersive Ideal and recording in an art space where people got to view you.

Yeah it seemed like an idea worth exploring. My first thought about that was that people would think it’s cool. I thought that people would enjoy it. A lot of my friends who aren’t musicians sometimes think that an album takes as long to make as it takes to listen to. A lot of non-musicians don’t know what goes into making an album and they don’t understand the extent of trial and error and also the idea of overdubbing.

It’s like when you learn that movies are shot out of sequence. You know, when you learn that with some movies they film the last scene first. And music is kind of like that. Or records are kind of like that. And in our case, the very first song on the album is not the very first song that we recorded. But you know that’s how some people think that albums are recorded, in a linear kind of way, and I wanted to show people the process. And also show them that it’s not that exciting. And watching a band make an album is not the same thing as a concert where they’re presenting to you in real time. So yeah it seemed like a worthwhile exercise. People seemed to enjoy it.

There’s three parts to the whole Immersive Ideal, correct?

Yes. The Immersive Ideal Number One was the band recording the album in Artisphere as basically an art exhibit that people could visit. Kind of like going to see a construction site where you can see people at work making the buildings. That’s essentially what number one was.

Number Two was a surround sound presentation of the finished record. And also there was a multimedia interactive thing where people could sort of look at certain photos of the process and interact and select the photos with a monome… which is basically a box of buttons that you can program to do whatever you want it to do. The buttons and lights can mean whatever you want it to mean.

In our case, we used it as a way for people to interface with the photos which were put on screens. And people could come into the exhibit and select which photos they wanted to look at with the monome, which has an intrinsic mystery to it, because all the buttons are white. It’s not like it’s color-coded or anything. You kind of have to figure out where you are and what each button does. But anyway that was Immersive Number Two.

Immersive Number Three, which we did this spring, was a live performance of the band with the band actually surrounding the audience. The band was in the corners of the room facing inward, and the audience was in the center of the room. I enjoyed that quite a bit… All these ideas, well I think people will be into it and maybe it will be cool, and they seem to keep taking off. It’s just been a very encouraging year.

From what I know of the response you’ve been getting, it’s been very positive.

Yeah, and it’s not all obvious. Like you said, the record is very dense. I mean, if you’ve seen some of the reviews some of of the people see the density as being exciting and stimulating. I was expecting someone to say “oh this record is totally packed with information, it’s overwhelming, I hate it,” you know? Something like that. So far there’s not been any of that response at all. And you know, anything we’ve done at Artisphere, people could have perceived as pretentious, or I don’t know there’s a lot of things that people could have criticized but the reception has been really really positive.

Does that positive reception make you consider following it up with any similar experiments?

I definitely want to keep messing around with music and art. I’m not someone who plans ahead a lot. I kind of improvise a lot. For example, the album, I don’t know if you knew this but we didn’t rehearse. We didn’t practice at all before we went in to make the record. In fact, most of the band had not heard the songs before we started working on them. So we did one song each day, and the way that we worked was in the morning we would listen to some of my home demos and sit around with cups of coffee and just listen. And then they’d select a song that they liked, and then we’d spend the day learning that song, and then in the evening we’d have figured out an arrangement, and then we’d record.

And so every day was a new song. It was one song per day, but totally flowing by the seat of our pants. And that’s often the way I approach things. I don’t have a kind of overarching design. I’m pretty impulsive, you know, I don’t plan a lot. So basically my thing is messing around and people let me do it… so I’m just going to keep doing what I’m doing I guess.

So would you say you view your art as more focused on the process itself?

I don’t know that I’m more process oriented than other artists. I don’t talk to other artists about how they feel about this. I will tell you this: I don’t like, and that comes from some extent my inculturation in the D.C. punk scene, I don’t like bullshit. And I don’t like people trying to cultivate mystique by being aloof. As you can tell, in this conversation, I’m not a deliberately mysterious person. I will tell you anything you want to know. If I have an answer I’ll give it to you. I’m never going to be evasive and I’m never going to be deliberately shrouded in mystery.

So my wanting to make our process transparent is somewhat of a punk thing. We have nothing to hide. And it’s also, I have to say, a statement of basically intrinsic confidence and that the music can withstand that kind of scrutiny. That people can see us put it together, and that it won’t lose it’s magic, is what I believe. I believe in the intrinsic magic of the song and I don’t think that they need to be shrouded in any kind of mystery in order for that magic to exist.

So that’s the nature of the transparency. It’s kind of a confrontational thing. It comes from a punk energy. My band no longer sounds like we have anything to do with punk music. Obviously now our music almost sounds like soundtrack music these days but I feel like D.C. Punk inculturation is just ingrained in me at this point.

I definitely still hear that sort of DIY punk ethos coming out in the music.

That’s great. A lot of people started making Bjork comparisons and all that kind of stuff. And I like Bjork, and that’s no dis to Bjork I like Bjork a lot, but I feel like culturally we’re coming from a different place than that.

I hear talk of a new album. Are you working on that already?

Yeah, I want to make something that is the opposite of this record, in some ways. You know, this record is stylistically all over the place. There’s a Japanese sounding song, there’s a kind of funky Mingus sounding song, there’s all these different style the record tries on, in a very Sgt. Pepper’s kind of way. Or White Album… kind of a sprawling, each song is different, kind of colorful mural.

And that’s cool, I’m glad people like it, but I have never made a record that has a feeling all the way through—that is consistent. And that’s something I would like to do now. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to pull it off. I may totally fail. Or you may talk to me again in 6 months and I may have totally abandoned this mission. But I want to make a record that has a vibe all the way through, that you can rely on. Similar to the way Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue or Beck’s Sea Change, or a Swans or a Ramones record where you look at the cover and you know what you’re getting into and it gives you that drug consistently.

You look at the cover of a Ramones record, or A Tribe Called Quest record, or band’s that have a consistent mission and a consistent sound that goes all the way through and that’s what they’re celebrated for. That’s what people love about them. I would like to make something like that. We’ll see if I pull it off.

I know on Beauty Pill Describes Things As They Are, you had a couple special guest contributors, namely Colin Stetson and Zeena Parkins. Are you planning on doing that for the next one?

In general, and this is a record producer cliché, but I just try to give the song what it wants. I’m sorry that that’s such a damn cliché but it’s really true. If the song seems to be calling out for a certain texture, we will seek out that texture. In the case of Colin and Zeena, they played the instruments that the songs seemed to be wanting, and their contributions were really extraordinary and went beyond what were were initially trying to do.

So I’m open to having depth. I’m pretty excited about the band. They are really extraordinary, and versatile and gifted musicians and arrangers. People often react to Beauty Pill as if it’s a solo project

on my part, and I understand why because I’m the person that tends to speak for the band. And obviously I write the songs and I’m the producer. I understand why people think that I am Beauty Pill but anyone that comes to see the show would see that I’m the least interesting part of the band. They’re really a living thing, this band. So that’s something I want to continue to amplify.

I think that’s why the record sounds good, even though we learned all the songs on the days we recorded them. I mean technically, that should sound like shit. A lot of bands in the situation of like, “Hey, learn and practice and record the song all in one day,” you might get a mess.