Mass indie rockers Spirit Ghost have been at this for a bit. Originally started as a bedroom-oriented songwriting exercise in 2012 by band principal Alex Whitelaw, the group has morphed a few times (across a few different area codes) into their current phase as of Boston’s must-see live acts. Psych rock, country, krautrock, surf: each and every Spirit Ghost could offer you a different flavor, but its Whitelaw’s playful-yet-exacting songwriting that binds it all. Now backed by members of virtually every other sick band in town, their third LP Ordinary People (out today via Austin label Happen Twice) is their strongest, most musically and thematically cohesive collection to date. We hopped on the phone with Whitelaw recently to chat about band history, basement recording, and the slow-but-steady unthawing of Boston’s icy cold heart. Hit play on the stream and read on for more below.
Allston Pudding: So this band has gone through a few different phases and locales. Can you give us a shortened history of what’s lead to here?
Spirit Ghost: So it started out as just me writing a bunch of songs in my room as an outlet so I didn’t have to wait for other people to teach drum or bass parts or whatever else, I could just do everything myself. I ended up really liking that process, but I still wanted to play live shows, so I met people in college out in Western Mass and eventually started playing house shows with them.
Then I moved to Austin, Texas and had a run there for like a year and a half, two years where we were actually able to play before COVID. Then COVID kind of shut us down so I moved back up here like three years ago, which kind of started the current iteration of the band, including Joey and Corey. I’m from Massachusetts originally though, right outside of Providence, but on the Mass side.
AP: So what is it about this particular lineup that you find inspiring?
SG: Everybody in the band now is really good at supporting the vision. I still do a lot of the main writing or the bulk of the songwriting, and then everybody is just really good at just like embellishing their parts, or coming along and making sure the live show is very fun and engaging and entertaining. Also they’re all just kind of a good time. They’re just really good, solid people who get how to just support a project and kind of bring it to life in a way that I could not do alone. So it’s very nice that I have them.
AP: Joey and Corey especially being in like a million bands makes sense, they seems like people you can lean on.
SG: Yeah, but they never let scheduling get in the way, like I’ve had people who are in a million bands, but then they’re like, I can’t do that one because I got another show that night. Whereas Corey’s will be like “I’ll play a million shows every day.” Which is huge and nice for me because I don’t have to miss opportunities.
AP: A Spirit Ghost set kind of falls into a few sort of distinctly different modes, is that something you find yourselves fitting around a bill or is it just a matter of how you’re all feeling on any given night?
SG: To be honest, it’s usually my call as to whether or not I feel like shouting and giving a bunch of energy or I feel like kind of singing or kind of doing a more laid back thing. I think it’s also just a function of us having a bunch of different influences. Sometimes I want to do like old country stuff and I don’t want to do the psych stuff anymore, or sometimes like right now I’m in like a big mood where I kind of want the live show to be a “live show.” So we’re doing like a lot of improvisation and a lot of embellishing on songs to kind of expand them out and make it more of like an event for people rather than just like a local band gets on stage, plays a song, stops, talks, tunes, plays a song, stops, talks, tunes etc. Like it’s been nice to kind of craft what you want a show experience to be for people in the audience.
AP: When did you start putting together the songs for this album and how much have they changed in the time since?
SG: The first single I wrote like in 2022. So that was like my first thing I think I wrote. I also kinda took two years off because of the pandemic and then some personal stuff kind of just really took it out of me, so I didn’t really care about music for a little bit. So all of these are like the songs about processing pandemic stuff and processing personal changes and things that have been going on in like my life. It feels good to be playing them with the band now, but they haven’t changed too too much.
I don’t know, I typically write songs over the span of a year or so and then I feel like whatever I have laying around, it’s time to shape that into something. It’s nice that this most of this batch happened to fall into a similar theme.
AP: Are you someone who puts things aside to revisit or makes older things fit into what you’re tinkering with, or are you more of a “I’m writing for a specific thing” type of songwriter?
SG: I can’t entirely control it. I have a practice in place where like I will definitely make an effort to grab my guitar and kind of strum it and then hum something and then typically if I like that thing and I want to have time to demo it out, I’ll demo it out, but that comes and goes in spurts. I’m trying to be better about doing it more often, but then I feel like I just end up getting frustrated because I feel like I’m forcing myself to do it and then it becomes not fun. I think you’ve got to like hold it loosely, whatever the fucking process is for writing.
But no, usually I feel like if I write something and I don’t like it, I’m pretty bad about coming back and tweaking it until I like it. Usually if I’m not excited about an idea I don’t want to finish it.
AP: Bedroom pop was sort of the jumping off point, but I feel like you’ve managed to slide a lot of different influences into this project over time. Is there sort of a conscious effort to progress, you know, on what the idea of a spirit ghost song is or could be?
SG: I’ve never really entirely been worried about that at all and I think I would get very bored if I only played a very particular type of music. Sometimes I want to write something that’s a little more punk-influenced, or country, or psych, or whatever else it might because it just feels fun to lean into the tropes of that style of music. An exercise that’s fun for me is asking myself how well can I imitate a songwriter that I love, and then inevitably you fall short of imitating that songwriter, and then you kind of just make something else entirely in that failure that’s maybe more interesting.
AP: That makes sense, Spirit Ghost is definitely not a “genre band.”
SG: For sure, which is sometimes an interesting challenge because it’s always funny to try to find people to play with. Like “could we play a show together that’s not totally disjointed?” I think it comes back to that thing of like tailoring sets. The set we would play with, say Balaclava is not necessarily a set we would play with like another band that’s like maybe a little more classic rock or garage it. We always have that heavier set in our back pocket for shows depending on the vibe of the night for that reason.
AP: There’s more keyboards and other richer instrumentation here on the new album than on your prior more solo-oriented efforts. Is that simply just a function of the types of songs you wrote for this, or is it more of a conscious desire to expand your sound palette?
SG: I think it was a conscious thing. I taught myself how to play keys over the course of these last four years kind of out of necessity. I was recording with my other band when I realized how crucial keyboards were in tying things together and making the music seem a little more connected. Also, I had been writing guitar music for a while and I was kind of getting bored of thinking of everything in terms of guitar lines, because there’s always like shortcomings to a guitar line. Things might sound better with like a string synth or something more robust. So I bought a string synth and became obsessed with it for a year and a half and I feel like I was writing everything on it for a while.
AP: Assuming you recorded this at the home studio from the video sessions and all that, how do you get such a rich sound from a basement setup like that?
SG: That’s all Joey. He has been doing it for a long time and is very dedicated to making stuff sound good and he has all of his tricks. If you ask him, he would probably say it doesn’t sound as good as he would like it, but I think most people who have heard it or who have heard things that he’s done in that basement will be like “it’s fucked up that it sounds that good” with his fucking mad scientist way of setting stuff up.
AP: Do you feel like you’re playing on the record is sort of influenced by that space?
SG: Yeah for sure. Again, just to like gush about Joey, it’s been very nice for the first time in kind of making music as a solo person, having a collaborator like Joey who also plays in the band. I can kind of hand things off to him and let him be creative on certain things, so it’s a luxury that he is in the band and he’s as good as he is at what he does because it just allows me to kind of be more nit-picky than I’ve ever when it comes to recording. Like “I just don’t like like my inflection on this one take of this one specific part, can we just do it like 20 more times?” much to maybe his dismay at times, but he will humor me.
AP: Would Spirit Ghost ever be a studio kind of band, or have you grown comfortable with how you’ve done this record and past ones?
SG: I don’t know. It’s one of those things of I’m always kind of weary of sounding too polished. So I don’t really see the point in a studio. Plus you hear stories of people getting advances and then spending like $10,000 to record a record and being in debt to the label for the rest of their lives. At the end of the day, I’d rather give money to Joey so he can buy more gear so we can do things on our own terms. Right.
At this point, Spirit Ghost feels very insular in a good way, we kind of have our own thing going on with our operation in that we feed off of each other and it feels very good. So we don’t really want to muddy that up with like other people.
AP: Happen Twice has kind of become a pipeline between Boston and Austin, then yourself also being sort of one in a way as well. How did they get involved in the release of this record?
SG: That was through Jon Wallis from Jonny Tex. I think he had been talking to Chandler (who runs the label) about us. Chandler also knew about us from when we were in Austin so there was some crossover. Joey and I had already decided we were going to record and release it ourselves, and I had honestly been on the fence just because I was in a really good state of being like “I don’t fucking care if anybody wants to put this out or cares about it. I just want to make and release this music.” Very much about getting back to the joy of making music, but then when Jon kind of talked to me about Happen Twice and encouraged me to reach out, and then Chandler was so responsive and easy to work with that it sort of changed my mind on the whole thing.
It was just a totally different experience compared to the last one where we tried to do the label thing, and nobody really gave a shit about it and I felt like I couldn’t get anybody to care which was the thing that just like burnt me out of music stuff for so long. So in that sense, working with Happen Twice was just like a breath of fresh air. While I love doing everything myself and have always operated that way, it’s been nice to have some people supporting for once.
AP: How does living in Boston, or least identifying as a Boston band, influence this project?
SG: I’m not entirely sure. I’m still kind of figuring that out just because I have my own misgivings about Boston and the Boston music scene in particular and how I kind of don’t think things should operate the way they do. Especially having gone to Texas and being like “cool we do actually operate in Boston in like a psychotic way.” That said, it’s gotten monumentally better, it feels like we’re getting back to something sustainable. But when I left, or really one of the reasons why I left is I just didn’t like feeling like playing one O’Brien’s show a month was going to cut it for me personally.
I think it’s one of those things where you have to build it and people will come. I think if more people would just play more shows and book at more venues and put on more shows and people would have more things going on, more people would be here who want to go to more things. But I think everybody’s kind of scared. There’s a there’s like a scarcity mindset in Boston that I think really hinders us. But again, that seems to be getting better. Winkler is awesome, all these newer bands that are here now are awesome. Black Beach has been here forever and they’re awesome. Deep Cuts is a great new venue. O’Brien’s has been holding it down for local bands for a long time, Brighton Music Hall even, I know you guys just did your thing there.
It feels like all this infrastructure is popping up again that did not exist before I left. And I think that’s why I left, because it felt the powers that be didn’t really have their fucking ears to the ground, and it seemed like all the same bands would get into the same things over and over and over again. ah So it’s like nice to have some a youthful vibrance in Boston right now that I think is really cool.
AP: Yeah, there’s definitely an upswing occurring right now that feels exciting.
SG: I’m walking around right now and it’s fucking freezing, so I understand that it’s never gonna be this cultural hub based largely on pure anger of the cold. At the same time, I went to Chicago and I feel like that was eye opening for being like “oh you can be like a cold, miserable city and still have like a thriving music community.” That said, Boston seems like it’s fixing itself, it seems like things have drastically improved, people are actually coming back and staying here.
AP: What’s next for Spirit Ghost?
SG: I’m not sure right right now. We’re just like going at a steady clip, we’re excited to host the release party at Warehouse XI, and then we’ve got a big tour in June where we’ll be going up to Canada, popping over to Chicago and hitting a couple of other places along the way. Hopefully from there we just keep building out and going on more tours. This next year is gonna be very busy for us, a lot of playing out. Hopefully I can write another album this year and get on a steadier release schedule than I have in the past, that would be nice.
Ordinary People is out now via Happen Twice, you can get a copy here. Spirit Ghost’s record release show is at Warehouse XI in Somerville on Friday April 4th, tickets are still available.