Gentrification, Vitality and Bliss
I interviewed Karl Briedrick of Speck Mountain, one of my new favorite bands, for The Rumpus. It’s always awesome when you talk to a musician and you really connect and get an awesome conversation. The hardest part about this interview was whittling it down from the approximately eight pages it started as. Read all about Speck Mountain and details on their track “Watch the Storm,” plus gentrification talk on Brooklyn and more here. A favorite takeaway:
“We couldn’t quite get a sound that was vital and new enough that we were interested in moving forward with, and then one day, I got stoned and listed to Marquee Moon by Television, which isn’t an album I’d listened to since high school, and also the Soft Boys’ Underwater Moonlight, which I hadn’t really listened to since freshman year of college. That’s when something in me opened up. It was feeling the freedom of guitar and guitar leads from Television. And the Soft Boys have these really nasty lyrics that are kind of mean, like songs called “I Wanna Destroy You,” or a whole song about being jealous, and it opened me up.
They’re these phenomenal pop songs that make me feel complete bliss, and it made me realize you could be a little nasty, that not all lyrics need to be blissed out in order for the music to be blissed out. I needed that, because pretty soon after that, a relationship I was in for seven years ended, and I didn’t really know what to do with myself. It was pretty intense, and I realized the only way to get through it all was to channel it through music and to just work on that and try not to think about what was going on. That’s when things really started to open up, because I had so much to write about.”
