A Plastic Picnic in Paradise
shot by David Feigelson.
This Gov Ball was a blur. From Jax bringing out Brendan B. Brown of Wheatus to sing “Teenage Dirtbag” to Playboi Carti ascending on a fiery stage filled with smoke and guitars, it’s hard to believe it all happened in just a weekend. That said, I left with many fond memories, one of them from the very beginning. Plastic Picnic kicked off the festival on Friday with a warm, dreamy performance, elevating my excitement as we near the release of their debut album on July 29th. The Brooklyn-based trio blew up following their self-titled EP in 2017, a serene collection of reverb soaked indie rock. Since then, they have released a number of singles and have been hard at work on their album. I got the chance to speak with Plastic Picnic after their set and asked them about the upcoming release and their direction as a band. They are truly kind guys and had some very thoughtful answers. Please check out our conversation below.
David Feigelson: First, congratulations on your album coming out – pretty soon at this point. How do you guys feel about that? It seems like it's been a long time coming.
Emile Panerio: I feel like we had the record done over a year ago, and had the songs done far before that, so we've been waiting over a year and a half now.
Lincoln Lute: But a lot of the songs were written during the pandemic and some of 'em were written long before it. So it was a process of writing a lot of these songs in 2020. And now, two plus years later, you're releasing them. Takes a while.
DF: How do you decide what old ones you keep? What's that process like?
EP: Long, long trials of democracy. We’ll play things and get bored with things and forget about things. Throughout that process, some stuff doesn't fall through. That's the main stuff. Every now and then, somebody will rediscover something old and be like, wait a minute. And with distance, hearing it again, we're all really excited. So I think it's just a natural time thing.
DF: Do you guys usually agree, or do you ever have disagreements?
EP: Both. I think we're all pretty mutually supportive. If one person's really fighting for some song, we give it a second or third chance, out of mutual respect for each other's ideas. If there's an idea that's not good enough, though, most of the time I feel like we're self-aware enough to say alright, nobody really likes this. I'm not willing to die on that hill, so we can let that one go.
DF: What was it like working in COVID as a band? I know you guys didn't put out that much after 2019, I assume that was intentional because of the pandemic? How is working in quarantine? Were you doing things remotely?
Gordon Taylor: It was all mostly remote. We were split up in various ways for a lot of the quarantine. And I think with so much time, everybody started working on stuff on their own. So we had a set of demos we were sharing with each other, and once we hit a certain point, we started working on them together in person. Then, the demos got a second life. Finally, when we recorded them, they took on a third life. These songs have been through a few iterations, but they all started with each of us being isolated.
DF: I was noticing while listening to the album, especially comparing it to your older EPs, that it feels like there's a little bit less of an emphasis on reverb and heavy atmosphere and more on the songwriting. Was that an intentional shift?
LL: Good ear. Yeah, that shift was totally intentional. We weren't in love with the fact that we were pigeonholed in some ways into a sound people labeled us with. We want to span a lot of different sounds—be able to be vulnerable over here with a folk song and then rock out over there. Part of it was boiling things down to the most important part. When we were live, we would add all this stuff on top, but when we were pulled back into our homes and writing individually, we focused more on the songwriting. When that happened, we didn't need as many layers that, okay, I'm primarily guilty of adding. Essentially, we were able to be a bit more stripped back when we wanted to because it wasn't written live.
EP: Yeah, I feel like we were able to take a lot of our musicianship ego out of the picture. It was easy to happen when we were together and we’d all get really excited, like, oh, I wanna pull this or that trick. In the past, when we've written songs, we’d write like a skeleton, and take the skeleton to the live studio for proper recording. The skeleton was a really small sliver, and then we’d spend so much time in an ethereal live space. This time, we spent so much more time on the skeleton, and by the time we got to the live space, the songs were more established. That just resulted in more direct, vulnerable, simplistic writing, which I think ended up being a benefit.
DF: That makes sense. You mentioned vulnerable writing, and there is a lot of personal material on the album. How does it feel performing that or just knowing that it's gonna be heard by a large audience?
EP: It's always cathartic, but I think as an artist you can take advantage of the privilege you have to write about past experiences or relationships. This time I tried to have a more open dialogue about those things with the people that the songs are about, making sure that I’m not being selfish when expressing things artistically. So, to answer your question, I feel a little bit better this time around because I set myself up to not feel as conflicted about the things I'm writing about.
DF: So by taking advantage, you mean presenting a story from one side that you think the other party might not really think is fair?
EP: Yeah, sometimes it's not fair for someone to hear that side of the story for the first time on the radio, you know?
LL: We have also been inspired by a lot of awesome artists. Phoebe Bridgers comes to mind, because she will talk about something really dark, like depression and suicide, and go directly at it. She’s not gonna pull punches. It's shocking but empowering, and we should be talking about mental health and all these things going on.
DF: You mentioned Phoebe Bridgers, what are some other musical or lyrical inspirations that you guys pull from? And is it like a direct, oh, I hear this and maybe we can do this in this way, or more subliminal and it bleeds into the music because of what you're listening to?
EP: I feel like it's pretty subliminal, but I definitely get stuck in tropes of a single band sometimes. On the more lyrical side, definitely Phoebe and older Northwest indie, like Death Cab, Modest Mouse, and Built to Spill. I also love newer pop stuff, artists that write direct, confrontational lyrics, like some of the Dirty Hit bands, Japanese Breakfast, or Mitski. I like to split the difference between that and the more metaphorical subtleties of some of the early aughts Northwest indie stuff.
DF: I also really liked Overcoats’ feature on your album. Those vocals added a lot to that song [“Roslyn”]. How did that come about and would you like to work with other artists as you continue to grow?
EP: Yeah, I think we're way more open to collaboration moving forward. That was like a seal-breaker for us. We’re mutual friends through the little Brooklyn music scene, and I reached out to them on a whim. I was surprised to hear that they were down. It was really exciting. But that particular song was vulnerable for me, and having them collaborate on it almost brought it out of my own world. It made the song a lot easier to finish, to be honest, because it made the song a little bit bigger than it was.
DF: You mentioned the algorithms, how does this new world of streaming and playlists affect how you create, if at all? I feel like that is such a dominating force on music right now.
GT: I don't feel like it affects how we create, but it affects our discussions about what singles to release. Like, I don't think it factors at all into the songwriting—that's a separate thing. But once you step back and come up with a plan for releasing something, it might start to play a role. Like what's a logical order to release songs in that would make sense with the landscape now.
LL: I think it's also a struggle to not let it influence the songwriting. Because you see there's a playlist, you hear what those songs are sounding like, and they’re from artists that we were on another playlist with. It's easy to think, oh, let's just write a song like that. It's like, no, no, no, no, don't do that. Just write our own music, you know, be true to ourselves, and hopefully it does well. But yeah, it's more evident than ever.
DF: In the next couple years, what do you hope to do? What does the future look like for Plastic Picnic?
EP: We want to keep on making records. We're also really excited to tour. We have some plans that are in the works, and after not being able to tour for two years, we want to get out and play. I think we grew a lot writing this album, and now we're in promotion and playing mode, but in the back of our minds, we're all also really excited to start writing again.
I left this conversation quite content. Plastic Picnic answered all of my questions thoroughly, demonstrating that they put a lot of thought into what they create. This album has been in the making for a number of years, and I am very excited for it to come out. Stream their new album, As Long As You Need, out on July 29th, and show Plastic Picnic some love.
edited by Sha Frasier, Editor-in-Chief.
