Storytelling and speaking out: an interview with Dylan Gamez Citron of bedbug.
Dylan Gamez Citron chats with Firebird about hosting living room shows, history books, and their newest album, “pack your bags the sun is growing.”
photo by Dustin J Watson.
bedbug’s static-y, lo-fi bedroom pop initially came onto the Boston music scene as a solo project created by Dylan Gamez Citron. Now, a few albums later, bedbug has transformed into a full indie rock band, still with the same thoughtful lyrics, soft vocals, and pastel album covers.
The new album, “pack your bags the sun is growing” was written during Citron’s move from Boston to Los Angeles. The lyrics feel like the same bedbug from previous albums, but with a more expansive sound, showing the ways that the band has grown and changed.
EA: I read that you used to host living room shows in Boston. What was that like?
DC: When I moved to Boston, I hadn't really gone to a lot of shows yet. I was from a suburb in New York, and there were college shows, but I didn't know about them in high school and there was no real way for me to get to them. When I went to Boston, I was listening to a lot of music on Bandcamp and really digging online to find music. I fell in love with going to shows.
Boston kind of has a reputation of, like, if New York is indie pop and Philly is a bunch of emo and shit, then Boston's kind of just whatever other weird, anxious indie rock that could exist. It’s always been a weird hodgepodge. There are so many students in Boston and the music is just so odd. There was a lot of cool stuff and none of it was exactly what I was really into. When I was in high school, I listened to a lot of bands, like the Radio Dept., some of the early Hop Along and Waxahatchee albums that were kind of acoustic, and the Orchid Tapes scene started right as I was leaving for college. All that quieter stuff that I really wanted didn’t really exist in Boston.
I had a big living room, and I decided to start having shows in it. I haven't really booked shows or played that much in the last couple of years, but I think that, when I was in college, I had something like seventy or eighty shows in one year. In that living room, it was pretty much just me, and my roommates would put up with it. It’s really hard to get booked if you're a band without a lot of clout, so I would set up these bills of four or five bands, all acoustic, and pretty much anybody would get a show. That was my rule, and that’s why we had to do so many of them. Very few people went to them, so my rule for outreach was that they had to bring their friends to fill up the house. If we get four bands and each of them brings three or four people, then that would be a good show. Obviously, sometimes it happened and sometimes it didn't. Sometimes we played for me and my roommates, and that was pretty much it.
That was my idea because it was really hard for me to start getting booked. Eventually, the ball started rolling, and I started playing once or twice a month in Boston for a really long time. Now, it's kind of self-sustaining, but when I was starting out, it was really, really hard, so I wanted to have a place for people to play music that didn’t feel like a cheap open mic or something like that.
photo by bedbug management team.
EA: You’ve played with bands like Japanese Breakfast, Grouper, and Lomelda. What are some of the most memorable shows that you’ve played?
DC: Those were all pretty cool. I think I was lucky to be one of the few artists in that indie scene in Boston at the time. There were a lot of bands in other scenes, but I was a little bit of a natural fit, and I was around, so it was really easy. The Grouper and Japanese Breakfast show was a college show, so I was lucky to go to that college to be the person that they picked to play it. For Lomelda and a lot of the other bands, like Snail Mail, those were just bands that, at the time, didn't have huge followings. I don’t even remember half the bands I’ve played with, and some of them are really big now.
Some of the most unexpected shows have always been house shows where I didn’t know the vibe and the people. It was almost like a party, with a bunch of people having a ton of fun in a really packed house. There’s no show better. Doesn’t matter who’s there, doesn’t matter who’s playing. If the crowd is enthusiastic and, honestly, mostly drunk, then you’ll have a blast.
I don’t really play a lot of shows, nor do I really enjoy playing shows, but those nights were always really fun.
EA: Do you think you’re going to play any shows for the new album or is that not really appealing?
DC: I’m trying to set up a release show right now. We’ll see. I know that some of my bandmates want to do a tour. Every iteration of the band, here in LA and in Boston, has always wanted to do a tour. And that’s cool, but it always falls on my shoulders, and I really don’t feel like I have it in me sometimes because it feels like a lot of work and stress for something that I’m like, “Eh… I don’t know.”
I think if I was asked to play a tour with another band that had figured out logistics, I would probably do it. That’s happened once or twice before, but the schedules just didn't align. Now that I have summers off because I work in the public education system, hopefully we’ll see what happens.
EA: You’ve gone from being a solo project to a full indie rock band. How has that changed the recording process for you?
DC: I started it when I was in high school, and I was in my room listening to a lot of bedroom bands and lo-fi bands, like The Radio Dept., Teen Suicide, and Julia Brown. I really loved that style of music, so I went out and bought a cassette recorder and whatever cheap synthesizers and pianos I could find on Craigslist at the time. I also had my acoustic guitar. I recorded everything with that setup.
I liked it because it was really self-sustaining, and the process of making that type of music is fun because it almost feels like a game, just putting it all together. I could just spend hours doing it, just mixing and matching different sounds and layers. It was always really fun for me, which was the drive of making the music.
I’d been in Boston for six years, and I was still getting booked as an opener. I was doing really well on social media and things like that, and I realized, “You know what? I think people just like going to louder shows.” The second I had a band, I was suddenly getting billed as the headliner on the shows. That’s all it took, really. I did like the sound, and I’m a big fan of early 90s indie rock, so I really wanted to record some stuff that sounded like early Modest Mouse or Built to Spill or Pavement.
I go into every project thinking, “What do I want it to sound like?” before I even start, because it helps with the vision of writing the songs. I can’t just write a single. I have to think about a bigger project. In this case, I really wanted to write something that sounded like some of that 90s indie rock stuff that I really liked.
photo by bedbug management team.
EA: You also re-recorded “songs about ghosts” with a full band. What was it like revisiting the song with such a different sound?
DC: I was really happy with the way that the full band version of songs about ghosts came out. I think that those songs were all blueprints for what this record was. It was me testing the waters and seeing if I could get away with having a full band and such a huge style change while keeping the same name. It seems like it was all in my head because no one seems to notice, except for the press materials. Most people are just like, “It’s just more bedbug,” and I’m like, “Okay! Sounds good.”
I’m hoping it’s just that I write songs in a unique enough way. That’s not a brag; it’s just that I think I can’t help it, but it all sounds like the same project because of the way the songs are written. When I recorded songs about ghosts for the second time, I really loved the way the mix came out. It really sounded kind of gritty and lo-fi, and I also got to experiment, playing some little guitar licks and riffs. I’m not a huge guitar head, and I sometimes feel like I’m not very good at it, so it was fun to pretend like I was soloing a little bit.
EA: How do you usually approach writing? You recently tweeted about tiktok’s influence on confessional songwriting.
DC: When I started writing, I really put a lot of thought into the way the lyrics were written, and writing lyrics was one of my favorite parts of writing music. And I do think that I have some tropes that I tread a lot, and it can be hard to break out of that when you’ve written five or six albums worth of songs. Eventually, you’re going to recycle some ground.
One of the things that I really like thinking about is the way that you can intermix reality and abstract lyrics and talk about things like nature and bigger concepts about sadness or loneliness, or things like that with things that suddenly get grounded. And I think that that sudden grounding, that one line that ties it all back in, hits so much harder if you understand the way to build up to it with surrealness or abstraction.
EA: The title of the album is pack your bags the sun is growing, a lyric pulled from seasons on the new coast. I was wondering if you could tell me more about what that means to you and why you chose it to be the title?
DC: When I’m writing music, it’s not always super autobiographical. I think a lot of people wish it was. People have told me that they have really connected with my music, which is something that I feel very grateful for. And a lot of those people feel a very deep personal connection, not just with the music but also with me, because of it. I think that sometimes I do wear my heart on my sleeve with my music, but a lot of the time, it is a form of storytelling from the first person that isn’t necessarily autobiographical. I hide some of my own experience within it, and so I have a bit of a veil of accountability that I can say, “Oh, that's not about me” or “Oh, that is about me.”
I think it's a little bit up for interpretation sometimes. Sometimes I don't even know fully when I'm writing it. I think that this is a good example of that. There are a lot of themes of leaving and moving in the album because I was moving from Boston to LA while I was writing it. That’s the big overall theme of the record. But I think that the “sun is growing” is kind of moving back into that abstract, where I just thought, conceptually, of the idea of something really almost apocalyptic happening. And having such a grounded repercussion of like “I guess we have to move,” is something that I really liked the interplay of and so there was a lot of that in the record. I think that the third song on the record is a good example of that, too, where it’s talking about tornadoes and stuff hitting everything, and then it ends up almost being more of a road trip song. Not to peek behind the curtain, but I like telling that kind of weird, surreal story in a way that still feels relatable, even though it's a little bit fantastical.
EA: I asked Danny from Frog about this when I interviewed him, and I also wanted to ask you this. You mentioned which bands have influenced your approach to this album. Have there been any non-music influences or any other media that you’ve been thinking about?
DC: I want to answer first with a music influence, even though that’s not the question, because I just think that Danny’s a fucking genius at exactly what I was just describing. Because Frog has so many beautiful moments where they tell some really twisted types of stories, some confusing types of stories, of murder and everything, and then they ground it so beautifully. And I think that there’s almost. I almost don’t know any band that is able to ground it. The last song. It’s either on untitled or kind of blah, because it depends on how it is credited, but the last song on kind of blah ends with a quote, like a conversation of a phone call home to a mother. And it’s after saying all this really bizarre stuff about like website titles and a bunch of weird imagery, and then because it’s all so confusing and jumbled, it brings it all so close together in that last line. It’s really something. So Danny is truly an expert at exactly what I’m describing.
But as far as non-music influences go, I think, early on, I was using a lot of sentimental moments from TV shows that I was watching as inspiration. Or I would get really inspired by things that I was reading. I was really into a lot of socialist and leftist history. A lot of those stories, when they’re told from a personal perspective, can feel really powerful because, around the world, there’s just been so much. There’s a book called Portraits of Chinese Women in Revolution that was written in the 40s about various women across the class spectrum in China. And I found that those stories really hit hard. Especially the ones talking about some of the people on the other side of the revolution, like the modern women, and the way that there was a lot of contradiction between them pushing back against a revolution that was really pushing for women's rights. But the way that it actually impacted them personally, and I just thought that a lot of those stories were really sad and emotional, so I would get a lot of my stories about people from that kind of media and would intermix stories about myself and stories about them.
This one, I don’t know. I wasn’t really engaging with as much. I know the one before this; I was watching The Wonder Years, and that had a huge impact on it. But honestly, I think that it was, if anything, mostly just influenced by music, even more than my previous albums, which were more influenced by TV and history.
photo by bedbug management team.
EA: You’re really open about your politics, so I was wondering how this relates to your identity as an artist or what role or responsibility you think artists have in the current political climate.
DC: I don’t know if there’s some sort of responsibility in general, but it definitely feels like I have a responsibility because of what I know. It feels like something that I have to do. I joined the PSL and started organizing politically five, maybe six, years ago. I joined the music scene in 2015/2016. That was also when I started reading a lot.
I’m Chicano, so I was reading a lot of Mexican American history, and then Latin American history, and then socialist history in Latin America. It was like a domino effect from my own interest in learning more about the history of Mexico and the history of Chicanos in the United States. It turned into me learning a lot about world history and socialist history, which, unfortunately, wasn't really super popular at the time, especially in the music scene. A lot of people were really focused on individual identity and how to prop that up. There were a lot of shows for POC, women, and nonbinary people, but it felt really fleeting, and it also felt almost backpat-y because it’s like, yeah, sure, we’re raising up these voices. But I don’t necessarily know what kind of impact that has, and I think it felt really weird from my perspective of people just kind of being like “throw Dylan on the show.” It felt odd, and it felt like sometimes the people that were claiming to be representatives of their culture. I was like, “You’re just one person, though; you’re not a representative of your culture; you’re just one person, and you’re just trying to play an indie rock show; you don’t need to do all that.”
There was a time in 2017 that I had just got canceled two times for posting about Palestine, and people were saying that I was antisemitic. I couldn’t play in New Jersey forever because the big venue in New Jersey had canceled me for speaking up about Palestine in 2016 or 2017. There were a couple of bands that I had booked and that had crashed on my couch and things like that that completely cut ties with me. I don’t necessarily think that I was being super inflammatory, and honestly, it’s funny because I’m also Jewish. But I’ve definitely learned to catch my tongue a bit more and to be careful.
It’s funny to see the way things change now, where it’s almost like, if you don’t speak up about Palestine, it’s a problem. But yeah, I joined the PSL to be able to have an outlet for that. That felt healthier. I started organizing, and I started bringing pamphlets, flyers, and information to my shows and started inviting people at my shows to rallies and readings and mutual aid things, and really anything that could feel like building a community in that way. I think that they have a lot of back and forth. I think it helps me to be a better organizer to be really involved in the music scene, and I think it helps me in the music scene to be a better organizer too. I think both of them go back and forth, but I definitely have learned how to do it in a smarter way.
EA: What have you been listening to lately?
DC: The new Puppy Problems record is awesome. That’s my friend Sammy’s album. Sammy and I have collaborated before, so you can find them pretty easily on my own Spotify page.
Another record that I’ve been listening to a ton lately is the original mixes of the ghost orchard record that came out two years ago. That one is really, really good. It’s called rainbow music.
I’ve been listening to a lot of the band Hovvdy. They’re really cool.
I also picked up listening to a lot of Motown and Soul again recently. I used to listen to that a lot in college. I’ve been listening to a lot of Etta Jones and Al Green.
edited by Alondra Romero.
photos by Dustin J Watson and bedbug management team.