An interview with Henry Pearl of LAUNDRY DAY.
Earlier this year, LAUNDRY DAY took the stage in UChicago’s very own Ida Noyes. We were lucky enough to chat with group member Henry Pearl, gaining insight into his creative process, life on tour, and what the future looks like.
photo by @itsmeeejennyy on Instagram.
Born and raised in New York City, the band LAUNDRY DAY has been pumping out rock-pop classics since they were freshmen at Beacon High School in 2016. They have a steadily growing fanbase that has no plans of slowing down anytime soon. Sawyer Nunes (vocalist), Jude Ciulla-Lipkin (vocalist), Etai Abramovich (drummer), Henry Weingartner (guitarist), and Henry Pearl (bassist) were all in from the get-go, doing interviews during the free periods, touring on weekends and then nationally the same month they released their first studio album, Trumpet Boy. Five full-length albums later, LAUNDRY DAY’s style has evolved, but their eclectic production and knack for storytelling have remained constant. They’ve toured across the globe with acts like The 1975, Clairo, and, most recently, Neon Trees. They’ve collaborated with artists like Kevin Abstract and Romil Hemnani of Brockhampton, recorded at Rick Rubin’s Shangri-La Studio, and performed at Lollapalooza, Austin City Limits Music Festival, Velvet Underground, Mercury Lounge, Rockwood Music Hall, and Tyler the Creator’s Camp Flog Gnaw (to name a few). Their most recent project, Younger Than I Was Before, is an homage to life in NYC. It is jam-packed with skits, rich production, and entertaining lyrical arcs. The album takes place over the course of a school day, and in concert, the group can be seen in their now iconic schoolboy attire. Most recently, LAUNDRY DAY took the stage in UChicago’s very own Ida Noyes. We were lucky enough to get to chat with group member Henry Pearl, gaining insight into his creative process, life on tour, and what the future looks like.
photo by @itsmeeejennyy on Instagram.
Alyssa Manthi: Starting off, who would you say are some of your biggest musical inspirations?
Henry Pearl: That’s a great question, Alyssa. You know, you guys are getting the Henry Pearl interview today. I definitely can't speak for my whole band, so I won't. I'm just going to speak for myself today. My biggest musical inspiration has got to be Freddie Mercury. I mean, he was different, and he leaned into it. He was amazing just by being himself, and I think that's the best thing any artist can do. I just love his songs as well, I love Queen. Queen is kind of my favorite band.
Eli Rapport: I saw somewhere that a big initiator of your exploration of music was your teacher, Mr. Lateek, I believe, at Beacon.
HP: We record, produce, and write all our own music. So, that means it all happens on our laptops, basically. Mr. Lateek at Beacon ran a class called Mic to Mix, where you went through the signal chain of music. Starting with your voice, to the microphone, and then what cables you have to plug in and then what preamps those go into and compressors and EQs. Then, I learned how to mix it on a computer and make it sound good; it was basically a production class, which is pretty rare to have at a public school. Shout out to Mr. Lateek for that. I took that class with Jude for a year, I think. And then I took it with Sawyer and Etai as well. He just sent you off to go produce as one of your classes. While other kids were learning, like, history or whatever, you could just be, you know, rocking out.
AM: So, what would you say your creative process is kind of like when it comes to making music?
HP: Some days you have something you want to say, and some days you don't have something you want to say. So, on the days I have something I want to say, it usually just comes out. There's not much process to it or control. It just happens. When I don't necessarily have something I want to say, it's a lot more about craft and effort. And trying and trying and trying more things. Then, I can mess around with the beat for a long time. But usually, when I have a song that I love, you know, it comes from passion, and it comes from experience, and it comes out of you as if it were already, you know, as if it were always there. And with the band, too, I just want to add that we collaborate super heavily. Everyone has unique things that they're really talented at, and it's so relaxing and exciting to be able to rely on my brothers in that way. Like, I know that Jude is about to write a great verse or something like that, you know. For all elements, whether it's editing, creating, producing the songs, or our like visual elements that go along with them.
ER: Have you ever tried to write lyrics or sing a bit? I know you play bass, but have you dabbled with stepping into different spheres?
HP: Yeah, I write songs for myself all the time. Jude and Sawyer are such great songwriters that whenever I take a song to the group to be like, “Hey, this should be a LAUNDRY DAY song,” it definitely has to be one that both I love and I'm willing to part with. Every time they bring a song, to have everyone else tear it apart and rebuild it, it can be really hard and vulnerable. You have to really let go. I write songs all the time on this guitar right behind me; I usually write songs on guitar. Sometimes you write a song by yourself, and you think: this is enough, I just made this for me. And sometimes, like, okay, I need to produce this, and then less often I do this with my songs, I think: I want this to be a LAUNDRY DAY song. ‘Cause in that group, I play the bass, I keep the beat. That's my position, and that's what I'm good at in the group. We've been doing this for almost seven years now, so you know, it's always great and exciting to switch it up, but also, as time passes, I feel like our roles are more locked in, so to speak.
AM: Do you think you'd ever want to explore a solo career or just release some of your own music on the side? I know that Sawyer releases some of his own music, right?
HP: Yeah, one hundred percent, I definitely do. I think what's been amazing about my band is we never thought twice about putting out music from the day we started. We were putting songs out on SoundCloud, and then we're putting an album out on Apple Music when we hardly were in the band for, like, I don't even know, six months or something. My take is that you'll get a Henry Pearl album eventually, or a project, or whatever. You're just going to have to wait a little bit. I'm busy.
ER: *laughs* As is life. This is a very specific question, but the song “Trumpet Boy” initially started as the song “Bisecting a Right Angle in Ur Bitch.” What were the main changes you guys made?
HP: Wait, where did you hear that? Where did you get that from?
ER: *laughs* In my research.
HP: That's funny. What were the main changes? Gosh, we just made it longer. I think the primary difference was the title. I remember we did the last section of that song—that was so long ago now, that was five years ago or something longer. I don't even know. A long time ago. The original demo was pretty similar to the final, I think, like when you make a song that has kind of heart to it, or soul like that song I think does, then you don't want to mess with it too much. So, honestly not a lot of changes in that one. Then there are songs like on our fourth album, We Switched Bodies, there's this song “Either Way It Goes,” and I feel like that one we put through the wringer and changed up a ton because we just wanted to make it rock.
photo by @itsmeeejennyy on Instagram.
AM: What would you say was the process of discovering your guys' sound? In a lot of your songs, it varies; not everything's the exact same. What was the process of getting to that point like?
HP: I think something that people love about bands, like popular bands, is that you know what you can expect from them. If you listen to The Strokes, for example, you know you're going to get a guitar riff. You know Julian Casablancas is going to be a little bit edgy and a little bit funny, and you can kind of picture his hair over his eyes when you listen to the music. With us, I don't think we settled at all. I don't think you can expect one thing from us. I don't know that we've found our sound. I mean, we have kind of motifs that are iconic or unique to us. The two singers thing, going back and forth between them. Or, one singer being really positive and optimistic, and the other being maybe a little darker in certain songs. Or, lyrics being really sad and the music sounding really happy. I think those are kind of our things if I had to put my finger on it. We just put out this album, Younger Than I Was Before, and I don't think it sounds much like any of our previous albums, and I doubt that our next project is going to sound like anything else before it. I'm not sure we have a sound, and maybe we should; maybe it'd be good for us to just stick to one thing. But our lives keep changing. I mean, we started when we were freshmen in high school, and now I live in an apartment in Brooklyn with my girlfriend. I'm 21 years old! *gestures* I have this giant tree behind me. Our life keeps changing, so our music is going to as well. We've been with a major label, and we're not anymore, and those sort of adjustments, like, we've switched through a couple of managers. Our career and our lives keep changing, and I don't think that music is that comfortable thing that you can always go back to and think, “Oh, at least I have this one style that I play now.” Shit keeps happening. I need to keep expressing all this different stuff that's changing in my life. And somehow, I do that through playing bass, I guess.
ER: Yeah, it's a creative process with a group, and I'd imagine it's a really cool way just sort of to evolve together. Not always trying to create a theme but feeding off of each other in a nice way.
HP: Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And I think that, and I think this goes for all of us, I'm not sure but, you know, right now we just got home from tour. I have a couple of albums that I've been listening to a ton. I've been listening to Life by The Cardigans. I've been listening to the new Troye Sivan album so, so much. When we start making our next project, all that stuff is going to fade away. When you have a new song that you made with your friends, the electricity of that—there's nothing else you want to listen to.
AM: Speaking of tour, how was it? What was it like touring with Neon Trees?
HP: This is a good question that I have a hard time answering sometimes. First of all, Neon Trees: a great group of people, I love them. Their story is super unique, and I've just seen them perform so many times—I'm completely obsessed. They're great, and playing the shows was great as well. A lot of energy; I mean, we drove across the country twice. We drove about 240 hours over 45 days, which is ten days spent in the car fully. And I love it. I'm great at finding that balance between standing up in the car and laughing. We have so much fun together in the car, singing and laughing, and we play a ton of games. But then also, tour is funny, like, you get tired! It's exhausting, and it's really hard, and you learn to protect yourself, and you learn to conserve your energy. So, it's part of an exercise in conserving your energy, which I think is a good lesson for anyone to learn. By the end, I was really tired. I'm happy to be home, but I can't wait to go out and do it again sometime. So if you're reading this: come take us on tour, I suppose.
ER: Now that you're home, are you excited about certain New York things? Like, going back to your bodega or going to any spots in New York that you'd recommend others go to?
HP: You know, the biggest difference between New York and everywhere else in the country is that everything's open. You can go to the bodega at 1 AM, or on my block, there’s a 24-hour empanada place.
ER: Oh, that sounds gas.
HP: It's great. It's like it never stops. You get to be on whatever schedule you want here. That's my favorite thing about New York.
AM: New York is a big part of what makes LAUNDRY DAY, LAUNDRY DAY. Do you think you'll always live in New York, or do you want to explore somewhere else?
HP: No, I mean, you gotta travel. You gotta travel! You can't stay in one place. Yesterday I was at a Halloween party, and everyone there was from Florida for some reason. People were like, “Where are you from?” And when I say New York, they're like, “Yeah, but originally?” and I'm like New York! I grew up here. I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I went to middle school in Harlem. I went to high school in Hell's Kitchen, and now I live in Brooklyn. And they're like, “Oh my God, that's amazing. But why haven't you left?” I need to leave at some point, but I do my little stints. I see myself in London in the future. But it's great; I mean, I have everything I need here, I love it. The only reason I say you need to leave is because everyone has to leave home at some point just to see what else is out there. But it's pretty good. I could see myself settling down here, growing old.
photo by @itsmeeejennyy on Instagram.
ER: Did you pick up a favorite snack or food while on tour?
HP: Oh my gosh, yes. Have you ever had... what are they called? Are they called Tim Tams?
AM: I've never had them, but I remember watching all those British YouTubers trying them when I was younger.
HP: This is my favorite snack from my travels. You have Tim Tams; they're like these chocolate crackers. You bite off each hand, and then you suck hot coffee through it, and you put the whole thing in your mouth. All the chocolate within it is melting from the hot coffee. It's called the Tim Tam Slam. It's great.
ER: Honestly, I think I might just go try to find them just to try that.
AM: We have to try.
HP: I can tell you what’s on our rider at every show we play. There's going to be bread and salami and Turkey and, like, deli meat. I had so much salami over the course of the tour, and I mean, I couldn't feel better about it—it's amazing. I love some salami. I'm not afraid to admit it.
AM: What was it like performing at schools? I know you performed here at UChicago, and then you went to Syracuse and Amherst. How is that different from playing actual shows?
HP: LAUNDRY DAY is for the kids, more specifically college. I feel like our crowd is our age or maybe a little bit younger than us. If we had gone to four-year universities when we graduated high school, we'd be seniors this year. All of our friends are seniors, or most of them from high school, who went off to college. I think when I play, I'm looking to connect with people in the audience. I'm not imagining I'm in a box, you know, locked away somewhere. It's really about who's there and who's looking at me. I will make eye contact with one person for the entire show if they have a good vibe and we’re translating energy between each other. I feel like that happens the most powerfully and consistently overall at a college show. We love playing schools; love it, love it, love it. I love a crowd of kids, and I love just dancing around with people who have a reason to want to get a load off, you know, and I think college kids do when they come to these shows. They’re so excited, like there's an event because it's different. I'm sure there's plenty of cool stuff to do all the time, just living in Chicago, at least. You guys don't seem to really agree.
AM: *laughs* I mean, there's a bubble - people never leave campus, even though we do live in Chicago.
HP: I was gonna speak on that as well. At some of the schools, when a band comes in, that's a really big deal, and that's really exciting for us to be that because we feel like a traveling circus. We want to bring as much energy into the school as we can. I feel like that goes back to the question of how the tour was because I think that's how I think about it. I have all this energy inside me, and this group - my group of friends - the four of them and I, we create so much energy together, being around each other, we bounce off each other so rapidly. It creates this lightning that when we come on stage, we get to zap the audience a little bit and give it away. We're like a battery that charges itself a little bit. This analogy is a little insane, but I'm gonna keep going with it. So, when we get to the colleges and all the shows, it's like our responsibility and our privilege to give energy, you know, and obviously, the crowd gives it back, and that charges us even more. It's really cool to come into colleges where maybe there isn't as much going on. You know that the whole school can come around, put their arms around each other, and dance and celebrate just their love for each other in their space and for music. It’s cool to be a part of that, always. I look forward to it.
ER: Has there been a particular fan interaction that you can think of that has just made your day or week?
HP: Kids were showing up to our shows dressed in uniform, which was awesome. This album’s aesthetic has been this sort of schoolboy look, and that's because our album takes place over the course of a school day. When fans would show up wearing the uniform, it represented kind of what's so special about the whole thing, which is that you can find a community here with LAUNDRY DAY. I just have to shout out one fan in particular named Jenny, who traveled from Germany to see us this tour. She wins the furthest distance. She also wrote us a really sweet note and brought us a bunch of European candy, which we were fortunate enough to share with the whole crew, which was awesome.
ER: That’s really nice.
Henry Pearl and Jenny; photo by @itsmeeejennyy on Instagram.
AM: Speaking of Younger Than I Was Before, I loved the fact that it took place over the course of a school day. How did you come up with the idea for the skits? Why did you choose the theme of school?
HP: The idea came from a conversation we had had when we were living in the Catskills together, which was that we needed to start a TV show about how ridiculous it was to be in high school. You meet so many interesting characters. We spent hours and hours laughing about just all the stories we remembered and imagined it turning into a TV show, and we came up with the title of every episode for this season; they just had all these jokes in it that anyone would find hysterical. I wanted to tell you guys about all the characters, but they're real people, so I don't feel comfortable doing that, but they were just hysterical, you know. I also have to give love to them for supporting us in high school or not giving a fuck, which is cool too. It kept us close to the ground. That idea eventually evolved into an album because it was just sitting. We loved the idea of doing a school thing, and we didn’t have the means, motivation, or understanding just to go and make a TV show when we were 18 years-old. We didn't know how we would do that. So, when we're making an album, we're like, fuck it, let's do school.
When it came to the skits, I had been helping my mom. [She] works in children's books, she's an editor, and something that they do is they record audiobooks, and then they put it to the visual of the pictures of the books and post it on Instagram and TikTok so kids can have access to it. I was doing the sound effects for her. So I kind of like realized, oh, this is something I can do. I can make it sound like you're in a room. So, that's kind of how it started with the skits. I would just make it sound like you were in a room, and then we'd write dialogue. We had our parents come in to be on the album like my mom is on one of the skits, Henry Weingartner's parents are on one of the skits, and Sawyer’s dad is in a skit. It's great, just getting the whole family involved. It's fun.
ER: That's amazing. Do you guys ever do entire family get-togethers or dinners?
HP: We haven’t in a minute, but we totally do. Our parents are super supportive, and they look out for us a lot. They're kind of like our board of directors because we operate under an LLC, which is boring information, but you can't do that when you're under 18. So, our parents had to be responsible until we could take it. They're super involved and super supportive, and we all get together and celebrate. It's always funny when you hear that the parents want to get together. It's a little nerve-wracking, a little exciting. It's like, okay are we doing something wrong? Are they just checking in? But it's cool. They're all great. I love all ten parents in the band.
ER: As a last question, just for fun, have you ever seen the show Hot Ones? We wanted to take a page out of Sean Evans’s book and do ‘Explain That Gram’ with you.
HP: Sure, I’ll explain that ‘gram for UChicago!
Our first tour we ever did was the Together Forever Tour, but it was just on weekends because we had school. So, that next summer, we did the All My Friends tour. When we went to Atlanta, I noticed there was a car dealership across the street. I was just in the mood of being stuck in the van like, you know, “Fuck y'all driving these nice cars, and I'm in this crappy van!” So, I just flashed them. No one told me to do it. It was completely my idea. I think the whole point of my Instagram, and I'm a little inconsistent about this, is just to post shit that makes you go, “What? What's going on there?” Just a little weird because I think that's kind of who I am. If you don't pay too close attention, I seem very normal, and then I can be a little strange. I'll post whatever on Instagram just to make people raise an eyebrow. I love that kind of content. Like, I posted a picture of my boogers once.
AM: With all the blood in it?
ER: Yeah, you know the one.
HP: It's fine, I don't know; I'm not doing photo shoots every day. I'm not going to be an Instagram baddie, so I guess this is a little more my niche.
ER: Fair enough.
HP: But yeah, that was a great day and a great show. I love playing in Atlanta so much. Atlanta is probably the 4th or 5th place that we've played the most in. It’s probably New York, Chicago, and then I think, LA after that. That's ‘Explain That Gram,’ I'm Sean Evans!
ER: Well, it was really nice talking to you. Thank you so much.
AM: Thank you so much!
HP: Yeah, you too. Thanks so much.
Listen to Younger Than I Was Before on streaming platforms today.
edited by Campbell Conard.
photos taken by & approved for non-commercial use by @itsmeeejennyy on Instagram.