Letting the Flowers Grow: an interview with comets near me.
The San Jose indie folk duo on songwriting, childhood, and building community through music.
photo by Tristan (TreeStamp) Padron.
When you’re a child, it’s easy to believe in things, like a fruit growing in your stomach when you swallow watermelon seeds.
In their debut EP, Don’t Pick the Flowers, indie folk duo comets near me look back at these memories fondly, singing about childhood nostalgia, old friends, and growing at your own pace. The four songs were recorded in a shed in the band’s backyard in San Jose, California, lending the music a DIY sound to match the intimate lyrics.
I had the opportunity to chat with the band about the new EP.
Evgenia: You just released your first EP, Don’t Pick the Flowers. How would you describe its sound? What were some of the biggest influences on it?
Kyle: We recorded it in a really DIY way. We actually recorded most of it at our old place, in a shed. We wanted it to have this rough, diy, kind of unpolished sound to it.
Maria: I would say, influence-wise, indie folk would probably be our general genre, but there's definitely some twee influences and emo influences as well. I think we were definitely influenced by Bright Eyes and stuff. And kind of by the evolution of some artists we like, which is why we took the DIY approach. We like Blink-182 and, if you listen to their early stuff, it just sounds like it's recorded on a flip phone. And we just wanted to do it all in a super DIY way, so we could have some kind of evolution over time.
E: You’ve said you wrote, recorded, mixed, and mastered the EP in the shed in your old backyard. Could you tell me what the production process looked like and how that influenced the final product?
K: It's pretty bare bones. We record everything onto my laptop, but we have a small mixer that has four inputs on it. It's pretty straightforward. We just plug in mics into the mixer and get a good level. For example, all the acoustic guitars are just kind of recorded with two microphones placed in front of them. The shed itself is somewhat soundproofed. There's a wall next to a fence that was shared with a neighbor, so we put a bunch of soundproofing on that side of the wall, because I got a bunch of free soundproofing from a friend. There was only enough for one wall, but other than that, the room is just a wooden shed that, for all we know, has been there since the 1920s, when the house was built. So it's just planks of wood that are barely hanging. They've probably rotted over the course of 100 years.
M: Definitely has a smell to it.
K: There's a strange smell coming from it. You feel like it could fall apart at any moment in time. So I think that's part of the roughness, too. We recorded a lot of the vocals there. So it's not perfectly dry, as if the whole thing were insulated from sound. You hear a little bit of the voice or the instruments bouncing off these old wooden walls and stuff.
E: You released a music video for your song “pedestal.” Was that your first time making a music video?
M: For comets, yeah. Kyle has probably been in music videos for past bands and stuff. I’ve been involved on the production side, which is actually how I met Adam, who was the guy who directed the “pedestal” video.
E: What was that like? How did you translate the song into visuals?
M: Adam, the guy that made it, has such an insane attention to detail and he really puts a lot of effort into things. We started filming it in October or November. And then we did some more in maybe January or February? I don't know. It didn't come out for a really long time. Because we had different locations and different outfits, I kind of realized, “oh, you have to get a lot of footage for safety.” So you would think, “yeah, we could get it in one day,” which we actually did for the entire scene that was in a ceramics room. We got so much footage, but it's a lot more fun and dynamic to have more scenes and stuff.
K: We spent probably one or two zoom meetings just brainstorming with Adam. We had some rough idea of what we wanted to do and we brought it to him. But once he entered the fold, it seemed like he had a lot of things that he wanted to do, because he was stoked on the song and stoked on the lyrics and wanted to do these visual things to accompany them. So a lot of it was just being like, “Hell yeah, man. That sounds good. Let's try it out.”
M: A lot of the lyrics in “pedestal” are metaphorical things. We talk about a basketball court in the song. It's not literal, but we talk about it, we talk about doors, like knocking on a door. So Adam was like, oh, like, we should do a sports scene, like in a basketball court or a soccer field or something. And then he had the idea to get a bunch of doors from a warehouse place and put them up in a field. We had some ideas based on the lyrics like, “oh, we should maybe have some element of that.” And he kind of just took it to 100.
K: I mean, the doors, I'll admit, when he first brought that I was like, “I don't really get it yet.” I didn't really understand how it was gonna translate visually, but I think by the time it was done, I thought that door stuff was the best stuff we did. It looked the best on camera and it was just like, my favorite day of shooting.
photo by Tristan (TreeStamp) Padron.
E: I was also wondering how you approach writing songs. What are some of the biggest sources of inspiration that you draw from when you’re writing?
M: It kind of varies from time to time. Usually, one of us will have a half-baked idea. Sometimes Kyle will come up with a little guitar riff and he'll keep playing it over and over. And I'll just be like, “Oh, this would sound good with that melody.” For our song “hallway light,” I think he just started playing the guitar. And he was like, “what does this sound like to you?” And I was just like, “I don't know, it might be fireflies and something sparkly, and kind of like childhood nostalgia,” and then we kind of built it up from there. But “pedestal,” we wrote that actually completely together. We have this Casio keyboard back there, that has instrumentals preloaded onto it.
K: Yeah, it's like a keyboard from the 90s that you can adjust the settings on and you can basically build a song or control how something goes, by genre. So we were just having fun. I would play random stuff, like a preloaded country song. And we would just kind of freestyle over it. And then do that again, with jazz or something.
M: And it would be kind of like a joke, like doing a country song and being like, “Oh, my name is Harold. I'm a cowboy.” It's kind of like a joke, kind of like a creative exercise. But then we were doing that with the different genres and we realized that we kept talking about a person that we knew who was kind of pissing us off. And we were like, “oh, this is kind of what we want to think about.”
K: We kept coming back to the same ideas and feelings so we were like, “okay, clearly, this is like what we want to say” so then we just tried to do it seriously, with just guitars. And that's how it came about.
M: Exactly. And then with the last time I saw him, I think that was the last song we worked on. We wanted to have a fingerpicking song because all of our other songs are mostly just like rhythm guitar. So we were like, “Okay, that'll be our sad song.” And we wanted to play with the feeling of hopelessness and you know, when you have a friend from maybe childhood that kind of went down the wrong path or something, and you just kind of wish you could do something, but you can't. So it's just kind of that hopelessness watching it happen and describing. And we both had experiences with a few people like that throughout our lives. What we kind of did is we wrote the song, but it's about maybe seven different people and all the lines are true, but they're about different experiences. All of our lyrics definitely are true, but it's two people with two different experiences. So we just kind of hot potato, throw it around, figure it out
K: It was kind of like creating a singular character from multiple real people in our lives who fit the theme or the feeling that we were trying to write about.
E: I also had a question about the title of the EP, since I saw that it was kind of chosen by listeners online. What does it mean to you? What was it like interacting with listeners in that way?
M: So basically, Tristan, the guy that shot all of our promotional photos and the EP cover, and our Spotify pictures and stuff, he was shooting with his girlfriend, Sam, who is also a photographer, and they were just kind of out in the hills of San Jose with us. And she asked like, “Did you guys pick flowers as a kid?” I was like, “yeah,” and then Kyle was like, “no,” but then, you know, Kyle was like, “oh, no, let's pick flowers. That's a great idea.” So we did and there were some shots with flowers.
K: I probably picked like two flowers, literally two flowers. But the second I picked them up, a park ranger just appeared out of nowhere in a truck. There had been nobody for miles, it was open hills. But the second I did that, he pulled up in his truck. He rolled down the window and he was like, “don't pick the flowers.” The whole rest of the shoot, we were just like, “Oh, we're gonna get in trouble.”
M: It's not that deep, but then at the same time we were like, “but it could be.” Flowers are something that, when you are a kid, you just kind of pick them and you don't think it matters and we give them as gifts but to what? To watch them die? We don't really have a stance on it, you know, but it's something funny to think about, you know?
K: And it does work with the EP as a whole, because a lot of it is like, “don't take something beautiful or innocent and use it for your own means.”
M: “Hallway light” talks about various silly mundane things like believing in Santa or swallowing seeds of a watermelon or something. It's not that deep, but at the same time, when you're a kid, it is that deep, and I think picking the flowers, it's like, when you're a kid, it's not that deep, but then you realize, like, “Oh, I'm ruining the ecosystem, according to a National Park Ranger.” It's just kind of playing with the juxtaposition there. And then in terms of interacting with listeners, I think it's fun doing things that way because building community is really important to us and I feel in the Bay Area, and specifically in San Jose, there are a lot of people that are in and out a lot. So it's hard to build a community here. So anyway we can get people involved in our creative process, even if it's just voting in a silly little poll, it's cool.
photo by Adam Planas.
E: You post a lot of covers on Instagram, so I was wondering, what’s another song that you think deserves a comets near me cover?
K: “Life is a Highway.”
M: We had a gig at San Pedro Square in San Jose a few weeks ago and it was like three hours long with few breaks. We were like, “Okay, we have to learn a bunch of covers for this gig” and it's mostly going to be like families and middle aged people. So we were like, “Let's do basic early 2000s alternative rock covers that people know and we can maybe throw in a few more niche things in there.” So we covered a lot of songs from Shrek. That was started off because Smash Mouth is from San jose.
K: Yeah, so “All Star” was like our first choice. We had to do “All Star” to rep fellow San Jose legends, Smash Mouth. And then we did “Accidentally in Love” by Counting Crows. And so we were kind of noticing “oh, there's a Shrek trend kind of going on with this” and then I think that's why we were talking about “Life is a Highway” because that's the song from cars, which has a similar online perception.
M: It's just like timeless, it's almost like a meme. But it's also serious at the same time. People view it very highly but also don't. It's just, it's just great.
E: Do you have any music recommendations for anyone who might be reading this?
M: Christian Lee Hutson. He just put out a song today. Love him a lot. I think his songwriting is very influential to us. And then Maggie Gently. We recently played with her and her band.
K: We played her album release show in San Francisco.
M: It's called Wherever You Want to Go. It’s sad alternative rock vibes, but yeah, they rock hard.
K: I mean, you could just check out my playlists. I love making playlists. It's like a weird hobby or fixation of mine. I don't like listening to them on shuffle even, because I just like the order of the songs. Like a radio DJ or something.
M: What about Greg Mendez, then? Because that's in your playlist. We just got introduced to him, I want to say a few months ago, because he opened for Snail Mail.
K: Then Stephen Steinbrink. He's from Oakland. But so you're in Chicago?
E: Yeah!
K: Do you know the band Into It. Over It.? They’re one of my favorite bands of all time.
M: Maybe add them, too.
photo by Tristan (TreeStamp) Padron.
edited by Jake Harvey.
photos by Tristan (TreeStamp) Padron and Adam Planas.