After Chicago glam-rock outfit Smith Westerns fizzled out at the end of 2014, guitarist Max Kakacek and drummer Julien Ehrlich broke off to experiment with a different musical approach. They synthesized sweet Chicago soul melodies, plaintive country songwriting, and gentle ’70s folk: Ehrlich took on lead vocals behind the kit, and his comforting falsetto coo solidified the sound they began to make under the name Whitney. Their 2016 debut, Light Upon the Lake, made them indie-rock darlings, and catapulted them to unassuming stars in their hometown.
Before Whitney performed at the 2019 Pitchfork Music Festival, Kakacek and Ehrlich sat down with Pitchfork contributor Leor Galil at the Chicago Athletic Association to talk about their band’s history and their forthcoming second album, Forever Turned Around.
Elia Einhorn: Welcome. I’m Elia Einhorn and you’re listening to In Sight Out, a series from Pitchfork that explores new perspectives on music, art and culture.
After Chicago glam rock outfit Smith Westerns broke up at the end of 2014, guitarist Max Kakacek and drummer Julian Ehrlich broke off to experiment with a different musical approach. They synthesized sweet Chicago soul melodies, plaintive country songwriting, and gentle ’70s folk.
Ehrlich took on vocals behind the kit and his comforting falsetto coo solidified the sound that they began to make under the name Whitney. Their 2016 debut, Light Upon the Lake, made them indie rock darlings and catapulted them to the status of unassuming stars in their hometown.
Before Whitney performed at the 2019 Pitchfork Music Festival, Kakacek and Ehrlich sat down with Chicago Reader music writer and Pitchfork contributor Leor Galil at the Chicago Athletic Association to talk about their band’s history and their forthcoming second album Forever Turned Around.
Leor Galil: How is everyone? Cool. So for the folks who don’t recognize your faces and those who are at home who can’t see you right now, would you mind telling us your names and what you do in the band?
Julian Ehrlich: I’m Julian Ehrlich, I drum and sing.
Max Kakacek: I’m Max Kakacek and I play guitar.
Leor Galil: And you guys met in Oregon?
Julian Ehrlich: We did actually for the first time.
Max Kakacek: Yeah.
Julian Ehrlich: I was playing for that band Unknown Mortal Orchestra and it was their first show and Max’s former band Smith Westerns took us on tour and that was the first time we met.
Leor Galil: And how quickly did you hit it off?
Max Kakacek: It took a second, I think.
Julian Ehrlich: No, we just literally, I don’t know. It’s not like you go around in a circle and you’re introducing yourselves or anything. We maybe vaguely met that night, but it took obviously a long time to realize that we were friends.
Max Kakacek: I think we were on the road a month total and probably two weeks in was when we actually all started hanging out Unknown Mortal, UMO, I can't even say the name, and sort of Smith Westerns.
Leor Galil: After you left UMO, Julian, Max called you to see if you wanted to join Smith Westerns, correct?
Max Kakacek: Yeah, I was actually at South by Southwest, I think, right after he left UMO. What year was that, was it 2012?
Julian Ehrlich: It was 2012, yeah.
Max Kakacek: Jake Portrait, who is the bassist of that band and a mutual friend, Julian’s known him his entire life, texted me. He was like, “you guys should hire Julian.” I gave him a call at South by Southwest. That’s in March, in May he moved here.
Leor Galil: How soon after that did the band come to an end?
Max Kakacek: Less than a year.
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah, it seemed like it should have been earlier.
Max Kakacek: Yeah.
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah, I don’t want to talk, curse on this... we can curse on this podcast?
Leor Galil: Fuck, yeah, right?
Julian Ehrlich: It was, I don’t know, you can’t really compare the two projects or whatever. The working relationships in that band just never seemed healthy in comparison to this one.
Leor Galil: When did you two realize that you had a healthy working relationship? When did you begin to actually play around with each other, musically. Sorry.
Julian Ehrlich: It was like spring of 2014.
Max Kakacek: Yeah. We all lived in this apartment, it was Ziyad, who is in the back somewhere over there, and Julian, Cullen Omori, and I in Morgan Square in St. Louis. Julian lived on a weird sofa in the dining room and we had three bedrooms. Then once Cullen kind of moved out after the breakup of Smith Westerns, Julian took over his room.
Max Kakacek: So we were just kind of living together for six months, maybe eight months, before we tried writing a song together.
Leor Galil: Who moved onto the couch in that instance?
Julian Ehrlich: Well, eventually Josiah, who is also back there. He moved onto the couch after he lived in Bangkok for a year. That was that mid-2015 when Whitney, the ball was kind of rolling on at least the material. We hadn’t played live yet.
Leor Galil: When did you begin to figure out what you were doing was this thing that became Whitney?
Max Kakacek: I think when we wrote “Golden Days,” that’s when we were the most excited. We were, man, this song means so much to us personally. We started Whitney as a kind of storytelling thing through the perspective, kind of a character that we made up.
Max Kakacek: “Golden Days” is the first song that we wrote where I felt like it came from us and it was about our personal experiences and we thought the song was amazing.
Max Kakacek: We were kind of obsessed with writing music, we were all very inspired by Julian’s voice as a new thing that we thought was really unique that we hadn’t heard before. Just kind of song-by-song throughout a year, it just kept picking up and just blossomed into what it is.
Leor Galil: You talk about creating this character Whitney as sort of a way to write songs and explore musical voices. When did you arrived at that concept as a way to challenge yourself creatively?
Julian Ehrlich: The first song that we did was “Dave’s Song” and that was a complete joke song. Then the second one was “On My Own,” which is, oh, this is, it seemed like melodically a little bit more sophisticated or something. We’re like, oh, this is pretty cool. I just remember walking around Chicago, it was that spring of 2014, and the first time you could be outside. We were just listening to it out, almost splitting Air Pods or something or listening out of our phone or whatever.
Julian Ehrlich: “Golden Days” was like the third, it was maybe “Polly” then “Golden Days ”or something. Figuring out that we could express the emotions that we wanted to in a way that we were proud of. It happened in that spring of 2014 basically.
Leor Galil: I mean what emotions were you hoping to express?
Julian Ehrlich: That was when the breakup stuff was happening. Which is such a boring thing to talk about right now, I think.
Leor Galil: Fair. How did you figure out how to build Whitney into a live band? How did you figure out who you wanted to bring in?
Max Kakacek: We got super, super lucky basically. Julian had known Justin, they both grew up in Oregon and they’d been playing bass and drums together forever, just music together in general. Josiah, like he said, moved from Thailand to, I think, in the beginning to be in a project that Julian and Ziyad were working on separate from Whitney in the beginning.
Max Kakacek: Kind of when Whitney got rolling, initially Ziyad joined and Josiah. We all knew Malcolm from high school, kind of CPS connections. Then Will was the one member that I’d known him since third grade because we took piano lessons together, but we had just gone separate paths.
Max Kakacek: But [inaudible] Cunningham, who I feel is like a huge Chicago music person and is also a mutual friend of ours and I texted her, do you know a trumpet person/player? And she sent me Will’s info and he pretty much joined after recording the first demo.
Leor Galil: He was kind of like the one lone person who wasn’t a part of your friend group. How quickly did you all kind of jell as a unit?
Max Kakacek: Very–
Julian Ehrlich: Super quick.
Max Kakacek: I remember actually going out with Will for the first time not recording and all of us were like, “We’re going to become best friends” kind of thing.
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah.
Max Kakacek: This is great.
Julian Ehrlich: I remember there was one party at our friend Timmy Parker’s house as well where Will had just realized he could do the thing with his trumpet where he emulates a whole trumpet section. I remember him showing me a voice memo and being like, “Listen, I’m playing the ‘Polly’ trumpet section.” Yeah, in the middle of a party being like, “Man, this sounds amazing.”
Julian Ehrlich: Then basically just being we need, we can maybe, totally have a live band now. Because previous to that we had been we could have a live band without the horns or whatever.
Max Kakacek: Then, also, our first show at the Empty Bottle, Charles Glanders just did sound and he’s been our sound dude ever since that show.
Julian Ehrlich: Literally ever since the first show, Charles has done sound for us very single show.
Leor Galil: You credit him in your albums too. What made you make that decision to put his name out there in a way that a lot of other bands don’t necessarily credit their sound man?
Julian Ehrlich: You just can tell when something fits. Also, I think maybe the sound game is a little bit... People change jobs quite a bit. But I think it’s pretty important to have your team set from the beginning. Especially the personalities working is a huge thing and they definitely work.
Max Kakacek: Yeah, and pretty much all of us decided not to sign leases and just live on the road for a good year until we get the project started. Everyone that committed to that is part of the Whitney family-type thing.
Leor Galil: That year, take us through that year. At what point did you release your first album? Where did you go from there?
Max Kakacek: When it actually came out, I think we’d been touring for six or eight months straight.
Julian Ehrlich: We had opened for Wild Nothing. We did the last CMJ that ever happened. Then went on tour with Wild Nothing, opening up for UMO and then pretty much our record came... that rolled into Pitchfork 2016 was right around the time that our record came out.
Max Kakacek: [crosstalk] that year.
Julian Ehrlich: That was the first show of our... and then we went on a long headline tour and then basically didn’t stop until 2018.
Leor Galil: Yeah, late 2018, if I recall.
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah, it was pretty... it was long.
Leor Galil: Yeah, I remember reading an interview where, I forget which one of you said, “Yeah, we need like a month to recuperate from all this before we go into the studio this October,” this past October. How did you find the time to write a record, considering you were on the road for essentially two years?
Julian Ehrlich: We needed more than a month and we took more than a month after that. It was like sporadic touring in the beginning of 2018. But we thought that we would just dive into writing LP two, but it never works out the way that you want it to, at least in our case.
Leor Galil: So wait, how did you envision LP two going the first time around?
Max Kakacek: I don’t know if we had any expectations. I think we needed time to completely change our perspective on what we even imagined it to be. We had a song that we played live for the last six months of the tour that we considered maybe what would be a lead single or a stronger song on LP two and it didn’t make it on the album at all.
Max Kakacek: It kind of took some time to get out of our heads from touring zone and really kind of pick apart the ideas and figure how to describe the weirdness that we had experienced over the past two years in a unique way and not just make an album about touring.
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah, I think it also just takes us a while to put anything into words that we feel kind of proud of. Words that we could see other people connecting to.
Leor Galil: Max, you mentioned the weirdness of the past couple years, what besides being on the road was so strange for you guys?
Max Kakacek: I mean I think it was the weirdness of being on the road and the weirdness of being back in Chicago intermittently and trying to hold on to friendships or relationships during that. Just things deteriorating and then kind of resolving constantly.
Max Kakacek: You’re back in Chicago for a week and everything is great with your old friends or partner or girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever. Then you go on the road for two months and slowly it chips away back to being at its worst and then you come back and everything’s fine for a week. It’s just kind of crazy ups and downs throughout a year or two.
Leor Galil: That in mind, when you do come back, what makes this place home for you?
Max Kakacek: Chicago?
Leor Galil: Yeah.
Julian Ehrlich: It’s the people.
Max Kakacek: Yeah.
Julian Ehrlich: It’s basically winter for nine months out of the year so you’re not attached to the surroundings or the scenery or anything. Are you? Is anyone in this room? No. It’s the people. I think it’s what’s always made this place great, to me at least.
Leor Galil: Well, Julian, you’re not from here.
Julian Ehrlich: I’m not, I’m not. I’m from a more beautiful place so maybe...
Leor Galil: I’m not throwing shade or anything.
Julian Ehrlich: You’re allowed to say that too.
Leor Galil: No, no, I’m not from here either, but when did you begin to recognize that in Chicago? When did you say, oh, these friends, these people are my home?
Julian Ehrlich: I guess just as long as it took to make a friend group that I felt that I was in love with, which probably happened around the same time that we were beginning to write all the Whitney stuff and all the Smith Westerns stuff dissolved.
Julian Ehrlich: I feel like we were fully forming a group of friends that was just really, everyone compliments each other and everyone loves each other and that pretty much became Whitney. But there’s a ton of other people in our friend group that we love so much as well.
Max Kakacek: There’s actually a specific, [Ren] Tyler, there’s a song about him on the new album called “Song for Ty.” Us meeting him kind of changed our entire social lives for the next two years.
Leor Galil: How?
Max Kakacek: He was just really an inspiring human being. Super creative, super into obscure music. Always showing you things that are really beautiful and not necessarily a genre that I would listen to normally. And he would just kind of show up at our house every day at a certain point. We didn’t have a doorknob or a lock, so at some point Ty would come over and we’d just hang out throughout the day.
Max Kakacek: That happened for like a good eight months and now he lives in L.A. We kind of wrote the song like an ode to him.
Leor Galil: Did you fix your doorknob?
Max Kakacek: We moved.
Julian Ehrlich: They fixed the doorknob at some point, I think.
Leor Galil: What did you learn from Ty that ended up influencing the work that you’re putting out next month?
Julian Ehrlich: I mean that song, we just love him a bunch. That song is only about him because, I don’t know, a lot of times you write a song or write a melody or the foundation for a song, and then be like, oh, what if we just write it about this person? You just drift off and you don’t end up doing that and you find out what it should really be about.
Julian Ehrlich: I feel we just got lucky with that song and we were like this totally makes sense. So as far as what we learned from him, I don’t really know. He’s just our friend. We just influence each other and maybe don’t necessarily think about it. We’ll think about it in 20 years.
Leor Galil: When do you see the beginning of Forever Turned Around? When did you know that what you were working on would be the new album?
Julian Ehrlich: Well, we knew that we had to write a new album. But there was definitely a succinct moment where “Forever Turned Around” the lyric came up and that melody happened. It was in Ziyad’s late mother’s basement. When was that? In just maybe–
Max Kakacek: November.
Julian Ehrlich: November/December? And we talked about this in the last couple interviews we did as well. That term and the lyric kind of came about and then we realized, oh, it’s kind of summing up most of the subject matter that we’ve covered so far. We spent a period looking back and doing sort of a revisionist history sort of thing and making sure that everything fully felt it would live on an album called Forever Turned Around.
Julian Ehrlich: Every song was looking at the main theme from a slightly different angle, but still fully serving its purpose.
Leor Galil: Revisionist history. So what was the shape of the record at that point?
Julian Ehrlich: I don’t know. I feel we were actually leaving it up to, we were leaving it a tiny bit shapeless just because we knew that a theme was going to pop out. I’m sure there’s tons for each and every song, there’s probably a specific thing, a funny lyric that we could tell you right now that would–
Max Kakacek: I think the songs were kind of piecemeal before we came up with “Forever Turned Around” as a theme. The lyrics were 80% done on all of them and there were a few of them, I think, we were struggling with making them not about being in a breakup and trying to explain a more complex version of a relationship. Where you’re more anxious about the stability that’s offered in a relationship, within one, whether it’s a friendship or romantic.
Max Kakacek: When “Forever Turned Around,” that theme or those words came out and the song kind of fell into place, we were able to go back to a song like “Valleys” or something and make it more about anxiety and feeling weirdness rather than just a straight-up breakup song or something.
Max Kakacek: I also think that theme informs a song like “Giving Up,” which we don’t think is a breakup song, it’s more of a look into someone’s relationship when they’re in a major valley of emotional understanding or something.
Julian Ehrlich: But that was like before, now I’m just remembering, there was a whole song that we thought we had finished and written about Josiah, our bass player, like leaving home for the first time. And it was kind of poking fun at him in a tiny little way, but the song still felt like it could be about anyone leaving home for the first time.
Julian Ehrlich: But then “Forever Turned Around” became a thing, oh, we need to change the meaning of this song, I guess.
Leor Galil: Going back a bit, where did you go to get space from the constant pressure of touring from this strange relationship of going on the road and coming back and the imbalance that created in your life? Where did you go to get some creative head space?
Julian Ehrlich: I don’t know. Nowhere in particular, but we did travel quite a bit. Whenever you feel yourself getting bogged down, you just... we would just go up to Wisconsin. We went to New York a couple times, went to Portland a little bit. We wrote a little bit in Lisbon, but that song didn’t make it on the record. Montana.
Max Kakacek: Yeah, Montana was a great experience, probably the best, but we’re also pretty, I think, obsessive writers when it comes down to actually finishing ideas. We’d spend a month in Wisconsin, there was a summer where we spent a month out there, and I think came up with a lyric, one lyric or something.
Julian Ehrlich: Like nothing.
Max Kakacek: Wrote a million and then just didn’t really find them relating to anything we were going through and lots of reworking songs and throwing out ideas happened.
Leor Galil: So when you’re going through so many ideas, when do you realize that you’ve come upon the lyric that you want to keep? When did you find that groove between the two of you, that you were like, oh, it’t working?
Julian Ehrlich: Well, a lot of times there’d be a lyric where you’re, oh, this is so phonetically, like it just sounds really good. It sounds like the perfect thing to say in the chorus; but I guess that’s the thing about songwriting, I need to now attach it to a bigger theme. It’s always worked between us where we’ve wanted to push the meaning to a higher place with every single word.
Julian Ehrlich: Coming up with the words that sound good or the lyrics that sound really good and give off the right emotion of good. Everything has to serve a higher purpose, I guess.
Max Kakacek: And that can be a huge rabbit hole.
Julian Ehrlich: Really, then you can think so hard about it where you’re like just switching the “and”s and the “but”s and the “the”s and “cuz”s. Just the little, tiny little descriptive words that they do mean different things sometimes.
Leor Galil: So which “but”s were “cuz”s and–
Julian Ehrlich: And which “cuz”s were “but”s.
Leor Galil: As songwriting partners, how do you balance each other out? How do you approach one another and offer creative feedback in a way that allows you to emerge with something that you’re both happy with?
Max Kakacek: We’re not brutally honest, but we’re immediately honest. “What about this line?” and the other person is like “no.” Then you keep doing that until they’re finally like, “I think that’s really good” or vice versa.
Julian Ehrlich: I think we’re just down. We’re just ready to talk super openly even when we’re being vulnerable or being quote unquote “vulnerable.” We spent so much time around each other in the past five, I mean seven years really, there aren’t many hard feelings ever.
Leor Galil: Any buts? No. When did you go, okay, let’s take this to the rest of the band. How do you fill out a song and make a Whitney song?
Max Kakacek: I think it changes per song. Especially on this album, there’s a few songs that I think the first things that we were hearing were mainly acoustic guitar and piano and strings. And those three instruments became, I think, pretty integral to the entire album.
Max Kakacek: Then with Will, we’ll just go in the basement for three days per song or something and just kind of work out... there’ll be a keyboard around and we’ll have a trumpet and we’ll kind of talk about the chords and where we think things should come out. It’s just kind of collaborative, a seemingly simple process, I guess.
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah, a lot of it comes from hanging out. Because I don’t think anyone in the band ever wanted to put pressure on us to be like, put me on the song, or whatever. We hang out a lot and then whoever would be in the band would just hear what new idea we were working on. Their input sometimes made it and sometimes wouldn’t. But, yeah, it’s just like a low-key vibe overall.
Leor Galil: You recorded a bunch of sessions in L.A. in October for this record, before taking it to Ziyad’s mother’s basement. What made you make that decision to revisit this work? How were those sessions sounding to you?
Julian Ehrlich: They sounded real bad. A lot of the sounds were cool because we recorded them with producers that wanted to make them cool. The songs just weren’t necessarily there. The skeletons were there, we didn’t change the structure of the song so much. We just knew that we would improve lyrics, some of the melodies.
Julian Ehrlich: We just knew that we needed to sit with them for a while. There were certain moments where it’s like, well, that’s not right. We should try to create some more magic here. Two minutes into the song, track six on the record. We need to make this a little more magical or something.
Max Kakacek: We also always do horns and strings in Chicago. Like we record them in our old apartment. We record all the horns and strings in the basement this time, but there’s one song that got bounced off a tape at the wrong speed. It was in between normal key and a half step up, so barely out of tune. And we had to try and record these strings and horns to it and make them sound in tune. It was the most debilitating process.
Julian Ehrlich: Like Macy, bless her heart, she was like, “Well, I am in tune. I know I’m in tune.” I was like, “I believe you.” She has perfect pitch.
Max Kakacek: Perfect pitch.
Julian Ehrlich: And then we decided, wow, I cannot believe the whole Pro Tools file was slightly sharp. We just had a bunch of technical difficulties basically.
Leor Galil: And how long did it take you to figure that one out?
Max Kakacek: A whole day.
Julian Ehrlich: A whole day.
Max Kakacek: We spent a whole day trying to figure out what was going on.
Julian Ehrlich: Then it’s not like the realization gives you comfort. We realized that and we were like, damn, this is probably happening to a couple other project files, and it was. We just had to completely strip it, take the drums and then just start from scratch. It was pretty intense. Also, it wasn’t Rado’s fault necessarily.
Leor Galil: Where did the magic come in?
Julian Ehrlich: I don’t know. It was a pretty dark winter. I don’t remember. That was last December.
Leor Galil: This past December.
Julian Ehrlich: When the magic really started, maybe. We went up to April Base. We wrote the last three songs on the record pretty quickly. The first one was “Song for Ty” in the basement. Then we went to April Base in Wisconsin and did “Before I Know It.” Then the last song was...
Max Kakacek: “Forever Turned Around,” I think.
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah, “Forever Turned Around” we finished in the basement all in the span of like a month.
Leor Galil: And “Forever Turned Around” informs the character of the album. Once you realized that, how did you go about ensuring that this was the quality that people would hear? How did you know that this was an idea that you wanted people to get, people to feel? What is that feeling since no one here has heard the record besides the people in the band. What should people be aware of? That was a lot, I’m sorry.
Julian Ehrlich: I have no idea.
Max Kakacek: Everything possibly being out of tune.
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah. In my head, and the only benchmark that we were trying to keep completely consistent was that it can hit you in the heart and pull at your heartstrings as hard as Light Upon the Lake did. And it’s doing it differently and just the subject matter is different. It’s more of a commitment than it is breakups or whatever.
Julian Ehrlich: It’s also like kind of a choose-your-own-adventure vibe. Forever Turned Around has four or five meanings, I think, but you’re going to find your own, hopefully.
Max Kakacek: I think we also put a lot more work into the atmosphere of the, the actual arrangements where the more you listen to the album, you’ll find a small thing that we kind of hid in there. Maybe because we got too obsessive about it. Like I was saying, it’s kind of fun to hear people that listen to it one time versus people who listen to it for a week or 10 days and have a completely different perspective on it.
Leor Galil: You mentioned the obsessiveness you have as writers, as musicians. How did the past few years as being part of this very popular band influence the obsessiveness and meticulousness that you brought to recording and finalizing this record?
Max Kakacek: I think we’ve always just kind of been like that. I think that’s one of the reasons why we started, when we started working together it worked out the way it did. Even writing those first songs in our house with no expectations. Just to maybe give to our friends on a SoundCloud link or something.
Max Kakacek: I think we were holding ourselves to the highest standard that we could imagine and that’s just kind of always been our vibe.
Julian Ehrlich: I mean we knew that there were going to be more people listening to this though. But we would always have the conversation where it would be like... I think you have to look at it from multiple perspectives as well. Just be like, what would a Whitney listener want to hear? Then, all right, are we proud of it? That’s the two perspectives basically.
Leor Galil: How did you know you were proud of it?
Julian Ehrlich: That’s like the hard... I think it took us, we got the final masters back and it took us like a week to finally be, oh, I’m fully proud of this and happy with this. I can tell I’m going to be proud of it in 10 years, hopefully, I think. Five years. I don’t know how we knew though. I think just taking space away from it allowed us to know.
Max Kakacek: You’ve also talked a lot about the idea of the honeymoon phase and relationships and friendships, and once that passes there’s also a phase in there with songs to... we’re like, once you’re past the idea of being super exciting and novel to you, you can actually kind of judge if it’s worthwhile to you. It takes a second as a writer to... whenever we come up with a new idea, I think we’re really excited about it and listen to it all the time on voice memo or whatever. Maybe kind of wrote it down or something.
Max Kakacek: Then maybe a few days later we’ll kind of toss it out. [inaudible] same thing. Kind of like to sit with stuff for a while and let it pass that phase of being novel and hopefully become something more than that.
Leor Galil: You mentioned honeymoon phase, what phase are you guys in as a band now?
Julian Ehrlich: I think we’re still probably in the honeymoon phase, right?
Max Kakacek: I don’t know. It's been a while.
Julian Ehrlich: I just think... no, the thing is, we would have completely switched up the entire sound and tools that we use to make this record. I think we knew we could take the tools that we found with Light Upon the Lake further and write different songs and better songs and be more excited about the songs and we did that.
Julian Ehrlich: But even as soon as we finished Forever Turned Around, we were both just, all right, so next one, we’re just going to tear it all down. We just have to get rid... I don’t know what that means, but we need complete change.
Julian Ehrlich: Though I think we’re still in the honeymoon phase on this record, but we’re going to do something different on the third one.
Leor Galil: Dubstep?
Julian Ehrlich: Yes.
Max Kakacek: Won’t say no to anything.
Leor Galil: The week that you spent with the masters, what did you do in that time? What was going through your head?
Julian Ehrlich: Just like knowing you’re second guessing yourself way too much, but being aware of it and then being aware of being aware of it. That’s part of probably releasing music and something that you feel like is an honest expression of yourself that’s about to maybe get spread to a ton of other people. It’s fun to second guess yourself, but then you just end up in the rabbit hole.
Leor Galil: Yeah, I can’t imagine a week of that at all.
Julian Ehrlich: Then we had to go through the album art, which was really intense on this one.
Leor Galil: What was the rollout from you okaying the masters? What have you gone through as far as the process of actually releasing the record in August?
Julian Ehrlich: The album art stuff, we just went through a million different ideas. I’m in a relationship with a really talented artist, if she was going to paint it, it had to happen organically. And then it did at the end and she ended up painting the album cover. It took a tiny bit of a toll on our relationship, we’re totally fine now.
Julian Ehrlich: There was that and then figuring out... you have to pick photos, the right photos that you want. You have to choose a first single, which is a... this is a tough record for that. Light Upon the Lake it was “No Woman,” which was just a very, very obvious choice. Whether it’s the best choice or the worse song, it’s just it does sound decent for a single.
Max Kakacek: Right now I feel like people are kind of challenging that idea of releasing two songs at once a lot, or three songs at once. I think we flirted with that idea a bit. Because I think we think of this album as an album listen, and choosing the one song, I think there was no right answer for us in the beginning. It’s kind of a constant conversation if we should release two or more at once.
Leor Galil: So why release one?
Max Kakacek: The album only has 10 songs, so we thought it...
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah. I don’t know. I mean there was a long time where I was just wishing we could drop the whole thing, but we’re not that big or anything. You have to be a massive artist, I think, to pull off the surprise release.
Leor Galil: Yeah.
Julian Ehrlich: Yes, exactly. I was trying to avoid saying–
Leor Galil: Yeah, you could say Beyoncé.
Julian Ehrlich: We love Beyoncé. We’re not as big as Beyoncé and we couldn’t do, or Solange.
Leor Galil: I don’t think anyone–
Julian Ehrlich: Or Solange.
Leor Galil: Yeah, yeah. When you released “Giving up,” you know you talk about wanting to make sure that these songs are able to pull at your heart strings, that you’re able to feel the depth and tap into that emotional feeling you have when you first wrote it. How did it feel to get that out in the open?
Julian Ehrlich: I don’t know. Can we shift that same question to a different song?
Leor Galil: Yeah. What other...
Julian Ehrlich: It does capture a moment in our lives pretty well, but I don’t feel like either of us think that that’s like a deep song or an emotionally–
Max Kakacek: Giving some background on that. That was the song we wrote the quickest. Maybe it took us 45 minutes and we were both in kind of... we had been so focused on writing that both of our relationships were taking a huge hit. The sentiment of the song of feeling like someone was giving up was more of talking about ourselves from the perspective of our partner in a lot of ways. Were you about to talk about “Valleys”?
Julian Ehrlich: Probably. Oh, yeah, our new single’s coming out tomorrow.
Max Kakacek: Nice one, there it is.
Julian Ehrlich: That actually is the song where in terms of lyrics or whatever, lyrical depth, that’s the one where we had the skeleton of the song for a really long time. And it took us figuring out the lyrics for that one was such an elaborate puzzle. I don’t know, lyrics are just really hard. It’s the best job to have, but that’s the toughest aspect of it maybe.
Max Kakacek: I think the interesting thing is with “Valleys,” we’ve had a couple interviews where people, I can’t remember if we asked them or they’ve asked us, what their favorite lyrics are and have thrown a couple lines out of that song to us for us to respond to. And they’ve always chosen the lines that are the most meaningful to us.
Max Kakacek: So as songwriters or people who worked on lyrics for a really long time, having any listener be able to pick out the lines that mean the most to us as their favorite ones as well, is super redeeming. That’s why I think “Valleys” connects to us in a kind of special way, especially right now.
Leor Galil: Cool. Well, I have taken up a lot of time and we’re going to kick it over to the audience for some questions.
Max Kakacek: [crosstalk] easier.
Leor Galil: You’re going to be on the podcast.
Audience 1: Check, one, two. I’m curious to know, you mentioned that some of the folks that heard the album for the first time called out a couple lines from “Valleys.” I think all of us would love to just hear what those lines were and why they were so important to you guys.
Julian Ehrlich: There was one that goes: “There’s fire burning in the trees, maybe life is the way it seems.” That was just a classic sort of situation where Max came up with part of the fire burning in the trees line and we didn’t have the equal and opposite B section, or reaction to that line. Then I came up with that after two days of just freaking out over it.
Julian Ehrlich: I think that’s just the one that it just sticks out a little bit, but I don’t know. Maybe if you listen to the song 100,000 times like we did, it makes a lot of sense. I don’t know. I think that line actually does just make sense. It’s a little bit of like we’re living in hell right now, if you didn’t get that, if you don’t feel that.
Max Kakacek: I like the ambiguity between that sentiment kind of referencing environmental disaster and also the changing of the seasons as fire burning in the trees. I thought it was kind of a sick line that has multiple meanings.
Max Kakacek: That song’s lyrical challenge in the biggest sense was the chorus is super simple and I’m not going to tell you the chorus lyric, but it was–
Julian Ehrlich: “To my love.”
Max Kakacek: Dang.
Julian Ehrlich: It says “My love” four times, every chorus. A total of 12 times.
Max Kakacek: It’s a lot of times.
Julian Ehrlich: With harmonies. But that was a huge thing. We had “my love” set. Like begrudgingly we were like it has to be “my love.” It just works phonetically, it’s a type of line where you’re like, okay.
Julian Ehrlich: We just spent so long trying to change the chorus, but then finally realized if we just take a whole two days and work on these verses, you can put my love in a different context and give it more depth. And that’s the reason why it’s maybe our favorite song on the record now.
Audience 2: You were saying your friend Tyler was an inspiration. What genres of music did he introduce you to that inspired songs on your new album?
Max Kakacek: The specific song that is about him is kind of like, I think the chord progression reminds us of like ’90s R&B actually. That was something he would play all the time. When we wrote it, I think the way it sound it just sounded like something he’d show us from some weird record.
Max Kakacek: That’s kind of where we originally thought of we’re going to write this song about him, and like he was saying, usually that idea fades really quickly. After the next thing, it doesn’t work and it just stuck with it.
Audience 3: A few weeks ago I think you guys put out a photo of you guys in the studio with a mysterious balding man in the foreground.
Max Kakacek: Oh, man.
Audience 3: I got all Winona Ryder in Stranger Things like, well, that’s got to be Justin Vernon right there. Was that Justin Vernon? So I was wondering if that was Justin Vernon? If so, what’d you learn and if you have any nuggets? And if not, I’m crazy.
Julian Ehrlich: No, no. That photo was taken at April Base, which is his studio. Brad Cook, he produces all Justin Vernon records basically. That was him in the photo. Justin was there. I met him briefly. I don’t know that dude very well. I can say that Brad’s amazing.
Julian Ehrlich: Just like the whole vibe or whatever that they've cultivated at that studio is amazing. I was very stoned the whole time.
Audience 4: So you’re going to be playing the new album on Sunday. Am I right about that?
Julian Ehrlich: Like half of it.
Max Kakacek: Half of it.
Audience 4: I was just wondering, how do you feel going into playing all these new songs in front of a hometown crowd? I would imagine you’re excited, but what other feelings do you have going into it?
Julian Ehrlich: Can’t wait.
Max Kakacek: Yeah.
Julian Ehrlich: Seriously, actually can’t wait. Just love this city so much and Pitchfork Fest has always been a great place, well curated. Should we just keep talking about it? 312 beer, Twin Peaks have their own beer there.
Max Kakacek: Union Park.
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah, Union Park, cool. I don’t know.
Audience 5: I was wondering if you guys would rather win the Grammy or see the Portland Trail Blazers win the NBA finals?
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah. That’s a great question, I don’t know. I don’t know. Winning the Grammy, it depends on which Grammy.
Max Kakacek: The golden one.
Julian Ehrlich: Album of the Year. The Grammy Grammy. Maybe in five years there’ll be an indie buzz band category Grammy or whatever and then maybe we'll win it then. But would that feel good, even? Would it be like, oh, this is a new category? I don’t know, that’s a great question.
Audience 6: So you talked a little bit about choosing a first single and picking artwork for the album. Is the album as a format something that’s important to you or is it just kind of this is how we get our music to as many people as possible? The album as a coherent art form in itself.
Julian Ehrlich: Also a good question. It’s totally valid to question the album in this day and age I think, but I think the album as a whole is the most important thing in our lives, honestly.
Julian Ehrlich: It’s all I think about, yeah. Because also I feel like it’s weirdly in jeopardy because there’s a lot of people making incredibly long albums and it’s just what is this right now? Not that they’re all bad. They’re not all bad. I don’t know.
Julian Ehrlich: It’s just really tough because it’s just like the way that you consume them is completely changing. I feel like that might be one of the reasons why we try to make such short, the new one’s like 33 minutes, the last one was 30 minutes. That might just be why we try to stick to classic album length or something, but I don’t know. Maybe we’re just out of date at this point.
Leor Galil: Which are the bad ones? No, you, sir.
Audience 7: Yeah, kind of piggybacking off of that. For each of you, you kind of approach this release in a pretty different scenario from the last one with a bigger following and probably expectations kind of attached to that. I’d be curious to hear what does success for this album look like to each of you?
Max Kakacek: Success for the new one, what would that look like? I’m not really sure. I think part of our, or at least my vibe, with making music now is kind of reducing or not having any expectations and just being happy with the songs and, I guess, hoping they connect with other people on a deeper level than just a surface little pop song.
Max Kakacek: Even if we maybe use pop formats in our music, that hopefully they actually find something deeper. Like tangible success, I think, is... I don’t really know.
Audience 8: So I was curious. Way back on your guys’ Instagram, some of your first posts were some cool, fun, rad individual pictures of your guys’ selves. I was wondering what was the creative inspiration for them and also what happened?
Max Kakacek: Are you talking about the first Instagram posts we ever made type thing?
Audience 8: Like the ones where you guys are just individually [inaudible] and you had singular things covering your...
Max Kakacek: Yeah, the naked photos.
Audience 8: Yeah.
Julian Ehrlich: Well, what was that 2015?
Max Kakacek: Yeah.
Julian Ehrlich: I don’t know. We’re a lot older now, it's hard to talk about that and, also, harder to think about that. I mean we wiped the Instagram before even starting to release this new music because it was like, well, in a weird way it’s like looking at a yearbook or something.
Julian Ehrlich: I don’t know, I feel like each of our albums is going to be a more up-to-date version of literally what we think, so why not take all the past thoughts away. Good question though. It’s good to bring that up.
Max Kakacek: Yeah.
Julian Ehrlich: The internet has changed a lot in the last five years or whatever.
Audience 9: So I’m wondering, you guys talked a lot about the lyrics and the songwriting process that you guys have been through. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about your process when you’re writing the music and how all the pieces come together?
Max Kakacek: Usually we, honestly, all the songs start with a chord progression. Either on acoustic, this album a lot was acoustic and Wurlitzer. Very stripped back, kind of cassette demos.
Max Kakacek: A lot of the music came pretty quick. We had ideas that lasted a year or so that we couldn’t write lyrics for, but knew the music was there. Then it’s just kind of chipping away at things and continually adding things and taking things away and moving stuff around, like a constant change.
Max Kakacek: One day we’ll wake up and be like, that guitar part that we made yesterday sucks. We need to completely re-record the song or something. Not getting attached to anything and keeping an open mind.
Max Kakacek: Then when lyrics are written, making sure that all those parts actually don’t take away from the vocal that has become a melody.
Julian Ehrlich: It’s a lot of talking, so much just one-on-one. Maybe one of us should have just constantly been wearing a wire because then we could look back on it and be like, wow, is this really how we got to this that got to this that got to this? It’s a really intimate interaction.
Leor Galil: You could record on your phone too, you don’t need a wire.
Julian Ehrlich: Yeah, I know.
Leor Galil: Well, thank you guys for talking to us. Thank the room for coming.
Max Kakacek: Yeah, thanks.
Julian Ehrlich: Thank you, also.
Elia Einhorn: This has been In Sight Out. A series from Pitchfork that explores new perspectives on music, art and culture. This conversation was recorded by Anhill Jimenez and edited by Mark Yoshizumi. Big thanks to the Chicago Athletic Association. In Sight Out's executive producer is Seth Dodson.
