Occurrence On the Making Of ‘REAL PERSON’
Photo Credit: Valerie Terranova
What was the initial spark or idea that led to the creation of 'REAL PERSON?'
Ken: We were in the midst of recording REAL FRIEND, our last record, and I kept coming up with these weirder, more experimental instrumentals that I was naming after people that inspired us. The songs were us channeling these people into songs. Like love letters to them.
Cat: I encouraged Ken to keep making these tracks to see where they took us. We are all big readers. So a new track became Olga Tokarczuk because we loved her novels. Another became Mieko Kawakami because we had read HEAVEN during the pandemic and talked about it a lot.
Johnny: Then Ken surprised us with tracks named after us.
Cat: I had gotten COVID in the summer of 2023 and was pretty sick. Ken sent me an early draft of my song, hoping it would make me feel better.
Ken: I made the song about Johnny while in the woods at MacDowell during a residency, playing around with a modular setup and a piano. Later, the actor Ryan Spahn read a monologue that I had written and that made its way into the song. It’s a love song.
Johnny: A very weird one.
Ken: Obviously!
Cat: Eventually, we had a nice suite of songs in this vein, then we realized it was an album.
Johnny: Which isn’t the follow-up to REAL FRIEND.
Ken: Rather it’s a strange appendage to it.
What impact do you hope this album will have on your audience?
Ken: Occurrence started as a much weirder place for me to make music. But since Cat and Johnny have been in the band, we definitely moved towards writing songs in a more straight-forward fashion. In a way, this album connects us back to some of the more experimental stuff the band used to do. The album comes out on my birthday, which is nice. So it’s a two-way gift, I hope.
Can you talk about any standout tracks on 'REAL PERSON' and what makes them special to you?
Cat: I definitely love the song named after me.
Johnny: Same. I love the opener “Louise Penny” and “Mark Fisher” a lot too. It was fun to use my voice in a different way.
Cat: Totally! I love them all.
Ken: It was fun to write a song inspired by friend of the band Wayne Feldman. His track started with me messing around with this old 2013 recording of him playing the banjo that he used really thick guitar strings on. I also included a voice memo he sent me that memorably features a guest appearance by a neighborhood dog. I feel like the song really captures Wayne.
Can you tell us more about you as a trio?
Cat: In 2014, Ken sent me a message on Facebook?
Ken: Yup.
Cat: Asking me if I still sang because he was working on some new music and wanted me to sing on it.
Ken: We went to college together but hadn’t seen each other–
Cat: For a long time! I was looking for a creative outlet so I said yes. He sent me one song. We worked on it remotely. It came out really good. Then he sent me another… Then another. Next thing I know–
Ken: We were a band. We released that first album in October of 2016. When we were getting ready to play an album release show here in New York, I asked my partner Johnny if he would join us as a second vocalist.
Johnny: Then suddenly I was in a band.
Ken: We’ve been a band for 10 years. Our first album ‘THE PAST WILL LAST FOREVER’ celebrates its ten year anniversary next year. Crazy.
Do you have any specific techniques or methods for experimenting with sound or visuals?
Cat: Ken usually comes up with a rough demo of a song. He always titles them. He then gives some to me, some to Johnny, and usually there’s a push and pull, and it becomes a song.
Johnny: Sometimes Ken will describe a story or image that he was thinking of when he was making the music.
Cat: Yeah, like this is about a self-driving car that kills people. That sort of thing.
Ken: (laughs) Or not. I just give them the demo and let the title take them where it goes.
Johnny: Sometimes I ignore the title and write about what the song conjures in me. Or what films or books we all recently talked about.
Cat: I never asked. How do the songs even start?
Ken: Sometimes it’s a piece of gear, or a sample, or a beat, and that seed becomes the song. I like to give myself constraints. I tell myself: It needs to be in this key. Or the tempo has to be this. Emotion usually takes over. And something tends to happen. Or it doesn’t. I didn’t realize how much unused material we had. Thinking about the 10-year anniversary, I started going through old hard drives and was amazed by some of the stuff we finished but decided not to release, or demos that never got made into songs. Some of it was really good.
Johnny: Why didn’t we release any of it?
Ken: Who the hell knows?
