Andrew Patrick of The Carolyn (continued)
Questions about specific songs and the last 2 albums
Do you think the new record and these feelings of being overwhelmed by stress and despair and depression were more influenced by external stuff like the pandemic – do you think that was more of an influence than things on the 2019 record that was written before the pandemic?
I think it’s a really, really solid question. Honestly, because this pandemic has been way longer than any of us expected.
And honestly, the whole writing process of this last release falls in that category as well. I don’t know which songs, maybe we’re a little bit more influenced by, you know, the collapsing world around us. I don’t know. It’s tough to say because a good portion of the record was definitely written pre-Covid, but there’s some stuff that I feel like it’s seeped in there when we were all kind of locked in our rooms – the state of being so isolated had to have informed it somehow.
Oli wrote this lyric that says, like “I saved this bottle for the impending wreckage”, and I don’t know if that’s a direct reference to the social uprising that happened in 2020, and also being locked in our rooms. But that really hit home for me to the point where I was like, “dude, can I hijack your lyrics and make a song out of this?”
I would say that the latest record necessarily has to be influenced by the pandemic more so than the first one, but it’s definitely not being fully informed by everything that’s going on around us. I think all the other stuff was just kind of icing on the cake or more fuel for the fire for writing the record.
So this is related to the collapse of democracy and climate change and all the terrible things going on. But how do you manage to keep producing things with nursing school and all these societal crises and disappointments?
Where in all of that do you find the energy to pick up your guitar and write something? Or, on the flip side, does all of that darkness and negativity give you more fuel? Does it make you more productive? I’m curious if that’s more of a driving factor and then something you have to overcome.
I can’t totally speak on behalf of my bandmates, but for me it’s a huge obstacle. MAJOR, I can’t overstate that enough. Especially going to like the second half of quarantine. Like “why the fuck does any of this shit matter?”
I know that’s like the wrong attitude to have, but when you combine that with pre-existing mental health issues – dude, I love writing songs that I love; this passion that I’ve chosen to spend all my time on.
Sometimes I’ll be really inspired, but with everything going on right now, I definitely don’t view “my art” the same way I did when I was 18. It’s sometimes really, really hard to stay motivated.
Bummer of an answer, but that’s kind of how I feel at the time.
No, it’s incredibly relatable because that’s, I didn’t really start making stuff until I was like 38. I didn’t do stand up until I was 39. I have bipolar disorder. I was constantly, chaotically depressed until then, and it’s so refreshing to hear somebody else say, yes, I make stuff – but these depressive periods usually mean that I don’t make anything or that I have to struggle uphill.
It’s an endless effort as opposed to being easy and natural. And when I feel like shit, I can’t just, you know, write something brilliant. Productivity with art is much more along the lines of, “I had a good day today, and I have the energy to write a cool song.”
That is a great observation. It really is sort of like a litmus test in many ways. So yeah, I don’t know for me, but I mean, I’m never going to not play guitar. It becomes so entrenched in who you are after a certain period of time.
Like. Half of my fucking life doing this, even though I haven’t been touring anywhere near that long. I’m never going to not play guitar and not write songs, but the capacity to which I do that remains to be seen.
Do you have tour dates lined up that are around Fest? Do you plan to tour behind this album?
So it was kind of a touchy subject for me because I thought I was going to be spending the majority of the rest of this year actually in clinical and a hospital [for nursing school].
But I view it as a blessing in disguise. That is kind of a weird way that this happened, that the rest of my year has kind of opened up past the summer. Like let’s book some dates and blitz, let’s pound the pavement because now I have way more flexibility and I’m really excited about this record in spite of all the challenges that presented themselves over the course of making it.
I’m really, really happy to get out there and play the songs.
You should be excited. It’s a really good record.
I appreciate you saying it. I’m too close to it to know if it’s even remotely entertaining.
Speaking of the new record, I really liked that song Snake versus Rat. And speaking really as a gossip, a nosy person, that lyric, “why the fuck did you have to rat me out” really stuck out to me. Are you comfortable talking about what you got tattled on for?
I hate to burst any potential bubble, but I don’t think there’s much of a narrative behind that song. Yeah. I think Oli’s flip answer behind the song is, “I don’t know what it’s about. I just wrote random stuff”.
I think that’s the easy thing to say. He probably had some turmoil going on in his life, in terms of his relationship, friends and family. Obviously, being in close quarters with your significant other, exclusively, not being able to go anywhere is going to be very trying, I would imagine.
So maybe it has something to do with that. it’s just sometimes words, phonetically, just sound cool. You kind of just run with them.
It’s a fun song. It’s a silly little song. I think he was just expressing frustration with, maybe another person over something seemingly trivial, but maybe it made him mad enough to write a song about it.
That’s very relatable as a standup comedian, because all we do is air grievances about petty annoyances. That’s all comedy is, it’s just, “this little thing that nobody else noticed pissed me off. And I have to get this off my chest”. That’s all comedy is.
I think that describes a lot of his writing honestly, which, I’m here for it.
What’s the inspiration behind calling the leading track The Apiarist? I love that word. So that stuck out to me.
This might be a silly answer, but a dear friend of ours ran a little house venue in Nashville. I think he still does, called The Beehive and he always really took care of us. We never had to worry about a hotel or finding another place to stay.
He literally kept us and I feel like he just treats everybody that way by virtue of the type of person he is. So we’re the bees.
The song, I guess it’s kind of like about being a little bit disenchanted with being in a “touring” band. I kind of feel like I’m in my late twenties and my life’s not really turning out the way I thought it would. And I’m playing in a living room in front of my friend who owns this house and two other people, which is cool.
I’m thankful to do it, but you know, you do it enough and it’s, “man, should I have gone to engineering school or something?” But in spite of those very brief moments of feeling defeated, this dude would make up for it in every way possible, like feed you, pay you, you slept on his floor and he made you feel, you know, “hey, you’re not doing anything wrong with your life”.
So that’s kind of what this song is about. And he’s the beekeeper. He’s a rad dude. He plays in a band called Smallville from Nashville.
That’s awesome. I love that song. I don’t know if you’re into Against Me but Laura Jane Grace wrote this great autobiography that your story makes me think of, about being on the road with no money.
Amazing. Yeah, it’s so good.
She was describing, especially when you’re young, the logistics of touring and how difficult it is, and fun also.
Yeah. We’re not even in the same universe as Against Me as far as like a pounding the pavement and work ethic, but yeah, there is a lot of truth in that book and just despite the fact that you’re meeting new people all the time, there is a deep sense of isolation and a lack of belonging.
So that’s, that’s why we kind of forever immortalized [Nathan] in the best way we could.
This is more about the title of a song than the actual song, but Spirits, Spilled Modelo and the Sound of Cuban Salsa Bands is super evocative. Do you have a story or a memory that you grabbed that title from?
So I think it’s a reference in a way to a band called J Church. I want to say they’re an obscure, Bay Area punk band from the early 90s.
I wrote it down because I asked Oli, the record [J Church] put out is called Camels, Spilled Corona, and The Sound of Mariachi Bands. I guess he really digs that band and tried to pay homage to them in some capacity.
And I think also those were three things that reminded him of his last bartending gig. So he kind of meshed the two.
The song titles on the 2019 record are super short and they’re really literal. They correspond directly to the lyrics in the song. It’s very straightforward.
On the new one, the song titles feel like the Jukebox Romantics, where they use a lot of jokes and puns and movie references. The Lawrence Arms have song titles that have nothing to do with the song, like Are You There Margaret? It’s Me, God.
I’m wondering what led you to move more in the direction of naming songs that on the new album, less brief and taken directly from the lyrics and more like references to something that might have nothing to do with the song.
I don’t know if it’s the entire reason, but I think a big reason for it is not taking ourselves quite as seriously as we did for the first two records. There are multiple reasons why we started embracing that ethos, but I think that was definitely part of it.
And also just honestly just trying to entertain ourselves. If we can have any sort of pseudo-intellectual dick-swinging going on just to make ourselves laugh. Like the latest single, Oli just said it one day and thought it was really funny. Like Munchausen by Proxy sort of corresponds to some themes in the lyrics, but he just said Munchausen by Praxis.
That’s that’s very, as both a leftist and a person who’s interested in psychiatric problems, I was like, that’s an extremely fun turn of phrase.
Yeah. But the way it was presented to Dave and myself was just, “you’re an asshole”.
He hit his vape and was like, “Munchausen by Praxis”. I’m like “dude, all right, we’re doing it”.
Also, in that song, there’s this amazing phrase, “this overwhelming sense of crisis holds me like a drug”. And I heard that like, wow, it just knocked me out. Was there a situation that led you to write that? It’s killer.
Another long-winded answer. I’ll try to trim it down as much as possible. Basically, you know, with the majority of this record, I’ll send a draft of something and he’ll send me one back with his 2 cents and omitting things, like peer review kind of thing, you know?
I think one draft he sent me was “overwhelming since the crisis that holds me like a crutch”. And I’m like, dude, take that out and put something that’s a little more obscure or open to interpretation. So I want to say it changed that word to drug and he didn’t fight me on it.
So that’s why it stayed. And I couldn’t tell you why “drug”, I don’t know why I wanted that word. I just thought it was more clever in some sense. So yeah, it just stayed.
I love the song A.M. on the 2019 album. I was trying to connect the dots by “wake up dead by the river’s edge”, and “dear Diane”. Is this song about Twin Peaks? Please say it’s about Twin Peaks.
Yes, plain and simple. There’s no way around it.
That is very gratifying. The first time I heard that song, I was like, “Diane, that isn’t a common name in the 21st century”.
Yeah. I feel like I was a bit too obvious with it, but I didn’t care. It was around when that third season got released. And I wasn’t sleeping at all again, so I was like, yeah, that’s what this song is about.
How fantastic. Is there anything more fun than when you’re, I dunno, writing a song, writing a joke, writing a poem or something, and you say, I’m just going to write this about, like, Woody Harrelson or something that I’m super into right now. I’m going to have fun with it.
If you’re making art for yourself, you have to keep it lively so that you think it’s interesting.
Yeah, there’s so much truth to that. And maybe I’m a selfish person, but I do think it’s a little bit like you hear every band say “oh, you got to write for yourself, but it’s no good if other people don’t like it, man”. I’m like fuck that. But I’m also smarter than your average person. (laughs) So I don’t care if you don’t like it.
I totally relate to that. It makes me want to write a joke about Twin Peaks. If I can think of one, you will be the first person that gets it. I will send it to you.
Do you have a song that is literally about something you’ve been through, like a direct narrative, as opposed to just like this made me feel a certain thing. Like less, “I’m going to put it out there as an abstraction” and more, “this is something very specific that happened to me”.
So yeah, I very much cloak everything – I shouldn’t say everything – a lot of what I write in metaphor. Maybe I’m lazy and unoriginal. But yeah, I just kind of hide behind that literary device, but I want to say the closest thing to what you’re asking is the song H.P.P.D.
That’s very much a causation. Things that happened in adolescence or teenage years or whatever you want to call it.
That was actually the very next question was that, with H.P.P.D. It sounds like it’s Oli’s story. Do you know what the story is behind that?
I think it was just a teenager that got busted with weed.It’s not super interesting. And, yeah, that’s just largely the extent of what the song is about. It’s his version of Cop by Alkaline Trio, I think, to some extent.
Next: Songwriting